Why atheists should join religions:

Speaking of "bastions of ignorance", your post contains no content other than gratutitous insults and arrogant posturing--hardly a sign of much intelligence.

 

Also, neodude is at least contributing roughly within the subject of the thread and its tangents, rather than just venting standard "atheist" BAWWWW RELIGION rhetoric.

 

Contributing for the sake of irony isn't contributing.

 

Is this thread playing up on the fact that at some religious meeting's the topic of discussion is often how other god's are clearly fake because of (insert reason) but fail to use the same scrutiny when it comes to there own deity?

 

I guess if we are considering "god" to be some sort of cosmic character or galactic persona, then it really wouldn't matter.
But if we are using God in the sense of some sort of interpersonal, insane force that is the glue of every fragment of existence, then the answer to that question in all actuality wouldn't really effect anything either, other than maybe your personal state-of-mind.
Actually, I think this is why a lot of atheist can't take the idea of God seriously. They get stuck on the mythological god, which is the magical thinkings of a past age.

That's kind of a contradiction.

 

No. It's got more in common with Entryism in politics, and the desire to take the Church* in a more moderate direction, rather than leave it to its own devices and hope that it reforms itself. Most atheists, even the ones that think all religious people are stupid and/or brainwashed and/or zealots and/or right-wing nutjobs, would still like to see the Church reformed to reflect a more humanitarian ethos. What I am saying is that, were those atheists members of that Church, said Church might actually listen to them.

*Church from here on in this post meaning any major organised religion.

 

Life is nothing but contradictions .

 

Just a fancy name for "physics", surely?

 

Dunno..."God" doesn't sound too fancy to me.
But yeah...maybe a fancy name for metaphysical physics
Or the force fueling physics

 

God kind of has to be an intelligent force. Some people would have it that, since God is the creator, whatever created is God; since God runs the place, any force that appears to be running the place is God. Which would be fine, if it weren't semantically misleading. The word "God" has connotations which are impossible to ignore, even if we claim to just be using it as a label for any force of creation or whatever. So to use it that way is disingenuous. And that, in fact, is why so many people do it. Once you've posited that any physical action is God, you have a foothold to start working back up again, so that the God in question is your god, as described in your holy text, even if that conflicts with the limits of the doubt you've used for your foothold (e.g. no-one really knowing how gravity works can provide a place to say "God makes it work", but it does not follow that "and the same god also sent his son to die for our sins").

Short version: using the word "god" to describe anything that answers the same questions as God used to is kind of misleading, and usually willfully so.

 

Whenever I say God I use the word in a universal sense, and never in connection with any singular deity-based religion.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
But I do agree that if we are using the word "God" then whatever force we are talking about should be self-aware.

 

Sorry, I wasn't accusing you of doing it. It's common enough though.

 

Yeah, it is. By the way, an atheist group I take fellowship with (See, it can work both ways!) was recently discussing a book by Bishop Spong, who is into up-dating Christianity for the twenty-first century.The question I've gotta ask is is this guy really a Christian, or just an atheist with a cope and mitre? It seems to me, this comes close to the "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" approach to Christianity--and yes, uncomfortably close to my own (which is more Borg than Spong, but unlike Borg, I'm not a full-fledged panentheist.). Isn't this just intellectually dishonest, deceptive--or downright subversive? One of the leading Protestant theologians, Paul Tillich, defines God as "the Ground of Being"--in other words, an abstraction. This view has been popularized by Bishop Robinson's book Honest to God, and there's something to be said for it. What would distinguish my beliefs from those guys is that I have an intense belief (strong intuition) in "Something Big Out There"--an elusive presence "in whom we live, and move and have our being". It's like the "something more" that William James talked about in Varieties of Religious Experience.This Something is "bigger than a breadbox" but beyond that I haven't a clue. Except that to call it the laws of physics doesn't quite capture the more personal nature of what I'm talking about. Is it an illusion? All in my head? Possibly, but elsewhere I've outlined several reasons for believing in it (I can dredge those up again if anybody's interested). The agnostic left hemisphere of my brain keeps such ideas on a short leash, while whistling past the graveyard. The right hemisphere is a believer, but the God it believes in is less Charlton Heston with beard and robe than Woody Allen wearing a beret and sitting in a director's chair. I have the uncanny feeling that my life is scripted--that I'm in one of those avant garde tragi-comedies with an ending that will leave everybody in the audience scratching their heads. But it's really interesting, and the belief system keeps me occupied and hopefully harmless.

 

maybe i can become a televangelist and get a bunch of followers who believe in me, then after they're all following me i'll go ha ha I was really an atheist all along, there is no God and I was just fucking with you . . .sounds like fun

 

Except then you'd lose all that money.

 

my religious views are strictly not worrying about anything a week in advanced. like afterlife, thats way to far ahead of me. plus no one could know. so. my lifes to short to care live in the moment, even though thats impossable, due to the fact it takes the brain 1/3ed of a second to process things, so we are never fully living in the moment.

 

How can anyone make out that atheism is a religion. As I understand it religious belief
isa superstitious notion of some all knowing higher power. Where is the evidence for this?
In some ancient manic writings purporting to be the word of some god or other?
Atheists look upon religion with scorn and rightly so in my view.

 

I Worry where the human race is heading with all this religious crap.

 

Why do people look at atheism as a religion? It's a rejection of religion, a rejection of things that require a leap of faith. That's it.

 

Most religions have enough conscious charlatans in them as is, they don't need atheists walking into there places of worship in an attempt to undermine them secretly in my opinion.