RE: Atheism worships a dead god.
August 31, 2010 at 9:55 pm
(This post was last modified: August 31, 2010 at 9:57 pm by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
(August 31, 2010 at 3:50 pm)Existentialist Wrote: A reasonably coherent video in its own terms, but harps on a lot on the same theme about not believing in things. Sorry if you had to play it again, but repetition does not rightness make, righteousness, maybe. As I've said, I have my own definition of atheism and I'm happy with it. It means, to me, if not to you, the state of believing there is no God.People can believe in whatever they want. Just note that your belief regarding atheists is wrong.
(August 31, 2010 at 3:50 pm)Existentialist Wrote: Other entities may also need words that describe not to be believed in but most of them - leprechauns, unicorns and tooth fairies - tend to lack the omnipotence that makes a god particularly important. They are hierarchically inferior. If we accept a word that denotes belief in the non-existence of God, the same word cascades its meaning satisfactorily to a full range of subordinate supernatural entities. It seems to me that this tendency to try to say that god is simply something that there is no evidence for, like leprechauns, rather than something that we positively believe does not exist, far from being the denial of a lie as the video asserts, is a serious attempt to demote the concept of god to a level which can be easily ridiculed and treated dismissively, a technique that the self-satisfied sounding chap in the video uses. We atheists engage in this hierarchical game at our peril, much replication of patriarchal authoritarianism quickly follows.
God is omnipotent in the same way that Superman is strong, batman is smart, and faeries are magical.
You can say that god is as omnipotent, but it doesn't make it any less of an exersize in imagination any more than any of the examples given so far.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan