Dear Atheists..

[mexico1970]

Err no, I was just pointing out one example of a Christian group extolling and pushing the virtues of the Old Testament, which happened to be the most recent I could think of.

I remember as a kid being told at school about Noah’s ark, as though it was Christian gospel… now that’s 50 years ago, and the school wasn’t evangelical.

As with all religions, their adherencers pick and choose what they want to highlight and follow, and ignore what they don’t want.

It’s a con, it’s preying on the weak and easily led.

When someone boasts that you should take what they say as gospel, you can bet your bottom dollar they are lying through their back teeth.

 

[JASR]

When someone boasts that you should take what they say as gospel, you can bet your bottom dollar they are lying through their back teeth.

Took another 3 years… about year 5… at that point I stopped singing hymns during assemblies (although that could have been that I wanted to protect my fellow pupils eardrums…), as a form of resistance… and just mentally shutdown during any RE type lesson, and made up maths problems in my book :-)

 

[Elbow beards]

Took another 3 years… about year 5… at that point I stopped singing hymns during assemblies (although that could have been that I wanted to protect my fellow pupils eardrums…), as a form of resistance… and just mentally shutdown during any RE type lesson, and made up maths problems in my book :-)

Even though I was never really religious, I think I believed in god without really thinking about it. Wasn't till I got to college and a light bulb switched on and I realised what a crock of shite it all was. Never looked back.

 

[tonea2003]

You say it gives you a good insight but you fundamentally misunderstand the core concept of Christianity and then use quote mining. It would be like picking a line from a Harry Potter book and saying this represents the entire series. It's not a serious argument.



The theology of a religion is not defined by small sects who use it politically. Or are you suggesting ISIS represents the Islamic faith well?

i've just re edited my reply as i felt i didn't explain myself clearly enough

i never said its represents the entire series you implied that i did
i was just demonstrating johnny's hypocrisy, by the use of the quotes that was it

again its your opinion that i dont get christianity

if its not a deity sending his son down to earth to save man from it sins by dying on a cross and then resurrecting and ascending back into the heavenly skies

not that i believe any of that actually happened

 

[Ohrodneyrodney]

Even though I was never really religious, I think I believed in god without really thinking about it. Wasn't till I got to college and a light bulb switched on and I realised what a crock of shite it all was. Never looked back.

Funny thing is, if it is a crock, you will never know. It’s only if it isn’t, that you will.

 

[Damocles]

It’s a con, it’s preying on the weak and easily led.

Weak and easily led. Interesting idea. Picking two names out of the air, let's say Martin Luther King and Gandhi, both highly religious people who civil rights work was motivated by it.

The problem with the anti-theism argument is that it assumes that you personally are smarter than all those thicko religious guys. That's inherently a bad argument.

These types of "they're all idiots/weak/conned" arguments don't work. They don't work because they don't scan with reality - the reality is that most religious people have a deep faith that they've wrestled with (often to the mockery of thoughtless people like in this thread) for years or decades, and to presume that you have thought more about this than them is clearly wrong. They also don't work because they're just a bad way to communicate. I presume idiocy when I see idiotic things, I don't presume that people of faith (which has been a consistent in every human civilisation that ever existed in the ~12,000 years since the first ever towns) are automatically all stupider than I am. I have no way of processing the world under that assumption.

 

[JASR]

Weak and easily led.

yep… which implies the ‘leaders’ aren’t weak. You need something about you to control others behaviour.

It’s How to extract influence, money and power from as many people as they can.

Religion is essentially just another term for a profit making business , wrapped up in a facade of mythology & symbolism, with self serving interests at the top, and with their workers doing their bidding and ensuring the business grows, lobbys, profits and attacks their rivals.

 

[M23 Citizen]

Not sure you’ve quite grasped the easyness in the concept of proof. Your ’god’ is not real. You offer no proof that there isn’t multiple gods running the show, you just blindly state there is one. You offer no proof that your ‘god’ is not a woman or a hermaphrodite, other than (I’ll anticipate you here) quoting a human created fantasy book.

So, you have said athiests need to prove ‘god’ exists, and are countered by ‘you can’t prove a negative’, and that’s where it ends usually. But a slightly different question to ask you on the same lines is:
What proof exists that your ‘god’ is a singularity god, rather than a multitude, and that they are a single white bearded male wearing white robes?

Without recourse to a human made fantasy book, you can’t.

Pure fantasy based on indoctrination and control.

Indeed.

The main god that most of the different mythologies (including the Abrahamic Mythology) believe in is the ancient sky god. Who, back before monotheism, was just one of many gods and goddesses across many mythologies but they all have the same roots and routes from where they came from.

The god of the sky became the main god in monotheistic mythology because he was like the father and husband of the other gods and goddesses. The sky is where we see the universe, it’s where everything happens. The sky was the television and cinema screen of the ancients, it’s where they looked and pointed to as they told and passed down stories about these gods and goddesses.

Imagine waking up 35,000 years ago around the burnt out camp fire that was roaring away the night before as your tribe ate and drank the day’s catches; as the blue hour starts early in the morning, you and your father start to talk and he tells you a story about how everything comes from the sky, all the other gods and goddesses, the weather, night and day etc.
The dawn goddess, a goddess of fertility, was the lover of the sky god and the Sun is the son of the sky god and the dawn goddess. Then the Sun rises and you see what the Sun brings to the world, it brings light and warmth and how it makes food grow that keeps us alive… you’d believe that he’s an important god this sky god.

This type of theism dates back tens of thousands of years. But the sky god, as the father and husband of them all became the main man. They call him many names, but he’s simply a deified personification of the sky.

It’s a myth but it’s so indoctrinated into peoples’ way of life from an early age that they sadly believe that the ancient sky god exists and isn’t just the oldest myth in human history.

 

[Big Joe Corrigan]

The best description I ever heard for religion was fairytales for adults.

 

[MarsLlama]

How is it that cavemen survived the asteroid but dinosaurs didn't ?




Just askin'

They hid in a fridge, which is a proven method of surviving almost any big blast [Spielberg, 2008].