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-- Christopher Hitchens gets cancer, theists expose their idiocy again.
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Originally posted by woscar To this day, I still don't understand why any atheist defends religion.

If only I didn't have to work on this dissertation of mine... oh, well, there's always the weekend

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Originally posted by Lira If only I didn't have to work on this dissertation of mine... oh, well, there's always the weekend

Hang in there Hitch..

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Originally posted by Capitalizt Hang in there Hitch..

it might be all the red wine, but watching that made me really sad.

wow man... what a life he has had.

quote:

Originally posted by woscar

Well, I was bored during a seminar. I wrote it in a hurry but I think I was able to make the main point clear:

�There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus� � St. Paul

�Oi, what if I don�t want to be one in Jesus Christ?! Sod off!� - Not even a bit saintly Lira

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Originally posted by Lira You can only justify rationality THROUGH rationality

Well, one could just as easily place arbitrary faith in rationality as in anything else.

But it seems to me that the very idea of "justification" assumes some framework or criteria by which to determine whether or not something is justified, to wit, rationality.

Atheists are just like religious folks. Complete jackasses. They have to bash the religious people instead of only claiming to their beliefs and leaving the rest to believe in what they please.

No one will change the world. That pretentious dickhead Dawkins won't and neither will any .. enlightened superstar-logic person, due to the fact that this epic issue surpasses only logics and is built on so many different levels. Indoctrination, hope, love and simply the time when you're in a dark room and you've got nothing left in the world.

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Originally posted by Lira (1) it doesn�t entail from the denial of the existence of God that all aspects of religious thought are going to crumble afterwards, so even if we did get rid of religion, no utopian age would ensue;

But I'd still argue (and I'm sure you'd agree) that it would be better to live in a world in which the conceits of religion are openly challenged than in a world in which they are not. That such a world will not be a "utopia" is of course true, but only in the sense that no possible world could ever be a utopia.

I think you're right in suggesting that there will be religions for as long as there are communities of human beings, but surely that's even more reason for religious thought to be held up to rigorous scrutiny by the dissenters, not less.

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(2) the option to live a godless life is mine and mine only � if everyone else had the same goals I have, then it would follow that I�d wish everybody became an atheist. This actually gives me a much harder problem to deal with: What goals should be worth pursuing?

That I advocate the truth of a certain idea is not to say that I will it as a particular "goal", much less that I think people who believe otherwise are somehow existentially misguided. I may think theists are "incorrect" in their claims, but - barring the more extreme cases - I'd rarely let my judgements pass any further than that.

To "live a godless life" is of course my choice - "mine and mine only" - and to choose for oneself is, as Sartre put it, to choose for all mankind. That's not to say that you would (or could) ever make choices for others on their behalf, only that you must recognise the importance of "authenticity" in choosing: what you wish for yourself you must also wish for all others in the same circumstances (which is why there's always a touch of inauthenticity - or "bad faith" - in the fundamentalists of one faith who denounce the otherwise identical rationale of a fundamentalist of a different faith).

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Let�s say I believe God exists. I don�t just imagine there�s an entity G � I assign a set of values and traits to this entity: He may be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving, or if I want to go for something really pessimistic, He�s just a cruel bastard having a laugh at our expense. Now let�s say someone hundreds of years ago believed (s)he received a message from this entity G which says we should not kill one another (let�s call it rule R1). Society takes this as one of its tenets and organises itself around similar principles, namely R2, R3 up until Rn. As these rules become deeply ingrained in social life, they�re slowly taken for granted.

Are you presenting this as an analogy as to how religious moralities are formed in the real world? Because I think you have it backwards: the rules come first, the Gods are introduced later to legitimise those rules.

The legal books of the Old Testament are a pretty blatant example of this. Many of the "laws" have direct corrolaries with laws from other Near-Eastern texts - primarily Babylonian, with some passages showing an almost word-for-word correspondance - that were penned hundreds of years before the name YHWH even came into existence. Some of the later layers of the OT (namely the "P source") demonstrate the re-interpretation of earlier Jewish myths to support the power of the priestly caste (Aaronid, specifically) with regards to sacrifices, temple worship, proscribed rituals and so on. In both cases, the human desire to impose rules (many of them being arbitrary and senseless) on others came first, the idea to claim the divine origin of such rules came second. At the risk of making a claim that I cannot possibly substantiate, there's probably not been a single "law" attributed to divine inspiration that cannot be better attributed to more terrestrial, human, political motivations.

