Moderator: Community Team
chang50 wrote:
Atheism is already mainstream in nearly every developed country outside N.America and civil society has not collapsed.On the contrary we are talking about some of the most civilised countries around.Naturally change is difficult,painful even.One of the biggest problems as atheism gains appeal is that ex-theists are often much more zealous and impressionable than those who never believed and they bring their intolerant attitudes acquired as believers with them.I agree it's the future and the internet with its inexorable scrutiny of ideas is the battleground,and one where ultimately theism will decline slowly over time.
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
Gillipig wrote:Damn, is this thread still alive!? What a waste of time, we all know religious people can't be reached through logic,
tzor wrote:Gillipig wrote:Damn, is this thread still alive!? What a waste of time, we all know religious people can't be reached through logic,
The strong atheist has no logic. Logic patiently points out that you can't prove a negative.
Now if you want to insist that religious people can't be reached by burning straw men, well then, a lot of people can't be so reached.
john9blue wrote:moral decay does not happen overnight. people in (insert "progressive" european country here) still follow moral codes (both government-enforced and otherwise) which are heavily influenced by religion. religion influences everything, or as you might say, "poisons" everything, regardless of whether some dude in europe acknowledges it or not (it even influences the way this dude was raised... the morals taught to him as a kid were probably influenced to some extent by religion)
also, are these countries "civilized" because of atheism, or is atheism a result of a high standard of living? again, has this system been shown to be stable over a long period of time? i don't think it has.
crispybits wrote:The strong atheist position you describe (There is definitely no God) is not the same as the currently popular atheist position (There might be a God, but I have seen no evidence that proves it, and in the absence of any evidence I have to assume the claim that there is a God is unfounded).
crispybits wrote:It's about whether you have an open mind and are willing to say "you know what, I was wrong about that" if presented with evidence that counters your beliefs. Funnily enough not something that religious people or institutions in general are well known for.
crispybits wrote:Nobody is claiming that atheism has swept the world and transformed it into a more civilised place. In pretty much every country there are still around 40-50% (at least) of the population that identify themselves as religious, including the supposedly atheist ones like Sweden, France or the Czech Republic.
crispybits wrote:There is a place in that for religion too. Don't get me wrong here, I'll stick up for your right to believe anything you want to believe in. I'll also stick up for someone else's right to call it ridiculous bullshit. Most importantly though, I'll make damn sure that I stand up and be counted when decisions are made that affect society that they are made based on evidence and reason and an ethical code that is based on compassion, responsibility and fairness, and not on what some religious text from hundreds or thousands of years ago says about what they thought God said we should be doing back then. Perhaps most importantly, I'll oppose any organisation or individual that brainwashes kids into core beliefs about the biggest questions of all before they are intellectually and emotionally mature enough to understand the concepts being discussed and independently form their own opinions.
tzor wrote:I guess I generally tend to get the strong Richard Dawkins type, especially on the internet. Remember that the previous post indicated "logic." In the absence of evidence logic can only say that there is no evidence. (Since there may be evidence but we are unaware of it.) One may choose to assume anything under these conditions, but this not derived from logic.
tzor wrote:Well it's not something that people in general are well known for.
tzor wrote:Stepping back a moment, I should point out that many so called "atheist" movements were often led by delusional utopian megalomaniacs desiring absolute power and causing untold death and destruction in their wake. A small number of the founding fathers of the United States, on the other hand were agnostics, which is as close to atheism as you can get in the 18th century. On the whole, the nation was better off for them.
tzor wrote:Well, first of all, we can go on for ages about "brainwashing." Just because something is old doesn't mean it's wrong. If that were the case, I would recommend you no longer ride in any vehicle because the wheel is an old as the caveman. In fact one could even argue about "survival of the fittest." Anything that doesn't work doesn't survive all that long. I think we will need to go into specifics here, because at this point we are so vague as to argue almost anything. What beliefs and questions are we considering?
crispybits wrote: Neither had republics and democratic forms of government maybe 3-400 years ago, but we still went ahead and did them. All societies change based on what that society believes to be the best path, and yes sometimes mistakes are made, but the solution is not to try and halt the change, the solution is to engage with the change, and to keep using every bit of energy we all have to making sure that whatever aspect of society we are talking about, the changes bring about a better society tomorrow than we had today.
crispybits wrote:Research has shown that there is a high correlation between atheism and education. As more and more people are taught to think critically more and more people reject religion. Of course there is also a correlation between the educational level of a society and the standard of living of a society, but if asked what was more likely, that someone had developed better critical reasoning skills and therefore had developed a certain core belief about how the universe worked, or that someone was able to afford a bigger house or a better car or a bigger TV and therefore had developed a certain core belief about how the universe worked, I think it would be obvious which is more likely to be related.
crispybits wrote:However the argument that it's never been done before is no argument at all against anything. If it had been tried, and it had failed because of the lack of religion, then I may be more sympathetic to claims that God-less societies are unworkable and will suffer inevitable moral collapse. The truth though is that it's never been tested long term in any society comparable with the ones we live in worldwide today. Neither had industrialisation maybe 250 years ago, but we still did that. Neither had republics and democratic forms of government maybe 3-400 years ago, but we still went ahead and did them. All societies change based on what that society believes to be the best path, and yes sometimes mistakes are made, but the solution is not to try and halt the change, the solution is to engage with the change, and to keep using every bit of energy we all have to making sure that whatever aspect of society we are talking about, the changes bring about a better society tomorrow than we had today.
crispybits wrote:There is a place in that for religion too. Don't get me wrong here, I'll stick up for your right to believe anything you want to believe in. I'll also stick up for someone else's right to call it ridiculous bullshit. Most importantly though, I'll make damn sure that I stand up and be counted when decisions are made that affect society that they are made based on evidence and reason and an ethical code that is based on compassion, responsibility and fairness, and not on what some religious text from hundreds or thousands of years ago says about what they thought God said we should be doing back then. Perhaps most importantly, I'll oppose any organisation or individual that brainwashes kids into core beliefs about the biggest questions of all before they are intellectually and emotionally mature enough to understand the concepts being discussed and independently form their own opinions.
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
john9blue wrote:crispybits wrote:Research has shown that there is a high correlation between atheism and education. As more and more people are taught to think critically more and more people reject religion. Of course there is also a correlation between the educational level of a society and the standard of living of a society, but if asked what was more likely, that someone had developed better critical reasoning skills and therefore had developed a certain core belief about how the universe worked, or that someone was able to afford a bigger house or a better car or a bigger TV and therefore had developed a certain core belief about how the universe worked, I think it would be obvious which is more likely to be related.
BigBallinStalin wrote:crispybits wrote:1) Rape victims
āIf within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife.ā Deuteronomy 22: 23-24 NAB
Stolen from here
Since there's no commandment against raping anyone, then I guess it's all right to rape those in the top 10 list shortly before killing them in the name of our Dear Lord, the murder prohibitionist, Jesus Christ/Holy Ghost/God--whichever one he is at the moment.
crispybits wrote:If they're female and you rape them within city limits it also gives you justification to kill them - double bubble!!
2dimes wrote:And I was with you there as a kid. Later I switched up to something just as good. Following the replacement too literally.
I totally wouldn't mind getting pantsed here so I'm going to pants dude. Then he's embarrassed and kills himself.
Later still I learned to understand, I need to take your personal needs into consideration and then, treat you the way I would want to be treated if I were you.
2dimes wrote:1. I'm a hypocritical Pharisee reformed.
2.With the naked eye? Can't see it.
john9blue wrote:this paragraph is a giant jumbled mess of cause and effect. you really thing people become atheists because of their schooling? i can understand how learning about, say, evolution can make someone more likely to be an atheist, but schooling in general has little to no effect on someone's core beliefs.
john9blue wrote:industrialization wasn't even POSSIBLE until 250 years ago. that's a pretty bad example.
republics and democracies are way older than that. and the difference between those and atheism is that in one case, you are adding something, and in the other, you are taking something away.
question: if atheism is the "default position" of every person, and atheism is good for society, then why does every successful society have tons of religious people? the evidence doesn't match your theory.
crispybits wrote:As chang said, I didn't say schooling, but education. Education statrs off as learning by rote, you learn the times tables by repeating them back over and over again. As we get older that changes into understanding how to multiply and being able to do the actual calculations in our heads. As we progress higher and higher in the edcuation systems, free critical thinking is (or at least should be) more and more important, until you get to the PhD and post-docs who are responsible for coming up with brand new ideas about the world and then going about finding tests to see if those ideas are true or false. More education = a more critically trained mind = more atheism.
crispybits wrote:An atheist society wasn't even possible until now either. For hundreds of years a public declaration of atheism had you at risk of being arrested, tortured and killed because the church and the state went so closely hand in hand and dissent was much more stamped down on than it is now. By the way the industrial revolution came right on the back of the "age of reason", which is the period in time when western civilisation started to really value critical thinking, holding no ideas as sacred, and science as we know it today really took off. The time of Newton. The time of philosophers like Locke and Voltaire. We moved away from dogma in a big way during that time, and it led to the technological advancements that are still happening today.
crispybits wrote:You're right about republics, that was a bad example, but the underlying point was that nothing has ever been done until it's done. We are all free to make arguments why something that has never been done will succeed or fail, why it will cause problem X or solve problem Y in society, but in the end the only way to really know if something will work is to let it happen. This is a fundamental part of society changing over time to embrace new ideas and new philosophies. You state that moral decay is inevitable if we get rid of religion, but I'm not saying we get rid of religion, I'm simply saying way make it rated R and we keep it as far away as possible from making any decisions for society as a whole.
crispybits wrote:Finally, I didn't say that atheism is the default position of every person, but you're right it is. Imagine a nursery school full of children whose parents have never mentioned religion to them. Now can you point out the christian kid, or the muslim kid, or the buddhist kid. Not the child with christian or muslim or buddhist parents, but the child who has developed a faith in a certain religious philosophy. Religion is something we are taught, we are all born without it. Spirituality, the belief in some vague higher power, may well be innate, but religions are not.
What I actually said was that the default position of logical atheism is that we should not believe a claim until we see evidence for that claim. It's actually closer to agnosticism in that regrd than strong atheism, but with the proviso that we start in the position of nothing is true and then proceed to build our views of the world based on the evidence shown for us, so the correct position is not to believe any God-myths until such time as evidence is provided for them.
natty_dread wrote:Do ponies have sex?
(proud member of the Occasionally Wrongly Banned)Army of GOD wrote:the term heterosexual is offensive. I prefer to be called "normal"
john9blue wrote:crispybits wrote:I'm simply saying way make it rated R and we keep it as far away as possible from making any decisions for society as a whole.
that would have basically the same effect as removing religion... maybe even a worse effect, since people will actively try to shun religious morals.
Return to Practical Explanation about Next Life,
Users browsing this forum: No registered users