Topic: Why I'm an atheist - page 34. (Read 89022 times)

Context matters. Lets look back not 4000 years but a mere 75. Around that time president's Roosevelt commanded an army to storm the beaches of Normandy and thus killed many defending soldiers who probably wanted nothing more then to be left alone by the United States army. He also ordered the development of a horrific weapons of destruction the atomic bomb that would later be dropped on not one but two cities full of women and children.

Should I be against what the President commanded back then? Well that would require one to look at overall context both of the commands in question the reasons the command was given and their necessity.

We would need to answer several questions including:
1) What does it mean for a command to be moral or immoral?
2) Could a command that is not accepted today ever be moral under any possible historic or future circumstances?
3) What are those circumstances?
4) Were those circumstances present when the command was given?

One can logically support the decision to use nuclear weapons at the end of WWII and simultaneously support their nonuse today. That is possible after a mere 75 years. Your critiques of biblical accounts concerned actions that occurred thousands of years ago in a world and context we can barely imagine today. Keep that in mind when you are critiquing those times.  

The answer to your question is yes I do reject the traditions of stoning, slavery, rape, and genocide, and no I am not against what my God commands.

If you think those positions are mutually exclusive then you have not analyzed the problem in sufficient depth.

^^^ There isn't anyone who is innocent... not even in Egypt. If there were some, they would never get sick, and they would never die.

What does God command us? "Love God above all things, and your neighbor as yourself."

To whom did God give the Ten Commandments? Not to us. To the people of Ancient Israel. Ancient Israel no longer exists. They were destroyed 70 AD by the Romans.

Get an understanding of what is going on before you start accusing someone of not obeying his God.

So you are against what your God commands? If I remember right Bible says that God command to stoning people to the death for things like pickup wood the last day of the week, slave the remaining of your enemies population and has command genocides multiple times like when he,she or it command to one of the angels or whatever to kill innocents children in Egypt.
I have read the almost all the Bible like a normal book, without any religious influence for any of my relatives and always think when I was a children that was a kind of very creepy adventures book or something like that. Now I have the same respect for religious people then I have for people who smokes and is: I don't care in what somebody spend their life, unless they affect anyone else.

As do I

A religious book written by the unknown number of authors over millennia is not evidence of God's existence.  

Your assumptions about how the universe came about are not evidence.

Yes, I do reject the traditions of stoning, slavery, rape, and genocide.

Enough said.

You have been presented evidence. You can find evidence for God in the Biblical tradition passed to us from the generations prior. Or if you choose to ignore that you can also infer the existence of God from certain basic features of the universe. The latter is the approach I took in my earlier post An Argument for God. I provided a link to it as your summary of my position is slightly lacking.

I am aware you that have rejected my argument. This puts you in a challenging position. There is a third path to take but it is the most difficult. That path lies in living out a life grounded in something other then God and learning the hard way the consequences the choice. 

People always get it wrong when it comes to religion. They think its about the building's or the prayers or the singing. That ultimately is irrelevant. Choosing ones religion is the process of defining who you are and the principles and reality you structure your life upon. Whenever someone tells me they are an atheist I pause and wait for some useful information. You don't define something by what it is not you define it by what it is.

Having rejected tradition and logical inference you live by and embrace some other worldview not grounded in God. Whatever you have settled upon I honestly believe it will disappoint you sooner or later.  Nevertheless, I wish you well on the journey.

I am open to evidence that I am wrong.  I have been asking for it.  All I got was "the Bible says that it is the evidence" type of arguments.

Then there are guys like CoinCube who jump to the conclusion that there must be some sort of pantheistic God because some things cannot be proven in Mathematics.  And that this God is a Christian, Trinity God.

Cell death is an irreversible process.  When you die, you are dead, no conscience, no memory, no more you.
 
Whatever religious fairy tale one believes is irrelevant.  Religious people are increasingly becoming irrelevant.

In a few decades, religious beliefs (aka fear of death) will be diagnosed and lumped together with other phobias.

Actually, the thoughts in your head are controlled by God. He simply uses everything to do the controlling. And He does it according to the touch of free will that your spirit has... because your spirit is too weak to move even your mind without being activated outside of yourself.

Maybe it is a personal belief.
Or that the community you live in is a reason for that.
The thoughts that are in your head are controlled by everything.

