[quote]Sloth wrote:
[quote]darsemnos wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]darsemnos wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]darsemnos wrote:
[quote]pat wrote:
[quote]darsemnos wrote:
Clarity is offensive.
If atheists communicate clearly, it will be offesive, because religion is almost always ridiculous, and often evil.
[/quote]
Insults and mocking are certainly clear. It doesn’t mean anything, it has no basis in fact or point. It’s sad, small and petty, really. If you have to resort to insults and mocking, it just means you have no point and pretty much concede you lost the argument. If you have to resort to it, who’s being ridiculous and evil, really?
What’s Dawkins really saying here? If you come across a religious person, act like your a 12 year old bully repeating 6th grade? That’s fabulous advice, glad you’re taking it to heart.[/quote]
No, it means point out the truth clearly. Evolution is a fact. The Big Bang happened. The earth is not less than 10,000 years old. It’s at least 400,000 times older. We DO have common ancestry with other apes.
Clarity is offensive because much in religion is silly. Take Christianity. God sacrifices himself (but not really,since Jesus is supposedly alive and well) to himself so he can protect us from his wrath that resulted from us being exactly as he made us to be. Well Adam sinned, but god still set him up to fail, on purpose, and everyone else is just born into a losing struggle such that they literally have to beg forgiveness for being born.
It’s psychologically unhealthy to feel guilty for being being born.
This is taught to children who are brainwashed to think they are literally evil and deserve to be tortured alive in fire forever. Love god or he will TORTURE YOU FOREVER. Literally. This is taught to CHILDREN. Do you think telling children they are evil and deserve to be torched forever is not psychologically harmful? It borders on abuse.
Not to mention the evil commandments in the Old Testament. Almost no one lives according to Old Testament because anyone acting the way god commanded the Israelites to would be on death row because our morality has progressed.
Slaughtering entire cities. Literal genocide. Well, sometimes the virgin women were allowed to live. Guess why. Would you thrust a sword through the belly of a child? God ordered men to do this according to the Bible. God commanded that women marry the man who raped her. God commanded people be put to death for imaginary crimes like witchcraft, and for homosexuality. He also commanded half of Israel to be subject to ritual genital mutilation. Lot is called a good man, even though when the men of Sodom come to his door to rape the angels he offers up his daughters to be raped. A man who offers up his daughters to literally be gang-raped is called a good man by GOD. God thinks gang-rape is ok apparently.
This is clarity.
Clarity is saying what everyone is thinking but for so long it was considered rude to state explicitly. Religion has had it far too easy for far too long. [/quote]
That’s not clarity. That’s a sophomoric grasp of theology. Clarity is not insulting. Misrepresenting, creating straw men out of people’s beliefs and then mocking the believer for something you say they believe, but don’t actually believe is mocking and rhetorical propaganda. It’s not illumination, it’s ignorance.
You aren’t tearing ideas down, you’re tearing people down based basically on bullshit.
Just because you don’t understand the subject matter, does not make other people who do understand it stupid. It means you’re uneducated on the topic, it doesn’t mean religious people are silly.
[/quote]
What bullshit? Everything I said is in the Bible. Is there a context in which murdering gays, genital mutilation, making women marry their rapists, genocide so you can steal land, are ok?
Exactly what have I misrepresented?
[/quote]
Cherry picking events in the Bible from biased, propaganda articles from www.infidels.org is hardly representative knowledge of scripture, religion or religious peoples.
Your misrepresentation is, that like most militant new atheists you try to paint religion and scripture as inherently evil, where probably like more militant new atheists, evil has no actual meaning since it is relative.
You haven’t read the Bible, you don’t know the Bible yet you see fit to criticize it.
For some reason, in the context of the Bible, it’s the only book where people who have not read it, do not understand it in any context see fit to criticize it. Where any other such treatment of a book, where a person who has not read it and has no actual knowledge of it would be roundly and mercilessly criticized for doing so.
I can already hear it now. “How do you know I didn’t read it?” or my favorite line, “I read it more time than you have!” No, you haven’t. It’s interesting, though, that the people who make such claims seldom know more about it than what’s in the average “Atrocities in the Bible” articles on their favorite atheist propaganda website. [/quote]
Nope. I haven’t read the whole Bible. I’ve read the entire New Testament, at least once, but not the Old Testament. I’ve read Genesis through Exodus probably at least twice. But it gets SO boring after that.
What context do you need? In what context is forcing a woman to marry the man who raped her a good idea? In what context is slaughtering an entire city just so you can take their land ok? In what context is killing homosexuals ok? In what context would you be willing to let your daughter marry a man who raped her? Would you ever be willing to let this happen? No, you’d more likely kill the man that let that happen.
These words ARE IN THE BIBLE. That’s all the knowledge you need.
This isn’t any old book. It’s a book many people want to use to reshape the world. And it commands things, at least did command things, that would make most people on death row feel guilty.
Please explain how you “understand” the Bible such that these things are good. I understand it as well as you do, and you’ve provided no evidence, no argument even, to explain otherwise. I was a Christian in a fairly fundamentalist sect.
You can’t define objectively good health. How dare you ever say anything is healthy or unhealthy. [/quote]
You don’t believe in good and bad, to be asking these questions. In your world none of these events are actually wrong. It would require you to fess up to something you can’t prove, “evil/good.” Faith, in other words.
Now, by our faith, God determines what is good and bad. Not us for him, but him for us. Because, he is completely insurmountable. And despite your assurances, your tone doesn’t convince me you’re of a kinder, gentler, mindset. You crow about your hatred, and your disbelief in the reality of evil. Yeah, frankly, I think your utopia would turn into a nightmare within generations. [/quote]
Your god’s goodness is arbitrary. How does he determine it? How do you know he’s not the villain and Satan is the hero? How do you know he’s honest?
I’m incapable of not judging your god based on his supposed works. I would have to lie to myself. If torturing billions of souls for eternity is good according to your god, then I stand proudly defiant in support the superiority of my morality to god’s, for mine is based about caring about conscious creatures, not hating them and torturing them for not being what they could not be. It takes a certain kind of crazy to hold people responsible for things they had no role in.
And god’s god who left him in charge of this little universe for a brief time will reward me with omni-heaven for seeing through the sham while you’re left in omni-hell.
I’m not in person who I am online. I hope you aren’t either.
Utopia is impossible and undesirable. That’s why liberalism is prone to such stupidity. Liberalism’s motto should be “Utopia Now!”