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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.