Topic: Why do Atheists Hate Religion? - page 399. (Read 901341 times)

Theist ignorant hatred is the reason gay teenage americans are three times more likely to commit suicide than straight ones.

That's a fact.

#goodReasonsToDespiseReligion

And yet, I would never call someone "gay" as a derogatory thing.

Fun fact: For most atheists, religion is like, the gayest thing there is. The absolute fucking GAYEST. Seriously you guys.

Plenty of rational people are irritated by religion just as plenty of irrational people are irritated by homosexuality.

I am not into taunting or playing around like a cat and mouse, or in your words like children on a school yard. The fact that you see it that way says more about you and then me, I believe.

I only brought up the fact that I have proof to answer the question. Why do I continue to believe? I believe because I have proof.

You act like I need to prove to you the existence of God to show why I believe in Him. I believe in Him and I have proof, that is why I continue to believe in Him (I believed with faith purely in the beginning). I don't need to prove His existence to you for me to believe in Him.

I was simply answering your question, not trying to be contrary. As the joint wrote below, and I already stated, I know my proof will not prove God to you.


BTW, I'm a female.

I don't want to speak for someone else, but I have a few questions and thoughts:

1)  What kind of proof are you looking for?

He mentioned his proof is subjective.  If it's 110 degrees outside and I tell you that it's cold outside because I happen to feel cold, how can I prove this to you?  A thermometer won't cut it except saying that 110 degree is cooler than, say, a paper fire.  Do you allow any room for experiential proof?  It would certainly be valid to say that my feeling and knowledge of being cold is experiential proof despite my inability to prove this to you or anyone else.

2) Do you generally believe proof must be empirical proof?

3a) If so, what place do you think logical or mathematical proofs have in rational discourse?

3b) Also, if so, by what means could one falsify the belief, or prove to the contrary, that empirical proof is not the only kind that matters?

School bag on the roof is nothing. It is your rejection of God that will throw you under the bus.

Nobody has to do anything to you. God gave you the strength, in the kind of being that He made you to be, that you can reject Him if you want.

God wants you to accept Him, because He is the thing that holds you alive. If you reject Him, you reject your life and your self. God doesn't want that for you. But He also wants you to make up your own mind. He hopes you make it up the right way, so that you can live. But you have the freedom to make your decision as you wish.

Because of all this, no good Christian will attempt to force you to believe in God. No good Christian ever attempts to force anyone to believe in God. Good Christians tell the message about God, they attempt to convince, they call, they invite. But they don't force.

At the time your rejection is strong enough that there is absolutely no chance for you to accept God under any circumstances, God will know it. What He will do is unclear. He probably will let you die, then, giving you the thing you asked for - death - so that your sinning will be less than it would have been had you remained alive, so that you will be punished less in Hell for rejecting God.

It's all rather "school yard" all this. I mean why make a big fanfare announcement claiming proof, then when asked to show it (which you wanted people to do anyway, or else why announce it?), reply "not telling".

What you gonna do next, throw my school bag on the roof for not subscribing to your God club?

A few comments I'd like to make about this post:

1)  "Woo" is certainly abundant.  Woo exists most prominently when someone looks at some evidence or experiment and makes unwarranted assumptions about it, e.g. how Deepak Chopra might look at ideas of quantum non-locality and use it alone to make statements about all of us being 'one,' or something to that effect.

Woo does not exist where there is a valid or sound logical argument that either provides a basis for bypassing scientific explanation altogether, or for framing scientific explanation within a broader, valid philosophical context.

2)  Agreed, ad populum proves nothing.  Just make sure you recognize this also applies to the countless persons who believe Empiricism is the end-all to knowledge acquisition.  There are both things which provably exist outside the scope of empirical explanation, and methods of knowledge acquisition which provably trump Empiricism in terms of general explanation (e.g. how Philosophy can explain and validate empirical exploration whereas Empiricism cannot, etc.).

To this end, scientific "woo" also exists, and usually takes the form of, "Look how far science has taken us technologically and in terms of our understanding of specific natural processes, therefore science is the best method of exploration." 

3)  Also keep in mind there is no empirical evidence that validates the scientific method.  Science as a working method is validated entirely by Philosophy.

4)  Automatically equating things like God or Intelligent Design to "paranormal" is a form of intellectual dishonesty (for, if such things exist, they are not paranormal but real).  What we can do is equate "paranormal" with "unreal," thereby elucidating my point -- one who assumes that God or I.D. must be paranormal is intellectually dishonest in that he a priori dismisses these things as unreal without any rational basis to make such an analogy.

No. I answered the question completely. You just want proof.

I'm sure atheists will love this answer, but I have proof. Those with hardened hearts will never see proof enough to believe in God though. Christians are not supposed to bother trying to explain or prove His existence to someone who will never believe. Atheists will say they will, but it will never happen. You'll say that's convenient.

Well, it's not, it would be easier to just lay it all out and have you believe. But it's not the way God set up the world. And my proof is my proof, and subjective, nothing you can't say was just a figment of my imagination and easily explainable. But I know it's true.


I guess that's what your argument comes down to. I just think that if science was explaining all of these things like you say it can, then people would be losing their notions in the supernatural over time, not getting more into it as science seems to be failing to explain things to people instead.

Sentence fragment.  "Simply because [what you said afterwards]," then what?  I'm not getting on your case for a typo.  I'll assume the 'then what' is what follows in your next sentence.



The type of "description" you reference here is merely relative description.  Aside from the fact that any data provided by such "technological tools" are always subject to the frailties of our own perceptions (i.e. it doesn't matter how good the tool is if the tool itself, and the gathered data, are also subject to the frailties of perception), we already have examples of where such "technological tools" provide us with empirical data that lends to contradictory explanation.  A powerful telescope is a great example:  

On one hand, a telescope can provide us with data that lends to the extrapolation of an expanding universe from a single point in space; on the other hand, the fact that we observe galaxies in similar stages of development equidistant to our relative locality (i.e. to our right, we see galaxies at age x and at distance y, but we also see this if we look left, up, down, etc.) seems to suggest that we are always at the center of the Universe.  Empirical methods have no means of resolving empirical paradoxes, and it is only by deferring to abstract methods such as logic and mathematics that we can possibly resolve these paradoxes.


In a practical sense, of course.  We needn't even consider cosmology to go about our daily life.  But without knowing 'all that we can know,' we 1) can't assume God does or does not exist, and 2) can't assume that exploring the issue and possibly arriving at a conclusion won't yield practical value that is currently unknown to us.


First, I again remind you of the fundamental and crucial point that "philosophical gymnastics" are what allow the scientific method to work in the first place.  Science is predicated upon empiricism which is a theory of knowledge acquisition.  Empiricism defers to philosophy to say, "Okay, in order to explain 'objectively' in terms of empirical phenomena, we are going to control for the possible effects of observation by simply assuming that observation has no effects on physical phenomena."  This is an entirely philosophical assumption, and it is empirically unfalsifiable.  To empirically falsify this assumption would require that one collect empirical data of physical phenomena by means of observation in a universe totally void of observation (a contradiction).  You must then ask yourself why you are willing to make what Hume calls "a complete departure from science" in order to explain it, but you are unwilling to make such a departure for anything else.

Second, Harry Potter by definition is a false analogy to an Intelligent Designer.  Is is theoretically possible to empirically prove or falsify Harry Potter because Harry Potter falls within the scope of Empiricism.  It is not theoretically possible to empirically prove or falsify an Intelligent Designer because an I.D. falls outside the scope of Empiricism by definition.

However:   Your reply entirely misses the point about the requirement of a theory to explain theories in general.  

Edit:  The most intellectually dishonest point you make is even saying things like "philosophical gymnastics" to begin with.  Absolutely all knowledge is predicated upon logic and Philosophy.  Hearing you talk like this is like hearing BADdecker refer to the theories of science as "science fiction."  A logical explanation, equal-to or greater in scope, trumps a scientific explanation 100% of the time, all the time, every time.

