For starters, whether or not I think people should be allowed their religious convictions and the ultimate cause of the universe have about zilch to do with each other, except that the religious convictions of some lead them to believe they can answer the latter. So already, you've got a stupid challenge to a rather bold assertion; even most atheists I know don't begrudge people their faith.
Thankfully, I do, being one of those hardcore motherfuckers.
Having said that, I'm not going to answer your question. To do so would lend you a sense of credibility that you're so desperately grasping at. Any schoolboy could find what is presently the most widely-accepted answer to that question in any contemporary encyclopedia. You don't want an answer; you want an opportunity to act snide and punch holes in the scientific method, something that, because you've taken this approach, you very probably have an infirm grasp of at best.
Lastly, you're implicitly presenting a logical fallacy called a 'false dilemma'. You seem to posit that if man's answer as to the ultimate origins of the universe are lacking or incomplete, the only other possible option is to believe in an imaginary sky daddy whose own existence is blithely dismissed as "eternal" and therefore magically immune to questions of causality. Totally glossed over is the unsatisfying but very likely true answer that man's primate brain simply has not yet discovered the answer to that question, and in fact may never. But ignorance of a fact does not mean that the truth is up for grabs. If you don't know what's in my pocket, that doesn't mean that my pocket contains lint, a baseball, change, a cell phone, the Hope Diamond, and condoms because you suppose it does and have not yet been shown otherwise. By that same token, before we developed germ theory - not too long ago, when put up against our existence on this planet - it wasn't evil spirits, God, ill humours, or any of the other fables people attributed illness to that was actually causing the illness. We were simply ignorant, as we largely are about the origins of the universe. That isn't an invitation for you to jump in at the end and spring your pathetic deus ex machina device.
Wow, you made the same mistakes you accused me of.
1.) I'm sick and tired of people telling people of faith that they are wrong and are children. Who the hell do they think they are? Does there faith in a god or gods bother them so much they can't keep their mouths shut?
2.) The universe thing is just to point out that science is kinda a religion to. It doesn't have all the answers and never will. You can believe in science and a religion at the same too.
Problem the One: I didn't call you a child, but I certainly think you're wrong. Tough titty, dude. I disagree with you, so you probably think I'm wrong, too. Thankfully, my point of view is backed up by some pretty fierce empirical evidence that actually works and has relevance to the world in which we live. Provided you're the theist I figure you are, your assertions are backed up by the world's biggest fan club. Not a whole lot else.
As to why I can't simply keep my mouth shut, I'll oblige you. Most people of a theistic bent carry with them an agenda that I find harmful not just to people I care about, but to society and this world as a whole. The examples are numerous: prejudice of homosexuals, bisexuals, and trans, thousands of holy wars, billions of dead, torture, genocide, opposition to science, suppression of reason, abstinence education, unnecessary sexual taboos, vice crimes...must I go on? While things like genocide and torture are near universals to the human condition, the bulk of those ills listed above are the specific purview of religion. Faith in the divine and the supernatural and a smug self-affirmation in your rightness without a shred of evidence is a recipe for insanity, and it is with supreme bitterness that I find that such is the world in which I live.
In short, I won't keep my mouth shut because you people are fucking up the world, and I've had enough.
Problem the Two: If you really believe that science is a religion, you either misunderstand the word 'science' or the word 'religion'. The two could not have less in common. I don't have "faith" that science will have all the answers (I seem to have said just the opposite, in fact), nor do I need all the answers, nor do I believe what answers science has provided because of unfounded, blind belief. A religion is a self-professed personal relationship with the divine and the supernatural, oftentimes manifested through obedience to a rote set of dogma. The scientific method is the means by which we understand reality; we do so through rigorous and repeated testing wherein we do our best to disprove our own theories until we have accumulated data that supports what we believe to be true. It is constantly changing, constantly evolving, and that's because as humans, we can be wrong, arrogant, prideful, vain, or simply ignorant of the facts. Thankfully, science is self-correcting, and those of us who come after the ones before are constantly retreading old ground to test its strength.
Science and religion are nothing alike. And many people do believe in science and religion at the same time. My personal and admittedly biased opinion of these people is that they're a bunch of fence-sitting punkass bitches who need to stop straddling the goddamn fence.
