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RE: Why does religion continue to grow?
June 12, 2015 at 7:14 am
(June 11, 2015 at 4:19 pm)SteveII Wrote: In spite of all the statistics and breakdowns of demographics, every day when you wake up there are more Christians in the USA and the world.
Oh, so now you're throwing the stats that spawned this thread under a bus and just declaring yourself the victor? Why didn't you simply start from there and save all this time?
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
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RE: Why does religion continue to grow?
June 12, 2015 at 11:36 am
(June 11, 2015 at 7:31 pm)comet Wrote: religion thrives where there is no hope. Atheism doesn't offer hope. It works for logical people with less emotion like me. Over organized religion will drop, but "belief" in something will stay the same will. Simply because belief in no-nothing has counters observational data.
Why would atheism offer
anything? It's simply the lack of belief in deities, nothing more.
My hope is in secular humanism. That we
can, some day, overcome our tribal instincts and come together for a common good. It might be pie-in-the-sky, but I think it's a far better outlook than nihilism.
"I was thirsty for everything, but blood wasn't my style" - Live, "Voodoo Lady"
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RE: Why does religion continue to grow?
June 13, 2015 at 8:05 am
(June 11, 2015 at 7:31 pm)comet Wrote: religion thrives where there is no hope. Atheism doesn't offer hope.
True, but this assumes that false hope is a good thing. It can be beneficial to have something to cling to under certain circumstances. But in general I think it's bad to place your hopes on something that cannot fulfill them. Atheism doesn't offer hope because it cannot, and it
shouldn't. Waiting for a non-existent deity to grant your wishes is far less effective than working to get the things you want with your own efforts. I don't rely on either god or atheism to accomplish the goals I set for myself; that's what
I'm here for.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
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