Being An Atheist in America Ain't Easy...
SuzannePjam
Posts: 411
I know this is long, but I posted the whole article because it was slow to load for me off the site.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek/
The New Naysayers
In the midst of religious revival, three scholars argue that atheism is smarter.
Is God Dead?: Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher
By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
Sept. 11, 2006 issue - Americans answered the atrocities of September 11, overwhelmingly, with faith. Attacked in the name of God, they turned to God for comfort; in the week after the attacks, nearly 70 percent said they were praying more than usual. Confronted by a hatred that seemed inexplicable, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson proclaimed that God was mad at America because it harbored feminists, gays and civil libertarians. Sam Harris, then a 34-year-old graduate student in neuroscience, had a different reaction. On Sept. 12, he began a book. If, he reasoned, young men were slaughtering people in the name of religion—something that had been going on since long before 2001, of course—then perhaps the problem was religion itself. The book would be called "The End of Faith," which to most Americans probably sounds like a lament. To Harris it is something to be encouraged.
This was not a message most Americans wanted to hear, before or after 9/11. Atheists "are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public," according to a study by Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6—only 2 percent answered "don't know"—and only 37 percent said they'd be willing to vote for an atheist for president. (That's down from 49 percent in a 1999 Gallup poll—which also found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual than an atheist.) "The End of Faith" struggled to find a publisher, and even after Norton agreed to bring it out in 2004, Harris says there were editors who refused to come to meetings with him. But after winning the PEN/Martha Albrand award for nonfiction, the book sold 270,000 copies. Harris's scathing "Letter to a Christian Nation" will be published this month with a press run of 150,000. Someone is listening, even if he is mostly preaching, one might say, to the unconverted.
This year also saw the publication in February of "Breaking the Spell," by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, which asks how and why religions became ubiquitous in human society. The obvious answer—"Because they're true"—is foreclosed, Dennett says, by the fact that they are by and large mutually incompatible. Even to study "religion as a natural phenomenon," the subtitle of Dennett's book, is to deprive it of much of its mystery and power. And next month the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ("The Selfish Gene") weighs in with "The God Delusion," a book that extends an argument he advanced in the days after 9/11. After hearing once too often that "[t]o blame the attacks on Islam is like blaming Christianity for the fighting in Northern Ireland," Dawkins responded: Precisely. "It's time to get angry," he wrote, "and not only with Islam."
Dawkins and Harris are not writing polite demurrals to the time-honored beliefs of billions; they are not issuing pleas for tolerance or moderation, but bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as a pernicious and outdated superstition. (In the spirit of scientific evenhandedness, both would call themselves agnostic, although as Dawkins says, he's agnostic about God the same way he's agnostic about the existence of fairies.) They ask: where do people get their idea of God? From the Bible or the Qur'an. "Tell a devout Christian ... that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible," Harris writes, "and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever." He asks: How can anyone believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God who permits a tsunami to swallow 180,000 innocent people in a few hours? How does it advance our understanding of the universe to suppose that it was created by a supernatural being who communicates only through the one-way process of revelation?
These are not brand-new arguments, of course, and believers have well-practiced replies to them, although in some cases, such as the persistence of evil and suffering (the "theodicy" problem), the responses are still mostly works in progress. Neither author claims much success in arguing anyone out of a belief in God, but they consider it sufficient reward when they hear from people who were encouraged by their books to give voice to their private doubts. All the same, this is highly inflammatory material. Dawkins acknowledges that many readers will expect, or hope, to see him burning in hell (citing Aquinas as authority for the belief that souls in heaven will get a view of hell for their enjoyment). Harris says he has turned down requests for the rights to translate "The End of Faith" into Arabic or Urdu. "I think it would be a death sentence for any translator," he says. Harris himself—who traveled the world for a dozen years studying Eastern religions and mysticism before returning to finish his undergraduate degree at Stanford—asks that the name of his current university not be publicized.