I never said I believe in god, so thats another assumption for you.
"My personal and admittedly biased opinion of these people is that they're a bunch of fence-sitting punkass bitches who need to stop straddling the goddamn fence." So its dumb to think that evolution happened with the guidance or a system place by a higher being? Your starting to sound like a bigot on this one.
Writers better than myself have dedicated books - or chapters of books - to why this argument is a ten-ton straw sack of shit. For you to understand why would require a bit of research, and I'll forgive you if you don't want to do it. But I'll break down the big four for you:
Hitler: Not an atheist, and quite clearly a theist who professed to be a Christian. The Vatican gave the nod to the Holocaust, which was itself the latest incarnation of the Blood Libel, which is entirely religious in origin.
Stalin, Pol Pot, and Chairman Mao: An illustrative; a man is torn to pieces on an island that contains many dogs. This island also contains many wild boar, bears, lions, and other predators. A dogcatcher shows up to the island and immediately proclaims that a dog killed the man. The fact that the governments of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao were nonreligious doesn't indicate that their lack of belief in God was the impetus for slaughter. In fact, lack of belief in God isn't what we're talking about, here. We're talking about reason and logic, two things that all of those regimes lacked. All three of the men listed painted themselves as divine or semidivine figures and established huge cults of personality around themselves to rival any religion. Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao had, in fact, made nationalism the state religion. The fact that none of those three men used religion to play on the populous says nothing about atheism or science; none of those were atheistic or scientific regimes. All of them suppressed science, reason, and thought, and all three supplanted 'state' for 'God' in a mandatory nationalistic theism.
And yes, it's dumb to think that "evolution happened with the guidance or a system place by a higher being". I don't think you understand evolutionary theory very well. Since you're so fond of challenges, tell me: if a higher being is responsible for the mechanism of evolution, then whence the cuckoo? The mosquito? Why is the mammalian eye built inside-out and upside-down? Whence tonsils? The appendix? The ubiquitous Darwin's point? Wisdom teeth? I don't think it' dumb to be ignorant of the facts of evolutionary theory; it's unfortunate that so many people are, but it's not something to vilify people over. No, I save my scorn for jackasses who read half the book and think they can fill in the glacier-sized gaps in their understanding with 'GOD DID IT' and then poison the minds of people naive enough to believe them. Yeah, I'm bigoted; against myopic, ignorant motherfuckers who throw around words like 'science' and 'theory' like they know what the fuck they mean.
1.) your intolerance of belifes besides your own makes you a bigot. Thats clear through your writings and responces.
2.) Hitlers not the only one mentioned, books have been written on how an absence of faith has led to more deaths than one of faith. So that argument is wrong. The numbers show aethist sociecties cause more death than those of religion.
3.) "Also, D'Souza is a fucking moron." This accomplished nothing at all.
Uno: Guilty. So what? I'm bigoted against theists. Next.
Dos: You apparently didn't read the above post, or at least not closely enough. None of the societies listed were "atheist" societies; they were nationalistic theocracies that just happened to supplant the head of state for the deity. Also, whether or not Hitler can be included on that list is particularly germane to this conversation.
Tres: It wasn't meant to accomplish anything. This isn't a classroom, college-boy, I don't have to be civil or respectful of your stupid, stupid assertions. Just pointing out that quoting someone who willingly dated Anne Coulter? Yeah, maybe not tops in the realm of credibility. He's clearly batshit insane.
Your first, third, and fourth links just repackage what you put in the link above. You're effectively masturbating, as if throwing more links on proves the weight of your arguments. Sorry, that shit doesn't fly. A shitty argument is a shitty argument is a shitty argument, no matter how many times you repackage it.
Your last statement is particularly boggling: "if you look Atheism follows all the rules of a religion." Oh, please, do tell. As I said above, you never did quite nail down what you mean when you say "religion", so I'll grant you that by what may be your functionally useless definition of the word, atheism could be wedged into the narrow door of your convoluted thought process. Nevertheless, please, regale me: in what ways does atheism - the lack of belief in a deity - follow "all the rules" of a religion?