^^^ Not formally believing in something doesn't mean that you aren't part of it, necessarily. Look at the "Flat Earth" thread in the "Off Topic" part of the forum. Those FE jokers think that there isn't any gravity, and that the thing that is really happening is some bizare form of density. This doesn't mean that they don't live in gravity.

An onion by any other name smells just as repugnant. A religion by any other name is still a religion. Atheism by the actions of atheists is a religion, no matter what they want to believe or claim.

Same here. I think it's time we change our views of atheists as baby-eating satan worshipers. I don't think they believe in satan either anyway. I know a couple of nonbelievers and they even have better morals than most theists i know. Respect begets respect so let's just let people be with what they want  to believe. Having theists and atheists for friends make up for a good discussion over beer.

You know what, I can't really blame you for being an atheist. There are lots of people that are like you don't worry. They are making me believe that religion was just created by humans for humanity to have ethics. And most atheist explanation in which when Jesus Christ rose from the dead, they explained it that Jesus Christ rode a flying saucer to rise. So, they say that Jesus is an alien.

But having a different religion is not a case for us. It's your own choice to be in that religion or sect.

Since religious beliefs were mainly invented as a tool to justify death denial, any acceptance that a different/contradictory religious belief might be truth or is a belief as legitimate as any other, means acceptance of death as final. Of course, this provokes serious reactions.

Therefore, empirical research confirms that when reminding of death, most religious people become more intolerant of different religious beliefs or non-beliefs.

And that the intensity of the intolerance will be proportional to the intimate insecurity of the beliefs. Which means that people with less psychological faith/security on their beliefs will be much more intolerant.

See inter alia:  Terror management and religion: evidence that intrinsic religiousness mitigates worldview defense following mortality salience: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16938037
A theoretical and empirical review of the death-thought accessibility concept in terror management research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20804234

Some Buddhists monks seem to coupe with different beliefs with easy because they are real convinced that their beliefs are true.

This isn't good. Because it means that to be tolerant a religious person has to be absolutely convinced of the truth of his religious beliefs. On other words, you know... more or less, a fanatic.

Indeed, if that can make a religious person accept with a condescend smile "crazy" different beliefs or no beliefs, it can also make them explode themselves for their beliefs. With or without a simile. Makes little difference.


Throwing stones on my own ceiling, research also suggests that at least some atheists react to the idea of death with more vigorous denials of god and some intolerance to religious beliefs.

On first sight, this seems absurd, since the nonexistence of god is irrelevant to death. But perhaps some atheists really believe that god doesn’t exist with the same kind of strong conviction that believers have on his existence.

At least atheist philosophy of life depends on the veracity of the nonexistence of god. Like believers, atheist have something to lose if they are wrong.

Moreover, if they are atheists on the good sense, they should keep an open mind and be always open to any evidence that they are wrong. And so, by principle, an atheist should have some insecurity about the veracity of the nonexistence of god. Or he will be a "fanatic" also.

Thus, maybe deep down some atheists might also be afraid of being wrong and end up "burning in hell". This could explain the strong reaction and more vigorous denial of god after thinking about death.

So an atheist has to be enough convinced that he is right to be tolerant to believers, but he also has to stay open to any evidence that he might be wrong, as the scientific method demands.

That's the whole point. Since the things that I believe in are real, you are the one who is believing in fairy tails.

BTW, other scientists have waked up long ago. They are finally becoming bold enough to come out into the open - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.49860956.

You don't know what epistemology is, never mind the truth.

You don't have the tools to distinguish what is true and what is false.

Good luck to you.

BTW, you believe in a fairy tale.  You don't believe me? Investigate who wrote the scriptures, when they were written and why?  The picture is clear to anyone with half a brain.

It doesn't surprise me no matter what you conclude. Why not? You would rather play with rhetoric than look at things that show you the truth.

So I conclude you don't have any examples.

Well, think about it.  Maybe you will find a way out of your madness.

I'm not here to play your games. You can't just decide what is truth. Truth is truth. Either you accept the truth or you don't.

You still have time to be saved.

Give me your BEST historical CONTEMPORARY evidence of Jesus existence or be quiet forever.

I have no fucking interest to re-hash ALL your bullshit list, I just picked the first one in your list.

Give me your ONE, best example and I will bury you with evidence to the contrary.

Stop talking 'Christian', I don't speak it.  I have no idea what souls, salvation, hell or heaven are.  They do not exist and are undefined. 

So use English, not Christian English if you want to get anywhere with me.