These authors have no geopolitical strategy to advance; they're interested in the metaphysics of belief, not the politics of the First Amendment. It's the idea of putting trust in God they object to, not the motto on the nickel. This sets them apart from America's best-known atheist activist, the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair, a controversial eccentric who won a landmark lawsuit against mandatory classroom prayers in 1963 and went on to found the group now called American Atheists. When a chaplain came to her hospital room once and asked what he could do for her, she notoriously replied, "Drop dead." Dawkins, an urbane Oxfordian, would regard that as appalling manners. "I have no problem with people wishing me a Happy Christmas," he says, expressing puzzlement over the passions provoked in America by the question of how store clerks greet customers.
But if the arguments of Dawkins and Harris are familiar, they also bring to bear new scientific evidence on the issue. Evolution isn't necessarily incompatible with faith, even with evangelical Christianity. Several new books—"Evolution and Christian Faith" by the Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden and "The Language of God" by geneticist Francis Collins—uphold both. But to skeptics like Dawkins—and to Biblical literalists on the other side—Darwin appears to rob God of credit for his crowning achievement, which is us. In particular, evolutionary psychologists believe they are closing in on one of the remaining mysteries of life, the universal "moral law" that underlies our intuitive notions of good and evil. Why do we recognize that acts such as murder are wrong? To Collins, it's evidence of God's handiwork—the very perception that led him to become a Christian.
But Dawkins attempts to show how the highest of human impulses, such as empathy, charity and pity, could have evolved by the same mechanism of natural selection that created the thumb. Biologists understand that the driving force in evolution is the survival and propagation of our genes. They may impel us to instinctive acts of goodness, Dawkins writes, even when it seems counterproductive to our own interests—say, by risking our life to save someone else. Evolutionary psychology can explain how selfless behavior might have evolved. The recipient may be a blood relation who carries some of our own genes. Or our acts may earn us future gratitude, or a reputation for bravery that makes us more desirable as mates. Of course, the essence of the moral law is that it applies even to strangers. Missionaries who devote themselves to saving the lives of Third World peasants have no reasonable expectation of being repaid in this world. But, Dawkins goes on, the impulse for generosity must have evolved while humans lived in small bands in which almost everyone was related, so that goodness became the default human aspiration. This is a rebuke not merely to believers who insist that God must be the source of all goodness—but equally to the 19th-century atheism of Nietzsche, who assumed that the death of God meant the end of conventional morality.
But Dawkins, brilliant as he is, overlooks something any storefront Baptist preacher might have told him. "If there is no God, why be good?" he asks rhetorically, and responds: "Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up." That's clever. But millions of Christians and Muslims believe that it was precisely God who turned them away from a life of immorality. Dawkins, of course, thinks they are deluding themselves. He is correct that the social utility of religion doesn't prove anything about the existence of God. But for all his erudition, he seems not to have spent much time among ordinary Christians, who could have told him what God has meant to them.
It is not just extremists who earn the wrath of Dawkins and Harris. Their books are attacks on religious "moderates" as well—indeed, the very idea of moderation. The West is not at war with "terrorism," Harris asserts in "The End of Faith"; it is at war with Islam, a religion whose holy book, "on almost every page ... prepares the ground for religious conflict." Christian fundamentalists, he says, have a better handle on the problem than moderates: "They know what it's like to really believe that their holy book is the word of God, and there's a paradise you can get to if you die in the right circumstances. They're not left wondering what is the 'real' cause of terrorism." As for the Bible, Harris, like the fundamentalists, prefers a literal reading. He quotes at length the passages in the Old and New Testaments dealing with how to treat slaves. Why, he asks, would anyone take moral instruction from a book that calls for stoning your children to death for disrespect, or for heresy, or for violating the Sabbath? Obviously our culture no longer believes in that, he adds, so why not agree that science has made it equally unnecessary to invoke God to explain the Sun, or the weather, or your own existence?
