Topic: The problem with atheism. - page 35. (Read 38470 times)

  Faith can also be equated with trust. I have faith that the sun is going to come up tomorrow, although there is no empirical proof that it will, because you cannot prove that there is not a mass of anti-matter hurtling through space that doesn't show up on any instruments and is going to blot out the sun sometime in the next day. The belief that the sun will still exist tomorrow is therefore irrational.

   It has been popular in some circles recently to replace the word "god" with "the universe." If you are talking about anything that is as small as the universe, or as small as an infinite number of universes, then you are not talking about the Most High. The insistence by some groups on emphasizing the importance of worshiping something smaller than the universe as being key to personal salvation is what caused me to reject God and label myself as an atheist. All praise and thanks to the Creator of everything that exists that I was able to travel outside of the US and see other perspectives...

There is no empirical proof that universal noncontradiction is valid [ ~(A & ~A)], you are accepting universal noncontradiction on *faith*.
Faith, by definition, is a belief *not* based on proof.  If something is verifiable, it is no longer faith.  Yet you are asking for proof.

Or maybe.... it just didn't have much of an effect.

Kids don't know what sex is, they don't know what's appropriate or not.  If he was molested, he may have not even known about it and just chalked it up to weird tickling.  It may truly have been a completely innocuous experience as far as he was concerned.

I'm not saying it WAS innocuous, I'm just saying that it's an entirely reasonable possibility that nobody seems to be admitting... that it actually isn't that harmful to the child is some situations.

That could easily be Dawkin's minimising the problem in his own mind because no-one protected him, and probably no-one believed him or validated his experience or something like that.   He claims it has had no lasting effect but I bet if a psychologist were to diagnose him they would find negative consequences in his life, because it is obvious he hasn't dealt with it if he is saying things like that.

Incidentally, what Dawkins (or any athiest) says doesn't reflect on atheists or atheism in general.   Because it's not a religion and there are no dictates.  It's simply people who don't believe God claims.  That's it.  They don't have anything else in common.

Well this gets back to my original point, that of course those who espouse religion (and benefit from it) would claim something like "man's completeness is predicated on his relationship with the true God".  But there's no empirical proof of such a claim.

Off topic but the child issue is a problem caused by government arbitrarily declaring someone a child and not a child based only on age and not their actions.  Having said that once there can be found a better way of properly identifying a child it is not ok to do things to them without their consent which can't be given by a child.

I'm not sure why you think it's somehow bad that he claims that the punishment for and our cultural view of crimes should be related to the damage they do.  All he said was he was molested as a child and that it didn't cause him any terrible lasting damage.

Crimes should be judged by the pain and suffering they cause.  That's a reasonable thing to say.

Grab a Zoohedron dice if you find that many religions appealing. 

    God is entirely free of need, and does not need our worship. Worship is the most beneficial thing in existence for we created beings. The universe, as well as religion, are created for our benefit.

   The utility of faith can be logically demonstrated, as I tried to demonstrate earlier in this thread. The argument is further bolstered by the placebo effect and other anecdotal evidence.

  I would simply point anyone who doubts the reality of phenomenon that are not empirically observable to DMT.

   Listen to the prophets- their message is one. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist.

Semantic fun...

To not know is to doubt. To know is to not doubt.  To doubt is to not have faith.  To not doubt is to have faith.  To not know is to not have faith.  To know is to have faith.

Also...

What one can prove he cannot know.  What one knows he cannot prove.  Scientists really need to understand the importance of this statement.

If man's completeness is predicated on his relationship with the true God (and there exists a true God), there's obviously plenty of harm in worshiping false ones.
All this talk, of course, has nothing to do with true faith, which lies outside of logic and reason.  Faith, by definition, is fully opaque to rational discourse.

I actually don't have a problem with religion.  It's obviously false but then people are allowed to believe false things if they want.  As long as I don't have to have anything to do with it, people can kneel and pray and "amen" to whatever imaginary friends they like.

As for the rest, I'm aware of the bible cherry-picking.     Your analogy about the children isn't a good one.  That's a real danger.  Let's assume that this God nonsense is true for a second.  The god would know that they were the only God.  What harm would it do to him or the beings he had created if they worship a false god or gods?  No-one's being hurt.  

Your problem is not with religion (i assume you are talking about Christianity), but with the Church & the Christendom.  Read Matthew 23 -- Jesus shares your ideas about priests.

As far as idolatry & graven images, that's O.T., Exodus stuff.  Think of it as your parents teaching you not to stick your hand into the fire -- you burning yourself doesn't hurt them, the reason they pwn you for playing with matches is to *teach* you, not because they're petty.

wow - at the descriptions part!

Transparent to the marrow of their bones
Companions of equal age
White skinned
Appetizing vaginas
Non-menstruating / non-urinating/ non-defecating and childfree
Never dissatisfied

and etc

that's fucked up.

Confirmed.

http://wikiislam.net/wiki/72_Virgins

Religion is just a wonderful tool to encourage people doing everything you want them to do for free.
Isn't it amazing when someone craves to kill as much as possible around them and then die just because of promises to appear in illusive world where they can fuck 72 virgins(boys/goats) forever with permanent erection?

Darwin invented or discovered that complexity does not always have to decay, but can evolve from simplicity through nonperfect copying and natural selection. The effect was that God is not necessary. Before Darwin, divine creation was maybe the most rational solution to the complexity problem. It must have been overwhelming at the time. His book is still readable and available on the net.

As science advanced, it became clear that it was not the individual that was the subject of copying, it was the genes. (Darwin did not know about DNA) Dawkins summed up the status of the genetic science with his "The selfish gene", also cutting short some erroneus partial theories like group selection and some political variants. Based on current science, he concluded that the mind, supported by the brain, did not have to be controlled by evolution directly, leading to free will. In his own work, in "The extended phenotype", he expanded on that, and also showed that the environment of the genes was not only the cell, or the individual, but the nature at large, including the great universe, and the inverse, that the genes are also able to affect the nature outside the individual, including the universe. Which takes the puff out of the environmentalist balloon, if you ask me.

Dawkins also tries to explain the fact that religion seems to exist everywhere, with natural selection. He tried to invent meme copying and selection as another form of life, maybe not too successfully. In "The God delution" he tries another variant, that listening to your parents without questioning can be lifesaving for small kids, and this instinct erroneously (in natural selection sense) is kept when the child grows up, including when the time comes to raise its own kids.

That's my understanding of Dawkins anyway.

Coin has only two (three) sides

Do you believe in pure determinism, by the way?

If so, consider this:  A free entity would be free to place its own constraints.

A religion is a type of belief system.  Christianity, for example, is often referred to as a belief with zero evidence, aka a faith-based religion.  Buddism, for example, is often practiced as a belief system based upon evidence.  Science is similar to Buddhism to that extent.  I think you categorize religions as special because they all have a certain social flavor that's so strong you can taste it.  But still, not even all religions incorporating some belief in a deity are the same.  Polytheistic gods are significantly different from monotheistic ones and bring to the table different assumptions.  Science has its own assumptions.  Observation has zero assumptions.