Atheism and Satanism

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I wasn't saying that these individuals are hellbound. Being Pagan, I don't believe in Hell. I also believe that every human being is worthy of emotion and consideration and care. I don't think predestination is the way to go, either. The belief that God, who supposedly knows the future, is therefore planning who goes to Hell and who does not, also negates the supposed "free will" He gave us. Regardless, I believe in reincarnation, and the Summerlands. Therefore, none of this applies to me directly. I'm simply stating my opinions on what I've read and heard throughout my studies and when I was raised Catholic.

...and besides, in these hate-ridden forums where people are constantly ripping on each other, it's hard to pick out whether people actually believe their insular statements or if they're just making fun of the people who do.

A good deal of religious dogma is obviously so silly it takes little effort to kick the nonsense around. The internet provides easy amusement for idle sadism. And faith, after all, is merely another term for gullibility. Scientific credibility is gained through the rapacious criticism of fellow scientists and is earned through great difficulty and a good deal of evidential confrontation. In direct contrast to the fragile mental toys that religions vociferously defend on evanescent authoritative grounds.

I'm saying that reality is a tough taskmaster and it has swift and unrelenting weapons when it is not understood. Ignorance and stupidity are relished by this unrelenting beast and you had better know your enemy very very well or it will demolish you with quick enthusiasm. And it's gifts can be sumptuous when they are understood but the price of those gifts is not to be led astray by naive and ineffective assumptions.

Individuals, of course, can delude themselves since there sectors of society that can welcome them, but a society built on false assumptions cannot help but suffer for them. Our society is on the brink of great disasters for abusing its power to destroy the ecology that maintains it. It's technological expertise is being employed to undermine the foundations that support it. We are just beginning to experience the strange phenomena of a society that depends upon the balance of distributing its wealth so that the wealth is fed back into its maintenance and then diverting that wealth to the privileged few in control. It is a formula for all sorts of violent disasters from which society cannot recover without a radical reconfiguration of its methods and directions. Ignorance is so pandemic in the species that it seems very unlikely necessary radical changes in directions can be effected. Religion is unhelpful here as it focuses on an afterlife which is totally unproven and thereby depreciates the vital necessity of change here in this world that we know now. It is a very useless diversion and leads to odd and pathological horrors such as the current wave of terrorism.

To elaborate a bit more on your question, I do not doubt that there are phenomena around that may delude people embedded in the framework of religion to fit these unknowns into that framework. The mind is a strange instrument. As a graphic artist I many times take random patterns of form and color and find photographic images of people and terrain within them because my mind is preset to find some configurative rational within those unintentional patterns. But I could never see within those patterns anything that was totally alien to my perception. We do not see reality, we impose the reality we know on what we see. Sometimes that imposed reality is useful enough for us to live with it and use it for our own purposes but it is vitally necessary that we be suspicious of everything we know. Science is. Religion is not.

Epicurus

you can call that atheism, and it certainly bears a striking similarity to atheism, but atheism is almost by definition
a modern movement. Further, while he proposed that nothing should believed in which could not be directly observed or logically deduced, this did not disclude altered states of consciousness, which the greeks had much better access to than we do now.

Its an interesting idea, but modern atheism is its own social movement based on rebellion against christianity, and thats all it is. It can't trace a lineage back any further then 13th century Europe, if that far.

The vehemence, negativity, emotionalism, and irrationalism of the atheists on this forum proves the point in spades.
Emotionalized disbelief is not the same as rational neutrality.

Disbelief in fact is logically equal to belief; its just belief in the reverse of the original belief.

The fundie christian who started this thread because he was excited to run off with the inspirations i gave him isn't capable of making the argument to support the contention, or of framing it in contexts which make it sane, rather than just a petty simple minded dualistic invalidation.

Maybe he will realize he could have stuck with it a little longer and derived something better than a flashpan

I don't get this trash about athiests are satanists because they turn their backs on god - like Satan did. Atheists deny existence of any mythical deity; that argument would only make sense if there really was a god to begin with. These threads are really pointless, though - the religious would ask for evidence of non-existence. My philosophy; if there is neither evidence for or against, it doesn't exist. Why? The very notion of evidence is some proof of presence, and the only conceivable evidence of non existence is impossibility of existence. Which it is; for this universe. What would be the mathematical expression of god?