Why do Americans still dislike atheists?

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

  1. NietzscheHimself Banned Banned

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    867
    I want you to make some kind of point so I can make fun of you for it. So far you have just spilled foul words for no apparent reason other than to cope with your already terrible life, by spilling it onto others.
     
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  3. 1337spb Registered Member

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    I'm agnostic and I don't like evangelical atheism. Or indeed evangelical anything. No one knows for sure so don't ram it down peoples throats.
     
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  5. NietzscheHimself Banned Banned

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    I know "not knowing" isn't the truth. Still people who set their premises to agnostic are, more often than not, open minded.

    It should be blatantly honest by most peoples opinions nobody knows the absolute truth. I find no sound reasoning in holding no truth to be an original truth when the only truth is what we appear to know of ourselves as a whole. Is it Ok for us to branch out unknowingly. Yes, but if all we find is nothing maybe we have stretched ourselves too far. We all have times where we curse God, Damn Fate, Objectify something obscure. And we all suffer the false premises that leads all light to an early end. Where these questions start and why they are irreconcilable. Maybe they just need more holy water to caste the demons out of them.

    A minds freedom of immagination often leads to its destruction.

    The world will never be anything more than what we make it out to become.
     
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  7. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    so true..
     
  8. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    Why do Americans still dislike Atheists?

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    Enough said
     
  9. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    And why pray tell do you claim that image is 'enough said?'
     
  10. John99 Banned Banned

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    Still going with the premise that americans dislike atheists means your are kind of dim anyway...so...does it really matter at this point?

    lmfao...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-b5aW08ivHU
     
  11. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    993
    Well, speak of dim. Keep posting. Maybe some day you'll have something actually worthwhile to add.
     
  12. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    It's funny that you imagine that Americans know who Richard Dawkins is, or have heard anything that he has to say, or form their associations with the concept of "atheism" from British intellectuals in the first place.
     
  13. John99 Banned Banned

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    22,046
    :zzz:

    next?
     
  14. Kennyc Registered Senior Member

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    As I said above.
     
  15. John99 Banned Banned

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    As much as anyone with an internet connection or maybe a t.v.
     
  16. John99 Banned Banned

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    i am just saying that your personality matches your avatar.

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  17. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    That is precisely what we are fighting.
     
  18. John99 Banned Banned

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    22,046
    Obviously that wont work then.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    To say, "No one knows for sure," is to mimic the intellectual dishonesty of the religionists.

    It's like saying, "You don't know for sure that there's not an alligator hiding under your bed, so I'm not going to take my shoes off." But no, actually it's not even that reasonable a statement. There is a zoo in Washington, they have an alligator exhibit, the entire staff could have gone on strike and left all the enclosures unlocked in protest, an alligator could have crawled 25 miles north without being spotted by the police or squashed by a truck, my housemate could have left the front door open, he could have come down the stairs and hidden under the bed, and along the way he could have captured and eaten a deer so my dogs are still alive and I didn't immediately wonder why they didn't run to the door to greet me when we arrived.

    The chances of this happening are infinitesimal, but it is possible. It doesn't violate any of the laws of nature that we have spent half a millennium carefully discovering.

    To say, "You don't know for sure that there is no god," does not fall into that same category. The existence of an invisible, illogical supernatural universe, from which creatures capriciously wield forces that interfere with the behavior of the natural universe, violates the fundamental premise of science, which 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. This premise has been tested and peer-reviewed aggressively and exhaustively for half a millennium, and has never come close to being falsified. All of our meticulously accumulated empirical evidence about the behavior of the universe supports this premise. To gainsay it is to reject science.

    So to say, "You don't know there is no god so there could be one," is as disingenuous as saying, "You don't know there is no Santa Claus, La Llorona, or Fraggle Rock, so there could be one."

    To postulate the existence of something for which there is absolutely no evidence, and then fabricate an entire gallery of supernatural creatures and a history of supernatural events around it, and then proselytize a code of behavior designed to please one of those imaginary creatures, is a sophomoric exercise. A great way to waste time and energy that could be spent learning how the natural universe actually works and making a positive contribution to civilization.
     
  20. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    More than enough said, thank you very much
     
  21. Spud Emperor solanaceous common tater Registered Senior Member

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    Fuck Kremmen, ya big Pommy Poonce.
    Why would ya think that Americans (especially Americans who are obsessed with atheists) would have a clue who Dawkins is?

    We all know the seppoes are the most insular, unwordly arm of the supposedly educated world.
    Now ya go and prove my own ignorance by posting up a piccy of some random dude who I just can't place.

    I suspect it's a young Ghandi when he wore specs (and was atheist) or Fred Phelps (before he was evangeliscised).

    Am I close?
     
  22. Captain Kremmen All aboard, me Hearties! Valued Senior Member

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    It's Nietsche.
    Wrong spelling I think.
    There's another z or a k or one of those other European letters in it somewhere.

    Nietsche was not the first atheist.
    But he was the first Atheist who understood the implications of being an atheist if you are powerful.

    Those implications being.
    You can do as you wish.
    You can lie, kill, betray, steal, and disobey every rule set down in the tablets of each and every religion.
    If God is dead, you can be God yourself, and with no consequences.

    A dangerous creed, indeed.

    In comparison, Dawkins is a country curate.
    A Christian in all but faith.
    Same as most of us in varying degrees.
     
  23. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    It is, in fact, Nietzsche. And K is a perfectly wholesome English letter. When the Roman monks transcribed Anglo-Saxon or "Old English" they used C for that sound, but later English scholars replaced it with K or CK, giving English its distinct un-Roman appearance.
    Dangerous but also distinctly at odds with our millions-of-years-old instinct as a social species. We are born with the instinct to depend on and care for our pack-mates. We have spent the last twelve thousand years enlarging our definition of "pack" to include an ever-larger circle of ever-less-well-acquainted people, yet we all still know that the only reason civilization works is that we do our best to live in harmony and cooperation with all of them.

    A person who believes that it is okay for him to lie, kill and steal is uncivilized, regardless of his religious or irreligious philosophy.

    If this is typical of Nietzsche's writing (making it one of the reasons I never bother to read philosophy books because I get tired of spending money on books and then tearing them up in anger), then he was a sopohomoric blowhard. He may have presented this as a valid code to live by, but apparently he himself did not practice it.

    We all respect the higher power of civilization, that wonderful superorganism that we created and which continues to grow and prosper (although not monotonically), of which we are the cells. There are people (modern-day Nietzsches?) who insist that they would rather live in the Paleolithic Era, sleeping on the ground, chasing mastodons, running from sabretooths, letting their elders starve during famines, and never hearing professionally composed and performed music. But if they were transported a couple of centuries back to a time when they could have found a tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers and joined them, very few of them would give up their beds, roofs, HDTV, internet, doughnuts and health insurance and actually do it.
     

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