are you an atheist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW9dmpR94J0

hahaha is this a bit

these guys are working together

"Can u indicate on the doll where god touched u GD, because cmon mayne whats up ya"

what an incredibly stupid thing to say, given the Catholic scandal. luckily my mom snapped out of the spell of Catholocism and spared me the what would have been not-all-that-remote chance of this "jab" hitting lil too close to home.

God's balls

dg r u claiming that god (doesnt exist) has fondled children u should bring this str8 to the cops dont wait to reply

thanks for asking me to clarify, friend. No, I am not actually stating that. But instead that many of His appointed agents here on Earth have raped many children over many, and the supreme chief of all of these agents assisted in covering up these heinous crimes. You should apologize to all the victims for your callousness.

oh ok ur not. phew. thought we'd made a major discovery there but it was just that you can't read.

I can read, that is plainly obvious. What isn't so obvious, but I am willing to have you show evidence of to disprove me, is if you are intelligent enough to grasp the connection between priests/religion/God.

what if you had said your initial comment to a victim of rape by a priest? I would hope you would feel some degree of shame and regret.

lol I'm a v unlikely defendant and you a much less likely prosecutor here man

xp there you go again

so you wouldn't feel a thing, yes? no?

dear sweet god (doesnt exist) you're tiresome. are you really gonna continuously circle around until I admit that child abuse by humans of one made up faith is a terrible thing despite your already acknowledging that God (doesnt exist) has never been involved in any such activjty

because if so, thats the kind of thing that makes ppl not wanna respond to you any more

then don't respond to me, don't read my posts. if it is such a labor, why do you bother? why are you defective in this way?

I simply wanted you to admit that you would feel badly for saying that remark to a victim of sexual abuse by a priest. Can you NOT READ? Because I did not at all ask you to admit what you just said I did.

qed

"a terrible thing despite your already acknowledging that God (doesnt exist) has never been involved in any such activjty"

I did no such thing. Surely your reading comprehension isn't that terrible?? God, being merely a concept, is very much involved in those crimes and their cover up.

notice how you have thrown at an ad hom in every one of your posts, and keep trying to shift this onto my deficiencies and away from your awful stupid comment.

smh i'll bet you wouldn't so proudly proclaim yourself a true white kid that can jump if there were a quadriplegic albino child here right now

"if you are intelligent enough to grasp the connection between priests/religion/God." is answered by "a terrible thing despite your already acknowledging that God (doesnt exist) has never been involved in any such activity".

so far the evidence in favor of you possessing the requisite level of intelligence is lacking. But unlike you, I am more charitable and will assume that it can be mustered.

this is maybe the stupidest revive ever

and yet after wasting your time reading all of it, you wasted even more time by posting in it. that's not exactly intelligent behavior.

perhaps it was stupid of me to assume you value your time on Earth

perhaps you are God, even

Cointless punt

futless guck

i was talking to an atheist tonight and he was patiently explaining how some things you can prove - like that water is wet - and some things you can't, like the existence of god and belief needs to be based on what you can prove and then i asked him if he believed in ghosts and he said yes

maybe he had a ghost bellhop once

anti atheism is about the dumbest thing someone who believed in a god can waste their time and mental energy on tho

hasn't deterred Phil Robertson

but i mean, you've got a god, we dont, dontcha think you're kind of above the debate?

if I'd an ice cream and someone without any ice cream told me they didnt believe in ice cream I wouldn't feel the need to do anything but enjoy my ice cream and maybe pity them a little

now, I bet your god is better than ice cream, right?

ppl OTOH who are ~spiritual~ well they can fuck off. and they dont get any ice cream neither.

i just thought it was funny that atheism has enough of a cache now that ppl can earnestly proclaim it w/out any of the presumptive skeptic baggage

but i mean, you've got a god, we dont, dontcha think you're kind of above the debate?

two thoughts, a. if i'm a believer i believe you have a god too, and b. kinda the entire foundation of monotheism is educating the world about god's existence

frequently and obnoxiously too, in many cases

I like the concept of a personal God

kinda the entire foundation of atheism is educating the world about god's non-existence

I've spent precisely 0 hours actively pursuing that education

is atheism necessarily proselytizing?

some ideological forms of it are, but--

maybe "ism" is the catch here

Pretty much every proselytizing atheist I've met turns out to be a former Christian. People raised without religion tend toward the "whatevs, as long as you don't bother me with it" side.