Even agnostic moderates get raked over—like the late Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who attempted to broker a truce between science and religion in his controversial 1999 book "Rocks of Ages." Gould proposed that science and religion retreat to separate realms, the former concerned with empirical questions about the way the universe works, while the latter pursues ultimate meaning and ethical precepts. But, Dawkins asks, unless the Bible is right in its historical and metaphysical claims, why should we grant it authority in the moral realm? And can science really abjure any interest in the claims of religion? Did Jesus come back from the dead, or didn't he? If so, how did God make it happen? Collins says he is satisfied with the answer that the Resurrection is a miracle, permanently beyond our understanding. That Collins can hold that belief, while simultaneously working at the very frontiers of science as the head of the Human Genome Project, is what amazes Harris.
Believers can take comfort in the fact that atheism barely amounts to a "movement." American Atheists, which fights in the courts and legislatures for the rights of nonbelievers, has about 2,500 members and a budget of less than $1 million. On the science Web site Edge.org, the astronomer Carolyn Porco offers the subversive suggestion that science itself should attempt to supplant God in Western culture, by providing the benefits and comforts people find in religion: community, ceremony and a sense of awe. "Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way," she writes. Porco, who is deeply involved in the Cassini mission to Saturn, finds spiritual fulfillment in exploring the cosmos. But will that work for the rest of the world—for "the people who want to know that they're going to live forever and meet Mom and Dad in heaven? We can't offer that." If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek/
The New Naysayers
In the midst of religious revival, three scholars argue that atheism is smarter.
Is God Dead?: Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher
By Jerry Adler
Newsweek
Sept. 11, 2006 issue - Americans answered the atrocities of September 11, overwhelmingly, with faith. Attacked in the name of God, they turned to God for comfort; in the week after the attacks, nearly 70 percent said they were praying more than usual. Confronted by a hatred that seemed inexplicable, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson proclaimed that God was mad at America because it harbored feminists, gays and civil libertarians. Sam Harris, then a 34-year-old graduate student in neuroscience, had a different reaction. On Sept. 12, he began a book. If, he reasoned, young men were slaughtering people in the name of religion—something that had been going on since long before 2001, of course—then perhaps the problem was religion itself. The book would be called "The End of Faith," which to most Americans probably sounds like a lament. To Harris it is something to be encouraged.
This was not a message most Americans wanted to hear, before or after 9/11. Atheists "are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public," according to a study by Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6—only 2 percent answered "don't know"—and only 37 percent said they'd be willing to vote for an atheist for president. (That's down from 49 percent in a 1999 Gallup poll—which also found that more Americans would vote for a homosexual than an atheist.) "The End of Faith" struggled to find a publisher, and even after Norton agreed to bring it out in 2004, Harris says there were editors who refused to come to meetings with him. But after winning the PEN/Martha Albrand award for nonfiction, the book sold 270,000 copies. Harris's scathing "Letter to a Christian Nation" will be published this month with a press run of 150,000. Someone is listening, even if he is mostly preaching, one might say, to the unconverted.
This year also saw the publication in February of "Breaking the Spell," by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, which asks how and why religions became ubiquitous in human society. The obvious answer—"Because they're true"—is foreclosed, Dennett says, by the fact that they are by and large mutually incompatible. Even to study "religion as a natural phenomenon," the subtitle of Dennett's book, is to deprive it of much of its mystery and power. And next month the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ("The Selfish Gene") weighs in with "The God Delusion," a book that extends an argument he advanced in the days after 9/11. After hearing once too often that "[t]o blame the attacks on Islam is like blaming Christianity for the fighting in Northern Ireland," Dawkins responded: Precisely. "It's time to get angry," he wrote, "and not only with Islam."
Dawkins and Harris are not writing polite demurrals to the time-honored beliefs of billions; they are not issuing pleas for tolerance or moderation, but bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as a pernicious and outdated superstition. (In the spirit of scientific evenhandedness, both would call themselves agnostic, although as Dawkins says, he's agnostic about God the same way he's agnostic about the existence of fairies.) They ask: where do people get their idea of God? From the Bible or the Qur'an. "Tell a devout Christian ... that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible," Harris writes, "and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever." He asks: How can anyone believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God who permits a tsunami to swallow 180,000 innocent people in a few hours? How does it advance our understanding of the universe to suppose that it was created by a supernatural being who communicates only through the one-way process of revelation?
These are not brand-new arguments, of course, and believers have well-practiced replies to them, although in some cases, such as the persistence of evil and suffering (the "theodicy" problem), the responses are still mostly works in progress. Neither author claims much success in arguing anyone out of a belief in God, but they consider it sufficient reward when they hear from people who were encouraged by their books to give voice to their private doubts. All the same, this is highly inflammatory material. Dawkins acknowledges that many readers will expect, or hope, to see him burning in hell (citing Aquinas as authority for the belief that souls in heaven will get a view of hell for their enjoyment). Harris says he has turned down requests for the rights to translate "The End of Faith" into Arabic or Urdu. "I think it would be a death sentence for any translator," he says. Harris himself—who traveled the world for a dozen years studying Eastern religions and mysticism before returning to finish his undergraduate degree at Stanford—asks that the name of his current university not be publicized.
These authors have no geopolitical strategy to advance; they're interested in the metaphysics of belief, not the politics of the First Amendment. It's the idea of putting trust in God they object to, not the motto on the nickel. This sets them apart from America's best-known atheist activist, the late Madalyn Murray O'Hair, a controversial eccentric who won a landmark lawsuit against mandatory classroom prayers in 1963 and went on to found the group now called American Atheists. When a chaplain came to her hospital room once and asked what he could do for her, she notoriously replied, "Drop dead." Dawkins, an urbane Oxfordian, would regard that as appalling manners. "I have no problem with people wishing me a Happy Christmas," he says, expressing puzzlement over the passions provoked in America by the question of how store clerks greet customers.
But if the arguments of Dawkins and Harris are familiar, they also bring to bear new scientific evidence on the issue. Evolution isn't necessarily incompatible with faith, even with evangelical Christianity. Several new books—"Evolution and Christian Faith" by the Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden and "The Language of God" by geneticist Francis Collins—uphold both. But to skeptics like Dawkins—and to Biblical literalists on the other side—Darwin appears to rob God of credit for his crowning achievement, which is us. In particular, evolutionary psychologists believe they are closing in on one of the remaining mysteries of life, the universal "moral law" that underlies our intuitive notions of good and evil. Why do we recognize that acts such as murder are wrong? To Collins, it's evidence of God's handiwork—the very perception that led him to become a Christian.
But Dawkins attempts to show how the highest of human impulses, such as empathy, charity and pity, could have evolved by the same mechanism of natural selection that created the thumb. Biologists understand that the driving force in evolution is the survival and propagation of our genes. They may impel us to instinctive acts of goodness, Dawkins writes, even when it seems counterproductive to our own interests—say, by risking our life to save someone else. Evolutionary psychology can explain how selfless behavior might have evolved. The recipient may be a blood relation who carries some of our own genes. Or our acts may earn us future gratitude, or a reputation for bravery that makes us more desirable as mates. Of course, the essence of the moral law is that it applies even to strangers. Missionaries who devote themselves to saving the lives of Third World peasants have no reasonable expectation of being repaid in this world. But, Dawkins goes on, the impulse for generosity must have evolved while humans lived in small bands in which almost everyone was related, so that goodness became the default human aspiration. This is a rebuke not merely to believers who insist that God must be the source of all goodness—but equally to the 19th-century atheism of Nietzsche, who assumed that the death of God meant the end of conventional morality.
But Dawkins, brilliant as he is, overlooks something any storefront Baptist preacher might have told him. "If there is no God, why be good?" he asks rhetorically, and responds: "Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up." That's clever. But millions of Christians and Muslims believe that it was precisely God who turned them away from a life of immorality. Dawkins, of course, thinks they are deluding themselves. He is correct that the social utility of religion doesn't prove anything about the existence of God. But for all his erudition, he seems not to have spent much time among ordinary Christians, who could have told him what God has meant to them.
It is not just extremists who earn the wrath of Dawkins and Harris. Their books are attacks on religious "moderates" as well—indeed, the very idea of moderation. The West is not at war with "terrorism," Harris asserts in "The End of Faith"; it is at war with Islam, a religion whose holy book, "on almost every page ... prepares the ground for religious conflict." Christian fundamentalists, he says, have a better handle on the problem than moderates: "They know what it's like to really believe that their holy book is the word of God, and there's a paradise you can get to if you die in the right circumstances. They're not left wondering what is the 'real' cause of terrorism." As for the Bible, Harris, like the fundamentalists, prefers a literal reading. He quotes at length the passages in the Old and New Testaments dealing with how to treat slaves. Why, he asks, would anyone take moral instruction from a book that calls for stoning your children to death for disrespect, or for heresy, or for violating the Sabbath? Obviously our culture no longer believes in that, he adds, so why not agree that science has made it equally unnecessary to invoke God to explain the Sun, or the weather, or your own existence?
Even agnostic moderates get raked over—like the late Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist who attempted to broker a truce between science and religion in his controversial 1999 book "Rocks of Ages." Gould proposed that science and religion retreat to separate realms, the former concerned with empirical questions about the way the universe works, while the latter pursues ultimate meaning and ethical precepts. But, Dawkins asks, unless the Bible is right in its historical and metaphysical claims, why should we grant it authority in the moral realm? And can science really abjure any interest in the claims of religion? Did Jesus come back from the dead, or didn't he? If so, how did God make it happen? Collins says he is satisfied with the answer that the Resurrection is a miracle, permanently beyond our understanding. That Collins can hold that belief, while simultaneously working at the very frontiers of science as the head of the Human Genome Project, is what amazes Harris.
Believers can take comfort in the fact that atheism barely amounts to a "movement." American Atheists, which fights in the courts and legislatures for the rights of nonbelievers, has about 2,500 members and a budget of less than $1 million. On the science Web site Edge.org, the astronomer Carolyn Porco offers the subversive suggestion that science itself should attempt to supplant God in Western culture, by providing the benefits and comforts people find in religion: community, ceremony and a sense of awe. "Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way," she writes. Porco, who is deeply involved in the Cassini mission to Saturn, finds spiritual fulfillment in exploring the cosmos. But will that work for the rest of the world—for "the people who want to know that they're going to live forever and meet Mom and Dad in heaven? We can't offer that." If Dawkins, Dennett and Harris are right, the five-century-long competition between science and religion is sharpening. People are choosing sides. And when that happens, people get hurt.
"Where there is sacrifice there is someone collecting the sacrificial offerings."-- Ayn Rand
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
In reference to one of those options, she responded, "Back when I got started on my career, that option was not around. So, when you mention it, I kind of don't know what you're talking about."
In actuality, she just didn't know what I was talking about, and was just afraid to simply ask, as doing so would have, from her point of view, made her look "ignorant."
So, the words "kind of" was her way of saying that she didn't know, but without actually saying it.
And that's the crazy world that we live in. We are so ruthless to one another that we are forced to skew and distort even our most miniscule vulnerabilities.
That's how malignant and deep the fallacies of our personalities really are. We can't even carry on a simple conversation without erecting walls to hide behind.
The belief in a deity and ultimate consequences does little to change the human heart. Like cough syrup, it only controls the most overt symptoms.
Great article, btw. Thanks for posting it. Yes, I read the whole thing.
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825
Carry on.
how would you know? the article is a brief summary of the author's views and an interview and history of the conflict. there is no argument, it's telling the story. you'd have to read his book to tell whether or not his arguments are sound.
