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Originally Posted by shakran
These posts are getting entirely too long, so you'll excuse me I hope if I cut out a bunch of stuff from yours and only answer the stuff that really popped out at me.
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Hmm. Random question: do you value truth, or your own well being, higher?
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Both. |
You get a prize for not answering the question! Do you prefer licorish or chocolate?
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First off, I was making a point. Second, assuming I was trying to convert UFO believers into non-believers, my first step would not be to march into a place where I KNEW the UFO believers to be and start insulting them.
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It was a simple question. You attacked me for shoveling UFO believers and Christians into the same category, and called UFO believers "whackjobs".
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No, I'm saying that YOU have said YOU want to eliminate the power of religion. OK. Fine. If that's what you really want, you're going about it in a very stupid way.
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It is a want. It is not my all consuming focus in life.
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To change their beliefs, you must win the religious people over.
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No, that is not the only way to contribute to the loss of religious belief. I do
not believe I am capable of freeing every human from their problems.
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You're not going to do that by starting off the conversation accusing them and their beliefs of being ridiculous.
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Having a conversation with someone is not the only way to convince them they are wrong. There are millions of ways to erode away the religious infection. Freeing souls lost to religious infections one-by-one in heart-to-heart talks -- that isn't the only way.
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I'm sorry, but I value truth more than I value this particular victory.
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In that case, as you have mentioned, no one can ever know the truth. Until that changes (and it won't) stop insulting people who have no more absolute knowledge of the truth than you do.
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The impossibility of absolute knowledge is a testament not to the pointlessness of knowledge and truth, but the ridiculousness of the absolute requirement.
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The problem is that you just don't know if they're wrong or not.
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I do not know in the absolute sense, in the way that I don't know
anything absolutely. I don't know
absolutely that raping babies is evil, but I still
know that raping babies is evil. Read that over twice if you have to.
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There's no way of knowing for sure. Hell for all we know we're all just some simulation running on some immensely powerful computer system. We don't know, and we won't ever know. And since we can't truly know, it would behoove us not to look down our noses at others who don't truly know just because they don't happen to believe in the unknowable thing that we believe in.
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Absolute knowledge isn't a requirement of action.
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I think you're confused here. I was accused by KM of making an ad hominem attack. I never accused you of it.
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I asked you not to make an ad hominem attack, not KM.
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Prove that one must have faith to believe that god does not exist.
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Because you cannot prove that god does not exist. Therefore you must take it on faith that your conclusions are correct.
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If you define faith that broadly, it is meaningless. You must have faith that the sun came up yesturday, you must have faith that your mind exists, you must have faith that there isn't a howling void outside of your door and that opening it is safe.
The impossibility of absolute knowledge does not mean that all knowledge is faith -- if you hold that to be true, then the word "faith" means nothing at all.
I object when someone takes a word, and broadens it to meaninglessness. As such, I quite reject your definition of faith, and all arguements that fall from it, as having any meaning.
If you can come up with a reasonable definition of faith that isn't useless, please do so.
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You consider the spaghetti monster belief to be crap?! My god, you are being disrespectful of a ridiculous belief system!
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If it were a religious belief system, then I would be guilty of that.
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How is the FSM belief system not a religious belief system? Is it because it is less popular than other belief systems?
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I would have to take the individual who believes it on a case by case basis to answer that. If he just dreamed it up, then maybe it's ridiculous. If he's been told all his life by all his relatives and all his friends that UFO's exist and they're going to come take him away to paradise, then that's not quite as ridiculous.
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Ah, it is popularity that matters. You object to my attacking a belief system because it is socially transmitted.
As noted, I understand that religion is often a socially transmitted infection. I'm aware that people are a product of their history -- argueably, people are nothing more than a product of their history. Dispite this, people are
not free of responsibility for their beliefs.
I hold each and every person responsible for their actions and beiefs. I understand that their actions and beliefs have causes outside of themselves, but that does not mean that they are not responsible for their own actions and their own beliefs.
Understanding why they have such a belief, or do such an action, does not excuse it. Seeing that I would have their belief, or do such an action, in the same situation does not excuse it.
If one is not responsible for beliefs that where the result of your environment, one is responsible for nothing. This is evidence that the term "responsible" is being used incorrectly -- it has been broadened into meaninglessness. My response to a term being broadened into meaninglessness is to reevaluate the broadening, and find a useful meaning for the word consistent with it's colloquial meanings.
