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Author Topic:   Federal Court & U.S. Supreme Court Ruling: Atheism is Religion
Alter2Ego
Member (Idle past 3820 days)
Posts: 72
From: Los Angeles, California
Joined: 04-06-2013


Message 1 of 61 (697677)
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


ALTER2EGO -to- EVERYONE:
Atheists consistently attempt to take the higher ground by insisting Christians are mental midgets for believing in a non-existent "sky gawd." They insist that the Judeo-Christian Bible is a book of fairytales. At one website where I have debated, the Bible was routinely referred to by atheists as the "BuyBull." Not only that, in most of my conversations with atheists at various websites, their usual accusation is that because of the belief in God, theists have committed all sorts of human rights violations in the name of "cultish religions." According to the many atheists I have debated at other websites, it is the belief in God that has caused people to commit the various atrocities common to mankind. Remove religion, belief in God, and belief in the Bible--the atheists argue--and the world will be a better place. This latter conclusion is mortally flawed for the following reasons:
Atheists have committed human rights violations en masse throughout history. For instance, Joseph Stalin--the atheist--ordered the deaths of between 40 million to 62 million people (20 million of whom were everyday Soviet civilians), compared to the 9 million or so killed by Adolph Hitler, the Roman Catholic who merely claimed he was a Christian.
In reality, the problem is not the Bible or God. The problem is people, including those in false religions that have failed to teach the masses Biblical truths. An appreciation for Biblical truths and Jehovah's righteous standards of what's right and what's wrong is the only detriment against people committing human rights violations. Blaming God for the crimes of false Christians and other false religions is an attempt at passing the buck.
"See! This only I have found, that the true God made mankind upright, but they themselves have sought out many plans." (Ecclesiastes 7:29)
DISCUSSION POINTS:
1.
Considering that atheists have themselves committed human rights violations under the banner of non-belief in a supernatural God or gods, can one successfully argue that "belief in god" is not the actual reason behind crimes against humanity? Or, in the alternative, can one successfully argue that it is indeed because of belief in God that people commit human atrocities?
2. Atheism is a religion according to a 2005 Wisconsin Federal Court ruling on the matter of Kaufman v. McCaughtry, as well as the Torcaso v. Watkins case that was affirmed by the 1961 U.S. Supreme Court--the highest court in the land--where court rulings become national law. However, atheists routinely argue they do not belong to a religion because, according to them, non-belief in God is proof positive that they are not religious. Do you agree with the atheists' position? Why so or why not?
3. Based upon numerous court rulings that atheism is religion, it is obvious that belief in a supernatural God or gods is not a requirement for being considered part of a religion. What arguments can you present along this line?
Edited by Alter2Ego, : No reason given.

"That people may know that you, whose name is JEHOVAH, you alone are the Most High over all the earth." (Psalms 83:18)

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 Message 5 by Percy, posted 04-28-2013 11:36 PM Alter2Ego has replied
 Message 6 by Coyote, posted 04-28-2013 11:43 PM Alter2Ego has replied
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Adminnemooseus
Administrator
Posts: 3974
Joined: 09-26-2002


Message 2 of 61 (697679)
04-28-2013 10:54 PM


Thread Copied from Proposed New Topics Forum

  
nwr
Member
Posts: 6408
From: Geneva, Illinois
Joined: 08-08-2005
Member Rating: 5.1


Message 3 of 61 (697682)
04-28-2013 11:15 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Alter2Ego
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


Atheists consistently attempt to take the higher ground by insisting Christians are mental midgets for believing in a non-existent "sky gawd."
This is an example of what is usually called a "sweeping generalization." You are taking what a few atheists say, and implying that all atheists do that. They don't.
By the way, some theists say rather nasty things about atheists. Should we indict all theists for that?
Based upon numerous court rulings that atheism is religion, ...
As far as I know, the courts are not arbiters of the meaning of words. You have not provided any citations. My guess is that the courts you are thinking about were only making a limited determination of the scope of the establishment clause of the first amendment to the US constitution.