Its a brief summary, and, i may read the book(s). i know, however, because they seem to be the same old, unstable arguments i've heard countless times before. the same people fill countless threads with around here. i may in fact take a look at the book(s), but i'm sure i will be unmoved.
fair enough. guess it was just a "dont judge a book by its cover or PR article" kinda reaction
plus i finally started law school, so im into dissecting details at the moment.
naděje umírá poslední
Yeah, we feed atheists to lions, make them sit on the back of the bus, and designate separate drinking fountains just for them. Forget getting a cab if you're an atheist. Its terrible!!
The primary belief you have is science rules, and how big a deal is that. Most people believe that science and technology are important factors in our lives.
My point is that it is not hard to defend a belief in nothing. The rest of us are the ones under attack. Sorry for my lack of sympathy but REALLY!
I had a whole post with examples why it's not "easy", or certainly not "easier", but there seemed to be a problem with the pit so I'll just leave it at that...
but just a reminder, god is watching you, it's even on the dollar bills.
naděje umírá poslední
Sammi: Wanna just break up?
I'd say a lot of people care, just find a thread with an atheist vision and read the post made by believers, they care.
Holidays under attack? Do you 'season's greetings' instead of 'Merry Christmas'?
Beliefs? Your belief in god is as much attacked as my disbelief in god.
What? Example maybe? And 'your'' government, you mean George "God told me so" Bush?
Defend homosexuality? Let's see who'd want to attack homosexuality? Ah yes, Christians.
Cruelty to animals? Is that something you care about just because you're a believer? Same goes for protecting the planet.
???
Get educated about atheism, this should get you started; http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/intro.html
If it hard to defend your beliefs? Do atheist feed you to the lions, make you sit on the back of the bus, and designate separate drinking fountains just for you?
naděje umírá poslední
Sounds like you've never taken the time to understand atheism. I mean REALLY!
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825
And what 'stable' arguments do you have to the effect that there is a God? And if you do believe in God, can you please explain what you mean by the word 'God'? Thanks.
And please ... if you think your holidays are under attack, you need to step away from the television. If ever there was a media-manufactured issue, that's it.
a derivitive of nature.
nature is god
god is love
love is light
For someone who's supposed to be smart this is a pretty silly way to go about finding his own truth about God. God only exists if it helps Dawkins to understand our universe. Gee, he's just a little self-centered. Girls must love him on a date.
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
I wouldn't say that having a natural curiosity about the universe makes a person self-centered. You do realize that religion has been used as a tool for explaining the universe ever since, well, there's been religion.
Otherwise, why do creationists find the theory of evolution and the big bang theory so offensive?
So, you see, it is equally important for Dawkins and creationists to have an understanding of the universe. But, in the case of creationism, such an understanding is not derived from selfish intentions? Only in the case of Dawkins and atheists?
Also, under your rationale, if science were to prove without a doubt that the universe was not created by god, you would still believe in god. That is, you believe that an understanding of the universe and an understanding of god are mutually exclusive (wholly separate) beliefs. If you didn't believe that, you wouldn't be accusing Mr. Dawkins of short-sightedness in his assessment of what defines god's existence.
But, the truth of the matter is that, if there is a god, his existence is synonymous with an understanding of the universe.
People with religious background often accuse non-believers of "selfishness" with little or no grounds. It has a lot to do their own ideas of selflessness being based on the ideals of worship and salvation, rather than actual compassion and empathy.
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825
when it hits you, you feel to pain.
So brutalize me with music.”
~ Bob Marley
Maybe so, but I don't see how it is any more selfish than religion's definition of god.
Religious people often do selfless acts, but here's why:
3. It is inline with the teachings of jesus and the bible.
2. The teachings of jesus and the bible are the word of god
1. God is the creator of the universe
If god was not the creator of the universe, the selfless and philanthropic aspects of religion would cease to exist.
That's why, ultimately, the quest to define god is, in fact, a quest to better understand the universe.
And I shall repeat what I said in my last post:
People with religious background often accuse non-believers of "selfishness" with little or no grounds. It has a lot to do their own ideas of selflessness being based on the ideals of worship and salvation, rather than actual compassion and empathy.
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825
I don't read it the same way.
