Religion is Opression

[Little Rik]

Sad to see that most atheists still think that non atheists are or must be religious people.
I couldn't agree more that science is a good tool to debunk and knock down religious dogmas
but atheists should really stop there and leave God alone which has really nothing to do with religions.
Atheists kill religions dogmas and religious people kill atheists dogmas.
That's ok for me.
In fact is very good because once atheism and religions are gone spirituality will prevail
and everybody will gain.
You never thought about it Brian, did you?  

NO, "spirituality" is a loaded word and meaningless. Now, our species did not crawl out of the caves without questioning social norms.

No I will not leave any spirit, deity, god/gods/or God or supernatural claim alone. The only thing you can get me to agree to is allowing humans by law to make whatever claim they want. Humans have rights, but ideas as claims do not deserve blind value, outside the right to claim it.

FYI atheists are not a gang, scientific method is what confirms the validity of any given claim. "atheist" is not a  dogma, it is not scientific method itself. "atheist" merely means "off" on one claim. There are plenty of atheists with their own woo just as absurd as any old myths of antiquity. I have met atheists who think the universe is it's own thinking entity. I have met others who believe in 9/11 and JFK bullshit conspiracy. I know atheists who worship guns on par with right wing gun nuts. I know atheists who are fans of Dumb Pac Chumphead. "Atheist" is not a dogma. We are not a gang, we are not a political party, we are not an economic view and some do have their own woo and superstitions.

Thor is a god, science didn't leave that alone, we know now lightening is not caused by a god. Poseidon the god of the seas does not create hurricanes. If our species never ditched bad claims, we wouldn't have our modern knowledge of the world.

Spirituality" is meaningless if you never engaged in of course.
No question about it.
Atheism on the other hand is dogma.
No question about it.
How would you known whether God exist or not if you never use the correct tool to investigate?
You guys keep on relying on physical science as if God would be a physical entity.
That is crazy.
It is by using the correct tool that you can find out and that tool is better known as spirituality or intuitional science.  

[pgrimes15]

Never heard of "intuitional science" before. Please define it, and identify some "intuitional scientists" and their works/papers etc.

[Natachan]

I never really saw Christianity as we practiced as oppressive. Granted we were loose Catholic/episcopal and not southern baptist. As such we didn't have the stigma about science or women. I will concede that southern baptists do have these things in large share.

I think the level of oppression as you put it varies by denomination and by practitioner and by church. Making blanket statements seems unfair and unrealistic.

[Little Rik]

Never heard of "intuitional science" before. Please define it, and identify some "intuitional scientists" and their works/papers etc.

According to yoga God is within so in order to find that out or better say to realize that
you need a science that is able to go within.
This science is very ancient and go back to Shiva and Krishna and it is continued so to speak
by various teachers such as the late P.R.Sarkar.
It is called intuitional because the practice allow to discover what is already there.
Being 99% practical and less than 1% theory there is little need to write books about it
nevertheless there are guidance that help to get at the core of issue.
If we believe that Shiva ever existed then we can say that beside giving us the science of yoga he also gave us the science of ayurveda medicine, the marriage system where it didn't exist the 7 notes and a moral code. 

[Brian37]

NO, "spirituality" is a loaded word and meaningless. Now, our species did not crawl out of the caves without questioning social norms.

No I will not leave any spirit, deity, god/gods/or God or supernatural claim alone. The only thing you can get me to agree to is allowing humans by law to make whatever claim they want. Humans have rights, but ideas as claims do not deserve blind value, outside the right to claim it.

FYI atheists are not a gang, scientific method is what confirms the validity of any given claim. "atheist" is not a  dogma, it is not scientific method itself. "atheist" merely means "off" on one claim. There are plenty of atheists with their own woo just as absurd as any old myths of antiquity. I have met atheists who think the universe is it's own thinking entity. I have met others who believe in 9/11 and JFK bullshit conspiracy. I know atheists who worship guns on par with right wing gun nuts. I know atheists who are fans of Dumb Pac Chumphead. "Atheist" is not a dogma. We are not a gang, we are not a political party, we are not an economic view and some do have their own woo and superstitions.

Thor is a god, science didn't leave that alone, we know now lightening is not caused by a god. Poseidon the god of the seas does not create hurricanes. If our species never ditched bad claims, we wouldn't have our modern knowledge of the world.

Spirituality" is meaningless if you never engaged in of course.
No question about it.
Atheism on the other hand is dogma.
No question about it.
How would you known whether God exist or not if you never use the correct tool to investigate?
You guys keep on relying on physical science as if God would be a physical entity.
That is crazy.
It is by using the correct tool that you can find out and that tool is better known as spirituality or intuitional science.  

I do not need a word rooted in superstition to have a feeling of "awe" about any good in life. I can look at a sunset, and have a deep feeling of "wow". I can have that same feeling when my mom tells me she loves me. I can have that same feeling when my cat curls up in my lap and purrs. I can have that same feeling when I think about the size of the universe or how small a quark is. I do not need to call it "spirituality".

That is a bullshit word, because there are also things in life that are extremely powerful that are quite nasty. There are deadly bacteria that can kill the strongest most healthy human. Hurricanes and tornados and volcanos are very destructive, I also have a sense of "awe" in the other direction like "WOW HOLY FUCK".

"Spirituality" is simply another loaded word and a gap filling word from an argument of ignorance. My appreciation for life and nature, good or bad, constructive or destructive is still there.

[Little Rik]

Spirituality" is meaningless if you never engaged in of course.
No question about it.
Atheism on the other hand is dogma.
No question about it.
How would you known whether God exist or not if you never use the correct tool to investigate?
You guys keep on relying on physical science as if God would be a physical entity.
That is crazy.
It is by using the correct tool that you can find out and that tool is better known as spirituality or intuitional science.  

I do not need a word rooted in superstition to have a feeling of "awe" about any good in life. I can look at a sunset, and have a deep feeling of "wow". I can have that same feeling when my mom tells me she loves me. I can have that same feeling when my cat curls up in my lap and purrs. I can have that same feeling when I think about the size of the universe or how small a quark is. I do not need to call it "spirituality".

That is a bullshit word, because there are also things in life that are extremely powerful that are quite nasty. There are deadly bacteria that can kill the strongest most healthy human. Hurricanes and tornados and volcanos are very destructive, I also have a sense of "awe" in the other direction like "WOW HOLY FUCK".

"Spirituality" is simply another loaded word and a gap filling word from an argument of ignorance. My appreciation for life and nature, good or bad, constructive or destructive is still there.

Your comment is ok with me but not ok for me.
Many years ago i also was floating on that plane.
After sometime that i was on that plane i realized that i was sort of travel
on the first gear so i need to engage into higher gears.
How did i come to that realization?
Simple.
After travel on low gear come natural that it is possible to travel faster.
Why should i stay in low gear all the time when it is possible to engage into
higher gear and go faster?
Cars give you that possibility and so our human nature.
Consciousness can be expanded to infinity until it become one with the infinity
but don't worry about that yet.
As far as you are happy as you are in first gear nobody will force you to go faster.  

[Brian37]

Religion is a tool, and I agree that two of its big uses are oppression and control. Two very ugly features.

The tool itself is not good or bad, it's entirely up to people what they do with it. As books though, horrible shit like the bible and the Quran are more like spiked baseball bats than shovels. They take a lot of modification to use positively. Like being softened with the pillow of secularism taped over it.

I put religions and atheism on the same despicable level.
When religions get the upper hand they cause enormous damage and
when materialism get the upper hand they also cause enormous damage
as we can see with communism before and capitalism now.
All these systems rely on exploitation so they are both evil.  

Bullshit. 

"atheist" means "off" on god claims, nothing more. Some atheists are greedy and materialistic, and others are empathetic and giving. "Atheist" is not a worldview, it is not a political party, it is not a religion, it is not a "system". 

What is "despicable" is when my well intended liberal atheist and theist friends on the left, being a social and economic liberal myself, pull the pluralism crap which allows the religious nuts to hide behind the word "faith" to avoid being called out.

Humans have rights, even the right to make bullshit claims, and others have the right to call it bullshit. Now, if we atheists don't like it when theists put us in a box, please don't pull the crap that bluntness and ridicule is the same as a demand to oppress the religious. Civility is not about being free from getting offended or offending others, civility is what you do in the face of of getting offended. The best way to shut a critic up is with facts.

[Heat]

Spirituality" is meaningless if you never engaged in of course.
No question about it.

We have to engage in spirituality just for it to be meaningful? What incentive is that? 

Seems like this supposed "God" you speak of is literally doing everything in his power to deteriorate any reason to believe in him in the first place. Also how convenient atheists who have engaged in spirituality fully, only later to have lost faith, are all collectively labeled as never having been spiritual in the first place.

Atheism on the other hand is dogma.
No question about it.

You're on an atheist forum, so stop with the utter stupidity in propositions like this nonsense. Dogma is classified as principles laid down by an authority. You know this doesn't apply, but yet, the willfully ignorant buffoon you are, you will still claim so anyways, just because you want to find some petty cheap insult that doesn't remotely make sense to throw at atheists without going in to further definition, hoping you can throw the single word out there without being questioned as a way to convey a negative, condescending, belittling, opinion without any real meaning behind it.

How would you known whether God exist or not if you never use the correct tool to investigate?
You guys keep on relying on physical science as if God would be a physical entity.

Oh for the love of god, i'm so sick of some of the theists on this forum. It's not that the argument is flawed, it's that you know the argument is flawed yet you will still use it anyways.

If you claim that the correct tool to investigate God's existence doesn't exist, how could you POSSIBLY claim to know that god exists.

Physical science? How old are you? How can you possibly, in any way, think that is the only form of science? Furthermore, how could you possibly demonstrate that this is form of science wouldn't be sufficient, without proving something existing outside of what's physical. Nobody's claiming god is a physical entity you twat, you're not even putting words in our mouths, you're putting words in nobody's mouth! Every theistic argument claims there is a being(s) that exists outside the physical, that may in some cases take on a physical form. However that is IRRELEVANT, as you have still failed to give us any evidence to even believe a being COULD exist outside the physical.

That is crazy.

It is by using the correct tool that you can find out and that tool is better known as spirituality or intuitional science.  

Intuitional science?

Alright first, that's some made up bullshit.

Secondly, you're basically saying that the science that trumps all other science is...no science whatsoever.

Are you fuckin' off yer' rocker bud?

Never use physical science, oh yes, evidently all discoveries, achievements, every advancement dating back to the stoneages is a result of someone sitting in a room and thinking really hard about what they wanted to create, and because they just used their intuitional science skills, it was created like magic!



You're the epitome of bad religious arguments. You're a twenty year old with a stuffed animal sitting in a corner, asking it if it wants to join you for your tea party, who until you were nine imagined it talking to you, hit ten starting to wonder why it wouldn't respond, and never took that as a hint to question whether or not it was real, leaving you twenty still asking the same old question.

By the way, what the fuck is "Science"? Why the fuck religious people repetitively mention "Science" as some god us atheists worship, as if "Science" is some organization I will never understand. You realize you use science in your daily life? You're sitting on a chair I presume, well guess what, it exists because SCIENCE. Ever used a microwave? SCIENCE. Hell EVER BRUSHED YOUR TEETH, OR USED A PENCIL? SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!

The truth is, you don't even know what the fuck you're claiming. You just need something to chuck back at atheists, because they keep pressing you on the dogma that controls your life. For you to act so bewildered by people who have used science to come to a conclusion opposite your theistic one, blaming "science", you are essentially admitting not only intellectual defeat but the fact that you didn't even know what the fuck you were talking about to begin with.

[Little Rik]

I put religions and atheism on the same despicable level.
When religions get the upper hand they cause enormous damage and
when materialism get the upper hand they also cause enormous damage
as we can see with communism before and capitalism now.
All these systems rely on exploitation so they are both evil.  

Bullshit. 

"atheist" means "off" on god claims, nothing more. Some atheists are greedy and materialistic, and others are empathetic and giving. "Atheist" is not a worldview, it is not a political party, it is not a religion, it is not a "system". 

What is "despicable" is when my well intended liberal atheist and theist friends on the left, being a social and economic liberal myself, pull the pluralism crap which allows the religious nuts to hide behind the word "faith" to avoid being called out.

Humans have rights, even the right to make bullshit claims, and others have the right to call it bullshit. Now, if we atheists don't like it when theists put us in a box, please don't pull the crap that bluntness and ridicule is the same as a demand to oppress the religious. Civility is not about being free from getting offended or offending others, civility is what you do in the face of of getting offended. The best way to shut a critic up is with facts.

The latest chat was about religions that according to you caused so much damage to humanity.
So far so true but you have to consider that even when religion are not there causing damage
somebody else will as i did point out when i said that communism and capitalism did and still cause damage.
Communism and capitalism are materialist systems and materialism is atheism in nature.  

[Whateverist]

Goddammit. Who left Rik's cage door open? Somebody get the firehose and try to loosen up some of these turds. Jesus fuckin' H Christ, what a mess.