a lot of you 'raised catholic' grls are hardcore atheists now. don't think yr so unique

i never claimed to be nor do i understand why you'd accuse me of something so fucking preposterous, i was stating a simple fact dear. i didn't suddenly just become an atheist either, i never in my life believed in any of that horseshit, it was unfortunately forced upon me.

well forgive me but this sounds like trying to claim some fame [unique-ness]

no, i was only trying to properly articulate how dogmatic i am about my atheism....how ironic. I'M JUST LIKE THEM.

except that i'm right.

i think all the things you mentioned the alt people doing are positive and creating a better alternative to the nuclear family is one of humanities most important projects. what you say is ridiculous, as if we're just silly alt teens trying to be fashionable and not respecting dad's authority. i don't follow the logic that says obviously because all these tribes have families and god like we do and we are obviously so much more advanced and they haven't got to our level yet it must mean our shared god and family structures must be somehow necessary for those tribes to progress to become like us.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Glice again.



"runnin and ya runnin and ya runnin away.. but you can't run away from yrself.." Bob marley

We are not more advanced than anyone, and to believe so is petty, ignorant, prideful and selfish. In fact, most so-called 'primitives' have a culture and social structure which is MORE sophistication, MORE elaborate, and has more DEPTH than our materialistic based systems of the modern era. Further, the nuclear family is a production of the idealism and fantasy of 1950s americana, it doesn't exist here, it doesn't exist anywhere, there is only one family, the human family, there is only one society, the global society. The variations are only a matter of perspective, just like two parallel lines can be altered to appear unparallel to the eye, when they are parallel all along..

but then again, my bias is that I am an Orthodox Christian, and we see the world as one single existence, one universal family ;) and it is christmas

bob was a wise man.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Satan again.

miss, God or the Devil are simply reflections in the mirror, the real question is not whether they exist or not, but rather which one do I see or want to see in the mirror each morning?

i agree that our social structures are not 'better' than anyone elses, and what we call civilisation is tremendously violent. i was trying to make the point that to see us as the superior advanced state that those 'primitive' tribes haven't reached yet is stupid and wrong, except i would hazard against viewing such societies with rose tinted glasses, or as somehow more pure than us. i don't think they are better than us, in a very crude way our materialism does make us more advanced, our technology and medical techniques for example. but i am not saying that our materialistic societies are worth holding onto above all, but the knowledge and experience we have gathered certainly is worth saving. i agree that we should see ourselves as one and any attempt at division is false. but we should not glorify regression. we should not behave like those spanish who destroyed thousands of years of mayan culture and art and history, making it lost to the ages. they thought they were more advanced and superior. deciding to instead think that about tribal societies is just condescending and does not fix the problem. i think the internet and all the knowledge contained is a lot more useful than the specific knowledge of a tribe who have very limited means of expressing it.

i should clarify that it is not an us vs. them issue and 'we' can never truly posses our material things like we like to think we can.

my favorite is easter.

(lololol)

ps: news guy just said "white kwissmiss".

pps: I'm sorry that the only suitable pagan imagery I could find was some neo-wiccan shit.

ppps: inb4 "druids made up yule in 1969"

All the "evidence" suggests quite the opposite (read the bible).

both hardcore religion and hardcore atheism require a great amount of faith and certainty that cannot be proven or disproven.

however, having a go at someone because of their personal beliefs is equally petty, isnt it. we must not try and rub our beliefs on people either way, which doesn't cancel our right to voice them, as long as we're not being judgmental.

its fine to say "this is what i believe in" but its not ok to say "you are wrong and you must be different" to someone in specific.

How does a lack of belief in something (atheism) require faith?

'nuff said

I think you are right to say that we're not more advanced than any society, it is a matter of perception. Therefore saying any of them was MORE advanced is also a matter of opinion.

one of the plus sides tho is that we try today to give people the right to have their beliefs, we've been failing of course in separating goverment from religion, but that should be the idea.

and in that case, you're as entitled to believe what you want as anyone is entitled to be an atheist.