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Now let�s say this entity G never existed � does it make all these rules void? No, not at all, it just opens makes them more vulnerable to criticism, otherwise you�d come to the bizarre conclusion that just because the entity G said we shouldn�t kill one another (R1), the absence of this entity G allows you to gleefully engage on a killing spree. You may even point out that this belief was around long before anyone claimed to bring a message from the aforementioned higher power, but this needn�t be the case. R3 could be a very accurate scientific predicted that turned out to be spot on � like how to cure all kinds of cancer. Would it be desirable to ignore this rule just because there�s no entity G? After centuries of social practice, would you even be able to tell the revealed rules from the former ones apart?! That�s unlikely, unless you�re a very good historian.

But who on Earth is suggesting that with the opposition to religion must come opposition to every position a religious person has ever articulated? That all religions have clear injunctions against the indiscriminate killing of human beings (though usually with pretty clear permission for killing people in basically every other circumstance) says nothing about the validity of religious claims, and everything about the universality of human experience. What it demonstrates is that moral claims should be made to stand and fall on their own merits - that is to say, judged against some objective criteria like "universal human sensibilities" - not on the basis of tradition or claims to divine justification. A good idea is a good idea, and a bad one a bad one, regardless of its origin. Surely no atheist would wish for anything more than a universal recognition of this simple fact.

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Now back to the real world: Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens, and I don�t believe in God. Does that mean any of us managed to break up completely from our Christian past? Not really, and this is what bothers me about their approach... I agree with John Gray when he says there�s something very similar going on when atheist proselytisers tell us how amazing the world would be if we all ditched God.

Oh come on, surely not? The promotion of a particular view or opinion does not instantly equate to proselytism, and it's always struck me as a very lazy argument to try to equate the "new atheists" with Christian evangelizers.

Firstly, Christian proselytism is firmly rooted in the concept of material conversions. The aim is not to engage in an open dialogue concerning the nature of our shared experiences, nor to express or justify its own world-view in any particularly sincere manner, but merely to convert as many brute numbers as possible. The reason for this is best likened to virology (the most successful religions will always be those that encourage reproduction if only for the sake of its own reproduction), but that's a little beside the point. The real point is that the methods and intentions of the "new atheists" are completely different from that of religious proselytisers, at least beyond the superficial (and completely meaningless) resemblence that both want to convince others that they are right.

(And again, let's follow that logic to it's natural conclusions: if simply having a strong opinion and wanting it to be heard is sufficient to denounce one as a "proselytiser" then we're going to find ourselves weidling the designation almost everywhere we look. Desmond Tutu was a fundamentalist proselytiser against apartheid, Keynes was a fundamentalist proselytiser against laissez-faire economics (and he even had the gall to retain certain assumptions of classicalist theory - what a fraud!) and Ghandi was a fundamentalist proselytiser against British imperialism (but even then he used the British language to express his opposition to Britain - how could he possibly claim that he represented a break with traditional British values when he himself used the same language?). Who in this dichotemic world of proselytisers and pluralists is not a completely objectionable hypocrite?)

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However, the reason why I feel the need to break up with their tradition is not because I think religion offers any sort of path to salvation, much less a true insight to whatever it is they are on about. I just don�t think everyone is out to seek the truth, or the natural truth at that (by natural I mean the truths about the natural world as opposed to a supernatural one). Some people would rather be happy than skilled at manipulating things in the world, the problems of having we all live under the same rules in a democratic society notwithstanding.

But like I said in my previous post, there's something very patronising about that. "These people are happy not knowing about the fragile epistemic foundations upon which all religions are based, let's leave them alone in case their poor minds explode with despair at knowing what our apparently superior minds can handle with complete ease". In the first place, that people might feel uncomfortable hearing certain ideas is no excuse to shelter them from said ideas. There are many people who are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that gay people are quite normal, healthy human beings, but I don't think that their irrational sensitivities are any reason to exclude them from having to hear any ideas to the contrary. Secondly, I think religious people are much more capable of handling arguments against the veracity of religious claims than you give them credit for. Just because not "everyone is out to seek the truth" that's not to say it's right to shelter them from it.

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In this sense, as I posted in that thread about God, as religion has its dogmas, the enlightenment has what I call rational axioms, namely �You shall be rational� and �You shall rely on evidence-based knowledge, not on faith-based knowledge�. As an heir of the enlightenment, that�s how I live. However, I�m hard-pressed to justify my adoption of these axioms:

But these aren't dogmas: enlightenment claims concerning the nature of the world evince their superiority not through any kind of rational circularity, but because they provided better (and more useful) explanations of the world around us. One can believe in the "rationalist dogma" of heliocentrism - that is to say, a belief borne (initially) of rational deduction - or the more intuitive assumption of geocentrism. Now of course we cannot say that either is absolutely correct - much less that the former will make you happier or more moral than the latter - but still: try getting a spacecraft to Saturn if you think the Earth is the centre of the universe.

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So, in the end, if I had to set the one goal I wish we all shared, it wouldn�t be the pursuit of happiness, the search for truth (I don�t even believe in a Truth anyway), or anything of that sort. I just think the liberty to do whatever we want without imposing our goals on everyone else should be the one axiom we ought to keep. Because, that itself, ironic though it is, is something that doesn�t just concern us, but the humanity as a whole.

But you seem to have this rather odd notion of a pluralistic "liberty" that is best maintained by everyone keeping their opinions to themselves and never saying anything that might "impose our goals" on anyone else: what kind of liberty is that?

quote:

CORe Version: Unlike S.E. Cupp, I don�t think there�s anything desirable about the Christian right. Unlike Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens, I don�t think atheists need to save the world deconverting everyone.

Neither do I, and I'm pretty sure neither do they?

quote:

I�m no bloody Hegelian.

Antithesis: Yes you are.

quote:

Originally posted by Chimney Atheists are just like religious folks. Complete jackasses. They have to bash the religious people instead of only claiming to their beliefs and leaving the rest to believe in what they please.

nope. you don't understand atheism at all.

FUCK HEGEL.

Continue with your businessesseseses.



WOW @ THAT PIC. I FALL DOWN AND FAINT. THERE IS A GOD.

quote:

Originally posted by -FSP- FUCK HEGEL.

I would, but I'm against necrophilia

(By the way, James, interesting arguments - I'm going to reply this Sunday )

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN nope. you don't understand atheism at all.

Put on your viking hat and explain it to me then. C'mon, let's see what it's all about.

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Originally posted by Chimney Put on your viking hat and explain it to me then. C'mon, let's see what it's all about.

atheists have no problem letting anyone believe whatever they want. its when those beliefs manifest in the public sphere that atheists go off their rocker, and rightfully so.

eh...but nobody really has the authority to say "atheists are like (x), and theists are like (y)." They're just people, so sure, some atheists act that way, but you can't really say atheists as a whole act one way or the other. Really the only thing you can conclusively say about the group as a whole is that they don't believe in any god(s).

pkcRAISTLIN the atheist evangelist has converted me!

quote:

Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN atheists have no problem letting anyone believe whatever they want. its when those beliefs manifest in the public sphere that atheists go off their rocker, and rightfully so.

lol, look at your post history and then try to make yourself believe that.

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Originally posted by srussell0018 eh...but nobody really has the authority to say "atheists are like (x), and theists are like (y)." They're just people, so sure, some atheists act that way, but you can't really say atheists as a whole act one way or the other. Really the only thing you can conclusively say about the group as a whole is that they don't believe in any god(s).

yeah, that's a fair point. im not pretending to speak for anyone, but chimney's assertion that atheists should be "leaving the rest to believe in what they please" is nonsense when and if "what they please" causes harm to others.

since this is hitchens' thread, and having read a bit of hitchens, i think he focuses pretty strongly on the external effects of religious belief, and doesn't "bash" religious people because he "has" to. he does it because unsubstantiated superstition deserves to be challenged, when and if it oversteps its boundaries, which is pretty much all the time.

weymouth, you can suck my dick, shit-for-brains.

I guess to that I would ask how they've harmed others?

I mean, besides this whole thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

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Originally posted by srussell0018 I guess to that I would ask how they've harmed others?

you serious? how about this little chestnut, just because its recent.

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PRIMARY school students are being taught that man and dinosaurs walked the Earth together and that there is fossil evidence to prove it. Fundamentalist Christians are hijacking Religious Instruction (RI) classes in Queensland despite education experts saying Creationism and attempts to convert children to Christianity have no place in state schools. Students have been told Noah collected dinosaur eggs to bring on the Ark, and Adam and Eve were not eaten by dinosaurs because they were under a protective spell. Critics are calling for the RI program to be scrapped after claims emerged Christian lay people are feeding children misinformation. About 80 per cent of children at state primary schools attend one half-hour instruction a week, open to any interested lay person to conduct. Many of the instructors are from Pentecostal churches. Education Queensland is aware that Creationism is being taught by some religious instructors, but said parents could opt out. Australian Secular Lobby president Hugh Wilson said children were ostracised and discriminated against if they were pulled out of the class. In many cases, the RI lay people were not supervised by teachers. Kings Christian Church youth worker Dustin Bell said he taught "about creation" in Sunshine Coast schools. Set Free Christian Church's Tim McKenzie said when students questioned him why dinosaur fossils carbon dated as earlier than man, he replied that the great flood must have skewed the data. Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said teachers were sometimes compelled to supervise the instructors "because of all the fire and brimstone stuff". Mr Ryan said Education Queensland had deemed RI a must-have, though teachers would prefer to spend the time on curriculum. Buddhist Council of Queensland president Jim Ferguson said he was so disturbed that Creationism was being aired in state school classrooms that he would bring it up at the next meeting of the Religious Education Advisory Committee, part of Education Queensland. He said RI was supposed to be a forum for multi-faith discussion. Education Queensland assistant director-general Patrea Walton said Creationism was part of some faiths, and therefore was part of some teaching. New research shows three in 10 Australians believe dinosaurs and man did exist at the same time. The survey, by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies, shows a "worrying" lack of basic scientific principles. "The results underscore the need for students to be exposed to science and mathematics through a well resourced education system, rather than learning about science through Jurassic Park," FASTS president Dr Cathy Foley said. PhD researcher Cathy Byrne found in a NSW-based survey that scripture teachers tended to discourage questioning, emphasised submission to authority and excluded different beliefs. She said 70 per cent of scripture teachers thought children should be taught the Bible as historical fact. A parent of a Year 5 student on the Sunshine Coast said his daughter was ostracised to the library after arguing with her scripture teacher about DNA. "The scripture teacher told the class that all people were descended from Adam and Eve," he said. "My daughter rightly pointed out, as I had been teaching her about DNA and science, that 'wouldn't they all be inbred'? "But the teacher replied that DNA wasn't invented then." After the parent complained, the girl spent the rest of the year's classes in the library.

and here's a favourite of mine

http://whatstheharm.net/scientology.html

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN atheists have no problem letting anyone believe whatever they want. its when those beliefs manifest in the public sphere that atheists go off their rocker, and rightfully so.

That makes sense and I agree. However too many times atheists try to tease religious dumb fucks, making it even worse and all hell breaks loose.

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Originally posted by Renegade But I'd still argue (and I'm sure you'd agree) that it would be better to live in a world in which the conceits of religion are openly challenged than in a world in which they are not. That such a world will not be a "utopia" is of course true, but only in the sense that no possible world could ever be a utopia.

I agree that religion should be challenged, and I'm all for it myself: However, it is one thing to criticise religion; the position of HHD is not as moderate as that.

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Originally posted by Renegade I think you're right in suggesting that there will be religions for as long as there are communities of human beings, but surely that's even more reason for religious thought to be held up to rigorous scrutiny by the dissenters, not less.

I can't see that change in the immediate future. Given more time, the trend could sway either way: perhaps we are slowly going to a godless future in which this is going to have as much an impact in daily life as astrology nowadays, but regardless of the outcome, I do agree with you that criticism is necessary, and I'm firmly against any sort of "sacred respect". Hell, I was expelled from a Catholic school age 9 exactly because I refused to let the nuns get away with it

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Originally posted by Renegade That I advocate the truth of a certain idea is not to say that I will it as a particular "goal", much less that I think people who believe otherwise are somehow existentially misguided. I may think theists are "incorrect" in their claims, but - barring the more extreme cases - I'd rarely let my judgements pass any further than that.

And we're, I think, on the same boat here.

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Originally posted by Renegade To "live a godless life" is of course my choice - "mine and mine only" - and to choose for oneself is, as Sartre put it, to choose for all mankind. That's not to say that you would (or could) ever make choices for others on their behalf, only that you must recognise the importance of "authenticity" in choosing: what you wish for yourself you must also wish for all others in the same circumstances (which is why there's always a touch of inauthenticity - or "bad faith" - in the fundamentalists of one faith who denounce the otherwise identical rationale of a fundamentalist of a different faith).

"Being and Nothingness" is still on my to-read list, but based on the little I know about his thought (and I may be widely off the mark here), I don't think I'm in a position to imagine others are in the same circumstances I am.

