The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too

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Originally Posted by theblake

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

Atheists cynical as they may be, have never done such things...

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Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot?

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Good point, but it could be argued they simply elevated themselves to god status. Cutting out the middle-man doesn't necessarily make it "atheism".

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

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Originally Posted by theblake

Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot?

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Good point, but it could be argued they simply elevated themselves to god status. Cutting out the middle-man doesn't necessarily make it "atheism".

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That poster may have just been ironically mimicking the religious fanatics being addressed in the hot chick's video. At least, I think this was the thread in which I posted it.

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

So many horrible things have been done in the name of God, under the orders of The Church, following the book which is based on ideas conceived and written by man in order to control the lives of others.

Atheists, cynical as they may be, have never done such things...

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People will do horrible things in the name of anything they believe strongly in. Communist Russia for example. How many people died under Stalin and Mao? Perhaps people should hold no strong convictions at all, eh?

Americans are forwarding kidnapping, torture and assassination as tools of government these days. U!S!A!, U!S!A! because religion is no longer the coin of the day in America, they get people riled up with patriotism and fear instead of God and fear.

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Originally Posted by mjmacky

You're forgetting the part that we can observe the occurrence of minutely probable events but there is no such verification for the fantasy of a metaphysical creator.

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There is no verification for what began the universe. There are only 4 options:

1. The Universe doesn't exist.
2. The Universe has always existed.
3. The Universe came into being on its own.
4. The Universe has a Creator.

It is not a scientific question and science cannot answer it. It is a philosophical question which the atheist, by declaring himself and atheist, is unfit to answer.

Secondly, there is verification for the existence of God. Worship is ingrained in humans and you will not find it as hard as you may pretend to... pray to God and you will have an answer. It may take years.

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Originally Posted by theblake

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

Atheists cynical as they may be, have never done such things...

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Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot?

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Don't forget Americans have killed over a million Vietnamese and Iraqis in their last few wars of aggression. Were these because of religion?

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

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Originally Posted by theblake

Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot?

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Good point, but it could be argued they simply elevated themselves to god status. Cutting out the middle-man doesn't necessarily make it "atheism".

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Humans will kill for any reason they hold dear enough. Religion, the common belief of a group of people, is often used by those with nefarious ends in mind. Whether that is an actual religion or if it is in the name of a political ideology such as Communism, Nazism or any form of extreme patriotism, we can hardly hold religion itself responsible.

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Originally Posted by svirk

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Originally Posted by mjmacky

You're forgetting the part that we can observe the occurrence of minutely probable events but there is no such verification for the fantasy of a metaphysical creator.

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There is no verification for what began the universe. There are only 4 options:

1. The Universe doesn't exist.
2. The Universe has always existed.
3. The Universe came into being on its own.
4. The Universe has a Creator.

It is not a scientific question and science cannot answer it. It is a philosophical question which the atheist, by declaring himself and atheist, is unfit to answer.

Secondly, there is verification for the existence of God. Worship is ingrained in humans and you will not find it as hard as you may pretend to... pray to God and you will have an answer. It may take years.

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I'll tackle both points.

For the first, we actually can approach the question of how the universe began, and it involves science and stuff. When we use observations, experimentation, and analysis to draw conclusions, we've implemented what is known as the scientific method. Philosophy is the earliest form of science. When an explanation becomes generally accepted with no major alternative explanation (which would also have been derived from the scientific method), the consensus upgrades those independent conclusions into a working theory. Regarding the universe's beginning, there's this thing called the big bang theory. You might know about it as some TV show with a laugh track, but it's also a real theory. There are scientists trying to create small black holes even. By the way, this obscure theory falls under option 3.

Addressing your second point is a much more interesting topic for me, and it's for a rather personal reason. I was brought up in religion, and for an extended part of my youth, I was deep in it. The deeper I went, the stronger my doubt became. I made a point to educate myself on matters concerning religion and mythology in general, and it allowed me to debunk the absolute truths they were attempting to offer. However, I had only labeled myself an agnostic at that point, for there was the matter of understanding the worship of a metaphysical being that made it feel like it was still possible. How was I able to reconcile this?

When I was in China, I was in the town of Jingshan, a village of roughly 600,000 rural Chinese in the Hubei province. In the center of town, there was a work of art depicting some Greek mythology tales (statues to be exact), and its presence struck me. When I began asking some of the English speaking locals about it, each conversation reached the same end result. These people had a rather difficult time understanding the concept of a god. How could this be? Why does it seem like such an easy concept for me and others who have grown up in the West? The key difference was the banning of the major religions. Granted religions still exist in China, but the people I was talking to had the distinct advantage of not having been brought up in any of those religions.

What's the point of my tale? It's that what I had believed as a natural human condition to believe in gods, instead turned out to be the product of impressionable children. Those of us brought up in the system have it imprinted on our psyche, as tends to happen with everything as children. If only you were fortunate enough to have never been instructed to believe these mythologies as a kid, you wouldn't have any difficulty rejecting them.

Therefore, I refute the notion of worship of a higher being as something genetically programmed. It was also this realization that allowed me to stop pussy footing the agnostic banner and admit to being a full-on atheist.

My god, are these topics crack cocaine to me or what?

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Originally Posted by svirk

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Originally Posted by megabyteme

Good point, but it could be argued they simply elevated themselves to god status. Cutting out the middle-man doesn't necessarily make it "atheism".

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Humans will kill for any reason they hold dear enough. Religion, the common belief of a group of people, is often used by those with nefarious ends in mind. Whether that is an actual religion or if it is in the name of a political ideology such as Communism, Nazism or any form of extreme patriotism, we can hardly hold religion itself responsible.

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While those commonalities may be true, the difference is the mechanism of manipulation; religion fucks with the afterlives for those who believe that they have them. It's a tool that performs on an entirely different level and should require such a distinction.

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Originally Posted by mjmacky

For the first, we actually can approach the question of how the universe began, and it involves science and stuff. When we use observations, experimentation, and analysis to draw conclusions, we've implemented what is known as the scientific method. Philosophy is the earliest form of science. When an explanation becomes generally accepted with no major alternative explanation (which would also have been derived from the scientific method), the consensus upgrades those independent conclusions into a working theory. Regarding the universe's beginning, there's this thing called the big bang theory. You might know about it as some TV show with a laugh track, but it's also a real theory. There are scientists trying to create small black holes even. By the way, this obscure theory falls under option 3.

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Science cannot help us deduce what happened before the laws of science came into existence.

"Do not the disbelievers see that the heavens and the earth were a closed up mass, then We clove them asunder and We made every living thing out of water. Will they not then believe?" [Quran 21:30] I have no problem with the Big Bang theory or evolution but I find that our greater understanding of the mechanisms of creation ought to lead one closer to the belief in a Creator... not taken as some sort of evidence against God.

The "Laws" of science always existed even before someone thought to name them.