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Legitimacy of believing

Im dying to ask you what axe it is youve got to grind with Christianity personally.


And Freddy you were distorting scripture in the other thread.. stating scripture that blatantly wasnt true. I tackled you on it and you apologised which is fair enough.

Then in this thread you were distorting history by stating that Hitler was a devoted Catholic which also isnt historically true.

Freddy when I read this from you ..

I also hate it when people distort history to further their argument
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I thought you were being hypocritical. You could say youre hating people who distort history while you are distorting history.

What do you think on reflection? Actually dont answer that if you disagree.. :)x lol
 
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^I've think I made that clear in other threads that we have conversed on. However I don't think simply stating what is and was necessarily means I have an axe to grind against Christianity specifically. But such as it is its not just Christianity I have a problem with, but all Monotheistic religions from Christianity to Islam to Mormonism and Judaism. I think eventually these mythologies will go the way of Zeus, and heaven the way of Hades and Mt Olympus. I also think it is foolish to buy into such unrealistic beliefs and incredibly intolerant to try and convince/scare people into believing. I have met countless people who have often felt unexplainable guilt for being human and fallible (incidentally most of these people were Catholics or Christians of other denominations) instead of simply accepting who they are. People who decided to embrace ignorance as a virtue and extolled it as such.

I've see women who had babies that they didn't want simply because it was against their religion to have an abortion resulting in a sad life for both mother and child. I've seen children harshly punished for small infractions by overbearing and discipline crazed religious zealot parents who think they still live in Old Testament days.

I have seen the random death of people that were wholly deserving of a good long and happy life. And when the priest said "Oh they are in a better place now or God called them back home" I got angry because the better place IMO was here with their families.

And I have seen poverty...extreme poverty all over the world while the priests get fat off their religious donations. Religion IMO served a purpose a long time ago. It has outlived its usefulness for centuries. Now it is nothing but a backwards tradition that impedes the potential of mankind.

To quote Edgar Allan Poe.
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
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Ive got to go out.. I love Edgar Allan Poe.. I also dislike religion ( for religions sake).. I was still tweaking my post above while you were writing your response.

Peace :)
 
freddy47 said:
Hitler took the idea of evolution and twisted it to a form that was no longer recognizable as the idea that Darwin first put forth. He also distorted Friedrich Nietzsche as well.
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so what if Cristian distort jesus message ?

or is it a situation where if someone distort science then he is to blame but if someone distort jesus message then religion is to blame ?
 
CoffeeDrinker said:
Why shouldn't it be okay?

What's the difference between religion and nationality? Both are arbitrary boundaries and a set of prescribed rules and behaviors, both are essentially imaginary, both are the source of man's gamut of negative actions. Believing in some form of a higher power has documented positive effects for a person, but when you try to talk about details to something make-believe, and force those arbitrary details on other people, then you cause problems.
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Fine. But when someone says that precious atheism isnt allowed to be accused of violence, then thats just a very reprehensible form of hypocrisy.
 
I am against what religion becomes. People abuse it as an answer into all their problems, and it becomes about right and wrong. It preys off of ignorance, it should be used to better yourself.

I believe in something. Something that's bigger than us. I cant imagine any other answer for how we even exist. What ever that's going to happen is going to happen, the best I can do is to be a good person and to enjoy life, give myself a purpose. I want to enjoy this life because it could be the only one I ever have.
 
Lazyscience said:
why would people kill in the name of atheism? it doesnt make any sense to me.
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Well Stalin was an avowed atheist and thought that if you change social conditions, people wont need religion anymore and everyone will become atheists. When that didnt happen, there was only one option left. Kill them.
 
ninjadanslarbretabar said:
when you say "we" you are inevitably excluding them
why is that ?
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i had to draw a distinction between this persons own reality, which you were arguing is as real as any other reality, and in which the person ought to get saved by prayer, and the reality of everyone else who experiences that person die. so essentially, because you cannot experience yourself being dead, i had to linguistically exclude the dead person. though standarly i use the term 'we' to include everyone.

anyway, i'm not really interested in that. i'm interested in how you explain them dying if their reality, where prayer saves them, has the same ontological status as everyone elses. or, in my other example, how some things are proven to be objectively true, given a particular set of axioms and the model instantiating those axioms, if everyones subjective reality is in fact reality, as you claim, where by reality i roughly mean a state of affairs external to oneself.
 
why do we say that we see in 3d when we use both eye ? 2d + 2d = 4d right ?
or are those "particular set of axioms" always relative to a particular context that you need to subscribe too before going anywhere

or in other words can you prove that something is objectively true in a dream ? and can you prove that this aint a dream ? or do you simply make the assumtion that this aint a dream and work from there ?
 
the axioms are everything. they are the context. i am talking about axioms in terms of mathematical logic, your example isn't of such a system. the point is, if those axioms are true, what follows from those axioms is true, (i.e. soundness is proven for logical systems) and anyone who denies that is simply making a deductive error, it is not 'different for them,' so how does your philosophy account for this?

what about the dead person? are they dead even though they were sure they'd live?

i don't want to go through endless examples, i'd just like a straight answer to my questions please. i don't think something is objectively true in a dream because i don't think dreams are the sorts of things where the concept of truth applies.
 
chinup said:
if everyones subjective reality is in fact reality, as you claim,
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well i made a thread about the symbiosis between objective and subjective reality where i spent a lot of time trying to explain otherwise

i really dont believe that "subjective reality is in fact reality"
i believe that you cant have the painting without the canvas and that the canvas is empty without the painting
 
i understand the concept of complimentarity, and wholeheartedly believe it, but in posts such as:

ninjadanslarbretabar said:
it doesnt mater if someone is a atheist or theist on a personal level, problems only arise when someone push their belief or "facts" unto others because from their point of view they are right and dont care to open up to the idea that they may be wrong from another angle because they cant understand the nature of the duality that what is to my right can be to your left and that that is not contradictory

reality doesnt have only 1 angle that we can all agree on
its a multidimensional thing with every possible angle
but if you cant let go of your ego on a mind level then you wont accept that others can be just as right as your are even tho they are saying something that contradicts what is true from your perspective
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its taken, imo, a little too far, in that to remain consistent you have to deny empirical facts, such as whether someone is alive or dead. i'm asking whether you take your words to their logical conclusion. if you don't really believe your above quote, thats absolutely fine, i'm sorry for assuming otherwise.
 
