Atheists who attack Christianity

Some people used to believe that the sun was carried across the sky by the gods, using chariots.

Gosh, however did they pull that off?

I described what you said -- how it translates logically. If that isn't your point, then you should state your point, perhaps.

If you use that reasoning as the basis of belief and apply it equally to all things then you'd believe in absolutely everything that can possibly be imagined, because nothing can be absolutely proven not to exist. I submit the reason you believe in god and yet don't believe in unicorns, faeries, and gnomes is that you choose to believe in god.

And we've since disproven that.

Still waiting for someone to disprove my belief.

You may submit it, but you would be wrong. Believe me, it would be alot easier if I didn't.

Laptop battery dieing ate my post, lets see if I can reconstruct it quickly.

I generally prefer to let people come to their own understanding of my posts, but since you asked...

1) If I were to use your logic to explain a dislike for damn near any other lifestyle, I would be called a bigot and chased across the forums by the anti-bigotry brigate with torches and pitchforks. But nobody so much as raises an eyebrow when you use that logic on Christianity.

2) I dislike false politeness. If you find something that is so central to me as distasteful as you claim to, you can't think much of me for believing in it. It's as absurd as some of the radical vegans who will scoff loudly that eating meat is a terrible thing, but, realising that they are at a table full of people eating meat, will add that, of course, "They don't hold it against you that you eat meat".

You're driving me nuts. It's spelled "a lot". This is elementary English spelling and should be a required part of anyone's tool box, if they're going to carry on multipage forum debates.

There. My eye stopped twitching.

~Ulrika~

Yes, I imagine it would be. I wouldn't like to know that I'm not in control of my own reasoning and that my ideas couldn't change based on new information. Imagine if you were making the same argument about anything else... say, for example, that the moon is made of hamburger.

My spelling is, as a rule, bad. I make no excuses, it's just really bad. The real irony is that I'm an English major. I do a lot (and I Do mean a lot) of proofreading of my own work, if anyone outside of teh intarwebs is going to see it.

OT: I do that all the time! I combine words that always go together into (in to?) a single word, like "thankyou".

Ah, but you're ignoring something I said earlier: You haven't disproven God to me.

I absolutely could change my beliefs *were I proven wrong*. I might kick and scream and take a couple years to accept it, but I'm not immune to being corrected.

But nobody has been able to even scratch the surface of disproving God. There are no facts in existance to dispute the point.

Into is fine, but there are profs out there that yell at you for it even still.

It's one of those words that Academia is being forced to accept, even if they dont want to.

Don't feed the grammar troll. It only encourages me. I feel guilty for posting that now.

~Ulrika~

How about I give you a new eye twitch?

Prove I'm not really the reincarnation of Cleopatra and that I don't really have an invisible, incorporeal unicorn as a friend and companion. Prove that Zeus doesn't exist. Prove this isn't all really the Matrix. Prove ...

Etc.

Can't prove a negative. Logical impossibility. The fact that you can't prove that a given thing doesn't exist somewhere, somehow, does not in turn prove its existence.

You act like your saying something I don't know.

You, like so many religious people, through indoctrination or for emotional reasons, have accepted that religious ideas are separate and apart from any other kind of idea - not bound by normal rules of reason or evidence.

Example:



Let me translate that into the logic we apply to all non-religious ideas: "Lack of evidence that something exists is evidence that it exists." That's what you're saying. Now imagine you're saying that about any other idea that has the same amount of evidence as the existence of god. That includes pretty much everything that could possibly exist, like moons made of meat.

I'm facinated that you seem to think you know why I believe what I believe, and how I believe it, when I don't myself fully.



Actually, no. Lack of evidence that something exists is simply lack of evidence that the thing exists.

I do not claim to have the slightest bit of evidence that God exists.

You're changing your wording. Now it's "lifestyle." Before, you compared it to a trait people are born with, which was an error.

Also, you misunderstand me. I'm not just against Christianity. I'm also against Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and you know what? Just name your unjustified beliefs of choice, and I'm against them. The list goes on endlessly.

Christianity is high on my list of concerns (although it's not the only one high on my list), but that's more because of the frightening power it currently has in the world than any special traits unique to the religion itself, as compared to other religions of a similar type (the particularly dangerous and frightening "force others to convert and/or kill the heretics" religions, of which Christianity is only one).



I'm not falsely polite. I'll tell you exactly what I think, or as close as I think I can get away with without being lynched.

Being ignorant in some way and/or harboring unjustified beliefs does not make a person somehow bad or beyond any possible hope. I would go so far as to say that all of us have, at one time or another, harbored unjusified beliefs of one kind or another. Bear in mind also that I was raised as, and once identified as, a Christian myself. I also used to believe certain things about my government that I now consider patently false. The fact that I held beliefs then that I consider erroneous now didn't make me somehow a terrible person.

I don't mean to be insulting or claim to know what you think, but how many factors go in to evaluating an idea? Information, reason, emotion. If there's no information and applying the same standard to other things would be unreasonable, what does that leave?

I forgot one: choice.

Bingo. And there we have it.

That is why I refer to it as an "unjustified belief." Because it is.

It cannot be justified, and in fact you yourself just acknowledged it. Just as it would be an unjustified belief if I thought I were really a sorceress from the planet Jupiter, long-lost princess and future queen of the galaxy. Or something equally silly.

Not changing my wording, precisely. I'm expanding.



Then I label you an equal-oportunity hater of religion, but it doesn't really change my point.

Any belief? How about true athiesm, the absolute, certain belief that there is no God?



But the vast majority of Christians aren't "convert or die". You are holding the majority at fault for the minority.



So, in other words, I can hate something without hating people who do it, as long as I think their is a chance I can "fix" them?

Got it.

Sorry, I don't temper my tollerance based on my belief that I can "fix" the "problem".

Again, you act like your saying something I don't know. Why?

Faith.

I have evaluated my faith. I fully accept, and always have, that there is no rational reason I believe what I believe. Nor do I take particular comfort in my beliefs - the world was much simpler as an agnostic. But never the less, I believe what I believe.