RE: A Small Census
March 9, 2013 at 2:29 am
(This post was last modified: March 9, 2013 at 2:45 am by jstrodel.)
Darkstar, that is true, and some people on the religious right have out of control political views. They should be criticized, and are, by many Christians. I am all for opposing fascism, whether it is from Christians or not.
But I am not talking about the left as in Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, mainstream democratic politics. I am talking about the radical left. I am talking about the left like Stephen J Gould, Christopher Hitchens, Karl Marx, Howard Zinn, The Nation magazine, Noam Chomsky.
I bet around 40% of the atheists in America are political radicals. And yes, this is connected to the political movement surrounding the 1960's, where a mix of Marxism/non-Marxist socialism, sex, drugs and rock and roll basically took over a lot of higher education. You can ignore this fact if you want to, but it is a historical fact. The atheist movement got a massive boost from this.
The influence continues today in the relationship between the rave scene, the drug scene, the political left, the sixties counterculture, atheism and the computer hacking/computer pioneer movement. It is all connected, atheism is a culture that is traced back to certain people. Not all people are connected to this, but many are, such as Steve Jobs (who considered taking LSD to be a very important event in his life) and a lot of the people that built the internet. They were atheists, sure, but they were also hippies and many of them were leftists (like Richard Stallman, a major leader in the open source movement, who is a libertarian socialist and atheist).
The point I am trying to make is that there is more that goes into peoples decision to follow God than whether they see the merits of Christianity or not. Atheism is not only people united by unbelief in God, it is people united by a lot of cultural ideas, whether they are good or bad or somewhere in between.
Things didn't just pop out of nowhere. There was no all of a sudden a lot of internet hacker types (legal or illegal hacking) who started going to raves and taking ecstasy who also happened to be atheists. That came out of somewhere. A lot of them happen to be political radicals as well. Look at people like Steve Jobs. The culture came out of somewhere.
It is not a coincidence on this message board that you see topics openly devoted to doing things that are very illegal (e.g. taking ecstasy) and looking at pornography. The culture of the internet and this message board has been shaped by a wide variety cultural forces, many of them having little to do with the philosophy of religion or something like this. People do not need to be recruited into pleasing their flesh, they need only to gravitate towards those movements that offer them sensual fullfillment, and day by day, week by week their beliefs over time become more and more tracked to certain experiences and places which tolerate their bad behavior.
This is a fact, and clearly and indisputably the way that people think. And this is manipulated by many people, not last among them, Stephen J Gould, Christopher Hitchens and Karl Marx. When I was in highschool, I had a highschool teacher who seemed to have a positive view of Marxism. He taught that the Bible was wrong. I wonder why.
Also important to note is that 1/5th of the world is Communist. They do not allow Christianity the way the US allows atheism. Of course they spend massive amount of money trying to build their movement. Of course attacking religion is a major part of that. Do they have to actually advocate Marxism to advance their movement? No, of course not.
But I am not talking about the left as in Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, mainstream democratic politics. I am talking about the radical left. I am talking about the left like Stephen J Gould, Christopher Hitchens, Karl Marx, Howard Zinn, The Nation magazine, Noam Chomsky.
I bet around 40% of the atheists in America are political radicals. And yes, this is connected to the political movement surrounding the 1960's, where a mix of Marxism/non-Marxist socialism, sex, drugs and rock and roll basically took over a lot of higher education. You can ignore this fact if you want to, but it is a historical fact. The atheist movement got a massive boost from this.
The influence continues today in the relationship between the rave scene, the drug scene, the political left, the sixties counterculture, atheism and the computer hacking/computer pioneer movement. It is all connected, atheism is a culture that is traced back to certain people. Not all people are connected to this, but many are, such as Steve Jobs (who considered taking LSD to be a very important event in his life) and a lot of the people that built the internet. They were atheists, sure, but they were also hippies and many of them were leftists (like Richard Stallman, a major leader in the open source movement, who is a libertarian socialist and atheist).
The point I am trying to make is that there is more that goes into peoples decision to follow God than whether they see the merits of Christianity or not. Atheism is not only people united by unbelief in God, it is people united by a lot of cultural ideas, whether they are good or bad or somewhere in between.
Things didn't just pop out of nowhere. There was no all of a sudden a lot of internet hacker types (legal or illegal hacking) who started going to raves and taking ecstasy who also happened to be atheists. That came out of somewhere. A lot of them happen to be political radicals as well. Look at people like Steve Jobs. The culture came out of somewhere.
It is not a coincidence on this message board that you see topics openly devoted to doing things that are very illegal (e.g. taking ecstasy) and looking at pornography. The culture of the internet and this message board has been shaped by a wide variety cultural forces, many of them having little to do with the philosophy of religion or something like this. People do not need to be recruited into pleasing their flesh, they need only to gravitate towards those movements that offer them sensual fullfillment, and day by day, week by week their beliefs over time become more and more tracked to certain experiences and places which tolerate their bad behavior.
This is a fact, and clearly and indisputably the way that people think. And this is manipulated by many people, not last among them, Stephen J Gould, Christopher Hitchens and Karl Marx. When I was in highschool, I had a highschool teacher who seemed to have a positive view of Marxism. He taught that the Bible was wrong. I wonder why.
Also important to note is that 1/5th of the world is Communist. They do not allow Christianity the way the US allows atheism. Of course they spend massive amount of money trying to build their movement. Of course attacking religion is a major part of that. Do they have to actually advocate Marxism to advance their movement? No, of course not.