Fundamentalism - the anti-American, anti-Christian branch of American Christianity

This message is a reply to:
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NoNukes
Inactive Member


(5)
Message 4 of 61 (697683)
04-28-2013 11:18 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Alter2Ego
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


Atheism is a religion according to a 2005 Wisconsin Federal Court ruling on the matter of Kaufman v. McCaughtry, as well as the Torcaso v. Watkins case that was affirmed by the 1961 U.S. Supreme Court--the highest court in the land--where court rulings become national law
Not exactly. Kaufman v. McCaughtry held that atheism was 'equivalent' to a religion, for the purposes of the First Amendment.
quote:
As such, we are satisfied that it qualifies as Kaufman's religion for purposes of the First Amendment claims he is attempting to raise.
If you want to make more of the holding than that, then you aren't following the holdings of the courts. You are off on a personal quest that none of us need care about.
As for Torcaso v. Watkins, there is a footnote that lists Secular Humanism as a religion, however the holding says the following (emphasis mine):
quote:
We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a State nor the Federal Government can constitutionally force a person "to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion." Neither can constitutionally pass laws or impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.
In short regardless of whether atheism is a belief or a non belief, the holding still applies. The words 'atheist' and 'atheism' never appear in the Torcaso opinion.
So is atheism a religion? Only in the same sense that not going to soccer matches is an activity.
according to them, non-belief in God is proof positive that they are not religious.
That argument would be stupid. I have never encountered an atheist on this site making such an argument.
I intend this to be my last post on this topic, so perhaps there is no need to respond to this post. I do find your ridiculous Hitler/Stalin comparison quite beyond the pale. You would do well not to continue to use it.
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass

This message is a reply to:
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Percy
Member
Posts: 22392
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.3


(8)
Message 5 of 61 (697684)
04-28-2013 11:36 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Alter2Ego
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


From James J. Kaufman, Plaintiff-appellant, v. Gary R. Mccaughtry, et al., Defendants-appellees:
The Supreme Court has said that a religion, for purposes of the First Amendment, is distinct from a "way of life," even if that way of life is inspired by philosophical beliefs or other secular concerns...A religion need not be based on a belief in the existence of a supreme being (or beings, for polytheistic faiths)...
...
Without venturing too far into the realm of the philosophical, we have suggested in the past that when a person sincerely holds beliefs dealing with issues of "ultimate concern" that for her occupy a "place parallel to that filled by...God in traditionally religious persons," those beliefs represent her religion...We have already indicated that atheism may be considered, in this specialized sense, a religion. See Reed v. Great Lakes Cos., 330 F.3d 931, 934 (7th Cir.2003) ("If we think of religion as taking a position on divinity, then atheism is indeed a form of religion.").
...
The Supreme Court has recognized atheism as equivalent to a "religion" for purposes of the First Amendment on numerous occasions...The Establishment Clause itself says only that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," but the Court understands the reference to religion to include what it often calls "nonreligion." In McCreary County, it described the touchstone of Establishment Clause analysis as "the principle that the First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion."
...
At one time it was thought that this right [referring to the right to choose one's own creed] merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.
...
Atheism is, among other things, a school of thought that takes a position on religion, the existence and importance of a supreme being, and a code of ethics. As such, we are satisfied that it qualifies as Kaufman's religion for purposes of the First Amendment claims he is attempting to raise.
Clearly the courts have only ruled that atheism is religion for the narrow purposes of applying the First Amendment. Note the part where it says “the Court understands the reference to religion [by the Supreme Court] to include what it often calls 'nonreligion.'”
Just as clearly, courts have ruled that atheism is not a religion for purposes of taxation. Certainly atheism isn't a religion if you define religion as belief in a supreme being or beings.
The question often raised when this subject comes up is why the worst criticism you can think to cast at atheism is that it is a religion.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Fix quotation marks.

