Oh man, not only are those Christians a persecuted majority but when they break the law and are peacefully called out on it - as previously notified they would be if they continued to do so - the guy doing the calling out doesn’t accept his much deserved beating gracefully and those who care about justice and what is right don’t just stop filming. I mean, wow, those Christians are just so persecuted. This, on top of there now being people who agitate for religious ideas to be given the same level of respect and be subjected to the same kind of criticism as any other idea. It’s all the fault of those filthy atheists.
Politics, religion, psychology, economics. In other words: how the human world works and why it works as it does is what fascinates me. Sometimes I post about such ideas here. Often I expand on such ideas to suggest how I think the world should work and why I think so. Sometimes, however, I just post pretty, shiny content I've found while sifting through the internet.
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December 7, 2010
September 30, 2010
Grr. This is a video of Richard Dawkins on the O’Reilly Factor. O’Reilly is annoying, but then he pretty much always annoys me. Key points to take from this:
“Leap of faith.” O’Reilly is the one who takes a position of certainty. Atheism by definition is a lack of belief and agnosticism is a lack of knowledge. In and of themselves they are not positions of certainty (although there are atheists who go further than lacking belief in a deity believing there are no deities).
“Being humble is a Christian virtue.” Being humble may be a virtue but it is not an exclusively Christian one and you don’t get it by becoming a Christian, so no, it’s not a “Christian virtue”. Furthermore, Christians believe the universe has been made for them and that there is a god out there watching their every move. How is that a humble belief? It’s the height of egocentrism.
Ignoring the incorrect lumping of Hitler in with the others, O’Reilly misses the key point that Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot had more in common with the religious than the non-religious in the sense that they were pursuing goals in the name of dogma. Dogma is a core plank of religion and probably the major problem with it. Atheism in and of itself is not dogmatic: it is a lack of belief, not a proscriptive belief in that which does not have proof.
September 6, 2010
Moral barometer?
Many Christians (and those of other religions?) seem to believe that if one is an atheist (or even an agnostic?) that one lacks a moral barometer: “Without belief in God”, they say, “why would the atheist be motivated to live a moral upstanding life?” This confuses me. Surely, if their creator-god exists and has given humans free will to make the choice whether or not to join the flock, there is an inbuilt moral understanding of right and wrong so that the making of such a choice has meaning. Furthermore, just because the atheist(/agnostic) hasn’t made one choice to do what is “right” by joining the flock, they still have that inbuilt morality which means they have motivation to make the “right” choices in other situations. Am I barking up the wrong tree here or is this common belief about atheists/agnostics lacking a moral barometer somewhat contradictory?
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