The Mainstream Media and Drinking: How did they agree on this particular lie???

[Pluripotent]

Those are not similar claims. If I argue that unicorns are real, and you ask me to show you a unicorn to prove it, your skepticism of unicorns is not rooted in faith.

This was not the argument as it was written. I think we are confusing atheism with agnosticism. The old saying is that it's much easier to convert an atheist than an agnostic. This is because atheism is a religious, and people believe in it fervently.

[John Watson]

You nailed it tertius. (excuse the expression).

It completely baffles and sort of frightens me the irrational beliefs people have.

Reminds me of this;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g

[DirtyRed]

I don't think this is true. A believer is asserting the existence of an invisible entity who controls all creation that we have no ability to see, hear, touch, smell, feel or in any way verify through empirical measurement. Tertius is arguing that if you look around there's no particular rational reason to think that there's anything more than random interaction of particles going on based on everything that we can measure or study.

Tertius sounds like an agnostic (the One True Path, by the way) in this case. You have identified as an atheist. Which means you claim that absolutely no god exists, with zero proof to back it up. Now, obviously it's pretty hard to prove a negative, which is why smart people like Tertius and I are agnostic.

WWJD: What Would Jesus Deadlift

[paterfamilias]

My grandfather was a farmer who became a non-denominational born-again Christian at an early age. He felt that his own faith and Biblical quotes were all that was necessary to prove that the Bible and his belief system were true. And to that end, he repeated both relentlessly, one might say compulsively, always oblivious to how they were received.
It's a sales pitch, delivered repeatedly with the knowledge that out of every hundred targets, one or two might be sufficiently broken down and/or vulnerable that the 'sale' can be made. A Pick-Up Artist for Jesus, if you will. And that, wal, is what I see in all your testifying and scriptural quotes.

For them wot reacted to this mainly as a boohoo story about my grandfather, I blame myself for not being articulate enough.
The point about my grandfather was meant to illustrate to wal that humble origins do not preclude smugness and arrogance with respect to one's message and one's role as messenger. It was also intended to point out that I am intimately familiar with many evangelical arguments and various tactics used in delivering them.
The second part I should have made clear was intended to be more general, so I'll expand here: Grandpa may have been the first snake oil salesman of this type that I encountered, but I spent many formative years in flyover states of the U.S., which means that pretty much all the time someone was attempting a similar sale, with varying degrees of ineptitude. And I now live in a town with a very outspoken conservative Christian population, so it continues.
I should clarify that I have no problem with people's faith; I just want them to leave me alone about it. Evangelism gets very, very old. (Yes, I've heard the good news! Many, many times. Now leave me the fuck alone!) I have friends who are religious Christians. We remain friends because we don't discuss religion.
I call myself atheist not out of any faith-based devotion to the idea, but because it's pretty clearly the case to me. That is no more a religious position than is saying that I don't believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. From where I'm sitting, any god that could possibly exist is indistinguishable from physical laws within the parameters of which randomness prevails. So why bother distinguishing? What crucially makes this a non-religious position is that evidence to the contrary would change my mind.
I've got to stop posting from my fucking phone. Gack.

[George Christiansen]

Again I ask you: how can the pursuit of knowledge on a societal level not be adversely affected when a percentage of the population considers some old stories the truth behind the universe?

Depends on what those particular beliefs are, but more importantly how people hold them.

Most believers do not have as narrow and fundamentalist a hold on their beliefs as you seem to do of your interpretation of those beliefs. It is pretty much people like you and the attendees of the creation museum that hold to a literal seven 24 hour days of creation being the proper way to view the story in Genesis. This has been the case since the earliest written discussions of the subject.

I am not missing the point. I just don't buy into your false comparison. One can believe in pretty much any scientific theory and still hold to their being a deity or deities who are using those mechanisms to accomplish whatever the heck they're after. It may be wrong and it may even be stupid, but that does not make it a hindrance to scientific inquiry because it is addressing an issue outside of it's reach.

A much bigger hindrance are all the people who cling to old science that has been debunked. That group includes the religious and the nonreligious and poses a bigger risk of holding back knowledge than someone who thinks prayer might effect the weather.

Ironically, that's kinda what this thread is really about.

[George Christiansen]

Blah. Blah. Blah.

I believe what I do because it is obvious to me, but the people who's worldview is formed by what obviously leads them to religious conclusions are just wrong.

That's what I thought.

[George Christiansen]

Following from that, logically, there's pretty much no other realistic option than for the universe to be empty of inherent meaning.

There is a difference between saying that you do not have evidence that the universe has meaning and stating that it does not. The second is just as assumptive as saying that there is meaning and we just have not found the evidence yet. Both opinions are speaking about something they have no ability to know. They are both a statement of what someone BELIEVES to be true.

[guyonabuffalo]

Religion definitely comes up a lot of this board.

I would like to point out that all "religions" are not created equal. I hope this is obvious to most folks now.

Jesus did provide a parable saying something to the effect that even if one rises from the dead, many people will not believe.

Evidence versus non-evidence always provides fodder for the proverbial debate cannon.

What bothers me about the debate is that it constantly devolves into pejorative.

[Sean Herbison]

Again I ask you: how can the pursuit of knowledge on a societal level not be adversely affected when a percentage of the population considers some old stories the truth behind the universe?

It depends on whether you're interested in the how of things. I believe in God, but I still want to know the mechanisms behind what we've observed about the universe.

I see that stuff falls down. Yes, ultimately I believe it's because that's how God made it, but that doesn't make me stop wondering how. Now we know it's due to the effects of gravity. But what causes gravity? The graviton? Maybe, but how do we find it? Believing in God doesn't mean you stop wondering how he set things up to work.

[ecj]

Tertius sounds like an agnostic (the One True Path, by the way) in this case. You have identified as an atheist. Which means you claim that absolutely no god exists, with zero proof to back it up. Now, obviously it's pretty hard to prove a negative, which is why smart people like Tertius and I are agnostic.

Where do you get this shit? Atheism is not an assertion of belief. It's an assertion of lack of belief.

a·the·ist
ˈāTHēˌist/Submit
noun
a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods.

I'm not agnostic because it is pretty fucking obvious that Bible-god is not real based on everything we have learned about the world over the last 500 years or so.