So I know people are raised catholic, and believe it because they are patterning their life after their parents. This provides me with information on how to break the pattern of religious infection. It does not mean that people are not responsible for their beliefs.
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Originally Posted by ShaniFaye
Im beginning to see that Atheists are as closed and narrow minded as believers are some times accused of.
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Some are.
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Im so glad the atheists I know in real life dont behave like y'all do and just respect an "interest" in things other than their "beliefs", because some of you do a real good job at not making yourselves desirable as companions
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I respect lots of things about lots of people. In this thread, I'm only talking about religious belief and the lack thereof.
I do throw in the "I can respect people even if I don't respect one of their beliefs" from time to time, but that isn't the focus of the thread's arguements. I usually throw that out when people accuse me of hating or lacking any respect for people who have religious beliefs.
I can have respect for them, but I would have more if they lost the religious belief.
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Originally Posted by willravel
I can think someone is misguided or has a different perception of our world without attacking them outright and challenging them at every turn.
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I don't challenge people at every turn. I am having a debate in this thread, in which my opinions about religious belief are being attacked.
I can respect someone
less because of their religious belief and still
respect that person.
Does nobody have a good friend that they love and that they think has a serious problem? Can they not love and respect their friend, yet wish their friend didn't have that serious problem?
Most people I interact with socially (well over half) are believers or one degree or another. They know I find their beliefs ridiculous, and they know that I love and respect them as people. One does not have to love and respect
every single feature of someone in order to love and respect a person.
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I was referring to Lizra's statement in only being interested in other atheists. And silly as it *might* sound to someone, even if I dont care about something I can still be annoyed at yakk's condescending manner and his overuse of the word ridiculous and his statement that his respect for a person is lowered if they persist in believing in God. A person's personal religious belief or lack thereof is not a factor in respect for that person IMO.
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I respect your respect of other's religious beliefs. It is quite likely a good, wise and smart belief.
I hold a different belief, one that you have no reason to respect. I can accept this.
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Originally Posted by ShaniFaye
I believe I said his overuse of the word and I said it was the way he presented what he said, not his opinion that its stupid or ridiculous. Sorry if the difference silly to you, but thats just the way it is.
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I'm using ridiculous regularly because it was my original descriptive. Changing up adjectives to something equivilent might make better prose, but it would fuzzy the waters (do I mean something different in this particular case or not?)
Would it be better if I used another word to describe my view of religious belief? Most likely.
Would "Delusion" work better? KM has been using it, and it seems to fit reasonably.
"Their delusional religious belief" instead of "their ridiculous religious belief". Avoids alliteration also!
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Originally Posted by shakran
Try "I don't believe in god, and here's why." Gee, you might even get people to listen to you instead of concentrating on how pissed off you made them if you did that.
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I don't believe in god for the same reasons I don't believe in the flying spagetti monster. Neither belief explains anything about human experience or life. Insofar as either belief has made claims or predictions about the world, they have been shown to be completely and utterly wrong. I consider your religious belief to be equivilent to the belief of a UFO cultist. I wish you where free of your religious infection.
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Maybe they don't want to. Who cares? Not your problem. Live your life, not theirs. Athiests love to bitch to high. .er. . heaven about how the christians want to impose their horrible god beliefs on everyone else. Well, the door swings both ways. Practice what you preach. It's fine not to believe in god. But quit trying to convert the masses lest you become guilty of the same bullshit you accuse them of.
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Religious believers continue to infect their children with their religious beliefs. Religious believers continue to impose their beliefs on me. Religious believers
holding the most powerful civil and military position in the entire world consider people without religious beliefs to be second-class citizens.
I have reason to be afraid of religious belief. And I don't think I can pick and choose which parts of religious belief that aren't threatening. There have been relatively non-threatening religious beliefs in the past (as far as I know), such as the theism of many of the founding fathers of the USA. It lacked sufficiently strong infectious power, and it pretty much died off as a philosophy.
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Yes. When you have a well established concept that people have believed in for millenia, I do think it would be awfully nice if you'd have some sort of evidence to back up your side before you trash theirs. You can bring up all the silly BS examples of modern hoaxes and paranoid conspiracy theories, but when you get right down to it there is a difference between that and well-established religion.
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I don't see why the length of establishment of the religion should sway me significantly on my opinions about the delusional belief itself. I'm well aware that delusional beliefs can be carried on through generations and generations of time. I'm aware that religious belief, in order to survive, needs to be very good at infecting the children of believers. Based off that, I'd expect older religions to be more powerful.
(And less destructive. On average, with lots of variance.)