yep, in my own little world sometimes i forget how many people still believe in it. we had a small christmas dinner with friends on the weekend and i really had to keep my mouth shut but after hearing people say, whats the point in living if there is nothing after this life i just had to point out what a sad way that was to live.

and the newtown shooting, that priest talking about more stars in the sky, president obama talking about shit not built with human hands...it just seems to me it makes light of the situation.

You are 100% correct. But that is a looooong ways away. My guess is we'll off ourselves before that happens.

I am a asstheist. I believe that if there is a god he/she/it is a fucked up asshole (+ I worship luscious butts)

What will really bake your noodles is that somewhere in an alternate universe all of you are right and all of you are wrong.

Whatever existence you choose to exert your quantum energy on is what ends up being your particular path.

After all, Earth is just a universal simulation.

The true nature of faith-based religious systems was lost thousands of year ago. Unfortunately its viral-like nature still persists as millions of people chase mere shadows of the potential abilities of the human condition.

That's okay though, because humanity's fascination with religion can be compared to a child who holds onto its favorite blanket. It serves its purpose, for now...

Two issues I suppose. Most atheists think life is an emergent property of the universe. Although we could have had life seeded here by an asteroid/meteorite there are many pathways to life forming of it's own accord just based on physics and an abundance of time. It's why people give the Drake equation a fair chance of being roughly correct and that it's highly likely life exists elsewhere. So calling the thing that created life here god to a lot of people is simply calling the standard model of physics "god" which is useless as it already has a name that describes it's function much better.
This leads into the second point that goes into what Dirty is trying to say very inelegantly. We have a tendency to say Side A says this, Side B says that, so it's split.. a 50/50 toss up between the two and it's even. But it's not really like that and people know it deep down. Think about the obvious complaint about liife as an emergent property of the universe, the theist will say "you can't prove that" and think they have made a great point - "I can't prove my God you can't prove your theory so it's a stalemate". But it's not like that both in theory and in reality. What Dirty is trying to say with his unicorn talk is to show roughly where god as an explanatory force sits on a scale of "proof". On one hand we have solid scientific theory and testable hypothesis. We have made the fundamental building blocks of life in the laboratory by simulating the early "primordial ooze". We have proven that ribonucleotides can be created naturally and that the ingredients to make them are common in the universe. So on one hand we have magic sky gods and on the other we have scientists making the first stages of life and showing there is nothing really that amazing about it from a physics and organic chemistry perspective (except that y'know it's amazing to our ape brains). Think of it this way, solid proof is a pound of lead on a scale. On one side we have nothing but air and on the other we have an eighth. When I "weigh up" what to believe in I look at the scales and rationally think about what is the most likely scenario given all we know about nature. All options aren't equally valid. If a talking unicorn is a one in a trillion chance, why take it seriously? Why even think about it? Is a talking burning bush one in a trillion as well? What about Thor? What about Thetans? A non-interventionist god would have to make more sense - one in a billion? a million? Just because it's an unknown doesn't mean it's valid or likely, it's just one of trillions of things we could make up on the spot.

At a certain point there is no point in continuing to give "chances" to outlandish suggestions like personal gods. We don't give chances to unicorns but because of out societal conditioning some people allow that maybe far off in the future in a billion years we'll find that unicorn or god. Other people as I mentioned earlier understand this at a certain level and reduce a god to an initial spark of life, or call energy god or some such other waffle that takes away a good descriptive name "energy" and rather uselessly adds another word "god" to it as though that changes anything other than satisfying themselves that they've left room for someone unknown.
We humans believed in thunder gods and bear gods and multiple armed gods. Are they all as likely as each other? Are they less likely than the Christian god? Why?

And why descend into the god of the gaps? That god is the answer to the parts we don't know about or people are personally ignorant about. Even though we've made the building blocks of life in the laboratory people still want to claim god as the "spark" as though that somehow makes things better. As though degrading god from someone who frowns while you masturbate to little more than the "guy" who set the controls for the standard model of physics and then disappeared isn't telling themselves something: Every time science explains something god gets smaller. It ignores the inexorable path god has taken from being the one behind thunder to being some amorphous causal agent that predates all the things we explain, and then as we explain them, causing the things before them.

It all of course ignores the stupidity of using a god to explain a first cause, ie infinite regress. You can't use something that is more complex than the system you are trying to explain to explain how it came about, then you have to explain what created this god that was more complex than the universe.

Anyways, I'm sure most of that will be ignored. I don't really get annoyed by religious stuff at xmas. I treat it like everyone does, a time to gather with family and appreciate what you have with pagan things like xmas trees decorating the place at a pagan time of the year. The thing that does annoy me though is Huckabee or whatever bloviating about prayer being taken out of school or godlessness causing school shootings, as though America isn't the most religous first world country there is by a massive and wide margin and all the "godless socialist" countries are the ones with mass shootings every month...
Idiots.

