Dang Martin

JadeBlackOlive wrote:
No such thing as miracles. Baby born healthy is just that…..born healthy!

Indeed. I sighed, accepted it, and proceeded to move forward.

physeter wrote:
I heard how she was preaching on the meaning of this, and I thought, it sounds like this applies to DACA, to the dreamers. And you know what? SHE FUCKING WENT THERE. She said so right from the pulpit. She said God calls us to be as loving as possible, not so worried about enforcing the rules; and she didn’t stop there, she also s…

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Belle Rose wrote:
There are PLENTY of examples of God intervening in miraculous ways in this world and yet you say there is always some sort of “other” explanation- but for some things that happened to me there isn’t….

How would you know that it is your god, Yahweh, who is intervening, and not Allah, or Vishnu, or any of the other gods? Was it…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
For me, becoming an atheist was a matter of putting away childish things and learning to become an adult. That’s a self-perception, I’m not calling other people childish, just describing my own experience.

This reminded me of an audio book I got a while back called “Letting Go of God” by Julia Sweeney. She tells her story of how…[Read more]

When I stop and think about things like Easter, as an adult, I still cannot see the correlation between a huge, anthropomorphic bunny with colored boiled eggs, and the story of a man who is supposedly the son of god, who had a really horrific three-day weekend for my sins, which had not yet happened.

Outside of the name, Christmas has little…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
but what’s wrong with having faith in physical laws and logic? One needn’t be defensive about disbelieving in magic.

I just wrote a long rant about this, before seeing this.

What’s wrong with having faith in physical laws and logic is that faith is not required.

Why muddy the waters by introducing faith or belief into these areas?

The word “believe” is more destructive than one might think. Not looking more deeply into it will produce deadly consequences.

I was reminded of how destructive it can be last night, watching a video of Bill Maher, where he’s talking about Conservatives who “do not believe in climate change.”

When he says it that way, it puts things like climate…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
Dang, what an upbringing! I can’t imagine what itt must have been like to plunge into 20th century America’s schooling system without knowing about their religion. Up until then, how did your parents handle Christmas and Easter?

Christmas and Easter were just holidays, like the Fourth of July or Halloween.

Easter was about that bun…[Read more]

Belle Rose wrote:
Honestly Physeter I think that Christianity varies a lot across the United States. I personally found that a lot about atheism didn’t add up for me.

There are over 50,000 brands of Christianity available for purchase, and yes they do vary. One thing they have in common is that each believes that THEY are correct, while the m…[Read more]

Belle Rose wrote:

Now, you’ve never even HEARD of Gezcabr before. You don’t know what this might be, so you ask me to explain it. I then proceed to tell you a story that actually requires lots of “teaching” as a child in order to believe. In other words, it’s not something that just anyone is capable of believing.

I don’t buy it. That sort of rid…

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Belle Rose wrote:
@regthefronkeyfarmer

“I believe in God” they are informing us that they have giving their cognitive assent to the proposition that “I understand that (a specific) God exists”. They are making a knowledge based claim because they are, by default, asserting that their statement is “True”.

It’s the same thing when you say you see n…

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Nerdy Keith wrote:

Dang Martin wrote:
It’s a damned tricky word, which is why I avoid it. Beer is easier.

Agreed. It’s better to simply say “I don’t believe in this.” etc.

Even then, I avoid the word “believe.” It’s too complex and loaded. “I see no reason why I should accept that this is true,” is more where I go.

I know it sounds lik…[Read more]

It’s a damned tricky word, which is why I avoid it. Beer is easier.

Unseen wrote:

Dang Martin wrote:
“What do you mean by ‘believe’” would be a fair question. But it’s better to leave those words out of the discussion, beyond citing whether or not a person has “religious belief.”

“I believe I’ll have another beer.”

Now we’re talkin’.