everyone (else) seems to be hating on atheists

[Aiza]

A better analogy to what you're actually doing would be if Hindus had killed and suppressed thousands of atheists and I ranted at Catholics about it, because they are theists, and there aren't any Hindus on the board to argue with.

Well....what if the Catholics explicitly identified themselves as "theists" and had some giant "theist forum" and a thread called "everyone seems to be hating on theists". I think it would be perfectly fair to talk about theists killing and suppressing atheists, even if no one shared an ideology (I hope!) with the killers.

Being a theist is highly correlated to having been taught there is a God, yes. Do you have any evidence otherwise at all? As I already noted, the study would exclude atheists who did get a religous education.

You are the one making the claim. I think you'd pick it up just from cultural osmosis, particularly in 1928.

Yet you paraded them in a thread about people hating on atheists, starting about the fifth post in, before anyone said any such thing. You didn't refute something, you started something.

I mentioned only the stats which might contribute toward unsavory "angry atheist" stereotypes: being more aggressive, impulsive etc. I have a ton of studies outside of that, if you are interested in them as a religious atheist I could PM you a lot more.

Antonia?

Probably just Anthony, I don't know too many Sisters who feminize their religious names outside of maybe adding a "Mary" on the front if they want.

Best of luck. I guess we won't have your company anymore after you join up.

I won't be joining up for another year (I hope so anyway...), though this upcoming year is going to be super busy anyway. Who knows though, we do get 9 days off to visit family every few years (and every year after we take final vows). Maybe I'll stop by and get the token "stop wasting your life on a sky wizard!" responses.

The church allows for salvation only if you repent for it [deathbed conversions basically]. I have no intention of repenting, however, since it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to live my life as an atheist, only to turn around and repent out of a fear of damnation...which is ultimately what happens with everyone. The fear of death and the hope for eternity and the worry of what they think will come after.

The Church allows for salvation for those who seek God wholeheartedly and who do good as well as their conscience allows, even if they do not belong to the Church. Your own "deathbed" conversion doesn't allow for salvation unless it also comes with a Baptism and/or Confession/Penance (if they already had been Baptized as a child) since repentance out of "fear of Hell" or "want of Heaven" is imperfect. Only way that deathbed conversions work would be perfect contrition which is hate of all sin out of love of God.

Also to butt in to your other discussion, there IS documented evidence that most parents teach the idea of god to their children in some way, I've actually seen it but fuck me I can't find it.

Sure, which is why some 99.9% of those in prison circa 1928 had received some instruction about religion. The problem is that number tells us nothing about theism or atheism.

Also: Yes, we DO have the authority to interpret scripture; we are literate, possessing reasoning abilities and higher cognitive functions for discernment.

Literacy is not enough. You need to know the languages, the history, the literary traditions (how and why people wrote), cultural mores, etc. If you want to understand within any religious context (and not just understanding say, the story of Job), you need to also know the Tradition and theology around the text.

Saying otherwise is like saying we do not have the authority to interpret the US Constitution.

We actually don't. Thats the authority of the Supreme Court, and even they can disagree and quibble over it, with plenty of 5-4 splits. And that's for a document only 300 years old and written in our native tongue! Regular citizens have absolutely no authority (much to the chargin of some, I'm sure)

Scripture is a product of the Church. The ones with the authority to interpret it are the Magisterium. Christianity is a 3-legged stool: Tradition, Scripture and Magisterium, and removal of one leg causes the rest to topple. There are tens of thousands of Protestant denominations.

In fact, Timothy 2:5 is pretty unambiguous in that: "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

I don't disagree with this. The Church is also made up of men (and women), and I am a member. The Church is the Body, Jesus Christ is the head. The Blessed Virgin Mary is the neck, still part of the body but the part of the body closest to the head.

And yes, I know the whole thing that Jesus founded the Catholic Church...except that Catholic means "universal," not "made of a hierarchy where certain men are more in authority than others."

The Apostles had more authority than the other followers. In Acts we see the early Church also was hierarchical: it had bishops (episkopos), priests (presbyteros), and deacons (diakonos), as does the Catholic Church today.

And another thing, what is with the Catholic church calling their priests "father?"

The statement in Matthew 23 is understood as hyperbolic within Sacred Tradition, trying to teach humility and remember that God is the ultimate source of authority and teaching, and warning not to inaccurately assign fatherhood or assign fatherhood to a great degree. Priests genuinely are spiritual fathers. (Pope (or "Papa" in Latin) also means father). He also says to call no man on earth "teacher" or "master", but elsewhere "teacher" is used by the Apostles (and by Christ)

Even if you did want to pretend it is literal, Protestants still call their male parent "father" as well, as well as their teachers "teacher". "Mister" comes from the word "master", and "Doctor" also comes from the Latin word for "teacher".

"And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. Matthew 6:7

The key word there is "meaningless". The Rosary is anything but! It is possible to pray the Rosary very halfheartedly, but that is not how it is meant to be prayed.

And Catholicism says that Mary was a virgin and remained one after Jesus was born

Nowhere does it say those children are of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There are two major traditions on this point: one is that those "brothers" are actually cousins or some other relative; and the other is that they were children of St. Joseph's from a previous marriage.

Snakes talking and an apple inducing sin [now if it was a bundle of grapes THEN I'd be like 'oh fuck yeah, that was the fruit of sin'] and all of humanity supposedly coming from two people without inducing catastrophic congenital illnesses that would have wiped us all out after our tenth generation or so and the world being created 6000 years or whatever ago despite all evidence to the contrary...........

That's what happens when you try to interpret Scripture without understanding any sort of proper context.

Its very surface level, and I won't try to address everything here, but for example. The snake has been interpreted to be a symbol for Satan or temptation from the earliest times of Christianity, there is no apple in Scripture (but its used in paintings and such), either way the fruit is not meant to be a literal fruit, and the world being 6000 years old is also nowhere in Scripture nor is it held by most Christians.