I guess I would consider myself an agnostic. I'm not an atheist which is, in its own right, a form a religion. That aside, I feel like I am smart enough to know that I am not smart enough to know if there is a god or gods or if we all just evolved from spunk.

What bugs me is when things like this shooting happen and suddenly there is a large collection of people saying this is a sign that we need to bring prayer back to schools. Praying in school isn't going to stop a mentally ill guy from taking his mom's improperly stored guns and shooting a bunch of people.

If there is a god and he/she looks out for us I would think that if they didn't want this person carrying out this horrific act they would have stopped them from doing it and that this god is not a big enough asshole to say to us, "If you would have just prayed in school I would have stopped this from happening."

That's as stupid as saying baldness is a hair colour or "off" is a tv show. Atheism is just looking at the evidence and saying there is probably no god. Not even saying there is no possibility of a god. Most atheists will say "Yep there is a possibility god exists, it's just very, very small and not worth thinking about", quite reasonable if you ask me but then I would say that ;)

A religion is simply a set of principles or beliefs that you have faith in. If you believe that there is no god then there are some kind of principles that you believe in and have faith in that lead you have this position.

Being an evolutionist requires as much blind faith as being religious. You have to believe that there was all this stuff just floating around in the ether, where it came from nobody knows, but one day Stuff A collided with Stuff B and Stuff C and they exploded. Our piece of debris happened to fall into orbit at the right distance from our sun so that over billions of years it was able to create an environment that was suitable to creating life and slowly over time we crawled out of the organic soup and became what we are. There is a lot of faith in there. Maybe it isn't the same as believing there is an all powerful being that just was and from it came nobody knows and it created everything, but it is belief never the less.

So, you have beliefs or principles which lead you to believe that there is no god. We are just an animal. When we die that is the end. You have faith in those beliefs. Belief + faith = religion.

Nope, you pretty much just flamed out there. Evolution is a capital "F" Fact. It is a Fact that evolution occurs. There is no faith neccessary at all. What you are calling faith (and btw callously insulting those who have faith and believe faith in the devine is special) is the same thing as not walking off a tall building because you have "faith" that the theory of gravity will cause you to fall. Both falling from buildings and evolution are facts. The theory part is the mechanism involved, so while scientists may argue over punctuated equilibrium in evolution or the mechanism of gravity, they don't argue over the fact of evolution or that you fall off buildings.
If you want to change the meaning of words go ahead but it has no bearing on reality or the argument. To get to the larger point of accepting abiogenisis, as I mentioned in the previous post, they've already demonstrated how it occurs up to RNA. The "belief" required isn't the same kind or quality as wholesale belief in something completely untestable, Ie it's not blind. If you could prove god or an invisible unicorn the way we are proving that life originated here chemically than it wouldn't require blind faith in god and I would be withholding all judgement as the scientists got on with proving god. God is untestable, abiogenisis is testable. You're making a category error. Belief + fact != religion.

I'm not arguing that evolution itself is blind faith. Animals are always evolving. Last I checked, and I'm no scientist by any stretch of the imagination, they have yet to explain exactly how humans came to be. We share DNA with apes, but I'm not aware of them ever discovering that missing link.

Evolution aside, the blind faith part comes from the big bang. You have to just believe that this stuff existed and exploded and created the universe. We have no proof that this is how it occurred. We have theories, but no hard fact in that case.

All the science aside, and I am likely blame for bringing it up, it doesn't really change the fact that I believe atheism is a form or religion. Maybe that is how I should have stated it to begin with. I feel that atheism is a religion. You may not. It's a free country.

You can feel what you like, just letting you know that why you're wrong and why the two things aren't the same. I can't dissaude someone from an erroneous notion if they want to hold it. *shrugs*

Also they've found countless missing links. Think about it for a moment. Every generation is a "missing link" if you want to be bloody minded about it so there a couple of hundred thousand different missing links. When you find a new one you almost create a Zeno's paradox on each side of it. I really don't even know the purpose of bringing that up is.. Are you trying to say the fact that humans evolved from a common ancestor to other apes has been proved with multiple missing links and mitochondrial DNA studies? If so congratulations, you're correct. If you're trying to say we don't know exactly what happened, day by day by reading their diaries and fb pages from 6 million years ago the exact path our ancestors took out of Africa.. I'd say... So? It's 100% proved it happened (or 99.99% if you want to be pedantic and not let me round up), that we're only x% sure when and what route it took is interesting but not especially applicable to anything other than arguments over competing theories for how the fact happened. Bring it up in an argument about when our ancestors left Africa, what route they took, when speciation occured and so forth. I've never really understood fetishizing the small things we don't know over the large things we do know.

