Religious people have you ever tried praying?

[rexbeccarox]

Not sure what you are trying to see. The vast majority of the world adheres to some form of religious belief, and Christianity is the most popular religion. Of course you are going to have cults and nutcases. What is the point?

How many internets do I win for predicting the NTS?

My point is that, as a group, Christians tend to be nice people that have families and invite each other over for dinners and their kids play together while their dads talk about the Bible or something like that. As a group, atheists tend to be under 25 and tend to be have some sort of very serious issue that they are angry about, which, when you analyze it closely, tends to turn out to be something that is more akin to an rebellious opinion than an authoritative expression of the state of man's nature. When you see who the people are who are very angry about serious moral issues, when you look at what they spend their time doing, a lot of the time it seems like they spend more time having fun than being angry. Just an observation. A lot of times the Christians who are serious spend a lot more time building up charities and soup kitchens then talking about whether it is immoral to smoke marijuana. Of course this is not always true, but it seems like it is a lot of the time.

Wow. Talk about straw men.

Christianity only really works if people are committed to a specific orthodoxy belief system. Atheism, understood as either the absence of belief (in which case it offers no direction for living) or culture of competing ideas about how to live (in which case it offers a conflicting and non-authoritative approach to understanding life, making it highly valuable to those who do not want constraints put upon them) cannot possibly work or produce spiritual fruit, because the nature of the contradictions and number of atheist approaches to philosophy leaves the atheist with essentially a blank check to write whatever amount to himself.

If your god all of a sudden told you it was ok to kill whomever you wanted, would you?

The existence of cults does not disprove Christianity, and it is not contradictory to condemn atheism for its negative affects on behavior which arise out of lack of a single system of ethics that emerges out of the atheist worldview and praise Christianity for its positive effects, which exist in the midst of cults and uncommitted Christians.

Yeah... I don't think I can... I mean, it's just so... I... (SMH)... yeah.

[Esquilax]

Totally called it!

[Faith No More]

Ah yes, the good old "atheists are just angry, immoral fornicators that don't want any constraints on their behavior" argument.

Jstrodel, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were telling the truth about knowing a lot of atheists(you won't, however, receive the benefit about having been an atheist, because that is the oldest lie in the theist playbook), but it sounds like you knew a bunch of assholes that happened to be atheists and somehow conflated the two.

[ideologue08]

Ah yes, the good old "atheists are just angry, immoral fornicators that don't want any constraints on their behavior" argument.

Jstrodel, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were telling the truth about knowing a lot of atheists(you won't, however, receive the benefit about having been an atheist, because that is the oldest lie in the theist playbook), but it sounds like you knew a bunch of assholes that happened to be atheists and somehow conflated the two.

What do you base your morality on? I'm just interested

[EGross]

While I would disagree that Christianity is the most popular religion, I will agree that a family that has a common path and a common commitment will certainly do things together. This is true for Muslims that I have seen getting food together for the family on Ramadan, of the Jewish families for Shabbat. Going to a common place of worship, speaking of something of significant meaning. It's all good. And this is typically from those who were born into it, married into it, and live it.

While, typically, athiesm doesn't have a central place of worship. It would be weird. And I do no know if you can say that there are no athiest families that spend time bonding over meal, and speaking of the nature of the universe, and the exciting discoveries made in areas such as dark matter. I am not in a position to say that. I also think it is a gross generality to say that all athiests are angry and that's how they got to be athiests. I sort of slid into it without any real emotional attachment and went "Oh yeah. Right." Sometimes I do get a tad ticked off when interacting with stupidity, but then, I would do that when I was Orthodox, so that was not a factor.

But to accept being, say, a Hindu, just because it would result in "Family night" is really not enough of an excuse. There is a kibbutz up north that I visited, it's an athiest one, built by Russians immigrants back when there was no real religion for them, who protested when some newcomers wanted to build a synagoge there. "No way!" They do have Friday night meals, not out of a religious sense, but out of a sense of community. They do sing songs together, play chess (I think it's genetic for the Russians!) and tell stories. They go for walks together in groups, and they tell stories. There is a sense of family, and no God for most (some of the newcomers believe, which is slowly changing the face of things). Kibbutzes are also dying out since it is a communist model based on a cooperative work ethic, which is a hard fit for some.

But I bring that up to say that there probably are athiest families that do the very things you mentioned. But since that is a world foreign to you, you don't really know.

[Faith No More]

What do you base your morality on? I'm just interested

I will answer that if you can explain how this question is relevant to what I said.

[CleanShavenJesus]

the people who are serious atheists, they are listening to indie rock music, they are going to bars, and they are having sex. A lot of them smoke weed.
causes.

What exactly is wrong about any of those things? I'm not saying I do any of them....well, I do have sex...but otherwise, not saying I partake in any of them, what makes them wrong to do? Aside from religious reasons.

You talk about those things like they're satanic.

[rexbeccarox]

I'm just gonna put this here:

For jstrodel