And less of the SuchFriends hating people. He's one of the good guys.

Hope he came with a gift receipt.

no, I know. I just bring up that particular instance a lot cause I think it's funny and appropriate for this thread/conversation.

simply because you cannot gather evidence about the existence or non-existence of a higher spiritual intelligence. in other words, we don't know shit. we need faith in our beliefs to claim we know something.

yeah i mean i hope that doesn't happen to me. but it has before.

lack of tolerance really gets jesus mad.

You're still wrong. You don't need faith to NOT believe in something. Indeed you cannot prove a negative, but lack of proof doesn't mean faith. I don't believe in a god because there is not one shred of evidence that a god exists. But I wouldn't say that there is definitely not a god because you can't prove a negative. Faith doesn't come into it.

you must spread some butter on someone else's toast before putting it on pookie's again.

faith in your belief, that´s what I meant.

if you believe you are right despite proof, that is an act of faith rather than an empiric belief based on evidence.

not believing in God in the religion-sense does not necessarily mean you're an atheist by the way.

regardless, none of us have the slighest clue why we're here or what happens when we die. so any explanation we can come up with is mere speculation that requires a certain amount of faith in the speculation itself.

while you say there is no evidence that god exists, a lot of people think there is. we see the evidence or the lack of evidence we want to see. we're still human and highly vulnerable to our own suggestion.

when one starts defending their atheism with such stamina, they resemble a radical religious to me.

truth is, we don't know anything, each one of us can believe whatever we want.

(Presuming you're talking about atheism): once again atheism is a LACK of belief.

Yes it does.

"Atheism" is a purely oppositional position, it just means what it says. Its not a worldview on everything, it says you dont believe in any of the Gods that people have conceived. If you think thats fundamentalist, you dont know how to use words.

I think you're right. Knox (as much as I am slowly falling in love with her) is getting her words all cock-squiff.

No, I used to think so. I don't really believe in God, or the bible or any religion or that someone resembling a human being created the earth or any of that, and I used to think that made me an atheist but it doesn't.

There is too much in the universe I can't explain for me to consider myself worthy of knowning anything about it. But that's me.

You might think atheism is a lack of belief. but I think it's still a belief attempting to bring us an explanation for our deepest questions. None of us can prove or disprove any belief efficiently.

Like I said, if you start defending atheism with such certainty, to me, it begins to look as close-minded as an extreme religious person.

Knox needs to get knocked. And i think you may be the man for the job Pookie

if you define atheism as a lack of belief there's no faith involved, but for example satan said there's obviously no god, which is a belief,

That's what it IS. Look in a dictionary and it will say Atheism: a lack of belief.

Not IF you define, THAT'S WHAT IT IS!!!!!

You are right. I really am talking about MY definition of the word.
Like I said, lately I started believing that rejecting all explanations provided by religions does not necessarily mean that one does not have spirituality.

I guess what I am trying to say is that personally I find these discussions very strange. I can live with not knowning. I feel it'd be overestimating myself to say there is or there isn't.

And whatever I tend to believe at a certain time, I will avoid voicing it as if I know the truth.

a⋅the⋅ism
[ey-thee-iz-uh
m]–noun 1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God. 2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.

I think a lot of this problem is that a lot of people, some atheists included, take atheism to mean the same thing denying metaphysics.

This may be projective of me, but I believe that the agnostic position is a refusal to describe metaphysical reality. Thus, theism and atheism is a 'who know' game.

Jesus, how dare I have a concise point. Atheism assumes nothing about the big questions of the Universe, it just says that assuming there is a creator behind it all is irrational and premature because theres no evidence to suggest exactly that. Its a lack of belief in one thing and one thing only; Gods as proposed by man.
You may dislike this or disagree with this, but the one thing its not the equivolant of is belief in Gods

You can't have your own definition. It doesn't work like that. Anybody would be saying anything and you would be the only person who knew what you were talking about.