~why johnny (atheist) can't beleive ~ and the cure~

Would that be because of all that christian love thy neighbor stuff?

 

That's exactly what it is. The folks around here are conglomeration of religion, warmongering, prejudice, bigotry and it all culminates a feeling to vote Republican. It's not just Tennessee....the entire southern U S votes Republican in every national election. Guess what? Back in the days of segregation and George Wallace types they all voted Democrat. After Kennedy/Johnson and passage of the equal opportunities acts the south went solid Republican.

 

Assault and murder are still crimes, even in "rural east Tennessee".

 

Time is nothing more than how we measure change. Since creation is by definition an act of change, nothing independent of time can create.

 

Time was created, at least in this Universe, at the moment of the Big Bang. That's fact. Still, despite the temporal limitations of language, even though there was no "time" before the Big Bang, the question of what came before the Big Bang remains a valid question.

 

You missed my point. Nobody...not one person who lives around here is foolish enough to state that he/she's an atheist in public. If you think I was just making chin music you missed it. I live in a county where three law officers have been ambushed and gunned down in the last five years. One woman and two men, the shooters are in the penitentiary. I'll give you ten to one odds they're still claiming they've been saved. Ol' Hey Zeus can work miracles.........personally I'm still waiting for one I can believe......'course I'm just 80.

 

Nutty people do what they want to do. You know, what the "voices" tell them. Only an idiot would believe a nutjob who uses religion or politics to justify their actions did those actions because of religion or politics.

 

No, it's a hypothesis. No statement about what might have preceded the Big Bang can be considered a fact since there is no way we can observe it.

Here's a valid question for you. Can you define "time", linguistically or mathematically, without referring to any change? I would love to see you try. The only way something can be independent of time is if it doesn't change in any way.

 

Exactly. Ever wonder about that or just give up on it as Magick?

 

And saying "God did it" isn't giving up?

 

It is making an assumption without evidence. Is that what you are accusing me of doing?

 

E = mc2, equation in German-born physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity that showed that the increased relativistic mass (m) of a body comes from the energy of motion of the body—that is, its kinetic energy (E)—divided by the speed of light squared (c2). This equation expresses the fact that mass and energy are the same physical entity and can be changed into each other.

If that's not time I'll kiss your ass in Times Square and give you thirty minutes to draw a crowd.

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human fraility. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature" ~Dr. Albert Einstein~

 

While science is dependent on a posteriori knowledge, philosophy has no such epistemological limitation.

Just pointing out the similarities.

 

Agreed, which is why when we talk about anything before the Big Bang or outside the natural Universe aka the supernatural we have moved from science to philosophy and, by extension, belief.

 

Isn't the speed of light measured by the change in distance divided by the change in time? I'll let you know next time I'm in Times Square.

 

that's pretty much the opposite of where I live. around here no one is foolish enough to state that he/she is religious in public. at least, not Christian. there seems to be considerably more tolerance of your more eastern faiths here - such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Christians bear the brunt of our mockery because it was the faith imposed upon us for generations, and because it's now so 'minority' that it tends to attract oddballs and misfits. people who are socially ill-equipped, or just excrutiatingly dull and stitched up, and who one isn't likely to have much in common with anyway, even were they entirely secular.

 

We do our grocery shopping at a Food City store a couple of miles from our home. Every time I go I pass a five foot high fence with the ten commandments one each spaced about 15' or 20' apart. Our county court house proudly displays, "In God We Trust" There are 95 counties in the state and I'll bet that 2/3 of them are about the same when religion is the subject. Here's a CNN video of one of the nuts who was just across the northern border of Tennessee in Kentucky......about 75-100 miles from here:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/16/us/snake-salvation-pastor-bite/

Many of the courts in this state still ask witnesses to take and oath with their hand on a bible. A person has the option to refuse but everyone knows that if that happens the side they represent just might concidently lose the case.