It seems to me that he is saying that if everybody just took as fact that God created the universe, there would be no need to study it. So, how does it help us understand it to suppose it was created by a supernatural being?
If that is self-centered, I'm glad most scientists are. Most things would be attributed to magic otherwise, and a bunch of the technologies we take advantage of probably wouldn't be available.
Actually, I do believe in God and it wasn't my purpose to promote atheism. I've heard the saying that religion is the "opiate of the masses," and I thought the part about people's tendancy toward doing good might be bred into the genes and I thought it was an interesting concept.
I'm Christian but I don't believe the Christian versions of everything and certainly don't believe in Adam and Eve and that God created the universe in 6 days. But I do think that you can believe in science and God at the same time. One of the problems I have with some of the faiths out there is that they hold fast to ideologue and if science disproves it they don't want to amend it.
"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
i was never really accusing you of starting a hate thread. i was merely speaking to the way i knew the thread would develop.
As far as the rest, i to am of frim belief that science and faith compliment eachother quite nicely.
Whatever. Yeah i've been through this one over and over on this board as well. Are you really that upset about your money? If so, let me know. i'll PM you my address and you can send it all to me. Look, as soon as, because you are an atheist, you are not allowed to earn and use money, then you can bitch about it, but until then... well,... its the same beans as any believer has. Do what you want with 'em.
this is when you can break down a human's actions and realize that we are all self-centered; our actions and thoughts no matter how generous or selfish are a reflection of how we as humans can adapt and function in our existence...
a derivitive of nature.
nature is god
god is love
love is light
This is true that we put ourselves before others. However, that does not preclude us from feeling the pain of others.
Please refer to the "self-actualization" component of Maslow's heirarchy of needs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825
Allright. i'm nearly impossible to offend,but, you've managed to do it with this here. NEVER have i even implied that ANYONE here is a second class citizen for ANY reason. My only intention was to show how stupid the claim is that being Atheist is an enormous hardship in America. Thats one of the biggest, foulest, steaming fucking piles i've ever heard. Except for the bit about my posts demonstrating an idea that atheists are second class citizens. Give it up Bro.
Don't try to frame me inside some kinda of liberal conspiracy that all conservatives who believe in God are whacked.
I didn't need the TV for me to figure out how about 10 to 15 years ago it became increasingly unpopular to believe in God. It is a ridiculous that so many people out there want to distance all our society from any public affirmation of what our founders based the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution on, freedom and individual rights. Religious freedom being one of those freedoms endowed by our Creator, and the concept that no man can deny another man what God gave him. Fundamentally that is what changed the world and changed history.
Yet, in the public square we want to uproot the connection because we are so enlightened that we don't need a God to ensure our rights anymore. Rather, we as humans have developed so wonderfully that now we can ensure it all by ourselves. But, then I look around at the world and I don't see that we are doing a very good job of promoting this idea, and many places the world has no concept of it, and they aren't very good places to be.
My response to the poster was really how I don't get how an aethiest can say it is hard for them, not that I don't understand that not everyone agrees with him, obviously. I thought it funny, and it still is. But the rest of you can't find any humor in me flip comments. Lighten up.
God help us
Well, we're getting there. No one ever said it would be easy. Religion works because it fits so well with the human condition. Of course there are many people who live without god, but who are also not true atheists. And it is those individuals who reflect poorly on the rest of us non-believers.
Those other places that you cite where god is not worshipped aren't places that practice atheism in the sense that it defines their morality. Rather, they are just living without god. Yes, there is a difference.
Sometimes, I'll hear people say, "I used to be an atheist. I used to laugh at god. But, then I saw the light."
Well, those people weren't true atheists. After all, they were laughing at god. I neither laugh at nor loathe the concept of god as he is not there to be the recipient of either reaction from me.
Being a true atheist doesn't just mean denying that god exists. It also means understanding why so many people believe he/she exists. I doubt those horrible secular places that you speak of ever took the time to really have that understanding.
http://forums.pearljam.com/showthread.php?t=272825