(September 4, 2010 at 11:56 pm)AngelThMan Wrote: You may have given it thought, but that doesn't mean you ever experienced or allowed yourself to experience God. If you had experienced God, the likelihood is that you wouldn't have become an atheist, unless you went through some sort of hardship or terrible disappointment in your life.
Alternatively, I could have experienced god in the exact same manner you have, but I didn't reach the conclusion that god is a real thing like you did. I'm sorry, you can't justify your irrational beliefs because of some ambiguous 'thing' you felt that I may not have because more likely than not, it was simply your brain doing something it probably doesn't normally do.
Like out of body and near death experiences, which has been shown to be the result of brain activity.
If anything, you're attempting to set up an artificial difference to justify your erroneous views on atheists and atheism in general. In other words, there has to be something wrong with us when the fact of the matter is that there isn't. We're not traumatized, we didn't feel things differently, and many of us has had as much or more exposure to religion as you have.
Your position becomes weaker still when not only are there those who choose simply not to buy into religion, but buy into a completely different religious faith or even into religious cults, counter-religions, or even religions that seem to be forming like a massive sarcastic parady of other religions (like pastafarianism, sandwitchism, pink unicornism, santa clausim, ronald reagonism, and rondald mcdonaldism).
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