 

I'm an atheist for several reasons:

- I have never felt any kind of "intuition" that God exists. Theists talk all the time about religious experiences. I have never had such experiences so its hard to believe in any kind of personal God.
- God lacks explanatory power. Whatever happens, we can say "well God did it." When asked why God did it, "the mind of God is unknowable." That's not very helpful. There is no sense in which "God did it" is a better explanation now than it was 2000 years ago. We still don't know how or why God would do certain things (in contrast to science or ethics where we have advanced significantly).
- None of the arguments for god seem compelling. The first mover argument seems question begging, design argument ignores emergent phenomena, fine tuning argument ignores sample bias, etc.
- Some of the arguments against God I find compelling. The problem of evil, incorrect prophecies, errors in holy texts, etc.

 

There is no rational explaination for the existence of a benign deity overseeing our lives. The "Sky Daddy" idea, as atheists often label it, has no rational basis.

I have had a spiritual experience, but I wouldn't label it a religious one. Yes, I've read a lot of medical data on it. It's one of the reasons why I majored in Behavioral Psych and also studied a lot of philosophy.

Unlike Christians of the modern era (but not all eras), I do not believe in a personal God. If God exists, then God is more as the Deists believed than modern Christians by virtue of evidence or lack theof.

While the existence of God lacks direct evidence, the fact the Universe suddenly popped into existence almost 14 Billion years ago does beg the questions of "Why?" and "How?"

Your arguments "against God" are interesting but have more to do with the fallibility of mankind than God. For that reason, I do not take any religious texts literally. Only as guidelines. Books of wisdom which must be understood in context, not just black and white lettering.

 

It's silly to take an oath on a book that says not to swear any oaths in the first place.

 

Ain't it the truth. Trying to talk reason/logic to someone who's hung up on religion will be unsuccessful every time.

 

How does a disinterested "sky daddy" have any more rational basis? Sure, he might not run into the same problems the Christian God does - the problem of evil and so on, but still seems just as irrational.

How did you convince yourself that the spiritual experience was of something supernatural rather than something natural? My problem with a deist God is he doesn't really do anything. Saying "the big bang is caused by a deist god" without any further elaboration seems no different from just saying "we don't know why the big bang happened." The statement "god created the universe" begs the same questions of why and how. At least with the scientific explanation there is some prospect of eventually finding out how/why it happened (as theory improves). Deism provides no such possibility.

The arguments I listed against god depend on a specific conception of God - I had the Christian one in mind but errors in holy texts exist throughout organized religion. As far as deism goes it just seems beyond human reason and therefore we have no reason to assume a deist god exists.

 

Everyone knows the earth is just 6000 years old:

 

First logic must be spoken to a theist, not word salad and dressed up innuendos , which is the common syntax of most atheist activists.

RevA

 

If I had to make a choice based on pure information i.e. If I could not apply faith or non empirical evidences, I think that a creator God that was not personal i.e. deism would be far more probable than any deistic religion's God. That is because no religion can be 100% accurate in their description or their their 'understanding' of God. When I am able to use ALL evidences* its obvious that the christian religion is more correct than the others through biblical verification ie biblical claims later verified by archeology and related sciences, revelation which includes the non theist but theist friendly calculation Roger Penrose came up with that used advanced math btw ie algebraical functions including calculus etc to show that the odds of the universe being as it is ie fit for (carbon or carbon based organic life) and fit for other life forms etc vs a white hot plasma etc being ten, ten to the one hundred and twenty third power against! (the universe being a random event). with the conclusion being the universe is designed for life. Other evidences convince me of Christianities credibility such as an NDEI experienced after a bad MVA and the cosmological arguments such as the KCA, and many other evidences which are too lengthy to expand on now. So to each his own, but in closing its a given that theists are far far more logical in their approach to how the universe began than most Re-atheists (radical extremist atheists), who's only evidence for their reality paradigm exists as their unsupported convictions and their hate for the christian region, meaning ; anything but God! lol.

Remember God loves you so I don't have to...nah...I am trying but its an up hill battle!

RevA
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