Why do Americans still dislike atheists?

Discussion in 'Religion Archives' started by Fraggle Rocker, May 15, 2011.

  1. jpappl Valued Senior Member

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    2,985
    Good advice. Kind of makes me wonder why so many worry about how much crap they have and how much money they make, especially those who are religious.

    Just think how pissed off your average 10 year old would be to get to heaven and find out there are no X-Box, guitar hero and gameboys.

    To me heaven is right here right now, make the most of it and enjoy.
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Theism and the oxymoron of "life after death" are merely (major) elements of the philosophy of supernaturalism: the belief that an invisible, illogical supernatural universe exists, in which powerful creatures live, who whimsically and often angrily interfere with the behavior of the natural universe.

    The fundamental premise of science is that the natural universe is a closed system whose behavior can be predicted by theories derived logically from empirical observation of its present and past behavior. Science is recursive and this premise has been subjected to the scientific method, and tested aggressively for half a millennium. It has never come close to being falsified.

    To embrace supernaturalism is to deny science, by accepting as proven a set of hypotheses for which there is no supporting evidence, a flagrant violation of the scientific method.

    While it is true that no living person has experienced death, the assertions of the supernaturalists include many instances of dead people communicating with the living. No respectable evidence for these assertions has ever been presented. The typical "evidence" is a splotch on a tortilla (of the billions that are manufactured every year) said to be the image of a Biblical figure. Since there are no portraits of those people against which to compare the tortilla, the claim is absurd. Another widely used type of evidence involves a "medium" who claims to be able to hear the dead and passes the communication on to their survivors, who of course cannot hear them directly. This is nothing more than a carnival trick. People have even claimed to hear their religion's god speaking to them, and the fact that no one else ever hears these conversations is explained away as God's supernatural ability to speak so that only one person hears him. It isn't even necessary to accuse the object of this communication of lying, since people experience hallucinations every day.

    In aggregate, the supernaturalists insist that they have evidence for their assertions, including the assertion of life after death, yet this evidence never stands up to the most elementary testing.

    This is why it would be just as unreasonable to accept the premise of an afterlife as any other supernatural premise: 1) There is no evidence for the existence of a supernatural universe, and 2) Since we first developed the scientific method, all evidence that has been tested has consistently supported the premise that the natural universe is not subject to supernatural forces.

    This is the evidence you require, and it supports the assertion that there is no supernatural universe, which includes gods, miracles and life after death.
    I don't know, and I'm not sure I even understand your labels. I was an atheist as a child because religion was never mentioned or explained by my family, who were all atheists. I never heard of gods and supernatural forces. When I first heard about them I thought it was a big joke, and that's basically how I feel about it today. I'm an atheist because not to be an atheist would be irrational or simply stupid.
    Why should I try? Why should I care? Atheism is not a religion. Atheists are not evangelists. Well most of us anyway.

    The majority of the people on this planet are supernaturalists, yet they manage to be decent people and do a good job of keeping things running. Obviously belief in a supernatural universe is not a major impediment to taking care of their business, so I'm not going to go around trying to convince them to be atheists.

    At the societal level of course I do see much harm caused by supernaturalism, especially the Abrahamic religions. They reinforce our atavistic tribal instinct and motivate us to kill each other for not believing in exactly the same supernatural universe. But going around and trying to convert one supernaturalist at a time to atheism doesn't seem like it would be very helpful.
    I don't "enforce" writing standards. I just explain them and, when necessary, explain the reasons behind them. As the Linguistics Moderator it's part of my job. Whether you follow the standards is up to you.

    There has been considerable research into the way the brain works while reading, and we know that misspelling and other errors in orthography interrupt the pace of reading. It's an apt comparison to point out that reading something in your native language that is full of typographical flaws is somewhat like reading something in an unfamiliar alphabet.

    A busty young lady was walking down the sidewalk toward me wearing a bright t-shirt with "Jerusalem" written in Hebrew. I know the Hebrew alphabet and even though I don't know the language I know the name "Jerusalem" when I see it. It took me quite a while to puzzle that out. The lady was about to frown at me for staring at her chest until I looked up and she could tell what I had been doing from the expression on my face, so she smiled good-naturedly.

    Reading an English sentence with spelling errors, or even simply bad punctuation, is a similar experience, although obviously considerably less difficult. You have to slow down and read every letter one at a time.

    Most university graduates can read at least 100 words per minute, which allows us to do quite a bit of reading both on the job and in our free time. We cannot read John's writing at anywhere near that speed. So it robs us of time we could be using to read something else. Sure it's only a few seconds per post, but if everyone wrote that way it would really add up.
     
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  5. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    um..one more time..Beyond and Back
    testimonies of ppl who have died then came back to life..
     
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  7. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    Wrong. If they did not die, they didn't die, the experiences they report are nothing more than what happens to our bodies (and minds) in extreme near-death (not death) circumstances.
     
  8. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    you didn't even watch it did you?
    some of those ppl were clinically dead.
     
  9. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    Didn't need to. What I said is true.
     
  10. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    And besides this offshoot has virtually nothing to do with the topic.
     
  11. yaracuy Banned Banned

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    364
    What does all this BS have to do with the opening post ?
     
  12. NietzscheHimself Banned Banned

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    You dislike an objective atheist standpoint. I should let you do the math. For no other reason aside from the fact they can.
     
