Re: 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...
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot?
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".
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
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...
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.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
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.
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.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
Originally Posted by
theblake
Quote:
Originally Posted by
megabyteme
Atheists cynical as they may be, have never done such things...
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot?
Don't forget Americans have killed over a million Vietnamese and Iraqis in their last few wars of aggression. Were these because of religion?
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
Originally Posted by
megabyteme
Quote:
Originally Posted by
theblake
Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot?
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".
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.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
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.
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.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
The "Laws" of science always existed even before someone thought to name them.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
Originally Posted by
mjmacky
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.
Your claim that a particular group of Chinese did not have a concept of God since no one taught it to them fails on two fronts;
1. The fact that there are faiths and religions all over the world from the earliest human civilizations to the present suggests that people who had no concept of God acquired it rather easily and that worship is ingrained in people. Where did all these religions come from if, as you claim, those brought up in a system without religion have no difficulty rejecting them? Some crazy lunatic calling himself a prophet comes to a people with no religion and starts telling them lies about God and the community accepts him as a wise leader? Or is it the arrogance of those atheists living in the present that leads them to believe that those living in the past were ignorant dupes who easily accepted all sorts of nonsense about a Creator?
2. Most Chinese practice a mix of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. They may not directly acknowledge God in the form of a Zeus like being or in the same sense as Christianity and Islam but they are feeding their innate desire to worship. Some Buddhists will go so far as claim atheism while at the same time having raised Buddha to an object of worship on par with God. In Confucianism and Taoism we have concepts of Heaven, with a capital "H", i.e. the Dictates of Heaven. This is not that far from the Will of God in Islam. We have concepts like Nirvana in Chinese culture which the West would call Salvation.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
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Originally Posted by
IdolEyes787
The "Laws" of science always existed even before someone thought to name them.
Name them whatever you like but they did not exist before they existed. Right?
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
Originally Posted by
svirk
Quote:
Originally Posted by
IdolEyes787
The "Laws" of science always existed even before someone thought to name them.
Name them whatever you like but they did not exist before they existed. Right?
Phenomena exist without being identified by man. Scientists are often only describers, not creators.
Example: A pile of rocks existed in the same amount/quantity even before man devised a system for weighing and counting.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
Originally Posted by
megabyteme
Quote:
Originally Posted by
svirk
Name them whatever you like but they did not exist before they existed. Right?
Phenomena exist without being identified by man. Scientists are often only describers, not creators.
Example: A pile of rocks existed in the same amount/quantity even before man devised a system for weighing and counting.
You're missing the point. The pile of rocks didn't exist before they existed. The Universe didn't exist before it existed. The laws of the Universe didn't exist before the Universe came into existence. My point was that, if you want to argue the Universe has always existed it is a philosophical discussion that science cannot address.
Re: The summer 2011 totally legitimate and like official atheist thread, endorsed too
Quote:
Originally Posted by
svirk
You're missing the point. The pile of rocks didn't exist before they existed. The Universe didn't exist before it existed. The laws of the Universe didn't exist before the Universe came into existence. My point was that, if you want to argue the Universe has always existed it is a philosophical discussion that science cannot address.
And you wish to argue that out of absolutely nothing came a being that was the all-wise creator of everything else? If so, that seems to be a MUCH bigger expectation than building up of things from basic matter. :idunno:
