rEvolutionist wrote:
So all a poll does is encourage people to lie
Why would we lie? Seriously?
To preserve your ego and your illusion of moral and intellectual superiority of course!
There's a small number of atheists out there who make a positive claim about Gods. Why aren't they lying?
They are. So are you.
Why would we feel the need to lie about our beliefs and reasonings??!
Because you become acutely uncomfortable and threatened when I demonstrate how religious and irrational your beliefs are and how faulty your reasoning is of course!
You are incapable of clear rational thought, and simply ignore evidence that clearly shows your beliefs to be wrong.
No, you're incapable of comprehending the rational thought I post. Big difference.
What the fuck are you even doing at a rationalist forum?
Well, at the moment, I'm annoying the ever-living fuck out of you. But that's just dessert.
about their true beliefs because they want the approval and support of their compatriots
What kind of retarded logic is that?!? If we are all lying, then why do we need to lie in the first place? If we share the same belief, then we don't need to lie about it to gain the approval of our compatriots.
Ah, but you have to lie in order to maintain the fiction that your positions and arguments are rational and/or logical in exactly the same manner, and for exactly the same reasons that you claim theists lie about their faith. You don't want to appear weak, or irresolute, or ill-informed, or irrational, and you need to bluster and puff in order to salve your own wounded ego because deep down inside you know I'm right and you're wrong, but you're too afraid to admit it, even to yourself. It's classic avoidance behavior. I suspect Mr Samsa could fill you in on the details of why people lie to protect their egos.
and don't want to be excoriated as you excoriate me, for not adhering to the Atheist religious orthodoxy.
Avail yourself of a dictionary, please!
No need, I'm perfectly familiar with the applicable definitions.
Just as you draw conclusions (often mistaken) based on the body of my work, and aren't shy about drawing conclusions and inferences based on what I write, I do the same thing with respect to your, and everybody else's contributions here, and it's my considered and deeply held opinion that nearly everyone here, or at Ratskep, or at RDF in the past, falls firmly into the category of religious Atheist zealot, which is a kind adjective for what many of them really are.
The difference is, we provide examples of your past work,
Which you promptly mischaracterize, misunderstand and ridicule without a scintilla of rational argumentation in support of your refutation. The examples you claim to provide almost never provide an example of what you think it exemplifies.
while you provide nothing because you are allegedly too lazy to do so.
Bored, not lazy. I see no point in mining ten years of your posts for something that anybody who has known you for a month knows is true. I've got better things to do than that.
We all know it's not laziness that is stopping you from doing it. It's the fact that there isn't any evidence outside of the faulty inferences of your blinkered mind.
You continue to provide the evidence on a regular basis. I leave it up to someone who gives a fuck to go look it up if they doubt it.
That's what makes them Atheist, as opposed to atheists. The reasonable, rational non-believer is perfectly comfortable with admitting that they don't know the truth and that the question of God's existence remains open and unresolved.
We are all perfectly comfortable with admitting that we don't know the truth and that the question of God's existence remains open and unresolved.
Hardly. You avoid addressing that subject with great vigor. And if and when you are caused to inadvertently address it, you almost always react with personal insults, derision and non sequitur in order to avoid having to say the one thing you can factually say about the existence of God: "I don't know." Everything else you contribute on the subject is nothing more than ream after ream of personal insults aimed at people who do believe in God. You're not satisfied to say "I don't know" and then have the common courtesy of allowing other people to believe what they choose to believe, you insist on insulting the majority of people on the planet at every possible turn, including those who are not deserving of your scorn and opprobrium. Your blind hatred of all things theological prevents you from engaging in reasoned debate on the subject.
We perfectly comfortably did so in that poll that you choose to ignore as an inconvenient truth. Why are you such a dishonest debater?
I'm not, you are. I respond to your diatribes and insults with thought and scholarship and I explain my reasoning even when you do nothing more than hurl childish insults. You just don't like the fact that I am adept at demolishing what you believe to be rational pronouncements. Mostly they aren't. But when they are, I am happy to both give you credit for them and engage you reasonably and rationally. This doesn't mean I have to agree with you however. Your "poll" means absolutely nothing, to me or anyone else who is able to formulate a rational thought and express it.
They are not afraid to face this insecurity and do not feel the need to cover up their insecurity about their uncertainty with bluster, bloviation and insult. As a Tolerist™ I have no dog in the hunt either way. I'm satisfied to let theists believe what they believe and Atheists believe what they believe without judging either one of them with respect to those beliefs
Yet you are perfectly happy to judge liberals about their beliefs. You aren't a tolerist. You are full of shit.
The difference is I'm specific and I only judge individuals based on their non-peaceable statements. I have no problem with your disbelief in God, that's yours to decide. What I have a problem with is your blatant and scurrilous lies and attacks on billions of people who have done you no harm merely because it satisfies some atavistic urge you have to excoriate theism. If you want to excoriate some specific Catholic priest against whom there is credible forensic evidence of sexual wrongdoing, I don't mind at all, and in fact I join you in condemning such people, and those who knowingly harbor and protect them from the consequences of their evil acts.
But so far, out of more than 400,000 Catholic priests currently in service, only about 4000, or about one percent, have even been accused of sexual impropriety, which is about 14 percent fewer priests than ordinary citizens who commit sexual assaults on children.
But that doesn't matter to you, nor do you care that hundreds of thousands of Catholic priests serve their parishioners faithfully and selflessly and perform all manner of charitable and altruistic acts, not infrequently at a cost to their own health, safety and lives. You don't care that billions of people rely on their religious beliefs to carry them through tough times and you don't care that the vast majority of them apply their beliefs positively and to assist others, not harm them. You don't care that when the AIDS epidemic began in Africa, Priests and other religious orders were quite literally the only people willing to attend to the needs of the stricken, without regard for their own safety, while the rest of the world, including physicians, were refusing to treat or even approach the sick out of fear.
You don't care about any of that. All you care about is insulting people of faith and disparaging their beliefs. Most hypocritically, you get all worked up and resort to even more invective when someone challenges YOUR Atheistic religious beliefs.
, so long as they manifest those beliefs peaceably. On the other hand, I also feel free, if not more than a little compelled to point out the logical and rational flaws in Atheist thinking and argumentation, just as I do so with my theist friend, and I absolutely choose to engage in defense against the many and ubiquitous slurs and slanders hurled at people who do not deserve such animosity.
You are literally one of the biggest abusers of logic and rationality that these three rationalist forums have ever seen.
Coming from you, that's a high compliment indeed. My sincerest thanks.
The fact that of the thousands of members involved in discussions over the years virtually no one ever agrees with your "logic" and "rationality" should be a clue that you aren't as bright as you think you are.
Well, I don't think that's actually true to begin with, but in any event that speaks to the strength and scope of the Atheist religious orthodoxy more than it speaks to any deficit in my argumentation. You see, it doesn't matter to me if I'm right or not, though mostly I am. It's the debate that's important. The journey down the path to enlightenment is far more important and instructive than some arbitrary destination along the way. If I'm wrong, I'm fine with that. If my posts cause anyone at all to think more deeply about a particular subject or point, I've done my job well. You see, like Socrates, I'm an interlocutor. My purpose and role is to advance knowledge and understanding by stimulating debate and causing people to think, although that usually doesn't include you. I've told you countless times that my actual audience is not the members of the forum, and particularly not you, it's the visitors and lurkers who may take away some new nugget of knowledge or understanding from the debate. Nor do I care WHAT nugget they take away. They can agree with me or disagree with me, it's all the same to me. What's important, the ONLY important thing is that my posts cause people to think about the subject, because thought is preferable to the sort of knee-jerk dogmatism you demonstrate with regularity.
I understand that you like to vent, but I have yet to see you make an honest, introspective and respectful post acknowledging that for billions of people, theistic religion serves as a stable foundation in their lives that makes suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune somewhat easier.
Of course you haven't because you are blinkered and a dishonest debater. I and others often make such remarks. You would never see them as they don't fit your biased narrative. Open your fucking eyes.
Trust me, they've been open for three decades now, and I'm very satisfied with what I see.
Whether or not their beliefs are a fantasy or even a delusion isn't really relevant to the potential, and factual benefits of theistic belief to those who need solace and comfort in dealing with the stresses of life, as any psychiatrist will tell you. I've not yet seen you present a credible case for why anyone should be an atheist,
YOU are an atheist, you dolt!
And atheism is the default state of humans until they learn otherwise. Some of us have just reverted back to our natural state.
No, I'm a non-theistic Tolerist™. And no, you have no critically robust evidence to show that atheism is the default state of humans until they learn otherwise. That's a presumption you make because you disbelieve that God, should he/she/it exist, is capable of making a fetus or infant or child or mentally-retarded person aware of his/her/its presence in the womb. But since you cannot prove that a fetus has no knowledge of God in the womb, and because infants cannot express such knowledge even if they have it, and because young children may forget (or be caused to forget) that knowledge for a time, it is irrational to say that atheism is the "natural state" of human beings.
