TJ

I like movies that have a lot of lines that stick, and, some of my favorites in that category are Princess Bride, and, many of the Monty Python films.

That is because I like funny lines, and, while I appreciate the gold mine that the God Father, etc, provide, overall, I have a soft spot for well written comedy.

😀

I love your writing, it is really well done.

😀

I used to like cats, but, then the local Korean restaurant closed for some reason, and, well, I lost my preference for cats.

Other Korean restaurants opened, with different menus though.

Anyway, I prefer dogs now.

You know how it is, some people are cat people, and, some people are dog…[Read more]

Knowing how things work, includes knowing that they can work in random fashions, such as in the radiation example.

The universe did not spring from nothing, or nothingness, it simply always existed.

Matter and energy, as two forms of the same thing, cannot be created or destroyed.   We know it was in a hot dense state about 13.8 or so billion…[Read more]

Perhaps the focus upon the made up context of “free will” causes us to miss what we are actually valuing in our evaluations of reality.

For example, it seems we all have ideas about how things work, but when trying to find ways to tie that to the free will question, it becomes a tangled mess, because it is a made up concept… a construct.

That…[Read more]

Yeah, there’s no connection, and, the parties that every rational person would like to see drop their prejudices, never seem to equate their bigotry, with, well, bigotry in the first place….and, therefore, never seem to equate the way they treated blacks or other minorities (“If we let blacks and whites marry, what’s next, people and monkeys…[Read more]

The OP seems to say we are all evolved from the same sources, but some of us are predators, and some prey…but, also that the weaker sometimes ate the stronger….which is not supported as a premise, when you consider the involved scenarios.

Is a pack of hyenas “weaker” than a lion?

They tend to win in a fight at least, so, it would seem the…[Read more]

@What is God

God is the answer to what happens to where my lap goes when I stand up.

He is a mistake made by primates to help explain what they could not understand.

We are the force that created gods, a mistake.  Correction of that mistake eventually lead to understanding evolution, relativity, and the math involved in bill calculations at…[Read more]

Rarely have I had a visit BECAUSE of my atheism, TO convert me, per se, albeit, random visits by missionaries, fishers of men, etc, do occur.

Most purposeful conversations about religion in this context seem to involve someone finding out, casually, that I do not believe what they believe…and, their disbelief in my disbelief.

They then tend to…[Read more]

The affordable care act only changes the health care available to those who normally would not be able to afford it.  Those who were always able to afford it are not going to get much change in their level of care.

Its mostly about shifting the benefit to the insurance industries, towards the patients.

@ Simon

The premise though, that you postulate, implies that a religious god DOES provide morality.

This is simply not the case.

When HUMANS wrote down what they believed to be morals (How bad can you beat a slave before you are being unfair, etc), they simply ascribed what THEY felt to be moral, at the time they wrote it, to what god…[Read more]

I consider morality to simply being as fair as you can.

As for “an atheist morality”, that would be akin to a “stamp collector, or, a not a stamp collector’s”, morality, etc…in that there is no moral code required to not believe in gods.

That said, if you simply look at prison statistics, say, in the US for example, theists are over…[Read more]

Is there an option to make the threads readable, perhaps in some sort of chronological order or with replies to a post below the post they replied to?

As its formatted now, the site discussions are too hard to follow, and even being able to have posts in simple oldest to youngest order/top-down, would help/be a massive improvement.

I looked for…[Read more]