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RE: Five Things She Doesn't Like About Atheists
April 1, 2026 at 11:35 am
(This post was last modified: April 1, 2026 at 11:44 am by Angrboda.)
There are multiple reasons why people believe, including ignorance, indoctrination, and both ends of the intelligence spectrum. It may be true that many atheists focus on intelligence as a cause, and for varying reasons, but it is a bit of a stretch for her to effectively claim that religious believe for reasons other than low intelligence. Surely some do, and therefore some atheists are going to focus on that segment. I think the question she is focusing on in her first gripe is whether people believe for defensible reasons. Some do and some don't. As long as there are people who believe for indefensible reasons, it is not a fault of the atheist for pointing that out.
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RE: Five Things She Doesn't Like About Atheists
April 1, 2026 at 2:50 pm
Some random internet chick doesn't like atheists?
Damn, so many sleepless nights ahead, now!
Playing Cluedo with my mum while I was at Uni:
"You did WHAT? With WHO? WHERE???"
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RE: Five Things She Doesn't Like About Atheists
April 1, 2026 at 4:02 pm
(April 1, 2026 at 11:15 am)AFTT47 Wrote: (April 1, 2026 at 1:48 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Religion makes many people stupid because they don't want to get educated on, let's say, evolution or history or whatever because they are in a bubble created by religion.
That's ignorance, not stupidity. Religious fundamentalism definitely leads to ignorance.
It is ignorance so deep and about such basic stuff that the difference from stupidity is indistinguishable. They are even trained not to process information in case they hear it because they are not just ignorant, but glorifying ignorance. It is not ignorance in a sense when a scientist says he doesn't know why the universe contains so much more matter than antimatter.
Then there is the rest of the post where I talk about Francis S. Collins, who is not a fundamentalist but gets willfully ignorant and illogical on the basic stuff when it comes to maintaining his religion.
Or take the doctor of mathematics, Richard L. Thompson, who wrote a ridiculous book called "Forbidden Archaeology" in which he falls for every blatant fraud in pseudo archeology in order to reach a conclusion that evolution is nonsense because Krishna created man and that man has existed on Earth for billions of years. Now is this stupidity or "just" ignorance? Seems very much like the Hare Krishna religion made him stupid. And he doesn't seem so much different than what Francis S. Collins does when he gets eager to prove his god.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"