And Freddy you were distorting scripture in the other thread.. stating scripture that blatantly wasnt true. I tackled you on it and you apologised which is fair enough.
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I would hardly call a simple mistake a distortion of scripture but whatever. It seems we have different definition on what distortion is.

Then in this thread you were distorting history by stating that Hitler was a devoted Catholic which also isnt historically true.
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Being that a mans devotedness is purely a matter of opinion this is unsolvable. But as I have already said perhaps he wasn't as devout as he claimed. But he was still a Catholic I will stand by that. But being that the man is dead and unavailable for an interview I guess we shall have to agree to disagree.

I thought you were being hypocritical. You could say youre hating people who distort history while you are distorting history.
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A different view on a matter is not necessarily hypocritical.

What do you think on reflection? Actually dont answer that if you disagree..
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Already did sorry...

Ive got to go out.. I love Edgar Allan Poe.. I also dislike religion ( for religions sake)..
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I love Poe too. First time I read Fall of the House of Usher I had nightmares about being buried alive. It takes a very skilled writer to instill such terror.

As for religion Christianity is a religion so I don't know how one can dislike religion and yet so happily take part in one.
 
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Fine. But when someone says that precious atheism isnt allowed to be accused of violence, then thats just a very reprehensible form of hypocrisy.
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None of us said that atheism isn't allowed to be accused of violence. Its just that your argument didn't make any sense.

Well Stalin was an avowed atheist and thought that if you change social conditions, people wont need religion anymore and everyone will become atheists. When that didnt happen, there was only one option left. Kill them.
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He didn't kill people because they wouldn't "convert" to atheism. That is simply another distortion of the historical record. If you have read anything about Stalin you would know that Stalin was a deeply distrustful and paranoid individual. Most of the people he killed in his purges were hardcore communists and therefore also atheists so again your argument falls flat on its face.

For example the first major purge carried out by the Bolsheviks was in 1921 where 220,000 FELLOW communists were killed. The major criteria for this first purge was social origin not religious beliefs. When Stalin took over the criteria for purging remained pretty much the same. Except now he added those he didn't trust.

There is absolutely no evidence that Stalin chose who to kill based on religious beliefs alone, none whatsoever and to claim otherwise is dishonest. His mass killing were purely political in nature not motivated by atheism.
 
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so what if Cristian distort jesus message ?

or is it a situation where if someone distort science then he is to blame but if someone distort jesus message then religion is to blame ?
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Depends on the persons motivation. But being that science is not a religious organization and therefore has no dogma or unifying ideological doctrine its kind of hard to assign collective blame on scientists. But lets say a scientist is creating biological weapons performing tests on humans and his motivation was purely scientific observation. Who is to blame for this scenario? Is it the whole of the scientific community? Or this singular scientists warped view on bioethics?

On the other hand a Christian or a group of Christians go out and murder a doctor that gives abortions. Ultimately it is the individual or the group that bears the brunt of responsibility. But some of the weight must be borne by the organization that promoted their ideology as well. For example can the Crusades truly be considered as the acts of a bunch fanatics who were no longer "true" Christians? Or is the whole of Christendom somehow to blame for developing such behavior in its people? Its not an easy question to answer and its clearly not the same as asking whether one scientists fucked up experiment a sign of all scientists being evil.
 
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You can't blame Christianity for the crusades any more than you can blame the economy or human psychology circa the 10th century C.E. It's just too broad of a thing to have any real meaning as the chief scapegoat. What gets accomplished in blaming it? It's not like people lack any number of reasons to go out and kill their neighbor, especially if they have different skin from your own. You can scour over the scriptures to ignore the majority of the messages in there and find the parts on who to kill whom when, and so forth, but that does a disservice to the way the majority of people believing in these religions operate.

Now... we have something like the Salem Witch Trials and the Inquisition where it's clearly the edicts of a few old perverts working within a specific framework, and the common practice even today of Muslims stoning their women who have upset the men of their family, these are all sick and indefensible practices, but it just shines a light on why no human power structure should EVER have society's approval for dealing out death sentences. They are no different than George Bush executing a record amount of criminals in Texans during his term as a governor. Murder is murder, and it's always negative. I'm of the belief that there is a psychological reason that gets disguised with things like "State Power" and "Religious Authority" and it gives weak people a reason to act on their animal instincts with impunity.

If the question is what's the legitimacy in believing in these things, then it's to give a person a feeling of strength in themselves, and confidence, and many other positive mental effects that can allow people to accomplish things they wouldn't normally be able to accomplish. That's about half the reason I believe in a higher power, but no one religion yet. The ohter half would be that coincidence is hardly able to explain everything that happens, and that it's a very logical thing to have a higher power. In that way I don't really have faith because of my reliance on logic, which is probably why I still think like an atheist even though I don't like athiests. hmmm....I'm going to stop there lol
 
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