rhonjon

_Robert_ wrote:
The kid next door on my childhood street in Palm Beach County grew up to become a Catholic priest who sexually abused a woman while performing an exorcism on her. Lucky for him, the church settled with her out of court. Prior to that, he was sort of a rock star priest. They were so proud.

His anti-abortion activity began in the…

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Unseen wrote:

jakelafort wrote:
Ever see the medieval Christian devices to stop erections while sleeping ?

Do they involve mousetraps or starving weasels?

Mousetrap?! I can’t believe you said that. It even made me wince. They may be schizophrenic, but apparently, they’re not squeamish.

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Ever see the medieval Christian devices to stop erections while sleeping ? Put a nun in your bed?? Nun for you tonight Holy Father!

Three nuns were at a vegetable stand where they brought cucumbers on sale four for a dollar.

First nun: Wait a minute. There are four cucumbers, but there are only three of…[Read more]

DrBob wrote:
Oh, I don’t think we’re any more schizophrenic than anyone else. For the record, Dia de Los Muertos is not a Catholic holiday or celebration, official or otherwise, and some practices are discouraged by the Church. It’s a cultural celebration, much like the 4th of July or Memorial Day is in the U.S. Priests may visit cemeteries with…

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Unseen wrote:
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it but Roman Catholicism has a highly irrational side as well as a highly rational side. The irrational side incorporates a fair amount of paganism and local religious practices having no liturgical justification. Mexico, a largely Catholic country gives us a couple well-known examples. One…

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This is one of the main reasons why I’m an atheist when it comes to the God of the bible.

As long as you keep God out there, nebulous and ineffable, his existence cannot be disproven. But when you entomb God in the pages of a book and claim he did this, that, and the other in human history, you open those claims to the scrutiny of historians a…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:
Rhonjon,

The Universe is Not Expanding. What is it Doing?

It just is what it is, as as people dejectedly say nowadays about things that do not have to be that way. 😁 More seriously, expanding does not necessarily mean everything is expanding at the same pace or direction. Hence, individual entities within the Universe…

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The Jews didn’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah they had been looking for. Jesus himself thought the tribulation and his second coming would occur before all the people he had been talking to at that time had passed away. He spoke of the false messiahs as if they would come after he was gone.

it’s crazy trying to make sense of this. The chu…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
“I’d like to see the day when Christianity goes the way of Zeus. Will it be a roll of the dice or is there some sense to the way things happen?” You are not likely to encounter many antitheists with greater vituperation and contempt for religion. Having said that make Christianity disappear and in its place some other horro…

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_Robert_ wrote:
The problem is that most of the world’s cultures are so preloaded with the artifacts of religion. It invades our languages, our traditions, our institutions, our relationships, hierarchies and gatherings, our expectations and our history. There is no pure control group; we have no idea what a non-fantasy-inclined secular human s…

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We have evolved all the senses that we need to survive on this planet. Organs for sensing things that are not necessary for our survival were not evolved because such organs would use up resources making us less likely to survive.

My survival doesn’t depend on me sensing infra red or seeing the same color that you see. All I need is to be a…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
I think what this thread is trying to determine is whether we can reap the benefits of spirituality (peace, love, happiness, social harmony, a sense of awe) without having to resort to religious delusion, supernaturalism, mysticism. Reminds me of can we be good without god. How the theists have controlled the narrative and had…

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Unseen wrote:
We know more about the cosmos than we know about consciousness. In a sense, we all know what it is. It’s what we have when we are conscious. What is the relationship between what’s inside the consciousness and the world outside of it? How is it produced? Even knowing where consciousness resides in the brain tells us little. We may…

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Simon Paynton wrote:

rhonjon wrote:
What we feel for Russia is not love but a calculated understanding that we would benefit from a healthy Russian society. Or if not benefit directly, then at least not fear nuclear attack.

I think in general we need to have compassion for our enemies, or we’re all lost. If we want Russia to be doing well, w…

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At this point, it won’t get us anywhere to continue  analyzing the merits (or lack thereof) of the word spiritual.

I think what this thread is trying to determine is whether we can reap the benefits of spirituality (peace, love, happiness, social harmony, a sense of awe) without having to resort to religious delusion, supernaturalism, my…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Unseen wrote:
To love someone is not to want them to be happy. What might make them happy could be, to quote Conan The Barbarian, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women”

The West wants Russia to be happy, at least in the sense of being well functioning and well adj…

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_Robert_ wrote:

Unseen wrote:

_Robert_ wrote:
Yes, there was real science, math, engineering and even some true medicine going on. They knew the earth was round (~5th century BC) and even had astronomical computers like the Antikythera mechanism 50BC.

For f**k’s sake. European astronomy didn’t even start to catch up to the cosmological and ast…

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Here’s the whole message:

What we call the age of discovery was actually the age of rediscovery. Very few intellectuals today want to admit it, but I think that when a mob of angry Christians burned the library of Alexandria in the fifth or sixth century, they didn’t destroy everything. They kept some of that knowledge just like the C…[Read more]

This was a great way to hide the fact that Jesus was born on Natalis Solis Invicti.