Atheism is based on the fact, that there is not a shred of viable human evidence that god exists. So it is logical to assume he doesn't exist, until proven otherwise. And the existence of a god that intervines in human society, is even more ludicrous. If that was the case, surely he would stop all the horrible poverty and human trafficking thats going on right now.

Wow deontic logic up the ass my fellows! I bet Saul Kripke is crying his heart out somewhere...

Aye, aye. Don't define your purpose on the words of some erroneous, ancient text written by a bunch of terrible scribes who were cult members that the Romans failed to rid the world of. Ain elohim.

Indeed. God interfered in the affairs of men (by at least speaking to some of them) all the time back when the Testaments were written.

non-existent till proven god?

I don't know. I'm an atheist. My interaction with other atheists AND religious people has been minimal. But I only said what I said earlier because the reason I stepped away from religion is because it was too loud and it claimed itself to be superior, and religious people were fighting rationale, logic and the like.

And now what annoys me about atheism, are the atheists themselves when they walk up to religious people and bug them. I mean give an opinion, being atheist is a choice, but pro-actively bashing religion is not the answer. I have always found atheists to be smart, laid back, open minded, intelligent and creative. And when they take the annihilation of religion a bit too seriously, they sound fanatical. I mean, the aggressive stance just doesn't go with atheism, which is not really anything more than a simple choice. It's not a movement, or culture, or community or race, let's not change it into that.

Peace.

What pisses me off is that I think the damn OP did this just to wind us up. He's not been back to refute any criticism or defend his point of view. Unless he's been swamped by the force of logic and reason and is off in a corner trying to figure it all out

Prodd, sorry for jumping on your back a while back, but you have to understand that atheists, as a whole, tend not to bother religious people with their opinions. You know why? Because we're not the possessors of truth trying to save souls, to lead the blind back to the path of light. Most atheists I know value a good argument, but they won't seek it out on purpose, certainly I don't. It's just that when a crap post like the first one seeks to misrepresent what atheism is about, that's when a lot of people get riled up.

I'm very peaceable normally

Fair enough.

As an athiest, I keep it to myself. I will get into these "fact vs faith" style conversations with religious types if it should happen, but I never seek it out. Part of being an athiest, in my view, is not just to deny religion, but also not to exist in a religious mindset. I don't tell other people that they're belief is wrong, nor do I try to convert them. I may be disgusted or annoyed by their ignorance, but I will not seek to change people's minds. Usually that kind of action has the opposite effect from what was intended.


This is not to say that I lack morality, which is a major concern of a lot of people. "Oh, he doesn't believe in God, he must have loose morals." My wife works with a 17-year-old Catholic girl at her job. That girl couldn't understand at all that my wife is athiest and doesn't believe in any religion. This girl is 17 years old, now pregnant, and likely to serve some time in jail for stealing over $500 from that business, not to mention how often she's stolen goods for sale, closed the store early against Mall policy, and how rarely she actually does the job she was hired to do. Religion is certainly no guarantee of higher morality.


I personally live by my own, much more logical morality. Be polite, follow the set laws of where you live, and don't do anything that harms other people. If you have a job, do it well.


I don't advertise my athiesm, and I don't try to sell it to others. Most of the people in the Army are Christian and I let them be that way. As far as some of them are concerned, I'm either Christian or religion-neutral.

When does that ever happen? Seriously now. And especially compared to how often the religious folks do it. It's whining about nothing.


How so?

I see that almost as often as I see Christians do it. Not the door-to-door thing that Christians are so fond of, mind you, but they are just as likely to harass someone about their faith as Christians are the deliberately unfaithful.



As for your second question, I imagine you believe people are born without a belief in a god. That's fine, and maybe it's true, but has there ever been an adequate experiment to test it? The only way you'd really be able to do it would be to let some baby raise itself on an island all by itself, which I'm sure would violate a number of laws on most Western nations. I don't imagine this has happened yet.

Atheism is superior. As I said, logical arguments are not on par with propaganda of superstition. If you're going to have that sort of "peace," why argue about anything at all? I mean, politics, legal issues, personal conflicts and all that stuff. Why not just "let it be?"

where the hell do you live then? not once have i ever seen an athiest going round handing out pamphlets entiteled "don't worship your non-existent god!" but i constantly get jehovas witnesses knocking on the door and people going round telling me i'm going to hell.

Just one thing: what's wrong with atheists doing, for example, handing out phanplets that logically argue that God doesn't exist?

Let's say that a friend of yours got a math concept wrong. Is it a bad thing to explain to him why he is wrong and what is correct?

Atheism is something that is to be forced on others?

"Force?" If presenting a logical argument to enlgihten the uninformed is "forceing," then yes.

It reads as if you are advocating actively going out to seek conflict as well as attempting to persuade people that their God does not exist, whether they wish to have any part of it or not. I thought the idea of atheism was to not do such things.

The idea of atheism is that God doesn't exist.

And why not "combat?" Would you let the deceivers spread their lies (and I know that the deceivers "belive" and "have faith" in their lies, of course)?

Well, atheism is, as far as I know, more about choice than brute-force. And why do you think that seeking "combat" with theists is acceptable behaviour, though you would likely complain about Jehovah's Witnesses who knock on your door to talk about God?

I have stated many times that logical argument is different from propaganda of superstition.

I know by pure logic that it is completely impossible for a god to exist in the way Christianity defines him. This argument plays the common assertions that god is all good and that god transcends natural limits and therefore can be the only creator of the universe against one another. When a Christian asserts that god is all good, one would pose the question, "If God is all good, how can evil exist in this world?" The Christian would reply to the effect of, "Everything has an opposite, and evil is the opposite by which good is defined." In essence, without evil, there could be no good as it would not be defined. However, since god is the only thing in existence that can transcend natural boundaries and was the first to exist, how could he have been all good without the existence of evil? If God were the first to exist and is all good, there is no possible way for evil to have ever come into existence in the first place. Had God been "all-good", the term good would not exist.
With logical fallacies such as these, how could it take more faith to believe in god as Christianity defines him than to not believe in god at all?

Bureaucracy created Satan, dude. Those angels got a taste for slacking and got fired by God.

Edit your quotes, assholes.


I second the "where do you live" statement. I have never seen this in my entire life. I'm starting to suspect that if it does happen, it's the result of a backlash against an almost-oppressive presence of religion.



The fact that children are most likely to believe in the same gods that their parents do kind of shows that belief in deities is learned behaviour, don't you think? Unless you are taught about the gods, you won't know anything about them, so how can you believe in them? Same with Santa Claus.

I onced watched a video hosted by Kirk Cameron (the actor from "Growing Pains"). He said you could prove the existence of God by using a banana. A banana is shaped to fit perfectly in a hand. How could this be without God? Show this to your atheist friends and it will destroy any argument an Atheist has.

Oh man, that video was hilarious. It went on for a half hour. I'm more Agnostic than Atheist. The video failed to sway me, but man, it made me laugh.

It has to be a joke... there's no way it couldn't be. The other day some girl told me it had been proven that God exists. Aside from looking slightly befuddled at the absurdity of that statement, instead of asking for how I simply dismissed it with I'm sure it hasn't - that kind of thing would be on the news.

Remember, we're talking about theists here. Many things are possible.

Oh man, you guys just take this way too serieusly, the OP is obviously trolling.


Besides, when christians try to prove their right with logic all they do is make comparisons, no science involved.

It's like if I said "If god is all-powerfull,
can he make a rock so heavy he can't lift it?"

There, I just "disproved" god, it's that easy.

I don't get "belief" at all. Atiesm is easy because it's based on logic, proof, science, and reason. But I have a hard time understanding what makes people believe certain things.


For instance, as my Mom has recently lost her mind and imported a 25 year old Muslim to be her husband, I find it completely absurd that a woman originally raised as a Methodist Christian, who essentially did nothing religious most of her life, would suddenly want to convert to Islam for this dipshit. I know she doesn't believe in Allah. My Mom has been through various new-age neo-hippie phases over the years culminating in a lot of time with my younger brother and I being dragged through incense-thick new-age curio shops where she searched for all kinds of crap like ways to communicate with her spirit guide (a panther, apparrently) to ridiculous crystals with all sorts of illogical powers.


Now, she's over 60, desperate and alone, and went looking for love on the internet. Honestly, I was happier when she was dating local rednecks. At least they had jobs, marketable skills, and could speak English.


I don't understand how someone can hear of a different religion and say, "oh shit, that make sense. I believe in that now." Scientology, Islam, Egyptian mythology, Nordic mythology, Satanism, Christianity, Judaism, Greco-Roman mythology, Hindu, all the little faiths of the different native tribes of the world. I just don't get it. If there is only one god, why are there so many different faiths? Either there are tons of gods, or there are none. Science and history point to the latter. Sure, in the Judeo-Christian faiths, God granted humans the freedom to believe as they wish, but if there is only one god and he made it very clear (at least in ancient times) that he existed, why would someone else just assume there are other gods to worship at all?


I don't get what makes people believe. I think, perhaps, there is a mental trigger to it. After all, I was raised Lutheran and confirmed as such, but am quite the staunch athiest now. My parents were not sternly religious. My Dad forced us to go to church and Sunday school every Sunday. But neiter he nor my Mom were actively involved in Sunday school or much else. We were always told that school was important. We didn't even see the importance of church--perhaps because there really isn't any importance, or perhaps we weren't guided strictly enough into it. Whatever it was, from an early age, I was always fascinated by science. Believe it or not, the first thing I ever said I wanted to be when I grew up was "a scientist."

I later dismissed that because "scientists have to be smart," which I guess paints a pretty grim picture of my self image even as a little kid. Damn.

It was no joke. That guy, Kirk Cameron, became a born again Christian at the height of his fame. He makes a whole bunch of Christian videos these days.

I like the way you worded that at the end. Hilarious. And so true. It's like watching those shows on the History Channel or Discovery Channel where they're hunting Bigfoot or Nessie or something. It's fun, it's interesting, but you know they don't find anything because if they did, you'd be watching the story on CNN (or the BBC for you, I guess), not the Discovery Channel.


Oh but wait, the liberal media would suppress such a story faster a Muslim wife gets slapped to shut up when speaking out of turn!

There's always John Safran to lighten things up
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fic56JN7aIw

I remember that video. Not only is it just retarded per se, but when you consider that the banana we eat is in fact a domesticated version of the wild banana (which has solid seeds and is inedible), a sterile hybrid created through human intervention over the past thousands of years, you laugh even more. So, the natural banana God created is inedible and worthless per se, but once you artificially mess with its genetics, it becomes useful. By that logic, humanity > God.


It's possible he is trolling, but it's not "obvious". If you think it's obvious, then you haven't seen many christians on teh internets. Some of them are even worse than the OP (see the example above, Kirk Cameron).

No I have not seen many christians on the internet (I tend to avoind them)

But if it's not trolling, it's really sad.

The thing is, if the banana is the atheist's nightmare, then the pineapple and coconut are the creationist's epitaph.

I think anything like that would be on the news before even being published in any journal, as it'd have to be peer reviewed and published and whatnot, but the news stations would just lap it up. That said, how would you broadcast it?

Selective breeding has gone on since man could farm. This makes it nothing new, or ground breaking like a lot of Christians seem to think. Genetic engineering of crops is only the step up from the selective cultivation we've been practising for a long, long time.

You guys are all butthurt. Most of the arguments I've seen are nothing but bitchfests about how God doesn't exist because it can be disproved logically. So far, people have argued the lack of evidence and the lame can God make a rock that not even he can pick up? Seriously, you'd think you have more than just that.

Read the Christianity debate thread if you want to find more arguments, instead of confessing your butthurtness here by claiming others to be butthurt.

But God CAN be disproved logically, and there is overwhelming scientific evidence to support the lack of existence of any gods as described in any religious text. On the other hand, the evidence that he exists is... where?

God, if he exists, exists beyond the realm of mortal comprehension.

Therefore, his existence can't be proved or disproved with logic. I've read through most of the religion threads here; the Atheists have claimed they have evidence, when all they have is speculation and their own personal hatred of religion.

I'm absolutely amazed that more people here can't seem to separate God from religion. They are two separate entities; one exists outside of our perception (assuming he does exist), the other is a human construction. One can't be proved or disproved, the other definitely exists. Just because human beings in general are stupid sheep that can't follow their religion the right way and most religions are filled with contradictions doesn't mean God isn't real. I have seen absolutely no one factor in the possibility that God exists and the religions are simply wrong.

That's what you always say. Can you cut your fingers off if that's the only god damned thing you can type, please?