The fact is that people use religion to inflict misery, but only at times. At other times they use it to bring peace and healing to others.

People can't get away from religion. Because nobody know anything about the future or his own future, people seek religion of some sort. Even the people who are against religion make it into a religion of non-religion... all because of our human weakness regarding our lack of for-a-fact knowledge of anything in the future.

It's simple ! Anything that disrupts peace and dignity of life cannot be a part of religion. This only implies that people have used religion to inflict misery on others instead of using it to bring them together. Over decades we have been spectators to the misery and communal fights caused in its name...Does anything else need to be said ?

Yes dear i give the answer of title of the thread that why atheist hate religion.

Ohhh, I see, you're answering the topic title but because you quoted part of a conversation relating to something more specific it looked like your contribution was in answer to the quoted dicussion you included.

Fair enough.

Retracted.

Yes dear i agreed with you that antheism is don't believe in God Right ?? I mention that the thinking and belief of every person is different Is it wrong ??

The fu. . .?

I'm taking it you posted this solely to get in your required minimum posting number for that online ring vendor you are promoting in your avatar, because the content is ridiculous.

Atheism is the absence of a belief in theism. There are no 'flavours' of absence of theist belief. It is either present as theism or it is absent as atheism.

Agnosticism is just someone who doesn't want to commit to either position.

 

There are frequent debates not only between atheists and theists, but also among atheists on the subject of religion. Why? Because there is no unanimity among atheists on religion. Different atheists believe different things about the value, nature, and future of religion and religious beliefs. It’s impossible to ascribe one overarching position about any aspect of religion to all atheists or even most atheists.

It takes time for people to lose their 'woo'.

Firstly, please don't ever cite how many people believe something to be true as a measure of it being true. You cannot prove anything by general consensus. You could say 100 billion people believe in something for which there is no objective measure and their assertion would be defeated by a single person who simply pointed out that fact.

Just because you employ positive reinforcement, confirmation bias and cherry-picking among a group of like-minded 'believers' does not make for evidence. The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. Nothing 'paranormal' has EVER been demonstrated that could survive critical analysis and you want to simply say, "Well, shucks, there's a lot of us who believe in it so we'll ignore the absolute lack of any data to support our claims" because that's sensible, right?

Secondly, people will often move from theism to agnosticism because they understand that religion is a man-made phenomenon, but they will still cite their own experiences of, "things wot u cud nt expln!!!!!1!1", leading them into maintaining a belief in 'the supernatural' allowing them to still hold on to the notion of 'dualism', something a lot of people believe they need to do because of their conditioning from religion.

Trouble is, if we can explain away every single claim towards the 'paranormal', which we can, and those who cite having 'knowledge of' the 'paranormal' are completely unable to ever demonstrate objective proof of such, then I think we're safe to say that our non-woo explanations are, as for 'god', infinitely more likely to be correct.

Simply because we can speculate on numerous possible theories and hypotheses which could be used to explain processes we have yet to more accurately observe and measure, none of which would require an omnipotent, omniscient super-being.

So, on the basis that explanations exist which do not require an omnipotent, omniscient super-being, they are by default *more likely* to be correct as they do not invoke infinitely more complex elements, namely, god(s).


Well, let's be honest, we don't need a 'comprehensive' theory of 'reality' to be able to accurately describe basic elements of what can be objectively tested, observed and measured, as long as we have the technological tools which can help to minimise on the erroneous frailties of our own perceptions.

We can, and have, achieved a great deal in our short time of applying the scientific method, without needing to say we 'know everything'.

Introducing gods into our hypotheses would be no different to introducing Harry Potter as an explanation for the origin of The Universe. Your philosophical gymnastics notwithstanding, I think we can safely proceed along the lines of ruling out our Universe having been created by a fictional character from a book, if you know what I mean.

Yeah see you didn't really answer the question, you just gave us your opinion. Just because xyz is comforting, doesn't imply xyz is true.
To be fair I knew you would never answer it because I asked an impossible question. Nobody can possible know if that particular God is false or not.
Good reason why I steer clear of the whole mess.