From TFA: "The Supreme Court has said a religion need not be based on a belief in the existence of a supreme being. In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, the court described "secular humanism" as a religion."
So for legal purposes, when dealing with freedom irrespective of religion or lack thereof, a federal court decided to equate secular humanism with more conventional religion.
You really don't see how that does nothing at all to support your point? Really?
For starters, whether or not I think people should be allowed their religious convictions and the ultimate cause of the universe have about zilch to do with each other, except that the religious convictions of some lead them to believe they can answer the latter. So already, you've got a stupid challenge to a rather bold assertion; even most atheists I know don't begrudge people their faith.
Thankfully, I do, being one of those hardcore motherfuckers.
Having said that, I'm not going to answer your question. To do so would lend you a sense of credibility that you're so desperately grasping at. Any schoolboy could find what is presently the most widely-accepted answer to that question in any contemporary encyclopedia. You don't want an answer; you want an opportunity to act snide and punch holes in the scientific method, something that, because you've taken this approach, you very probably have an infirm grasp of at best.
Lastly, you're implicitly presenting a logical fallacy called a 'false dilemma'. You seem to posit that if man's answer as to the ultimate origins of the universe are lacking or incomplete, the only other possible option is to believe in an imaginary sky daddy whose own existence is blithely dismissed as "eternal" and therefore magically immune to questions of causality. Totally glossed over is the unsatisfying but very likely true answer that man's primate brain simply has not yet discovered the answer to that question, and in fact may never. But ignorance of a fact does not mean that the truth is up for grabs. If you don't know what's in my pocket, that doesn't mean that my pocket contains lint, a baseball, change, a cell phone, the Hope Diamond, and condoms because you suppose it does and have not yet been shown otherwise. By that same token, before we developed germ theory - not too long ago, when put up against our existence on this planet - it wasn't evil spirits, God, ill humours, or any of the other fables people attributed illness to that was actually causing the illness. We were simply ignorant, as we largely are about the origins of the universe. That isn't an invitation for you to jump in at the end and spring your pathetic deus ex machina device.
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1.) I'm sick and tired of people telling people of faith that they are wrong and are children. Who the hell do they think they are? Does there faith in a god or gods bother them so much they can't keep their mouths shut?
2.) The universe thing is just to point out that science is kinda a religion to. It doesn't have all the answers and never will. You can believe in science and a religion at the same too.
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As to why I can't simply keep my mouth shut, I'll oblige you. Most people of a theistic bent carry with them an agenda that I find harmful not just to people I care about, but to society and this world as a whole. The examples are numerous: prejudice of homosexuals, bisexuals, and trans, thousands of holy wars, billions of dead, torture, genocide, opposition to science, suppression of reason, abstinence education, unnecessary sexual taboos, vice crimes...must I go on? While things like genocide and torture are near universals to the human condition, the bulk of those ills listed above are the specific purview of religion. Faith in the divine and the supernatural and a smug self-affirmation in your rightness without a shred of evidence is a recipe for insanity, and it is with supreme bitterness that I find that such is the world in which I live.
In short, I won't keep my mouth shut because you people are fucking up the world, and I've had enough.
Problem the Two: If you really believe that science is a religion, you either misunderstand the word 'science' or the word 'religion'. The two could not have less in common. I don't have "faith" that science will have all the answers (I seem to have said just the opposite, in fact), nor do I need all the answers, nor do I believe what answers science has provided because of unfounded, blind belief. A religion is a self-professed personal relationship with the divine and the supernatural, oftentimes manifested through obedience to a rote set of dogma. The scientific method is the means by which we understand reality; we do so through rigorous and repeated testing wherein we do our best to disprove our own theories until we have accumulated data that supports what we believe to be true. It is constantly changing, constantly evolving, and that's because as humans, we can be wrong, arrogant, prideful, vain, or simply ignorant of the facts. Thankfully, science is self-correcting, and those of us who come after the ones before are constantly retreading old ground to test its strength.
Science and religion are nothing alike. And many people do believe in science and religion at the same time. My personal and admittedly biased opinion of these people is that they're a bunch of fence-sitting punkass bitches who need to stop straddling the goddamn fence.
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I never said I believe in god, so thats another assumption for you.