  13. yaracuy Banned Banned

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    What is the atheist standpoint ?
    What math. do you want me to do ?
    Can you explain you third sentence .
     
  14. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    only in your definition of what death is..
    it was in response to:
    i just submitted evidence that says that statement is not true.
    whether you accept that evidence is your responsibility.
    I can believe it.
     
  15. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    Death is well defined. I have no personal definition that is different. And you are the one who delineated a specific definition of death, which clearly is wrong if a person comes back to life.

    Sorry Squirrel you are simply wrong on this one.
     
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2011
  16. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    5,478
    so you are saying death is more than your heart stopping and being brain dead?
     
  17. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    Fraggle Rocker,




    Doesn't this answer your question?

    I suspect it is because you are desparate to get rid of God out of the minds of everybody. You're transforming the world into hell on earth, and you don't even know it.
    How many dangergous people does it take to transform a city or even country of millions into a no-go area.
    I think it has to be something along those lines.

    jan.
     
  18. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    Jan, I actually you think you are on to something there. The whole point of gods and religion is to alleviate fears (and explain the unknown) through (self-)deception. To take that away induces fear.
     
  19. Jan Ardena OM!!! Valued Senior Member

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    13,968
    Just to let you know.
    My response was purely a response to the OP.
    It's not my opinion.


    jan.
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Don't make the mistake of thinking that people like Dawkins are typical atheists. One of the reasons I despise him is that he has happily accepted the position as our spokesman, causing the public to quite reasonably assume that he does indeed speak for us. While I agree with much (but by no means all) of what he says, I don't agree with his attitude of confronting religionists and attempting to show them the error of their ways.

    I do that here on SciForums, among a self-selected population who have volunteered to be exposed to the scientific method and thereby to learn why irrational faith in the supernatural is antiscientific. But I don't go around talking this way to the general public. I can say with no exaggeration that some of my best friends are Christians. I'm happy with the way they lead their lives and they feel the same way about me, so we have no reason to argue about philosophy.

    I understand that supernaturalism is a collection of archetypes and therefore almost certainly an instinct. I understand that asking people to question their instincts and learn to override them is never easy and rarely successful, especially for someone who has not made a career of it. Dawkins clearly does not understand this, even though he seems to have made a career of it. He thinks that shoving logic in people's faces will make them logical. Instead he makes a fool of himself and, because everyone assumes that he is our chosen spokesman, he makes fools of all of us.
    Excuse me? Please provide the evidence that supports that assertion. Jung pointed out that the wars among the Christian nations have been the bloodiest in human history, although I would include the depredations of pagan Genghis Khan in that list. Christendom alone has wrought immeasurable evil on this planet, from the persecutions of Jews and followers of traditional Egyptian polytheistic religion when Emperor Constantine made Christianity Rome's official religion, to the institutionalization of violent antisemitism as almost the defining trait of European Christianity right up until its crowning achievement, the Holocaust. Along the way Christian armies obliterated two entire civilizations, even destroying their records (Aztec libraries, Inca art objects) in an attempt to erase them from history, terrorized an entire continent with the Inquisition, and fought cruelly among themselves over arcane doctrinal disagreements in the hundred years of non-stop warfare we euphemistically refer to as "the Enlightenment."

    In modern times, the three primary Abrahamist communities (Jews, Christians and Muslims) appear determined to engulf the entire planet in a Nuclear Holy War.

    Meanwhile the "peaceful" Buddhists and Hindus spent a couple of decades murdering each other in Sri Lanka, the Muslims are killing each other over doctrinal disputes when they're not busy trying to annihilate the Christians and Jews, the Christians on the Emerald Isle have only recently stopped killing each other over doctrinal disputes, and the Jews are paying the world back for the Holocaust by turning Palestine into one big concentration camp.

    And please don't give me the old bullshit about how we are responsible for communism. The communist slogan, "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability," is a reworking of Marx's favorite passage in the Book of Acts. Communism is an offshoot of Christianity; no other philosophy would suggest with a straight face that an economy can prosper if what a man takes from it does not have to correlate with what he puts back in.

    If there is a Hell on Earth, it was brought to you by the religionists, especially the Children of Abraham.
     
  21. birch Valued Senior Member

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    5,077
    you get too hung up on labels. capitalism can work by taking more than giving back. labels really mean nothing. in essence, there are plenty of christians who have values that are not based on fairness or equal contribution. after all, god shows favoritism as well as gives immense blessings to some while not others. capitalism is also not based on equal contribution. humans have a sly way of working things and if you flip or look under the table, it will be enligtenening how much the same the motives really are with a different ruse.
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    I agree that there have been and still are capitalist economies from which more is taken out than put in. But those are dysfunctional economies that either will collapse before long like the European communist economies, or will be repaired. Repair might involve merging some of the principles of the legacy culture, like Chinese communism borrowing just enough Confucianism to work. Or it could be a revolution.
    Not at the individual level, but in aggregate. Capitalist economies--like any economies--only survive so long as total production slightly exceeds total consumption.
     
  23. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    We aren't desperate yet here in the USA. However, in many places in the world, the victims of religion might be. It's their almost literal hell by being burned to death for witchcraft or stoned to death for loving the wrong person that religion is responsible for. Even here in the states, theists are attempting to teach bullshit to our children as fact, trying to take away the liberty to control your own body, and entertaining wild apocalyptic fantasies that cause people not to care about such things as the environment or global warming. If these idiots dislike atheists, I really don't care.
     

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