Then there's the argument that if God is omnipresent in nature, God must be present in each and every human being as well, and therefore atheism, or the "absence of belief" is merely a state of ignorance that can be easily rectified through education or interaction with God when the time is appropriate. Therefore, one can argue that a-theism, the absence of belief, is like any other developmental deficit that changes as the human being grows and matures. Zygotes don't have a heart, but all that is necessary for a heart to come into being exists within the zygote. There is no reason to believe that atheism as a "default state" is anything other than a stage of development that exists in all humans, but for one reason or another is suppressed in a small part of the population, such as yourself, which makes Atheists genetic aberrations as opposed to "normal" human beings.
or an Atheist. I've not seen any evidence that your being an Atheist gives you any comfort or solace or any assistance in dealing with the perfectly natural stresses and uncertainties that come with contemplating one's own mortality and the uncertainties of life. If anything, I see the exact opposite in you. I see hopelessness, depression and a morbid attitude of uselessness because you try to take refuge in reason and logic when, as many others have demonstrated over the ages, abandoning yourself to faith in something greater than yourself might actually make your life better. I've yet to see someone as prominent as Dawkins honestly address the value of "religious delusion" to society or the individual. The best he came up with, in TGD, is a vague question asking why it isn't better to be rational and reject delusion, which he pointedly never actually answers.
You're one to talk about pragmatics over principle.
How dare you lecture anyone about pragmatics.
"Who dares, wins." SAS motto
One of the reasons I recognize this trait in you is because I too suffer from the same atheistic ennui and dissatisfaction with life. But rather than respond to that internal conflict by attacking others for whom theistic religion is a solace and comfort and a moral compass that leads them to be better people, I try very hard to accept that my lack of belief is quite personal and isn't the fault of anyone or anything else, and I try to respect the beliefs of others...in other words, I'm tolerant of their beliefs so long as those beliefs manifest themselves peaceably and in positive, productive ways for both the individual and society in general.
EXACTLY the same for us, as we've mentioned many times over the years. The only problem we have with theism is when it starts messing with our lives. THAT is not acceptable.
That's not the impression get from your body of work. The impression I get is of a virulent and violent active hatred of all things theistic. As far as "messing with your life," most of theism through the ages has been beneficial and indeed can be traced back as the origin of much of what you enjoy as a part of your life. As for what's "acceptable," you sound positively Libertarian in your insistence on personal autonomy and freedom. I'd think you'd be directing your ire at Socialism and Marxism rather than religion, because both of them fuck with your life far more, and far more negatively, than religion ever has. Then again, being a Socialist and a Marxist who believes in majority rule, since the majority of human beings hold some sort of theistic belief, according to your own ethical and moral metrics, you should just shut the fuck up about theism and accept what the majority wants you to do.
Heinlein said it well when he said, "When the natives rub blue mud in their belly buttons, the polite thing to do is rub blue mud in yours." Thomas Jefferson was a Tolerist™ at heart when he said, "But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
And that's precisely why I'm a Tolerist™ and not an Atheist. It does me no harm to respect the peaceable religious beliefs and practices of others, and it's good manners and a plus for civilized society for me to respect their religious liberties that initiate neither force nor fraud against me. I don't have to believe with them or even agree with them, I just have to tolerate their peaceable activities and not render judgments about their beliefs or practices
because they do me no harm.
On the other hand, anyone who engages in initiating force or fraud and acts in a non-peaceable manner, no matter what the putative justification, be it religion, politics or anything else, does so at their own risk, because I reserve the right of self-defense against any and all non-peaceable actions.
Religion and belief in God exist as an evolved behavior at the very least, and the fact that 80 percent of the planet's population hold some sort of theistic belief is not something one can simply dismiss and ignore.
Who's dismissing and ignoring it?
More of your biases showing, Seth.
You're kidding right? You do so at every turn.
Even if it's all a delusion, people believe in theistic religions because it is useful and helpful to them in dealing with the difficulties of life.
No shit, Einstein?
Yes, no shit Lenny.
And what, exactly, is wrong with that?
Nothing at all. But you'll ignore this, as it doesn't fit your biased narrative.
Then what the hell are you bitching about all the time?
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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