"My personal and admittedly biased opinion of these people is that they're a bunch of fence-sitting punkass bitches who need to stop straddling the goddamn fence."
So its dumb to think that evolution happened with the guidance or a system place by a higher being? Your starting to sound like a bigot on this one.
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Hitler: Not an atheist, and quite clearly a theist who professed to be a Christian. The Vatican gave the nod to the Holocaust, which was itself the latest incarnation of the Blood Libel, which is entirely religious in origin.
Stalin, Pol Pot, and Chairman Mao: An illustrative; a man is torn to pieces on an island that contains many dogs. This island also contains many wild boar, bears, lions, and other predators. A dogcatcher shows up to the island and immediately proclaims that a dog killed the man. The fact that the governments of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao were nonreligious doesn't indicate that their lack of belief in God was the impetus for slaughter. In fact, lack of belief in God isn't what we're talking about, here. We're talking about reason and logic, two things that all of those regimes lacked. All three of the men listed painted themselves as divine or semidivine figures and established huge cults of personality around themselves to rival any religion. Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao had, in fact, made nationalism the state religion. The fact that none of those three men used religion to play on the populous says nothing about atheism or science; none of those were atheistic or scientific regimes. All of them suppressed science, reason, and thought, and all three supplanted 'state' for 'God' in a mandatory nationalistic theism.
And yes, it's dumb to think that "evolution happened with the guidance or a system place by a higher being". I don't think you understand evolutionary theory very well. Since you're so fond of challenges, tell me: if a higher being is responsible for the mechanism of evolution, then whence the cuckoo? The mosquito? Why is the mammalian eye built inside-out and upside-down? Whence tonsils? The appendix? The ubiquitous Darwin's point? Wisdom teeth? I don't think it' dumb to be ignorant of the facts of evolutionary theory; it's unfortunate that so many people are, but it's not something to vilify people over. No, I save my scorn for jackasses who read half the book and think they can fill in the glacier-sized gaps in their understanding with 'GOD DID IT' and then poison the minds of people naive enough to believe them. Yeah, I'm bigoted; against myopic, ignorant motherfuckers who throw around words like 'science' and 'theory' like they know what the fuck they mean.
Also, D'Souza is a fucking moron.
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2.) Hitlers not the only one mentioned, books have been written on how an absence of faith has led to more deaths than one of faith. So that argument is wrong. The numbers show aethist sociecties cause more death than those of religion.
3.) "Also, D'Souza is a fucking moron." This accomplished nothing at all.
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Dos: You apparently didn't read the above post, or at least not closely enough. None of the societies listed were "atheist" societies; they were nationalistic theocracies that just happened to supplant the head of state for the deity. Also, whether or not Hitler can be included on that list is particularly germane to this conversation.
Tres: It wasn't meant to accomplish anything. This isn't a classroom, college-boy, I don't have to be civil or respectful of your stupid, stupid assertions. Just pointing out that quoting someone who willingly dated Anne Coulter? Yeah, maybe not tops in the realm of credibility. He's clearly batshit insane.
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http://www.statenews.com/op_article.phtml?pk=22579
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20060203_sam_harris_answers
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/259129.htm
http://www.americanvision.org/articlearchive2007/03-07-07.asp
Thats just some...also, if you look Atheism follows all the rules of a religion.
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Your last statement is particularly boggling: "if you look Atheism follows all the rules of a religion." Oh, please, do tell. As I said above, you never did quite nail down what you mean when you say "religion", so I'll grant you that by what may be your functionally useless definition of the word, atheism could be wedged into the narrow door of your convoluted thought process. Nevertheless, please, regale me: in what ways does atheism - the lack of belief in a deity - follow "all the rules" of a religion?
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The facts bothering you that your religion has caused more deaths than those of other peoples? You have not provided an argument yet. HAHAHA.
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"The Supreme Court has said a religion need not be based on a belief in the existence of a supreme being. In the 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins, the court described "secular humanism" as a religion."
So for legal purposes, when dealing with freedom irrespective of religion or lack thereof, a federal court decided to equate secular humanism with more conventional religion.
You really don't see how that does nothing at all to support your point? Really?
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