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RE: Questions for Athiests/Agnostics
June 7, 2011 at 3:51 pm
(June 7, 2011 at 3:46 pm)Eternity Wrote: For following something you atheist claim to be fairytales. I mean these were smart people weren't they?
Smart people can be delusional. My dad has a Ph.D. in chemistry and still considers himself a christian. When I ask him about how everything needs scientific evidence except his religion he gets extremely defensive, almost as if he knows he shouldn't believe but he still does. He just came from a time and place that religion wasn't questioned and everyone was religious. Many smart people can still be religious as intelligence doesn't necessarily imply someone is grounded in reality.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
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RE: Questions for Athiests/Agnostics
June 7, 2011 at 3:55 pm
(This post was last modified: June 7, 2011 at 3:59 pm by SleepingDemon.)
It isn't entirely the fault of theists that historically the supernatural was answer enough for life's questions. 2000 years ago there was plenty to be afraid of, natural phenomenon that wasn't understood. However theocracies have historically held a boot at the throat of progress, so what advances in human knowledge could have been made were not. If humans had abandoned mythology a thousand years ago, civilization today would probably be unrecognizable to us now. But our progress was a treacherous one, always with the threat of death for deviating from doctrine up until what, 200 years ago? Want to know why we are not exploring the galaxy at this point? It isn't because we lack the capacity for it, it is because our intellectual growth was stunted by used car salesmen with bibles for 1500 years. If at this point, someone doesn't understand fundamental cosmology, biology, meteorology, physics, or meteorology it is their own damn fault. Go to a bookstore, skip the religious section, and a wealth of information opens up for you.
I'm going to claim meteorology being listed twice was for emphasis, but my phone wouldn't let me edit it. :-p
"In our youth, we lacked the maturity, the decency to create gods better than ourselves so that we might have something to aspire to. Instead we are left with a host of deities who were violent, narcissistic, vengeful bullies who reflected our own values. Our gods could have been anything we could imagine, and all we were capable of manifesting were gods who shared the worst of our natures."-Me
"Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men." – Francis Bacon
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RE: Questions for Athiests/Agnostics
June 8, 2011 at 1:39 am
@Min- The core of religion is supranatural at best and wishful thinking at worst. I like to think it's majorly somewhere in the middle near faith. I wasn't aware science worked without evidence? Perhaps you could give me a specific example of science teaching me something about God or his existence? I look to science for lots of things in this world, but the supranatural, metaphysical or celestial are not topics it covers or ever would that I can see.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari