Vicious Love

Also, what Sarpedon said. Only bolded and underlined.

WalrusGumBoot

To all responders,

Wow! I am very pleased with the response I am getting and the quality of the replies. I have to say that I can understand your perspective much better.

Your points are all well taken, but there has been some that really stood out because I can relate to.

The unfortunate truth that many "church people" can be such hateful folks, and yes, Protestants can be as bad, or worse, than Catholics. I wasn't Catholic bashing, but it just seemed peculiar to me that the ones I came in contact with had that background. Like I said, perhaps coincidence.

On second reading of my own post, it sounded a bit argumentative as one of the first posters pointed out. I apologize for making it sound that way - sometimes my words come out wrong.

Again, many thanks!

HelpingHand

[/QUOTE]
Well, I just like to debate and to see what other people think about (a)theism etc.

That's something that really bothers me too. I try to make my ideas as clear as possible and I also try to dismiss arguments made by theists, but I do not insult people or call them names, no matter how ridiculous I might find their claims.

I have been an atheist since I was 13 or 14 and a friend of mine asked me,"Where do you think God came from?" Then I knew that God was not the answer to every question and I became an atheist. I must admit, though, that sometimes I still have my doubts, but over the years they've diminished.
I am not hostile towards God nor towards the Catholic church e.g.
I was raised a Catholic and I do not think Catholicsm is 'the king of hypocritical beliefs'any more than other religions. Most Catholics I know are gentle and caring people and I have a great deal of admiration for them, although I do not share their God-concept.

Greetings

Walter

Ieldra

As a rule, other people's beliefs don't matter much to me, as such. Belief itself is not the problem, but what grows out of it. This is best shown with an example: When I was 13 or so, a friend of my sister's (then 9) asked her about her religion, and when my sister answered that we weren't members of any church, the answer was a dumbfounded "But...then you aren't really human!!!". Again and again I've met a similar attitude, although most didn't dare put it as succinctly. Theism, as a rule, has a built-in intolerance, exceptions notwithstanding. As Christopher Hitchens has put it: Religion kills. Influential religious organizations lobby politicians to make laws that insult human dignity, Christian fundamentalists bomb abortion clinics, Islamic fundamentalists murder women if they don't do what they're supposed to do, Hindus still burn widows, etc. etc.. A long list of atrocities followed most religions wherever it went, made worse by the fact that they're absolutely pointless. Secular organizations might have their own list, but at least they mostly do it for understandable reasons.
I might argue against belief, but what I *really* fight against is the bigoted and neurotic morality, the contempt of reason, the debasement of life on Earth, of love, the human love that touches and gives pleasure, and the intolerance.
As long as religious organizations only apply their rules to members of their own faith, it's more or less OK, but if they go and try to apply their rules to everyone, I'll fight. Why I don't "simply enjoy the rest of my life"? Apart from the fact that I do, I sometimes feel religion tries to make that impossible.
Sorry for the rant, but it *is* a rather emotional topic, although it's often clouded in the language of rationalism. If you're a creationist, this fact as such won't matter much to most atheists. But if you go and try to establish creationism in *biology* classes (instead of religion classes where it belongs), that isn't a simple mistake. It's an act of war.

I'm sorry, but many theists *are* close-minded and intolerant. I don't know how many of them are, I've also met very nice people where exchanges about religion were more friendly banter than heated debates. I've even lived in a religious community for a few years, with no serious clashes even though they all knew I was an atheist. Maybe people like them are even the majority, at least in my country. I don't know. But the fact is, their organizations are often very intolerant and their holy books even more so. Because they're the primary sources, I'll judge the religion as a whole mainly by the proclamation of organizations and what I read in the holy books. And what I find there isn't very nice.

I have always been an atheist. Not surprisingly, as a child of an atheist mother and an only nominally Protestant father. As a child, I found religion silly and pointless, occasionally threatening, and my opinion didn't improve with the years, although my tolerance in everyday life did. These days, faith as such is something some other people use to guide their lives, it's not my business if they don't bother me with proselytizing attempts. Information and friendly debate is always welcome, but when it comes to the influence of religion on politics things are likely to get somewhat hot.

WalrusGumBoot

Trying to answer your question should be easy (a simple yes or no answer to the first question should suffice), but it's really not. So, how do I start?

Evolution has failed to answer a number of nagging questions I had, such as the origins of the matter that makes up our universe and it's complexity. Even nit-picky questions I have about how certain features of species can evolve, if the premise holds true of random mutations becoming a permanent fixture of the species if it increases their chance of survival and mating opportunities. Probably the most amazing example is the angler fish, which essentially has that "fishing pole" with a worm-line appendage that it wiggles around to attract prey. Plus as a bonus, it glows in the dark! To me, reducing it down to a series of advantageous mutations is not possible for my finite mind.

