Warning: Anti-religious sentiment, also, long post

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CAN I GET AN AMEN?!

I found his post to be funny, and enjoyed it, besides how many people are going to change their minds about faith due to an internet forum anyway?

None of them, under any circumstances, seem inclined to pull themselves from their blind faith.

It's just that he distracted attention from that fact

There is more to God than Christianity, and more to Christianity than dumb Americans.

To be able to label a meaningless rearrangement of matter "evil" - that takes philosophy. Philosophy is at best just a shinier more mentally taxing way of dressing up our constructs.

Bluesummers, I liked your first post. The negative responses so far are not surprising to me. I hope you don't let them get you down.

I'm not religious (I consider myself an agnostic), but I just don't see the point in trying to "rescue" humanity from religion. To me, militant atheists seem like a bunch of mean old men trying to tell children that Santa isn't real. Sure he's not real, but what's the harm in believing that he is? Overall, religious people tend to be happier than atheists. If someone gets comfort from a religion, then good for them. And you want to take that happiness away from them? Without religion, many people would become brooding nihilists, and that doesn't exactly sound like a recipe for productivity, or peace...

Yes, there are religious elements to some wars, but they're usually triggered by other things (territory, resources, racism, political ideology, etc) and religion is just used to rally people to the cause. Without religion, people would just find other excuses for wars. The world certainly wouldn't magically transform into a peaceful utopia if religion were to disappear.

Every human on the planet has beliefs and opinions that are absurd when considered from a purely logical perspective. If some of them are more absurd than others, what real difference does it make in the grand scheme of things? Thousands of years from now, our descendants (or machine overlords) are going to laugh at our primitive ideas, whether or not we believe in God.

Assuming, of course, with all the gullible people who believe all sorts of strange things, that the human race will behave itself sufficiently to produce more than a few surviving generations in an increasingly hostile world.

Religion is for people who are mentally immature and desire an imaginary supernatural parent figure to tell them what to do, it is for people to afraid to be truly be free and thus responsible for their own choices. "God" is merely a form of psychological projection; a bigoted person's god is a bigot, a tolerant person's god is tolerant, people project their ideals onto an imaginary father figure.

Bluesummers, your post just seems like an endless tirade and drivel against christianity. Polytheism is still in existence, if you opened your eyes. What most atheists do is criticize the religion they were raised in, surrounded, informed of etc. Now Islam is getting the blame as well. Why is it that the blame is on the religion and not on the person itself? Because it is in their books? But the books are just that, books. I highly doubt the Dalai lama is preying on mindless drones so that he can control their will. Is that who you had in mind when you thought this long post? The Evil Mahatma Gandhi, the cruel Mother Teresa, the rabid M. L. King. Their followers, nothing but brainless men.

You seem very sure of this. Perhaps, in your anti-religious view you've set up a religious doctrine for such a position. What is true for one is not true for another. If I believe in a creator, and you do not. Who is right? Certainly, you cannot answer that for me.

You obviously haven't seen Bulletproof Monk II. Oh, wait, the Dalai Lama blocked it's release.

Between the godless purges in the Communist bloc, I see a connection of how governments are trying to cut the middleman and be worshiped as gods. However, even North Korea has other organized religions, but they are too organized and arcane to even be considered a blind faith. At least not as much as the great leader, Kim Jung Ill.

It not only is for such people. It makes people this way. If you teach your child science and rational processes of thinking on the one hand, and on the other hand you also teach him a world-view based on some ancient collection of myths which he is supposed to believe just because, then you've taught him two different and mutually hostile things. Rational thinking will combat the religion, and religion will combat the rationality.

I don't have to answer anything. Atheism is the null position and thus the burden of proof is on the theists to find evidence for their position. There is no empirical evidence for the existance of "God" and thus I have have no reason to believe in such an entity any more then I have reason to believe there are invisible pink unicorns on the far side of the Moon. Claiming that a deity exists is epistemologically equivalent to saying invisible pink unicorns exist. The statements COULD be true but there is no evidence.

You are a genius! Your logic is undeniable! I will form a loose-knit cult around you and send you human sacrifices!

I'm a practical atheist, rather than a philosophical one. In other words, the concept of 'God' has no part in my life. I would never argue against the existence of a 'God', it's just that the word means nothing to me. I'm open to the existence of intelligent forces beyond what we currently know through science, and if I encounter one, I may or may not piss in its eye(s).

In my case, God is firstly irrelevant, secondly inevident. For God to be relevant during my lifetime, wordly intervention of some kind must be evident, which is not the case. For example, I do not see people being struck down for saying, "Jerry Falwell was an inbred, racist hick!" See? Nothing happened. For him to be relevant during an eternal afterlife, I would have to believe that there is such a thing as an "afterlife." Fortunately for my overall mental health, I do not; In fact, my highly extensive understanding of the makings of human character also leads me to the conclusion that my character will not remain intact after my central nervous system has shut down for good. Obviously, a person of my overall background and views would consider deist theories an intellectual curiosity at the best of times. When the person who is trying to convince me of it has the not-so-well-hidden agenda of converting people to Christianity, it just puts me in a foul mood.

Deism/theism/ultra-orthodox Christianity, which we perpetually seem to be discussing all at the same time, rests upon the belief that the universe must have come into being through the efforts or will of someone or something that is capable of having intentions. However, human beings form intentions through a variety of interneural transmissions, and the system is generally highly buggy and extremely imperfect. Although deism might bear some merit if I believed that human will worked independently of naturalistic forces, I have no such belief. As such, the deist's references to "volition" or "thought" are due to a fallacy of anthropomorphism. Even so, deism is more inevident than untenable.