The earliest atheists were basically called out for proselytizing about a unorthodox view of the world. So there are the roots of it.

And yeah most of those early "atheists" were just weird DIY or anarchist Christians.

all beliefs are susceptible to doubt but religious (and anti-religious) beliefs are a special category perhaps. you could argue that this is the purpose of church: to continually affirm belief. it's something that has to be maintained, nurtured, adapted to shifting circumstances in a way that belief in ice cream doesn't. you might even call it an anxious belief. political and moral beliefs often work this way too. these are not beliefs that are "comfortable" with difference, they have to account for them and, usually, dismiss them somehow because they are beliefs that exist in a framework where the opposite belief is at least somewhat tenable. religions wouldn't make such a big deal about "believing" in God if the proposition were equivalent to believing in ice cream.

there's a chassidic story about a rebbe who was complaining to god, "you put the torah in a book and you put desire in the world. no wonder we sin. put the torah in the world and desire in a book and we would all be righteous." this idea that god is concealed and needs to be revealed in the world has really old origins. there's a midrash about abraham that he would invite guests to his tent to feed (which is the context for the 3 angels story) and after they ate he would teach them how to praise god.

ryan otm but deems's ice cream metaphor gets at something too

i'm an atheist (for lack of better word) but (so to speak) a dostoevskian/ kierkegaardian atheist-- i.e. a miserable one

i think religion/ theology (like "metaphysics") is deep down fundamentally encoded in human being (like grammar is)

putting aside for the moment hateful/ controlling/ ideologically necessary proselytizing (like ugh phil robertson) i have a lot of respect for serious theology; imo it recognizes and thinks through fundamental existential issues that much "atheism" (cf nietzeche's "last man") is facilely in denial about (everyone's on their own kind of opium)

ps not that i agree with nietzsche's "last man" depiction, diagnosis, or judgment (i don't); but agree that human/ societal response(s) to the "death of god" or "nihilism" call for serious reflection (and a facile atheist's "we are now enlightened/ free/ perceive true reality" is especially to be interrogated).

i think sharp distinctions should be made between:

1) religion as means of cultural identity--particularly in the modern context as a cultural identity that is not based on race.
2) religion as speculation about transcendence, the "whole," the creation of the universe, Being, etc (perhaps here derived from primitive mystery cults)
3) religion as generator of meaning, truth etc. (subset of 2 perhaps, but it feels distinct in modernity and the advent of nominalism, negative theology, etc.)

I think 1 is perhaps "encoded" if only in the sense that we are animals that have to be able to produce group identities. there's an immunitary/auto-immunitary logic here that is probably inescapable. 2 and 3, however, strike me as cultural adaptations/innovations.

The anxious belief/framework belief ryan mentions ear;oer isn't necessarily a quality of organized religion so much as a quality of organized authority. There is a history of a politically/commercially dominant Christianity and there is an alternative history of unorthodox believers, and it is easy to put everyone under the same "Christians" umbrella.

not sure about the virtue of serious reflection on religion

if you conceive of religion as a response to consciousness then it's not necessary but it has a root which precedes its particular expressions in culture

agree those distinctions v significant; but i think i'd still argue 2 & 3 are in a way (genetically) "encoded"

on a very basic level, e.g. the human universality of funeral rites

by "theology" i don't necessarily mean something sophisticated or theoretical (hence the analogy with "grammar"). e.g. languages have deep complex (somewhat mysterious) subject/ verb/ object/ attribute distinctions that are only "theorized" recently (last couple millenia) of human history (qua substance/ accident etc.); "grammar" as a science may be recent but grammar itself seems encoded

similarly, some "transcendental" conditions of human thought-- not just linguistic, but ethical, metaphysical, existential-- seem encoded

i'm not a kantian but kantian so otm on a lot of this-- esp the contradictions (e.g. re whole/ part, eternity/ temporality, etc.)

edit to: eternity/ finitude