I have been told that just because modern evolutionary theory cannot explain everything today doesn't mean an explanation doesn't exist, but rather it means that it hasn't been discovered yet. But even this belief takes faith that a natural answer does exist, and if I cannot find answers for the smaller, trivial questions, like the dear old angler fish, why should I jump in with both feet? I have no personal reason why I don't want to believe in God, and it looked like to me that I would have to put my faith in one or the other.

I hope this all made sense. I have a lot of thoughts on this whole thing, but organizing them into a human-readable digest form can be challenging.

Equinox

Hi Walrus-

My answers:

1. because we are constantly bombarded by Christianity in this culture, either someone trying to “save” us, or convert our children, or whatever. Talking about spirituality with like-minded friends is a refreshing change, and best done while we are doing recreational things (like hiking for me).

2. because we are human. These kinds of behaviors have evolutionary origins, just like the desire everyone has to “win”, etc. That isn’t an excuse, however, these actions are not ok, and I’m sad to say that I’ve stooped to them at times too. It can be a knee-jerk reaction when we get hit over and over by in-your-face type evangelists (I'm not saying that you nor all theists are like that of course). I'll apologize in advance for anything I say that sounds too aggressive. I can't apologize for others, hopefully they will do so themselves.

3. I had quite a happy and loving childhood growing up Catholic. It was only later that I decided Christianity didn’t make sense (for instance, I wondered why an all powerful God would sacrifice himself to himself in order to convince himself to change a rule that he had made himself), and that move was accelerated and completed by reading the Bible (something that Catholics don’t do as much as Protestants - so I hadn't really read much of it before that). I can post a longer version of my spiritual history that I’ve written and have here. Let me know if you want that.

I hope those provide some answers. Have a fun day-

-Equinox

P. S. - A simple reason for your noticing that many atheists were rasied as Catholics is simple statistics. Statistically, Christianity is the biggest religious group in the world, and most Christians in the world are Roman Catholic - more than all other Christian denominations put together. Even in the US, around a third or so of all Christians are Roman Catholic, so even if people converted in and out of Christianity in equal numbers, you'd notice that more American Atheists came from Roman Catholicism than from any other denomination.

Y.B

The theory of evolution has nothing to do with the origins of matter. It is a theory that deals with biology, not cosmology, physics or chemistry.

You're forgetting at least one part of the theory of evolution, one that is the very opposite of random: natural selection.

David B

Hello again Walrus.

Just a few points.

One being that I hope you didn't miss my post above, which seems to have been made when you were responding to others higher in the thread.

Another being that it appears that you might be making the common mistake of conflating evolutionary theory with cosmology.

The ToE is concerned with, basically, the origin of species, once given self replicating molecules, with variation.

The origin of such self replicating molecules, and molecules whether self replicating or not, and the whole shebacg, is the remit of other disciplines.

As far as your particular question on the Angler fish goes, then I'd like to suggest you start a thread in the E/C forum, where a number of world class experts in the ToE hang out, as well as gifted well informed amateurs who are pretty well informed.

Another again - I don't really see the necessity to invoke a god to explain ultimate origins, since that leaves open the question of the origin of said god. A god capable of tracking the thoughts and deeds of individual people would need some pretty complex sensing and data processing, as far as I can see.

How could such a god have come to be?

David B

JamesBannon

Because, to be perfectly frank, we are pissed off at being accused of being immoral because we are atheists. E.g., in a recent debate on the BBC some fuckwit of a Muslim had the temerity to accuse non-believers of being bad Scottish citizens! Excuse me but the terrorists in the car were muslims. So much for faith inspiring good citizenship. There's plenty more where that came from.

We don't call all theists morons, just the more egregious ones (see above for a good example).

As a former Roman Catholic myself (I finally gave it up when I was about 14) it was the stupidity of regarding irrelevant old men as infallible that did it for me. When I was young my automatic reaction to authority figures was "Fuck you! I won't believe what you tell me". To some extent it still is.

Lowly Idiot

Of course it is! You're just not trying hard enough!

I used to have the same problem with the horse chestnut tree.



Just look at those spiky sods. There's no way I'd be able to chew one of them without carving up the roof of my mouth. But then I learnt about it. It's an evolutionary arms race. Great stuff! No need to crowbar a god in here, thank you very much. I don't know much about your fish conundrum, but I'm fairly sure someone's got it nailed down.

Unfortunately for the horse chestnut tree, it needs pull its finger out and evolve a way to stop small schoolboys from throwing sticks at its branches, taking its fruit and drying them out in the airing cupboard for a couple of weeks, covering them in nail varnish and then skipping off to smash the hell out of other bits of its dried fruit in the school playground.