RE: what is atheism
December 26, 2012 at 1:27 pm
(This post was last modified: December 26, 2012 at 1:29 pm by Creed of Heresy.)
I live by a simple maxim: Put up or shut up.
They make the claims. I ask them to put up or shut up. They never put up, so I ask that they shut up.
This is how it is with religion. As someone who is very good with reading motives and intents in people via their actions, and as good as I am at reading behavioral patterns, I have oft noticed just how many appeals to emotion the many claims in the various "holy" books really have. That's all they are, you know. Appeals, nothing more.
The few historical referrals to the Christ-figure do little to prove much of anything to me, ditto for claims in a 1700-year-old text-book alluding to god that which is now easily explainable by science in ways that are far more logical. I see no reason to attribute god to anything anymore; it is superfluous, unneeded, unnecessary, and most of all, unwanted. "God moves in mysterious ways" sounds like a fucking excuse to me if I ever heard one, and if you tried an excuse on that level with anything else in life, nobody would ever buy it. Seriously, just try it.
Your wife: "Why did you sleep with my sister!?" You: "I move in mysterious ways." Result: Divorce.
Police officer: "Why did you shoot that man?" You: "I move in mysterious ways." Result: 25-to-life.
You: "Why did I jump from this building??" Your brain: "I move in mysterious ways." Result: Dead in 3...2...1...splat.
Replace "I" with "god" and the end result is still the same. It's a piss-poor, extremely stupid excuse and nobody buys it until it comes to something that can't be attributed to something dumbed-down for the masses. Scientific deconstructions of such events are pish-tushed and haughtily decried as the scientists raining on the parade or being naysayers or killjoys or some such garbage about the supposed miracle when in fact they're simply giving a valid reason to why what happened, happened, so that it might be studied and harnessed to aid other individuals later down the road rather than letting it get chalked up to some superstitious mumbo-jumbo babble-ical shit that, ignored, does nothing to aid anyone further.
So, no, the idea that being a total atheist makes someone completely close-minded is false. It means they're very open-minded, in fact; far less prone to attributing something to something that hasn't been shown to actually be there, and far less prone to delusion. You, however, are saying that you are credulous, which means that it is highly likely that some day in the future when something not easily explainable happens to you, you're probably going to convert back to whatever religion you were beforehand as a "born again" individual. The members of your religion will hold you up as a paragon of their faith, proof that anyone can "come back to the light," when in fact you actually turned off the light of reason and went scurrying back under the blankets and covers of faith; the false comforts that it entails.
If/when that happens, just promise you won't start writing books or doing interviews or anything like that about how it's such a triumph of faith to bring an atheist "back to the light", it's really obnoxious; like a high school kid bragging to his friends about doing this TOTALLY SWEET JUMP ON HIS SKATEBOARD MAN AND HOW HE'S SO REBELLIOUS CUZ OF IT. Ok? Promise?
They make the claims. I ask them to put up or shut up. They never put up, so I ask that they shut up.
This is how it is with religion. As someone who is very good with reading motives and intents in people via their actions, and as good as I am at reading behavioral patterns, I have oft noticed just how many appeals to emotion the many claims in the various "holy" books really have. That's all they are, you know. Appeals, nothing more.
The few historical referrals to the Christ-figure do little to prove much of anything to me, ditto for claims in a 1700-year-old text-book alluding to god that which is now easily explainable by science in ways that are far more logical. I see no reason to attribute god to anything anymore; it is superfluous, unneeded, unnecessary, and most of all, unwanted. "God moves in mysterious ways" sounds like a fucking excuse to me if I ever heard one, and if you tried an excuse on that level with anything else in life, nobody would ever buy it. Seriously, just try it.
Your wife: "Why did you sleep with my sister!?" You: "I move in mysterious ways." Result: Divorce.
Police officer: "Why did you shoot that man?" You: "I move in mysterious ways." Result: 25-to-life.
You: "Why did I jump from this building??" Your brain: "I move in mysterious ways." Result: Dead in 3...2...1...splat.
Replace "I" with "god" and the end result is still the same. It's a piss-poor, extremely stupid excuse and nobody buys it until it comes to something that can't be attributed to something dumbed-down for the masses. Scientific deconstructions of such events are pish-tushed and haughtily decried as the scientists raining on the parade or being naysayers or killjoys or some such garbage about the supposed miracle when in fact they're simply giving a valid reason to why what happened, happened, so that it might be studied and harnessed to aid other individuals later down the road rather than letting it get chalked up to some superstitious mumbo-jumbo babble-ical shit that, ignored, does nothing to aid anyone further.
So, no, the idea that being a total atheist makes someone completely close-minded is false. It means they're very open-minded, in fact; far less prone to attributing something to something that hasn't been shown to actually be there, and far less prone to delusion. You, however, are saying that you are credulous, which means that it is highly likely that some day in the future when something not easily explainable happens to you, you're probably going to convert back to whatever religion you were beforehand as a "born again" individual. The members of your religion will hold you up as a paragon of their faith, proof that anyone can "come back to the light," when in fact you actually turned off the light of reason and went scurrying back under the blankets and covers of faith; the false comforts that it entails.
If/when that happens, just promise you won't start writing books or doing interviews or anything like that about how it's such a triumph of faith to bring an atheist "back to the light", it's really obnoxious; like a high school kid bragging to his friends about doing this TOTALLY SWEET JUMP ON HIS SKATEBOARD MAN AND HOW HE'S SO REBELLIOUS CUZ OF IT. Ok? Promise?
