I live in a country full of superstitious twits

Actually I meant what I said. But you are right, effects must by definition have causes. It was more or less a silly question, to see what kind of silly answers would result.

I prefer to think of things that happen at quantum levels as not necessarily being matters of cause and effect, before and after, etc. To look at the quantum world as more than just a world described by the language of mathematics is a bad idea in my opinion. That is, to apply too much of experiential reality to an interpretation of quantum events is about as sensible as saying that I brought 2(i^2) apples in my lunch today.

Edit: Given the post below, i decided to better address the possibility that a sibling really could put -2 apples in my lunch, given a loose and flexible interpretation. So instead, lets say..... (4(i^2))^1/2 oranges

that is: the square root of (4 times (the square root of -1 squared)

2i oranges is less tangible than -2 apples.

This could be a reasonable thing to say, if you let your little brother pack your lunch.

*searched for a picture of a couple rotten apple cores* bah, nevermind.

I've explained myself quite sufficiently in this thread. Your reading comprehension problems are your own. I'm sure there are many reasons you're not a member of an organized religion. Care to share them? Or would that make it too hard for you to talk out of both sides of your face?

(It seems I can't mute you since you're the moderator of a group forum.)

well you didn't mention i needed to use my secret decoder ring to find the explanation

why would i share my reasons with you? to subject myself to more insults about my beliefs? coward, two faced, cowed by politically correctness, ... no thanks.

Okay, I get it, Chip must be ad homineming. It must be him. Oh wait, no he's not.

You certainly are though. Judging from the edit post remarks anyway...

Question: is it an ad hominem, by your thinking, to point out an ad hominem? I mean, that'd fit into your line of thinking, as far as I understand it, about bigotry.

That's Jauani's sig...

Insults are only ad hominem attacks if they are made against me.

Everyone bases their opinions on the evidence they find compelling, yet still form differing opinions from the same evidence. But evidence isn't proof.

You are sooo comparing apples to oranges

I would plead my case to the atheist - who is far more likely to have worked out his or her own code of morals and ethics and to have spent an inordinate amount of time considering the consequences of his or her actions. The lapsed catholic is, statistically, far more likely to be a recidivist felon and given the definition of "lapsed catholic", far more likely to have been indoctrinated and be clinging to a mindset of "whatever I do, God will forgive me if I repent and I get a reward after I die" - which provides me with zero - zip - zilch - nothing - nada morally or ethically to appeal to in that person's character.

Your characterisiation of "to an atheist, life isn't sacred" is insulting and inaccurate. I am an atheist, and to me, human life /is/ sacred. Now, you may have severe difficulties comprehending that fact, but I'm OK with having chucked something in your path that will bewilder you - what I just said is accurate and all your soon-to-happen spluttering in protest doesn't change the fact that I'm atheist and human life is sacred to me. You might try reading the definition of "athiest", it might help you with your imminent cognitive dissonance.

You would do well to avoid inaccurate generalisations in the future.

Now now Mr. Widget!

Just because human life is sacred to you doesn't make human life sacred.

Just because you believe human life to be sacred doesn't make it so!

To each his/her own!


(which I think is the real point. At least my point anyway.... "Anything goes" can make the world dangerous! Especially if you live around the corner from a tyrant!)

you may want to use a different word than sacred. unless you really do mean that to you human life is sacred. if that is the case, you may want to examine your beliefs as some of them suggest you are in fact not an atheist.

How ironic that our rampantly materialistic and selfish society, which is also overwhelmingly God-fearing, identifies the extreme minority of atheists as the cause of the rampant materialism and selfishness.

I loathe materialism and greed. I hate how wasteful we are. I'm sickened by the rotund, ignorant, impatient, overentitled people I see all too often around me, packing their groceries into double-bagged plastic and piling into their monstrous gas-guzzling SUVs to roar down the road with the rest of the fleet back to their incredibly energy-inefficient suburban homes.

I want to like people, and on my better days, I do like people, but our society itself ... no, I don't like it. It's greedy, and it's selfish, and it's incredibly overentitled.

Of course, that must all be the fault of the tiny minority of atheists. It can't be the God-fearing overwhelming majority that's GREEDY. And SELFISH. And MATERIALISTIC.

Sorry. This just really hits a nerve with me, on more than one level.

Then you accuse me of being a liar, and you would in fact be wrong in that accusation.

