How do atheists do life?

[vulcanlogician]

The only thing that sucks is that Gae Bolga's "Why would you use Christ as an excuse to be an asshole about a cake?" post needs to be heard by an actual Baptist. (Sigh.) Maybe some day.

[adey67]

It's an obvious poe and troll and not even a good one, pathetic, 1 out of 10 for effort. What we call in Britain a wanker or tosser.

[Fireball]

Only read part of page 1. So much tar, so few atheists.

[Belacqua]

But for the most part, people come here to hang out and have interesting discussions.

I hope so. Awhile back, on another now-defunct forum, when I asked why people spent so much time focussing on the negative, it was asserted that lurkers would be persuaded, and so their gripes were doing the world a valuable service. That seemed pretty faith-based, to me. I mean, if somebody's making real arguments at least it's possible, but if they're just insulting each other it does nothing. 

What about you? I know you like Plato, but who else do you dig?

It's kind of you to ask!

For the most part I get my philosophy through literature, I guess. My main focus for a long time was the work of William Blake, who was a great thinker. Really second only to Dante as poet-philosopher. A sort of hinge in history, in which the Christian Neoplatonic tradition grows into something like German idealism, mythicizing Kant and Hegel before Kant and Hegel even wrote. His work also has the great advantage of being wildly beautiful and so intentionally difficult as to be nearly incomprehensible. The beauty and difficulty are intrinsic parts of the message. The other Romantics, too, can't be understood without Plato, and can be seen as developing Plato's thought into our own age. 

There are surprising parallels between Blake and Nietzsche. Somebody with more energy than I could write a good book. Both begin with the premise that the phenomenal world is created solely through our imaginations. For Nietzsche, the reality is chaos and the imaginative faculty is "Apollonian." For Blake, the imagination is God himself. Blake is like the optimistic version of Nietzsche, in which the Übermensch is the pure antinomian Christ.

Once you've worked on Blake, you come back to the Bible (which he called "the great code of art") and all the objections to it that the naive atheists make seem irrelevant.

[onlinebiker]

And --


How do xtians "do life"???


Cowering in a corner of the cell, being the " wife" of a rather large, sadistic man named " Chainsaw".

[Nakara]

What’s this... « life » you speak of?

[DodosAreDead]

Fucking hilarious that the town doesn't even exist lol.

[brewer]

It's an obvious poe and troll and not even a good one, pathetic, 1 out of 10 for effort. What we call in Britain a wanker or tosser.

His local train station view.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Your "heaven on earth" sounds like hell to me.

Church often brings out the worst in people.

The example given of "girl talk" made me want to vomit. What the fuck is "girl talk?"

Girl talk??

Girl talk apparently does not include discussion about politics. That's not fit for the ladies.  

When I was in the Navy we had a lot of girl talk.

[adey67]

Pastor Philip getting up on the altar to preach was a dead giveaway you don't climb on an altar to preach you use a pulpit or a lecturn, climbing on an altar is a huge no no it's a sacred space. The guy is a complete ass.