1237: Bad Egg

[Jo_Culprit]

Originally Posted by Junkenstein

yeah i see that, and that's a reason for my own pet peeve against cocky atheists.

It's like fake anarchists, they put shame ona a whole pretty reasonable movement because they use it to be cocky and judgemental.

same words can be applied to religion, yes.

Assholes are assholes, if they're religious or non-religious., The spite applied by devoted christians is the exact one that snarky atheists have.

This.

[DWarrior]

Originally Posted by The King of Awesome

This is why atheists are despised by a lot of people. You can't just not believe and go about your regular business, you have to say that everyone who is religious is an idiot. I am atheist, but I am not going to go judge people who are religious. If I were to judge people based on which higher power they believed in, then that's really no different than people who do believe in a higher power - and then you have no right to look down on them, which makes you a hypocrite.

Let religious people be religious, and let your own religious views be your own - no need to force them onto others. You're not atheist because you want to brag about it to others, right?

Wouldn't you agree that rationality is a characteristic of intelligence? Atheists tend to be rational because they look at lack of evidence, whereas religious people, when they even bother justifying their beliefs, twist the facts or fail to recognize alternative, simpler explanations of the events they describe. Also their pro-faith arguments such as punishing/rewarding diety as a pre-requisite for morality, and other similar nonsense demonstrate defective rationality. So I think atheists are justified in making a judgement-call of theists' intelligence based on the lack of rationality.

Religious people might not overtly call atheists stupid (because atheists actually give arguments for their atheism, so it's hard to say "you're using logic, you're stupid"), but they still judge atheists negatively all the same, and their judging is of the bigoted sort.

EDIT: "hipster" Atheists, and other irrational atheists are just as irrational as religious people.

[Jo_Culprit]

Just on the whole "religious assholes vs. non-religious assholes"

Theres (almost) no real silver lining to altheism and I think people that really believe there is nothing after death go through a crisis of mortality.

Why did I raise this point? well because all the assholes that are athiests I've met are so focused on the back forth justification struggle with the devout that they never really consider the mortality they believe in.

Whereas i think althiests who have gone through this crisis are much more understanding of religious belief, because they perhaps would rather be devout and have something to look for to after death. Ignorance is bliss and all that.

[poingjam]

There was no "probably not" in the poll, so I went with no. I don't believe in God (or anything else, really), but I accept that there are things I don't know and probably never will. It just seems unlikely to me that there's a big dude in the sky handing out rules.

Oh, and the silver lining of atheism and/or agnosticism is the ability to be yourself. If I had to conform to God's rules (according to the Baptist tradition that I started out with), I'd be a bigger mess than I am. I'm lustful, vengeful, and deceitful (on occasion, anyway), and I'm totally comfortable with those traits because I don't have a book telling me that I should be ashamed of them.

Edit number two! Non-believers who constantly bash believers are childish. You can believe what you want, but don't judge people for believing something else or you'll come off like a dick.

[Carruthers]

Originally Posted by DWarrior

Whether or not it cares doesn't really matter. If it exists, it'd be important for the same reason any other science is important ...

Oh, right. I won't argue with that. Some would though.

[Anxious Nerd]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

Because when you realize there's more to life than getting a girlfriend, you'll need to face your own questions about mortality and purpose. It's part of being human.

Yousa thinking yousa people ganna die?

[Anxious Nerd]

I view God as always being other people's God. The Gods sold by the major religions sound shitty and no one seems to believe in the stock God anyway. It's always a case of picking and choosing from a religion the bits that you want to follow and then throw in some mysticism while you're there. At this stage I'm widening from God to religion in general as it's all about following the word of God. The afterlife is covered as being part of God's great plan.

The question for me is does a God exist. But I wouldn't know what God to concoct for myself, nor how to begin to convince myself of its existence. God is an idea that people only vaguely agree upon and so it isn't something I can begin to grapple with.

Here's a basic question that I can't really resolve within myself:
What's the point of God creating anything, let alone humans?
If God felt the need to create anything, does that mean God was bored? playful? creative? incomplete?
Why stop after one reality? Why bother to actually create it, isn't it enough to just perfectly cognitively conceive the notion?
If we are but a notion, then what point would there be of an afterlife?

[Osiris]

I answered no, because I don't believe in God in the classical sense. The Universe operates on a certain set of rules, and I've asked myself how or why these rules exist. Some people call it God, others call it Science. I don't believe there is any sort of being that has any influence day to day, I don't think that anything on earth was "created." But I don't know how it all got started, so maybe that makes me agnostic and I shouldn't have answered. I hope this didn't ruin the Scientificness of the poll

[-John-]

Pull down all the places of worship and use the land for something useful, stop teaching religion in schools if you wana believe in stupid things keep it in your own home. I think we should live in a god free world. There should be no debates about this nonsense. we shouldn't have to disprove it, we should live as if its fiction (which it is) the people that do believe should have to prove there is a god. otherwise religion should be ignored completely. its the 21st century for fuck sake.

[DWarrior]

To keep consistent with my avatar: