Meaningfulness v meaninglessness; theism vs atheism;

[dqualk]

Also if I may, I'd like to point out that most of the Crusades were organised for fun and profit on behalf of whichever pope was in power at the time. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Christians were being oppressed and slaughtered in the holy land. In point of fact, the middle east at that time was far more religiously tolerant that Europe was and had a number of homegrown christian sects. Finally, one crusade, I cannot remember which one, ended with the crusader armies attacking the other bunch of Christians that hung around in that area, the Byzantines, this was done for fun and profit by the vatican.

This demonstrates that you know nothing about history. Please research stuff before you say it. That goes for your cronies as well. The fact is that the Byzantine Christians held those lands until the Muslims invaded it, and the fact is that they were continuing to conquer the rest of the Byzantine Christian empire, and ultimately they succeeded, thus the Ottoman Empire and eventually the Turkish state. Grow up. There is no doubt, and there is a plethora of evidence that pilgrims were being slaughtered, raped and stolen from regualarly. There were tolerant Christian kindgoms, and tolerant muslim kingdoms and there are intolerant ones at any point in time. You blind youself to the facts out of your hate for Christianity. You want so badly for it to be exceptionally evil that you refuse to use your own atheist standards of judging something value relative to other things. The fact is the Church is relatively one of the best institutions of all time. Yes it has done bad things, but ultimately, relatively its good has far outwieighed the bad compared to other institutions. The Church invented health care, adoption agencies, the university system, in fact atheism is the red headed step child of Chritsianity. It was christianities tolerance and love for reason and the truth that allowed atheism to flourish. Why do you think atheism is limited to the Christian west for the most part?[/b]

lol you atheist living in fairy land where the Church is held to some crazy standard, but whatever makes you happy, whatever you want.

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Second, in modern times we see your church ( used to be mine but I quit when I was 20 ) condoning pedophilia among its priests, Before your head explodes understand that I agree that not ALL priests are pedophiles but in far too many cases the power-structure that is all the church is enabled these sick bastards to continue because they were far more concerned about how badly the church would look ( and how much money it would cost them!) than they were about the children who were being institutionally sodomized.

lol this is retarded and unfounded. The Church always and everywhere tried to stop child abuse. In all her ways. Even the bad bishops who moved priests thought that the priests were no longer predators. This was a common belief among stupid phsychiatrists, that people can be rehabilitated without punishment. Silly. The Church's canon law was very much against moving priests, the bishops ignored canon law. It would be like being mad at the american government because someone murdered someone and hid the body well, so teh law enforcment was not able to apprehend the criminal, then when the facts go public, and the police get the criminal, you still blame the system for not knowing, when there was no way they could have known. When the Pope et al. found out about the abuses they defroked and removed people from ministry, immediately. Grow up, and read the facts, that you atheist claim to care so much about. Prove it!

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For the record, it really pisses me off when people try to downplay molestation and rape in the church by pointing out that teachers do it. Teachers are punishable by law. Most of the time, not all of the time, rapes by teachers are not covered up in the sense that the teacher gets away with it. The opposite happens with priests. That is a bullshit argument. One does not excuse the other.

Well you are not following my arguemtn, moletstaion etc. is a grave evil. The Church's canon law called for very strict measures to be taken against predator priests, bad bishops ignored canon law, kept the evil a secret, and thank God!, they were finally exposed as bad bishops. And removed from ministry, for good reason. No you are VERY wrong, teachers get there evil covered up ALL the time. Many people get away with evil things. They do it by hiding it from the right people. This is exactly what those bishops and priests did, they hid it from the right people. Had a good bishop found out he would have immediately intervended which is exactly what ultimately happened.

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Many of you are only making yourself look worse. You demonstrate that you do not post, at least not on this thread, to learn or to open dialouge, you post to insult and in general make a fool of yourself.

Once again my only point in starting this thread was to demonstrate that atheist lack sujective value, and I believe that Theism is a well respected and intellectual position which gives subjective value, so why would one not choose a subjectively meaningful system.

Congratulations are in order for your underwhelming display of hypocrisy and demonstrating yet again you still don't know what atheism means.



Its an amazing achievement. You have the Internet with millions of web-pages of indispensable accurate information at your fingertips and yet you choose to scorn every one of them.

What you're doing here is no different than arguing with engineers what aerodynamics involves when you failed to understand what "air" actually is first. Go back and learn the basics if you want to have a proper discussion.

Listen welsh cake, as much as you would like to avoid responsibility by saying that you are not related to each other, you are wrong! You see, this is the way we categorize anything, especially within a Darwinian world! Things that are similar in a way we can group together. For example, there is no actual yform of tree out there, yet we recognize that it is useful to group trees together so we do it. In the same way it is useful for me to group atheists together, and to make general assumptions and analogies about them as a whole, now naturally this process wont be perfect, as there are always those who do not quite fit within the category, but are unfortunately lumped in. But this is the way the world works. We have to generalize sometimes to make a point.