Illuminatus on 17/1/2007 at 17:54

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jay pettitt, any community built around ideology is a strong community, and if a religious community exists, then clearly its own members are benefiting from it. One of the biggest reasons religious attendance is so high in the US compared to Europe is because of the civic perks that a church can offer its congregation there. In Europe, the Church's civic aspect is not as prevalent.

As for Strontium Dog... so many lols. See, at first I thought you were actually interested in some critical analysis of your position and its faulty premise (disproving God using science), but somewhere along the way I realized you just wanted a shit-slinging-fest, for lack of a better phrase. That’s not the point of this thread though, and the debate’s over unless you actually address the main point: faith is not a scientific thesis, and anyone who treats it as such is not a scientist.



Sir, you’re as dogmatic as they come: you uphold an inflexible, arrogant opinion and are incapable of understanding the other side’s point of view. Dogmatism can be secular too; it exists wherever someone tries to rub their ideology in people’s faces. Again, what have you been doing so far here with atheism? Screaming “BUT I HAVE SCIENCE ARRRGH!!” doesn’t change this fact buddy.



You heard it here first people: believing in a religion is like jumping under the wheels of a moving truck. Dude if you still can’t see how amazingly offensive, presumptuous, and anti-liberal you are being, then watch some bad televangelists preach; you’ll recognize their style. And, yeah, it is preaching, right from the book of St. Dawkins. Don’t you realize how wonderfully ironic your intolerance makes you look?

When I mentioned that you “regard someone’s spiritual belief as a threat to your well-being” you accused me of putting words in your mouth.



;)



Your inability to see religion as anything but a Big Fat Lie is still keeping you from grasping the huge gap in your reasoning. Science has nothing to do with what goes on inside a Church, as your “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” clearly explains. In fact, by bringing up the NOMA but still attacking faith, it’s clear that all you want to do is, well, attack faith. Which is fine, hey, but I gotta warn you… churchgoers will still be churchgoers no matter how many superheroes like you try to save them from the rampaging truck that is the spiritual community.

Chimpy Chompy on 17/1/2007 at 18:13

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I think Jay's being a bit alarmist.



This does need a little further explanation. How is belief a danger to one's self, in such a manner that you should try and talk people out of it for the sake of their safety?

Chimpy Chompy on 17/1/2007 at 18:41

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Well yeah, I think voices like Dawkins should be heard. I am interested in reading his works - couldn't find God Delusion on paperback, and I'm a cheapskate, so picked up Unravelling the Rainbow instead. I just get a bit wary when people talk of the christian church in this country being a significant threat - it falls into "looking for things to be angry about" sometimes. Then again, I remember there were some fairly nutty christians around when I was at uni. And I've read once or twice about Fucking Creationism trying to get its claws into science class here - without much success, thankfully. So I guess some number of fundies are indeed out there somewhere.

However, if your second paragraph is replying to what I said, I don't understand what you mean? Strontz was accused of being preachy about atheism, he said "if I told people not to lie under a bus would you call that preaching"? Which seems to suggest he sees some harm or danger to one's self in believing in a god. Or did I read him wrong?

SD on 17/1/2007 at 19:11

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You've already established that you haven't the first idea about science, though. If you did, you wouldn't use such trite, tedious and untrue clichés like "science asks how and religion asks why".

Adam & Eve were the first humans - this is a scientific hypothesis.
The Earth is 6000 years old - this is a scientific hypothesis.
There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us - this is a scientific hypothesis.

Theists like to tell us that our immutable scientific laws can be broken at wll by God, yet they provide precisely fuck-all evidence to support it. And this bullshit isn't just restricted to the Old Testament; if you believe the story about the Feeding of the 5000, then the Law of Conservation of Matter can be broken at will by a hungry Jew with a fish sandwich.

Now I'm asking you, why can science not challenge these ludicrous, illogical threats to its position?


Incapable of understanding the other side's point of view? I'm not really. If you're saying their point of view is scarcely worth understanding, I'd agree with you.

You might as well say I don't understand the complex relationship between Rainbow Brite and her faithful flying horse, Starlite. Well shit, son, that's going to keep me awake at night. Oh no, I don't understand Klingon - that's really going to fuck me up if I ever go to sleep at night and wake up on Qo'noS isn't it?


And again you misinterpret my words, no doubt deliberately.


Look up the meaning of the word "intolerance" when you have a free moment. Then actually explain to me how adopting a differing opinion is "intolerance". You're throwing out words like "dogmatic" and "intolerance" when you don't understand what they mean.


I see, so I'm supposed to use "my reasoning" to come to a conclusion that defies reason - that religion isn't a barrel of guff? I think that just about says it all.

You are so clearly having a laugh here. If I didn't know any better I'd say you were an alt-nick on a wind-up.


Irrational thinkers are, on balance, more dangerous than rational thinkers - not just to themselves, but to everyone else too. Some are more dangerous than others (generally the kind whose beliefs tell them that blowing themselves up on a tube train is a fast-track to paradise), many aren't particularly dangerous at all, excepting the occasions when they gang up to try and curtail my personal rights or (http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/liverpoolecho/news/echonews/tm_method=full%26objectid=18260158%26siteid=50061-name_page.html) mount a hostile takeover upon my alma mater.

As a general rule though, irrational behaviour is not healthy, and religion is the ultimate red herring.

Pyrian on 17/1/2007 at 19:35

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I think it's important to remember that it's not the supernaturalism itself that makes religion dangerous, but the adherence to potentially harmful doctrine in the face of disproof or even mere lack of proof. Now, the fact that supernaturalists (i.e. religious people in general) have, in self-defense against science, largely embraced unprovability does elevate them to a particularly noxious doctrinal level, since that's clearly a dangerous position to take if avoiding blind ideology in general is accepted as a good.

I think it's more that atheism does not in itself escape the pitfalls of blind ideology.

Er, most of the conflicts of the cold war...

I don't think you should be calling a blatantly atheist ideology pseudo-religious; as a defense of atheism, that's just changing its definition. I'm afraid it's a very broad term.

Here's what I mean: let's say we succeeded in convincing the world as a whole that religions were bad and shouldn't be followed. Would that, in itself, slow war at all? Or would other blind ideologies slip into the gap just as easily - and just as violently? I rather suspect the latter. Nature famously abhors a vacuum, as they say, and society abhors a power vacuum.

Most of the Christians in the U.S. firmly believe in freedom of religion. There are those among them, however, who work tirelessly to turn our country into a de facto theocracy. This has not risen to a level of wholescale challenge to basic rights, but they've won some significant battles in defiance of their relative minority status. So far, through a great deal of vigilence, they've been mostly held back, but there's no question they'll keep trying and if we stop contesting their lies (and they deceive with no hesitation or evidence of conscience) who knows where they'll get. I frankly fear and despise these people above any other serious political group in the U.S.; they're not just against religious rights, in the "war on terror" they've shown themselves to be against ALL human rights.

You were ascribing fundamentalist positions to ALL Christians. Other objections have also been raised.

The genie was never IN the bottle; illegal abortions were the norm before they were legalized. Like drugs or alcohol, it's not something you can prevent, only fight. Anyway, if you're actually interested, the state of the political battle over abortion in the U.S. is quite fragile at the moment - there are court cases pending as we speak that could overturn RvW, and some states where abortion access is so limited that it might as well be illegal.