Why I'm Atheist and not Agnostic

Interesting, thanks.

 

Don't be stupid. Under the right conditions Christianity can be just as evil; Hanging people for witchcraft, rounding up and executing 6 million jews... et cetera et cetera...

Jesus Christ, a couple steps in the wrong direction and they'd be eating and drinking actual human flesh and blood for communions.

 

Sooo are you saying only religion can bring people to commit these kinds of atrocities?

 

Still wouldn't solve the problem of the necessity of interpretation. Regardless whatever details it might contain it would still be a repository for symbols which had to be deciphered. All those who believe that the bible is an unerring particular word simply cannot apprehend the readers role in a books communication or can't tease out their own level of participation in the communication of ideas. Symbols can be taken to mean anything. It is at the level of belief then where the problem is and not in the nature of a book.
If you hadn't been convinced a book had magical properties then it would be more consistently comprehensible for what it is, a book.
By and large I do think these distortions, beliefs in magic, can be mended through education but there will always be those of intractable stupidity which is backed by the stubbornness of pride. It would be a personal embarrassment and seem psychologically devastating for them to admit mistake but wouldn't in fact prove deadly if they did.

 

You mean a couple more steps in the wrong direction? Under the right conditions men can be vicious.

 

Don't even get me started on the catholic church... Who cares about their stand on geology and evolution, they have blood on their hands,
not to mention institutionalized abuse of children, full participation in genocide of native peoples...etc

 

You care. The only problem with your level of caring is that it is adversarial as opposed to just or understanding. It fosters ire in you and all you can see is blood. In this sense you suffer the adversary of your own adversarial verdicts. The only verdict that does not perpetuate a balance owed is not guilty. If we could but observe the phenomena of the world and our own sensations without the specter of guilty con-science then our science or systematic regard of the world would be just and so to then our reasonable responses.

 

The catholic church has slightly progressed a bit over the centuries, Gong. Thanks to secularism mostly I guess. If they would have been stigmatized and/or banned or persecuted the world might have been even less fun. Thank God for the rational approach of us and our ancestors
I don't think they as a whole ever institutionalized the abuse of children. I take it that is a mild exaggeration of words (or am I taking the word institutionalized too literally?). They did try to hide it and cover it up though, but that is of course not the exact same thing.

 

Look, the things I have against Christianity in it's basic form, (besides certain actions of it's adherents throughout the centurys) are the completely irrational ideas put forth about the creation of man and woman, ( woman being made from adams rib, for fucksake ) immaculate conception, ressurection, the idea of satan as an entity, the idea that we are all born into sin, the exclusionary beliefs that if you do not accept the lord jesus christ as personal savior thats died for your sins you will not be saved in the "second coming" but instead be left to a living hell on earth...I could go on but I think you get the gist. If all those things are supposed to be viewed as metaphor, thats certainly not the way they are put forth. furthermore, any authority who believes those things as literal truths, lacks rationality and objectivity to the point of being dangerous to progressive society IMO

 

Under the right conditions anything human can be just as evil. But those witch hangings in Christendom happened long ago. In recent centuries, the biggest body counts have resulted from secular movements, starting with the massacres of the anti-religious French Revolution. Those 6 million Jews you mention were victims of a primarily secular ideology--a curious amalgamation of nationalism, socialism, and romanticism, laced with eugenics and Teutonic pagan mysticism (and admittedly, anti-Semitism left over from the Christian past). Stalin killed more people than the Christians and the Nazis put together, and Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kims of North Korea multiplied the body count in the name of the atheist ideology of dialectical materialism, Marxism-Leninism. But there is room for hope. In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist (and atheist) Steven Pinker argues that, thanks to the spread of trade, literacy, and cosmopolitanism, we've made some real progress in controlling our violent impulses and empathizing with others. The headlines suggest that folks in the Middle East didn't get the memo, but I doubt that witch hangings and heretic burnings are likely to make a comeback in the U.S. and Western Europe in the forseeable future.

Far be it from me to defend the Catholic Church. Instead of Luther's idea that the Bible is the sole authority on truth and right, the Catholics see the institution of the Church as the sole authority, which leads to results which are as bad if not worse. Pope Francis seems to be a true Christian, but he has his hands full with an Institution (with a capital "I") that's hide bound in tradition on which it depends for its legitimacy. I have Catholic friends, and even Episcopalian friends, who subscribe to what I consider to be the dangerous belief that the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church through its Councils. After studying with these same people Church history (through excellent histories by Diarmaid Maculloch and Charles Freeman)--after seeing the politics involved in the creeds and dogmas, the venality, the atrocities, perpetrated in the name of Jesus--it's hard for me to understand how anyone can still cling to this idea. No human is infallible, no book is infallible. Once we realize that in full humility, we might make spiritual progress.

 

Far be it from me to defend the Catholic Church as well, but with the way you've phrased it here, the Catholic perspective seems superior given that the Church is living and can grow, while the Bible is fixed at an increasingly remote point in the past.

Then again, institutionalized spirituality is never really a good thing, so I guess it's a catch-22.

 

Exchanging one pope for thousands was a smart move. Well done, Luther.

 

Neodude! Great to hear from you! I'd given you up to alien abduction. Are you still in God's county?

 

Physically yes. Spiritually I couldn't say.

I'm still living in Oklahoma.
Not sure where on the Belief-spectrum I fall these days.

Cool to see that you're still around. Maybe we'll get into some discussions like old times.

 

Well I understand and I don't think you should support what you don't support, at the same time the bible is a collection of of books from different authors written at different times and in differing social contexts spanning thousands of years. For example there is more than one creation story in the bible. There are two different stories of creation. The first one which is actually a younger version says god created man by saying let us make man in our own image and likeness male and female he created him. The second version older and less advanced in understanding is the one you cite and gives explanation for and assumes blessing for the cultural artifices of patrimony and the accumulation of power and wealth through inheritance. One is a cultural treatment of the idea of how the extant became and the other is a metaphor of our personal becoming.

I certainly agree with you that the dogma of sectarian belief has nothing to do with the truth and can in fact make it seem obscure, but I think we can discern where people or the people who wrote texts were at by following who might benefit from the ideas put forward. Follow the money or the pay day so to speak. For example we could say that someone who says things should be taken on faith alone are seeking to consolidate power in favor of their conviction. If we know this is the purpose then we can take that into account. On the other hand there are statements that can only be applied to personal development, like when you pray do so in secret to your father who knows you in secret. So if the baby is understanding the phenomena of the world then we kind of throw it out with the bath water by dwelling on blemishes or letting them be the guide for our attempts at understanding.

I'm not seeking to convert any one to a view but am suggesting as a rule every phenomena can be expressed in a form of intensity that is spectral or interpreted as high or low frequency. Sunlight is beneficial within a certain range of exposure and damaging at another. Same for the phenomena of religion or the applications of nuclear energy. Stereotype is applicable in a theoretical sense but brutally unfair as regards the dimensions of any particular individual and brutal to the perception of things as a whole or congruent reality.

 

I agree. I saw him briefly light on a board a few months back.
God's country if you're a drunk indian anyway. I'm from Missouri which more aptly appeared to me at times dusty and stormy Misery in the form of thunder storms and tornadoes and heat waves and cold snaps and the cold shouldered suspicion given to those who appear strange. At the same time I miss lightning bugs.

 

I understand what you are saying, Dope, and I have no disagreement.
I did say in my original post I have no problem with any individuals personal faith.

 

I do not think that the possibility of God exists in the range of reasonable probability.


-

So Agnosticism is the position that you can not know. This is not my position because I think there is a preponderance of evidence that God is a product of mans imagination, desires and superego.
I do not think in absolutes but degrees of probability. Much of our knowledge base exists in probabilities. There is a very high probability with reason and logic to think that God is imaginary. The idea that God is an actual being is so illogical and unlikely to me that it is far beyond any REASONABLE probability. I might not say 100%, but 99.99999% certainty. I feel this means I am not agnostic because probabilities beyond the range of reason are really pointless to consider. To give any credit to absurdity is just foolish. To say you can't "know" when one position is beyond reason is just foolish.

-

 

Since this assessment is entirely subjective on your part, expressing it in terms of numerical probabilities gives it a misleading air of bogus precision. It's not unreasonable to believe that the pervasiveness of religious beliefs, despite their diversity, reflects a common sense of universal truths grounded in a perception of the integrated complexity of the universe. To call these perceptions "absurdity" and "beyond reason" seems itself to be foolish.

 

Agnostisim sounds a bit gentler to me than atheism...Atheism almost sounds against religion.....just words.....really......

I just say I am not not any religion, but very spiritual.....

I like what the secular humanists believe...that it is not up to a god to fix things....it is up to us.....

but this is all very personal to people...people can believe and not believe whatever they want to, as far as I am concerned.....

as long as someone is a good person, what do I care what they believe in or not.,