RE: Are atheists religious?
October 28, 2011 at 2:46 am
(October 17, 2011 at 3:59 pm)John Jones Wrote: You want proof? Here's proof: What material, rational, property distinguishes a TV from the carpet it stands on? I can tell you, because I'm not a religious atheist animist - NONE.
Well he did get at least one thing right. To quote Democritus:
"By convention there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention there is color; but in truth there are atoms and the void."
There is no fundamental distinction amongst the pleroma of existence — distinctions between this and that, between the table
and the floor — these exist only in the mind. Out there is only the continuous fabric of being.
The Buddhists have a term, "Shì shì wú ài," which translates as "between each thing/event and another thing/event there is no thing". I paraphrase it thusly, "being is seamless from end to end." They likely layer additional meanings onto it, which I won't go into, but the core observation is sound: distinctions belong to the ego, not to the underlying reality.
Anyway. Seeing that he got every thing else wrong, it's hardly worth noting. However, I do note these same "arguments" — if one chooses to dignify them thus — they seem to appear everywhere at once, like mushrooms sprouting across the land. I don't know whether these are multiple posters or very industrious lone individuals, but they seem to explode on the forums all at once. One has to wonder if perhaps there is a factory, somewhere, maybe disguised like they do marijuana fields, where they take creationists and fundamentalists and shove a tube up their ass, whereupon they repeatedly shart out effluvium and bottle it, whence forth they forward it to a lab for analysis, to see if it has the right properties, whether it is suitable bollocks for spreading, and, if so, they culture and grow it until they have enough to send it on for distribution. We're likely seeing only the end product of a vast chain of events.