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Atheists around world suffer persecution, discrimination (pg. 10)
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| Dykes_on_Jay |
| Religion is like a period. So long as they feel loved they won't ask any questions. |
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| de+ |
| quote: | Originally posted by Halcyon+On+On
I would add, in argument, that perhaps many of the examples he forwarded do not personally believe in the literal interpretation of religious texts. One can still be an intellectual, yet observe that the strictly metaphorical and allegorical interpretations pose support for their beliefs in the existence of God. I would not call that stupid on its own, rather evidence of a humanistic facet of conditional and existential analysis. |
I wouldn't call it stupid either, just gullible. I assume that they observed the interpretations of the other major religions as well? Read the books for each and then through study and listing the pro/con of each decided to go with catholicism? Or did they just pick the one they were raised with/was most prevalent in the area and stuck with it?
Not that there's really anything wrong with being gullible as long as it's not bothering other people, I'll give you that. But don't tout it like some sort of great amazing thing. It's just being gullible.
| quote: | | It's when biblical (and otherwise) literalists, and their self-assuming pontifex, make their decrees for public interest in assumption of their own principles, that it becomes a point of contention that any mindful individual ought take offense. |
I'll give you this. But it unfortunately happens a lot in most places around the world, which is why atheists keep resisting.
| quote: | | Atheism is one claim. |
Atheism is not one claim, it's a rejection of claims. We don't claim anything.
| quote: | | Religion is one belief. But Atheism, in itself, does not seek to revoke religion, but theism, and its long-standing legacy in political influence to evangelize its morality as the only morality, at the utter cost of dissent in the interest of fundamental human rights to the pursuit of individual fulfillment. |
Atheism does not seek to revoke religion or theism. Atheists pretty much only have a problem with people using arguments based on things that aren't empirically true, because they are generally skeptical of claims. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
Atheism is a claim. You're both (you and Joz) correct that it is a rejection of other claims, but "there is no verifiable evidence for God" as a sole statement has arisen as a response to post-enlightenment musings on our place in the universe. It is of course correct in every laboratory sense, and all the more so when we begin a dialogue on public policy and the synthesis of governing bodies, their imposition into the pursuit of life in a civic manner, but that doesn't make it any less of an elementary argument in the flux of the public sphere.
Like it or not, spiritualism (and it's Big Brother, religion) is a defining attribute of our species. You can eschew this to mere gullibility all you like, but the formulation of encoded inferences is a default characteristic of mankind; children see things in the dark, thunder inspires fear, hypnogogic reactions and the existence of DMT in the brain, pareidolia and books of documented mental illnesses; all of these things are completely natural occurrences, and it's self-evident that early mankind sought to imbue such events with shamanic hierarchy and inevitable augury. It's at its heart merely spatial-temporal reasoning, extrapolated to clutch epistemological framework. This, too, is natural - nobody in particular made us do this (that's the whole point), and its very existence is proof that it is who we are, it is how we are built. You can explain away that it's is a compounded coping mechanism for sentience, that it is an evolutionary quirk for tribal cohesion, but you cannot claim that it's not here to stay, and that atheism is a much later claim to keep the fascism of religious thought in check.
If we were innately capable of rational thought rather than the uniquely distilled byproduct of millions of years of behavioural neuroses, none of this would be a point of contention. The scientific method must be taught to us that we might derive appropriately empirical conclusions of reviewable volition. It is precisely why the claim is so important, and that we not merely assume "oh, that's how everyone should think because it's the least wrong option"; We quite demonstrably work counter to this assumption. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by de+
Atheism is not one claim, it's a rejection of claims. |
... which is itself a claim.
Atheism is not a religion, not a matter of faith, and it's not loads of things, but saying you don't believe in God is definitely a claim. |
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| Psyshell |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
... which is itself a claim.
Atheism is not a religion, not a matter of faith, and it's not loads of things, but saying you don't believe in God is definitely a claim. |
Technically speaking.
Theism is the active belief in a directly intervening god (or gods i.e. polytheism) who continues to do so, or something like that. A-whatever just means not that (like the word ahistorical). So atheist just means someone who does not believe in a directly intervening god.
Under that definition agnostics are also a subset of atheists. As are buddhists in some ways, I guess it could be argued they're more deistic as well. Laveyan satanists also are most definitely atheists. As are some hectic subsects of hinduism (there's one that believes that in fact gods are the dreams of men, I think that'd qualify as atheist). A non belief in the supernatural is generally thought of as required to be atheist but it's not necassarily so. I can think I'm a wizard and still be an atheist. I don't btw but I know some people who do who claim to be atheists.
There is also another way of looking at it. That you live life by scientific method and that even though god might exist as a 1% chance it's so incredibly unlikely it's not even worth thinking about and is worth discarding immediately until proper evidence is presented. Whether that belief makes you an atheist or an agnostic is stupid semantics that doesn't matter.
So anyway, saying saying you don't believe in god is not a claim in itself, although actively saying god 100% doesn't exist is. I doubt many people are actually that close minded about the existance of god. It's just that there isn't any evidence for it so it's ing stupid to believe it exists, you may as well be the idiots who lived in medieval times that thought giving a priest some money was going to buy them a better afterlife.
Also, if anyone wonders why my text is so unreadable and crap I'll give you a hint.
http://tinyurl.com/c3ekh8j
What the is this ? vbulletin version -500? Put in some code that detects the browser resolution and give me a way bigger text box please. How am I supposed to write big paragraphs when I get such a ty little text box on my 1080p moniter (which nowadays cost 80-150 dollars, not exactly expensive). Really awful forum software is gonna be one of the reasons new users don't stay btw. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| (the little tab in the lower right hand corner of the text box stretches it out.) |
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| Psyshell |
| Thanks, I still shouldn't need to do that in the first place, it's just lazy coding. Or maybe there should be a list of options in my user profile that asks for my screen resolution and then that changes how big the code for the reply box is. |
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| srussell0018 |
| You should write swamper a letter. |
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| Halcyon+On+On |
| If the box were enormous, it would be really awful to look at on a smartphone. It'd be like typing in Notepad, which can be pretty awful, horizontally. |
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| Psyshell |
That's why I said it'd be nice if the code detected what screen resolution you were using. Pretty sure all modern browsers (firefox, chrome, opera) do this. If not, a button somewhere that lets you change between "home mode" and "smartphone mode" right next to the reply box would be great. You could set the default resolution the reply box is designed for for both in the profile panel and there'd be different options for 720p, insert 5 other common smartphone resolutions, 1080p, 1280x1024, 1600x1200 etc.
As for writing swamper a PM, maybe. Maybe someone should start a thread called "forum coding improvements... bringing tranceaddict into the 2010+ decade".
Or he could just buy the latest version of vbulletin (or we could do a crowdsourcing campaign for it on kickstarter, I'd put in 10 bucks) and do a database transfer and make sure to bring all the smilies and there we go. It'd involve 10-30 hours+ of setting up the forum admin permissions and stuff but that's just life. |
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| OrangestO |
Yes, you can write coding that automatically detects whether you're using a certain browser, mobile device, etc.
It's not all that hard implement, either. |
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| srussell0018 |
| You can also stop whining about every little thing and quit being a little bitch. |
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