If someone else had lived the very same life I did, then yeah, I think being an atheist would be the most authentic choice he could possibly make. However, I don't think I've got an existential doppelg�nger, so I'm in no position to make choices for others.

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade Are you presenting this as an analogy as to how religious moralities are formed in the real world? Because I think you have it backwards: the rules come first, the Gods are introduced later to legitimise those rules.

No, because I do agree with you here as well. I've heard some very cute arguments from recent religious developments here in Brazil that claim God legitimises very modern cultural changes.

And they firmly believe their position is inspired by something supernatural! My favourite claim is that the spirits (in a local religion) support Esperanto because it's a world language. Yeah, right

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade The legal books of the Old Testament are a pretty blatant example of this. Many of the "laws" have direct corrolaries with laws from other Near-Eastern texts - primarily Babylonian, with some passages showing an almost word-for-word correspondance - that were penned hundreds of years before the name YHWH even came into existence. Some of the later layers of the OT (namely the "P source") demonstrate the re-interpretation of earlier Jewish myths to support the power of the priestly caste (Aaronid, specifically) with regards to sacrifices, temple worship, proscribed rituals and so on. In both cases, the human desire to impose rules (many of them being arbitrary and senseless) on others came first, the idea to claim the divine origin of such rules came second. At the risk of making a claim that I cannot possibly substantiate, there's probably not been a single "law" attributed to divine inspiration that cannot be better attributed to more terrestrial, human, political motivations.

And, once again, coming from a naturalistic background, it's no surprise we agree here as well.

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade But who on Earth is suggesting that with the opposition to religion must come opposition to every position a religious person has ever articulated? That all religions have clear injunctions against the indiscriminate killing of human beings (though usually with pretty clear permission for killing people in basically every other circumstance) says nothing about the validity of religious claims, and everything about the universality of human experience. What it demonstrates is that moral claims should be made to stand and fall on their own merits - that is to say, judged against some objective criteria like "universal human sensibilities" - not on the basis of tradition or claims to divine justification. A good idea is a good idea, and a bad one a bad one, regardless of its origin. Surely no atheist would wish for anything more than a universal recognition of this simple fact.

Indeed, but my point (coming from a previous thread) is that just because we're atheists it doesn't mean we didn't inherit a set of religious values from the religion we broke from.

The reason why I'm saying this is because there seems to be a smug universalism in the words HHD that can apparently be summarised in the following sentence: "Religion is bad therefore we should all refrain from being deluded by this sort of superstition". I should be prepared to accept the fact that, no, there may be a person out there to whom religion may be a good choice.

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Originally posted by Renegade Oh come on, surely not? The promotion of a particular view or opinion does not instantly equate to proselytism, and it's always struck me as a very lazy argument to try to equate the "new atheists" with Christian evangelizers. Firstly, Christian proselytism is firmly rooted in the concept of material conversions. The aim is not to engage in an open dialogue concerning the nature of our shared experiences, nor to express or justify its own world-view in any particularly sincere manner, but merely to convert as many brute numbers as possible. The reason for this is best likened to virology (the most successful religions will always be those that encourage reproduction if only for the sake of its own reproduction), but that's a little beside the point. The real point is that the methods and intentions of the "new atheists" are completely different from that of religious proselytisers, at least beyond the superficial (and completely meaningless) resemblence that both want to convince others that they are right.

Are they really completely different? Thus far, I've failed to notice what the main differences are between the "New Atheists" and the missionaries that try to convince you they're somehow enlightened and want you to convert to their world-view.

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Originally posted by Renegade And again, let's follow that logic to it's natural conclusions: if simply having a strong opinion and wanting it to be heard is sufficient to denounce one as a "proselytiser" then we're going to find ourselves weidling the designation almost everywhere we look. Desmond Tutu was a fundamentalist proselytiser against apartheid, Keynes was a fundamentalist proselytiser against laissez-faire economics (and he even had the gall to retain certain assumptions of classicalist theory - what a fraud!) and Ghandi was a fundamentalist proselytiser against British imperialism (but even then he used the British language to express his opposition to Britain - how could he possibly claim that he represented a break with traditional British values when he himself used the same language?). Who in this dichotemic world of proselytisers and pluralists is not a completely objectionable hypocrite?

Well, and I'm prepared to reach this conclusion and make the very same objection: Suppose a small community in India wanted to keep the status quo as a British enclave in this country Ghandi wanted to set free, would Ghandi be entitled to say independent was the best possible outcome to all Indians?