If I pay a thousand people to each drive a mile and tell the next person to drive a mile to tell the next person to drive a mile until the 999th person tells the 1000th person to drive up to your door, knock on it and slap you in the face when you open it.. What is the salient point? That some asshole paid a thousand people to prove a point or that the 135th person took the jersey turnpike instead of the gateway?

Also you might have heard of the large hadron collider and it's recreation of the environment after the big bang (and it's possible detection of big bang material, ie proof)

Anyway, this is just another long way of repeating again the point that fact based beliefs aquired after testable scientific enquiry cannot be equated to blind faith. I wish we didn't live in a choose-your-own-facts society but apparantly we do so I won't spend any more time explaining it when you obviously have your mind made up about it.

Atheism is an opinion based on facts.
Religion is an opinion based despite facts.

Stop acting like this is a fact. Which it is not. It's your personal belief based on theory not facts.

Great, you are the first person in this thread to understand what i was saying. I had no idea it was this complicated to most people here.

People who call being atheist a kind if religion are usually the most dumb people in a religious thread. Every single time.

Atheis means no belief. You have no belief. By your logic is someone who does not have a car still a car owner.

I believe in science myself, but lets not make a mistake of assuming that:

if A is possible then A happened...

just because it's possible to create organic stuff from inorganic matter under certain conditions, in no way proves, or even suggests, that that is indeed what happened...

it is perhaps the most logical explanation given our current knowledge, but it's far from a "fact"...

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

You took me seriously?

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I keep an open mind. Anything is possible. I just try to be a good human.

I'm not saying it's a fact it did happen, I'm saying it's a fact it can happen, which given the complete lack of any facts on the other side, as you suggest, makes it the most logical explanation given our current knowledge. I also mentioned panspermia. I also can't rule out aliens, but they all inhabit different places on a probability scale, they're not all equally probable options just because they exist as options.

I posted an essay, but changed my mind...

It isn't worth debating any longer, but here is a link to a ruling where the federal court of appeals actually ruled at atheism is a religion.

In the end it doesn't matter. Tomorrow the sun will come up and life will go on regardless of what any of us think.

I'm agnostic, too. Often, Atheists are much like the religious fruitcakes in their arrogant view that their outlook (that there is no higher power) is absolute - that not even a possibility exists that there may be more than we currently understand - as if we already know all there is to know.

And those preachers weighing in on the tragedy are pig cunts.

Man's arrogance and conceit that at the point in time he's on Earth that he's got it all pretty much figured out. For primitive age man the answer was religion, dieties. Today it's science for many. Two thousand years from now looking back at what we know now, what we hypothesize now, will make us look primitive. The solid science we have collected through our existence will stand, I'm amazed reading about these geniuses from thousands and hundreds of years ago and their work in math and sciences. And two thousand years from now scientists will look at our contributions and be impressed but they'll also think how primitive we were.

Here's what I wonder - if we don't destroy ourselves completely and we continue to thrive on this planet, we are going to make ourselves immortal - whether that is reprogramming our genes, making a copy of ourselves, downloading what's inside our minds into a new body, whatever - to many religion is mostly about a fear of death, non-existence. If we were to live for 500 years or forever the need for religion for many would evaporate.

your were throwing "fact", "proof", etc pretty loosely, and calling people "wrong" while at it... all while this proof/facts only suggests possibility of one way of how the world and life was created... which from what I understand is full of holes, assumptions, and likely plagued with "reporting bias" (it's unlikely that any scientific journal would publish any work that would support "intelligent design" or any other less popular theory...)

so while I agree with you that that it is the most logical explanation, one needs to keep an open mind... :2 cents:

Believing in something that is based on no real facts nor proof is just funny. It goes against any kind of basic logic.

Some people here are just born "button pushers" hehe.

See I think it's beliefs based on scientific inquiry that have the least conceit. On one hand you have people that KNOW they were made in god's image on god's special planet that used to be in the centre of the universe. This creator of the universe speaks to them or otherwises is there for them in there lives and has a personal plan for them.

Science on the other hand knows that knowledge is incremental and that we can't know everything and you have to be ok with probabilities, grey areas and unknowns. It also has a less conceited view of our place in the animal kingdom and universe.

On the other hand you also have to be aware that just because our science is primitive compared to 500 years in the future that doesn't make it wrong, bad or weak. The wheel is primitive but we still use it 2000 years later. To a certain extent you discover the large valid scientific principles early. Pretending for a moment there were 1000 advanced species in the universe, you would imagine that gravity was "discovered" before quantum mechanics in the vast majority ;)

I don't think you'll find I was in error with my usage although I'm sure I could have been clearer.

Like this post Mutt :thumbsup Pretty close to what I believe in aswell.
Human Life is extremely important, it is why as an Atheist, any loss of life is tragic to me.
I don't know everything, I know little compared to many great people on this planet. Nobody knows everything, but I'm not afraid of the unknown either.

Actually, no we are not.