Why do atheists think that religious people are delusional?

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Dave, if we could just harness the endless enthusiasm you have for the topics you talk about we could solve the energy crisis overnight.

 

The more that come out, the more people know an "out" person, the more we can crush the hateful belief of the bible towards innocent people.

 

You''re winning? Are you kidding? Did Atheism just begin when you were born? Do you ever wonder why it never had an inkling of impact within the history of mankind??

What is happening is the end of the zillionth start of a movement towards atheism. It will disappear when it is intimidated to even the smallest degree. It only flourishes in peaceful tolerant religious societies. But the Times are approaching when all belief systems will be put to the test. Atheism doesn't understand or fight for the concept of freedom that allows it to exist or even know it's true enemy. Atheism will fall before it gets even close to winning. Just like in times past.

 

The funny part is not that atheist think that people who believe in a god a touched - it's when you start to talk to Believers about OTHER religions and
find out that Believers think anyone who believes in a god other than their own are crazy.

Go into a Christian bookstore and glance through the many titles of why Christians should stay away from the crazy Mormons.
Muslims think other Muslims are crazy for not quite believing properly and cut off each other's heads to prove it.
Catholics and Lutherans went to war for years.


And we who are Agnostics just sit back and watch the crazy fight about who is craziest.

 

Gotta have respect for the above!

I blame religion for ISIS about as much as I blame a fork for my expanding waistline. Religion is an amalgam of good and bad, just like atheist and humanity in general. To blame the many by the acts of the few is illogical by my measure of logic. Through history oppressive groups have come in many favors from theistic to secular and it can all be traced to one thing... fallible humanity as no one group has a monopoly on oppression and terror.

A Bible is an inanimate object and how it is used depends upon who holds it. I argue that the world is a better place because of the Salvation Army and their tireless work to help the downtrodden... an example that there is a good side to religion as well.

I do not see terrorists as Muslim anymore than I see David Koresh as a Christian... which is not at all.

 

Atheism to a large extent promotes the problems which religion tried to avoid in the first place.

Welfare is now higher that the Defense Budget.
Illegitimacy is equal to the legitimate births.
73% of the Black families and 10% of the White families are on Welfare where the kids suffer poverty and child abuse.

 

Do Straight people have to come out so everyone knows they are sexual?

Gays seem unhappy if they can not tell us all that they like men, not women.
How sane would that sound, to even you, if men had to make sure everyone knew they we having straight sex when they had, so then they could enjoy the privilege???

 

The unfortunate reality is that driving a wedge between blacks and their communities centered around the church in favor of a community lined up at the welfare office has had huge detrimental effects in shattering the momentum that had gathered there. The War on Poverty was a political solution for LBJ, not a humanitarian one.

I support religious communities. I don't care if they are Christian, Muslim, Jews, or anything else because they possess a dynamic that can and often does improve the lives of their members as a collective. It does not matter what they believe in really as far as I am concerned. Don't expect me to necessarily agree with their morals or teachings or beliefs about the past/present/future, but I at least find utilitarian value in their existence as it has been, on balance, a positive collective enterprise for society.

 

Not Hitler nor Stalin nor Mao ever sat back.
Those atheists were to much into exterminating religious people and others.

The differences between religious understanding is why the New Jerusalem has 12 foundation walls:
This is supported by modern psychology which says humans come in twelve different forms of thinking, called Learning Styles by the schools.

 

The part of human nature that troubles me is in our choice to follow, not the leaders themselves. Why do large groups of people feel compelled to follow angry, power hungry leaders bent on vengeance?

Religion plays a part because it is so often tied to cultural identity. Its a big part of manipulating the way people feel about the lives of people outside their cultural group.

So I end up wondering, is cultural identity inherently evil? On one hand its the thing that bonds people in a certain place and situation together, and on the other it is what makes some people violently reject outsiders. And right now with global forces wanting a stable, (or at least consistently policed and regulated), population, the friction between global social expectations and local norms is apparent.

 

You need to realize that the ridiculous lure of 72 virgins and a guaranteed place in paradise for a person "who fights and dies for Allah" is one of the big draws to be an Islamic terrorist. Clearly there is a link between Islam and terrorism.

 

Well said. For most of my life I was a follower. I would follow the herd because I thought "they are all going that direction so that must be the right way". But over time I started to question why is a thing wrong instead of just blindly and obediently believing what another told me. Once I started to challenge those who told me a thing was wrong and dug for the truth, or at least "my truth", I found that many times the basis for a wrong that I had been taught was founded upon harmless action... which I just could not accept... thus my no longer being a follower.

What I found was that many of our social norms that guide how we act are based upon harmless superficial action that is judges as a negitive... for example long hair on men. We ostracize those who are different as they do not fit the norm, which when one realizes that normal is relative the silliness of it all becomes apparent.

There is way too much judgment and not enough tollorance in this world.

 

But you know that there is more to a fundamentalist's beliefs than just that, right? They believe in a literal interpretation, most of it. But the bible does not assert how it is to be interpreted. It just lays it out there. If you interpret it literally, it becomes absurd, utter nonsense, which is then believed in. This is what freedomseeker is going after. He just cannot believe that a modern brain believes in the nonsense. Cannot blame him.

Now I happen to think that Christ is Truth, that Christ consciousness is Truth. But you and I depart from one another there. You want to then ascribe qualities to Truth, when I say once you attempt this, you move away from Truth. For the human brain cannot hold the Truth as a intellectual entity. The Truth just IS, and it is not related to thought at all. So you cannot have it, as most people think when it comes to possessing something.

Truth is revealed when the ego, the Self is NOT. When the self is not there, Truth reveals itself. But thought is tied up with the Self. So thought can never grasp something like Truth. Thought can never know it. You think that it can. So we do not think of Truth in the same manner.

 

Sure there is a link as they both use the Quran but that is where the similarity ends, thus my argument that the fringe does not represent the whole. Tying both groups the the Quran and labeling them as a negitive is illogical by my measure of logic. Each group of Musilms need to be assessed individually not collectively.... the same goes form Christianity, to do otherwise is biased.

 

The bible is probably based upon a mystical experience, some of it, which cannot be conveyed in language, for it is outside of thought. But man is an animal that wants to communicate, and when a nonordinary state of consciousness is attempted to be communicated, apparently fairytale format was used, for it needed to be interesting enough to be passed on. Now, if another person had the same mystical experience, they would understand what the fairy tale was trying to communicate. If not, it became utter nonsense.

 

Some of us see that story as metaphor as well. Some of us understand Christ was all about transcending the ego, which is the cause of all sin, and as created a very brutal world, with the history of humanity being literally a nightmare.

If one understand the foundation, that the creation of the human ego was what separated man from god, then what Christ taught makes perfectly good sense. He is talking about transcending the self, and that new state of consciousness will bring heaven on earth, at least when compared to what it has been. His message was very down to earth and practical. But if one does not understand this, it becomes utter nonsense quickly.

Christians do not want to deny, transcend their egos. They want eternal life for them. So, what Christ was teaching is just not acceptable, and because of that we see a religion to arise that was 180 from the teachings. We saw a religion arise that was only about the ego, the very thing that Christ said must die. If one understands this deal about the ego, and then read the bible again, it is coherent with that idea. And it doesn't enter into the realm of fairytale. The trouble is with the language used, but it gets cleared up when you understand what that language now refers to. At least it makes sense when seen from this perspective. And none when seen from another.

 

No sir, Thomas Jefferson was right. One has to separate the diamonds from the cow patties. Once you understand what is being talked about by Christ, the denial, the negation of the self, the ego, for it is an illusion created by thought, then you can easily separate the diamonds from the dung. And it is full of the dung that man put in there.

 

Fundamentalism is recent, and did not exist at the time of the founders. Fundamentialism was created by half mis-educated americans. If you want to get an idea of how Christians used to think, go to an episcopal church, for it is basically the angelical church of England. And more intellectually sophisticated when compared to the dumbed down fundamentalism.

 

No one is deluded as much as atheists are. They think that they can get away with their deluded state by referring to themselves as "rational spectics."

No one is buying it.

 

The Gays behave exactly as the people who Romans said worshipped Eros, and the feminists behave exactly as the followers of Ishtar.
Yet they say they are not religious.

 

?
Huh...?
Man put nothing into the Bible, because all that was written was true, which is the whole message.
Truth is the savior, and the image of the father of us all, Reality.

That is true with or without the Bible.
The Bible a tool which like a net, catches people and drags them inside.

 

You are thinking in the right direction here, but its the Buddhists want men to "kill the Ego."

Christ wants men to use Truth as their guide, while they resist the urges, desires, impulse, demands, wants, drives,...(is that seven, one for each archetype)?
Truth is the factor which determines if the ideas we get are right or wrong.

 

That is pretty much what Humanist are taught,...that they need seek the mystical peak experience.
That is what Christians find when they convert to religion.

 

And "Truth" is as subjective as what beer I find to be the best in the world...it all depends on how I feel at any given moment.

Truth does not equal Fact.

 

Because if the faith is based on a non-philosophy then you must believe in some supernatural force called a deity or deities or have some deific force which is unproven, so therefore your delusional to some degree. Science doesn't make grand claims if it doesn't know something then its something not known its neither a negative or positive claim, and Atheism largely uses science as a basis until other evidence comes up sufficient to not make supernatural claims deniable.

So in simple terms a deist says [for argument point here] the giant cow of the heavens exists and I believe it since the Earth is fertile so it imbues the soil with its mighty dung.

An Atheist would say you can't prove this mystical dung is in the soil and no one saw this imbuing so there is no giant cow of the heavens based on that claim, keep though investigating the issue of soil quality while the Cowites come up with more convincing evidence.

The Atheists can't deny the cow and can look at the claims made and discredit or credit those, to therefore make a limited positive or negative claim. This principle applies to any claim can it be denied, supported or is it neither if neither its a simple claim such as there is a god being and one believes in it with no other claims made. Simple claims are not an issue its when claims are made beyond that.