Emotional resilience and Philistinery

[Get me Rex Kramer!]

Rex:

I have no idea what ,exactly, it is you wish to achieve by coming here and calling us idiots because we don't play by your rules.

Firstly us negative (dawkins 6) Atheists do not say "there is no proof so there is no god" we say "in the absence of proof we will act as if there is no god unless someone tells us differently

I am no ex communist I am what you would call a 'blue grit' in your native Canada.

So lets deal with a few issues that you have,

We have plenty of alternatives to religion. If you talk about ethics then every Atheist I have ever come across normally has quite well developed ethics. Indeed because ethics are ,for us, about what is good I find them superior to Theists who say 'because God says so'. Your god is a nasty genocidal thug and your heaven seems to be living as a court apparatchik to Saddam Hussein.

It is not our business to provide 'comfort' for people. If someone was dying and was happy at the thought of meeting god then I would leave them alone. If they were terrified at Judgement I would gladly inform them they had nothing to worry about since there is no retribution from a genocidal desert wraith.

The most insulting, though, is your insistence that we are somehow philosophically lacking. I did my second Bachelors degree in Philosophy so I really doubt if your Philosophy is going to be better developed than mine but in any case the dearth of Christians in the subject (there is Alvin Plantinga and a couple of other non entities) are massively dwarfed by Atheist and Aptheists.

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If you want to ask for specific replies then please number them and I (at least) will endeavor to reply to them but dump the superior attitude. We don;t look to theists as authorities.

I have a BA and MA in Philosophy. I also did a years' research with published work in a journal. I am acknowledged in a recent book on Kant. I am a teacher and lecturer. Let's not compare dicks mate.

I don't find atheists' ethics 'quite well developed', I find them cherry picked from various sources that don't necessarily fit together well. In fact, I don't find there to be a credible atheist 'way of thinking' and that's the reason for the discussion: because I feel there should be if what atheists say always already has socialised consequences (and nobody has contradicted me on this so far). This is the main reason I find atheists to be philosophically lacking. As I have mentioned, the symptom of this is the belief that we can build our lives around simple descriptive truths about the physical universe and forget the complexity of human need. I'm glad you would stop at telling someone about to die that there is nothing waiting for them, but I wonder where you do draw the line.

My worry is that in order to know where to 'draw the line' at insisting on cosmological accuracy (i.e. this is a universe without a God or any purposiveness, no anthropomorphism), one has to know very well the person to whom one is talking. Without knowing what effect brutish (there's that word again!) truth-facepalmery (a new term for you) has on people, it seems childish to insist on undeveloped perspectives. That is, to me. And I say this not to insist that you agree but in the hope that you can understand it.

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I'm incoherent and cannot communicate my views. So far.
I'll wait for more posters who don't want to waste time.

Do you think you're the first self satisfied arrogant Christian to come here to spout this line of bullshit?

You most certainly are not, and you won't be the last.

Be assured though that arrogance will beget mockery. So please don't be surprised at the responses you receive.

I'm an atheist. But I'm still not surprised.