Sure, this puts me in a very difficult position: What if a black community in South Africa opted for the perpetuation of apartheid for whatever reason? Do we, as champions of the free world, have any right to convince them it is not a good idea?

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Originally posted by Renegade But like I said in my previous post, there's something very patronising about that. "These people are happy not knowing about the fragile epistemic foundations upon which all religions are based, let's leave them alone in case their poor minds explode with despair at knowing what our apparently superior minds can handle with complete ease".

No, I don't think they're happy and ignorant. Most of the time, they're happy and think everyone else is ignorant! That's what I'm trying to get at: Can we criticise their thoughts? Of course! Unless they're out to endanger the well-being of others (such as terrorists) or have an impact on our life (such as politicians) do we have any right to expect them to disrespect them (Dawkins just called a bunch of people "idiots" in a way in that interview I posted, and he's prepared to say theists are "deluded"), or expect them to "see the light" someday? No, not at all.

Even if this isn't your position, you've probably noticed that there's a lot of atheist animosity against religion these days. Is this really a good way of criticising an idea you disagree with?

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Originally posted by Renegade In the first place, that people might feel uncomfortable hearing certain ideas is no excuse to shelter them from said ideas. There are many people who are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that gay people are quite normal, healthy human beings, but I don't think that their irrational sensitivities are any reason to exclude them from having to hear any ideas to the contrary. Secondly, I think religious people are much more capable of handling arguments against the veracity of religious claims than you give them credit for. Just because not "everyone is out to seek the truth" that's not to say it's right to shelter them from it.

But I'm not saying religion shouldn't be criticised

All I'm saying is that the way the "New Atheists" criticise religion is heartbreakingly pointless and maybe even bad for future dialogues.

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade But these aren't dogmas: enlightenment claims concerning the nature of the world evince their superiority not through any kind of rational circularity, but because they provided better (and more useful) explanations of the world around us. One can believe in the "rationalist dogma" of heliocentrism - that is to say, a belief borne (initially) of rational deduction - or the more intuitive assumption of geocentrism. Now of course we cannot say that either is absolutely correct - much less that the former will make you happier or more moral than the latter - but still: try getting a spacecraft to Saturn if you think the Earth is the centre of the universe.

Precisely because that's one goal we value. Tell to any theist that science can provide better explanations: the sort of explanations they require has nothing to do whatsoever with how to manipulate the practical world. We could land on the moon and establish a colony there - it doesn't explain why we're doing it.

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade But you seem to have this rather odd notion of a pluralistic "liberty" that is best maintained by everyone keeping their opinions to themselves and never saying anything that might "impose our goals" on anyone else: what kind of liberty is that?

No, that's not my position at all. Like I said before, I'm for criticism, I just tend to be cautious when this criticism seems to call for the suppression of idea unless you've got a very good reason not to wish for its extinction.

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade Neither do I, and I'm pretty sure neither do they?

Judging by their books, this is pretty much what I think they implied. I can even go as far as reading the books all over again just to check.

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade Antithesis: Yes you are.

quote:

Originally posted by Renegade I still think there's something very condescending about the atheist who defends theism.

By the way, I really feel bad for this guy:



His opinion is rather interesting, but the coldness of the audience that doesn't even smile at his jokes is really upsetting

All right, sometimes I do feel like biting my tongue

quote:

RC Bishop Links Love Parade Tragedy To 'Sin' An Austrian bishop has described a German music festival stampede where 21 people died as a sinful event and suggested the deaths may have been God's punishment for losing faith. Salzburg's Roman Catholic bishop, Andreas Laun, described the Love Parade and participation in it as "a rebellion against creation and against God's order, (which) are sins and an invitation to sin". As well as the deaths, more than 500 people were injured when a lethal bottleneck formed as revellers tried to get in to the festival in the German city of Duisburg on July 24. Writing on the German-language website Kath.net, Mr Laun warned against judging the dead. At the same time, he indirectly linked the deaths to God's right to punish apostates - those who turn their back on the true faith. The provocative comments are expected to draw outrage from victims' families and survivors. The remarks from such a senior member of the clergy are also feared to draw the embattled church hierarchy into further criticism of its rigid attitude to modern society. In recent months the church has tried to weather storms over successive child abuse claims, a lack of sympathy to predator priests' victims and a crisis of legitimacy. A memorial service was attended by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, amid assertions that the parade would never be held again.

[Sourc
e]

This is why I still think they need the occasional smack to the back of their heads

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