This is not the first time I've dealt with people who are ignorant of me, my particular conscience, faith, religion - making patently false statements about me, even after I have told them /explicitly/ that no, what they are saying is patently and explicitly false.

I am atheist.
I see human life as sacred.
I'm not the only one in the world who is like this.

People who hold and espouse strong opinions about things they don't understand, irritate me greatly.

No, I'm not going to discuss it with you just to demonstrate to you how wrong you are. My personal life is my personal life and is not for sharing. You're ignorant of why I am this way, but to anyone actually interested or educated, it's not hard to figure out a number of possibilities.

The question is, will you remain willfully ignorant and continue to hold forth strong opinions about things you don't understand, or will you take the responsibility of freedom, educate yourself, and instead of publicly calling someone a liar about their personal views, consider the radical notion that you don't know everything and that your tidy worldview is incomplete?

OMGoth, I might be telling the truth about myself! Did you even read / comprehend what I wrote?

My point was that /his/ sweeping generalisation / characterisation is inaccurate, since he was claiming that I, and all atheists, hold X position when in fact his characterisation is a strawman and is his own problem, not mine nor anyone else's.

I've only read the last page of this thread so who knows what I am stepping into here.

I saw Jauni's quote above and and a Monty Python scene went through my head - all of these pitiful children in a church (where did they find those child actors ) singing a song. Five minutes later, Oh, yes!

Every sperm is sacred.
Every sperm is great.
If a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.

I looked up sacred with defineacred on google.

Sacred is a PC role-playing game

Umm, well that was a ways down.

The number one definition is

concerned with religion or religious purposes; "sacred texts"; "sacred rites"; "sacred music"

which would be a problem for an atheist.

There is also this definition.

Worthy of respect or dedication; "saw motherhood as woman's sacred calling"

which doesn't have the religious tone to it.

edited for Monty Python video

You know, I think you have read too much into that. I read the post as being a semantics argument, not one that calls you out as a liar.

http://www.positiveatheism.org/index.shtml

Coming in late to this thread as usual. The problem with atheism is that we don't have a PR department. We are very independent folks who don't really care that much what other people think. We contribute to charities (at least I do) in good proportion to what Christians give. Sometimes we even give to religious charities, because they're better organized.

And whoever noted that atheists actually value life more than believers (because we think death is the END), that's exactly the point. Most all atheists I know came to their position through personal struggle and study, much hard thought and could only take the leap out of Godthink when we no longer could rectify all the contradictions and magical thinking that go with Religion. We've chosen to alienate ourselves in a big way from mainstream belief because we prefer being true to ourselves to whoring our beliefs to social pressure. (Don't flame me for that -- many people go through the same struggle & study to become believers, my point is that all of us must be intellectually curious and then be true to ourselves).

So to Kevn's specious point about pleading with an atheist -- a *thinking* atheist wouldn't be there in the first place, any more than a thinking Christian. I'm sure there are people who label themselves as atheist without really knowing what it means, but I'd also wager there are one hundred times as many people who label themselves Christians with no more reason than that.

I saw one study that showed 95% of prison inmates claim to be Christians. Around 4% are Muslim. That leaves less than 1% (if you account for Buddhists, Hindus, Santerians, etc) who might claim to be atheist, which is drastically below the national 3% cited elsewhere.

We don't commit crimes. We're too busy arguing with Christians.

Then you have an inaccurate conception of what an atheist is.

"Atheist n A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others." —Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic’s Dictionary

What a thread! OMG this has been the most fun I've had in ages! as of this post there are 23 pages of thread devoted to a reported psuedo-random sample of purported average Americas by a department of the U of Minn - with which I am too familiar and know too well that their sampling techniques are questionable at best.

2000 samples against 295,734,134 possible - not highly validated and wildly questionable results and we end up with what a couple pages of reasoned discourse embedded in 20 some odd pages of diatribe, name calling, drivel, and speculative analysis. This beats out my local tavern for sheer knock-down drag-out social interaction humor.

I love you all with all the affection a jaded cynical internet veteran can muster for his ardent compatriots in this best of all electronic universes - but please stop! I can't breath, my sides ache and I nearly tossed my otherwise totally delicious lunch reading all of this - laughing so hard.

PAX!

Lewis Black rocks!


http://www.mpempire.com/images/lewis%20black.jpg

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Nobody is supposed to know I'm here!!!!

It's an internet discussion board, what'd you expect?

And yes, Lewis Black rocks the rockers.