This message is a reply to:
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Coyote
Member (Idle past 2106 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


(7)
Message 6 of 61 (697686)
04-28-2013 11:43 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Alter2Ego
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


Not so
Your claim that two courts have determined that atheism is a religion is unfounded.
Regarding Kaufman v. McCaughtry, what the Federal Court declared was that in a particular prison, under First Amendment rights, atheists have the same rights to meet as do religious groups.
The court noted:
It is undisputed that other religious groups are permitted to meet at Kaufman’s prison, and the defendants have advanced no secular reason why the security concerns they cited as a reason to deny his request for an atheist group do not apply equally to gatherings of Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or Wiccan inmates.
This is not the same as a court ruling that atheism is a religion. The court ruled that if you allow specific religious groups to meet, there is no valid security reason to prohibit anti-religious groups (i.e., atheists) to meet as well--under the same First Amendment. While being accorded the rights of a religious group under the law, this does not make them a religious group.
From Wiki:
Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961) was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court reaffirmed that the United States Constitution prohibits States and the Federal Government from requiring any kind of religious test for public office, in the specific case, as a notary public. ...
It has occasionally been argued that the Supreme Court, in Torcaso v Watkins, "found" Secular Humanism to be a religion. This assertion is based on a reference, by Justice Black, in a footnote (number 11) to the court's finding, to court cases where organized groups of self-identified Humanists, or Ethicists, meeting on a regular basis to share and celebrate their beliefs, have been granted religious-based tax exemptions.
Justice Black's use of the term "secular humanism" in his footnote has been seized upon by some religious groups, such as those supporting causes such as teaching creationism in schools, as a "finding" that any secular or science-based activity is, in fact, religion.
It should be noted that footnotes (dicta) are not a part of the opinion and have no force of law. Creationist websites, hoping that nobody will know this, frequently make claims such as you have repeated.
All this case did was overturn a state law that required an office-holder to declare his belief in God.
There was absolutely no legal status granted to "secular humanism" or to atheists by Torcaso.
All of what I have gathered here is freely available on the web. You should check your sources before reposting anything from a creationist or fundamentalist website. They tend to lie, misrepresent, obfuscate, and otherwise mislead their readers. They don't have any real evidence, so they have to do this!
Edited by Coyote, : speelling

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
Belief gets in the way of learning--Robert A. Heinlein
How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?--Robert A. Heinlein
It's not what we don't know that hurts, it's what we know that ain't so--Will Rogers

This message is a reply to:
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Pressie
Member
Posts: 2103
From: Pretoria, SA
Joined: 06-18-2010


Message 7 of 61 (697687)
04-29-2013 1:03 AM
Reply to: Message 6 by Coyote
04-28-2013 11:43 PM


Re: Not so
Thanks for the information, Coyote.
This is a regular "argument" heard from lots of religious people. As I don't live in the US, I normally don't know what it all was about and don't find it worth going into. You cleared it up for me in one short post.
The bottom of the story is that Alter2Ego did not tell the truth about the findings in those court cases.
I wonder why Alter2Ego did this?
Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

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NoNukes
Inactive Member


Message 8 of 61 (697733)
04-29-2013 10:59 AM
Reply to: Message 7 by Pressie
04-29-2013 1:03 AM


Re: Not so
The bottom of the story is that Alter2Ego did not tell the truth about the findings in those court cases.
I wonder why Alter2Ego did this?
Alter2Ego's post is sufficiently within sniffing distance of the truth to allow asking some of those pointed YES/NO 'have you stopped beating your wife yet' type questions. Isn't that the type of 'reasoning' we've come to expect?
Yes, footnote 11 that Alter2Ego refers to is present in the opinion, but the footnote is not the opinion of the court, nor is it part of the reasoning behind the court's opinion. It is the opinion of the one Justice selected to write the opinion, which does not make the footnote the law of the law. As Coyote said, it is dicta only.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)
I would say here something that was heard from an ecclesiastic of the most eminent degree; ‘That the intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes.’ Galileo Galilei 1615.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass

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Otto Tellick
Member (Idle past 2331 days)
Posts: 288
From: PA, USA
Joined: 02-17-2008


Message 9 of 61 (697863)
05-01-2013 8:16 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Alter2Ego
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


Alter2Ego writes:
In reality, the problem is not the Bible or God. The problem is people,
I couldn't agree more. Indeed, the problem begins with the people who write "scripture" and invent gods in order to externalize the responsibility for whatever behavior they want to incite (be it good or bad behavior).
... including those in false religions that have failed to teach the masses Biblical truths.
Or Buddhist truths, or Hindu truths, or Zoroastrian truths, or Mayan or Aztec truths, or animist truths, or (my personal favorite) Socratic truths.
An appreciation for Biblical truths and Jehovah's righteous standards of what's right and what's wrong is the only detriment against people committing human rights violations.
(I think you meant to say "deterrent" rather than "detriment".) No, I think you're quite wrong on that point, for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, the terms "Biblical truths" and "Jehovah's righteous standards" encompass rather a lot of nasty stuff (slavery, rape, merciless genocide, etc); on the other hand, there are quite a few deterrents against people committing human rights violations that have no dependence whatsoever on the Bible or your particular God.
Blaming God for the crimes of false Christians and other false religions is an attempt at passing the buck.
Since I agree with you that the root of the problem is people, and especially since I don't think there is any such thing as a God of the sort you are referring to here, this statement seems to me very much like a strawman argument. And then there's the "no true Scotsman" aroma that always comes with phrases like "false Christians and other false religions". Would you like to present any sort of evidence-based criteria for differentiating "true Christians" from "false" ones? Is it simply that "true Christians don't do things that we consider bad"?
Regarding your first discussion point, I think it's worthwhile to get a little more clarity about the motivation and implementation of atrocities by "atheists" like Stalin, in comparison to those of religious practitioners. (BTW, I think Stalin was an "atheist" primarily in the sense that he opposed organized religion because he viewed it as unacceptable competition for his own demagogic ambitions.)
Stalin was indeed responsible for many millions of deaths, not only through ordering deliberate acts of violence (and possibly murdering people himself), but also through the enforcement of disastrous policies for farming (based on dogmatic pronouncements rather than evidence), which led to widespread starvation. Do you think this violence was specifically addressed against theists because of their beliefs, and their clash against Stalin's atheism?
I think not. Stalin murdered people (or ordered them to be murdered) primarily for the sake of expanding and sustaining his own power. Now, when Shiites and Sunnis, or Catholics and Protestants, or Hindus and Muslims, or Jews and Muslims, or Buddhists and Muslims, or Christians and Muslims, or Jews and Christians, or Hindus and Sikhs, or... well, whenever any given pair of religions come into conflict, such that adherents of one seek to annihilate those of the other and/or vice-versa, it can certainly be argued that the violence here is also for the sake of expanding and sustaining the power of the particular groups (actually, the religious leaders of those groups).
But in those various religious conflicts, the stated reason for violence is always cited to be the will of a deity, and the targeting of violence is always selective, based specifically on the beliefs that people hold. This contrasts starkly with Stalin's violence, which was only selective on the basis of whether he personally felt that a victim's death would further the interests of the Stalinist regime, but was otherwise indiscriminate.
{AbE: It's also quite likely that a lot of killing may have been done by others within Stalin's regime, acting entirely on their own initiative and without his knowledge, for the purpose of expanding/sustaining their own power, whether or not they felt it would advance the Stalinist agenda.}
In religious conflicts, it is specifically the identification of persons with particular religious creeds that drives the selection of victims in targeting violence. If the religious beliefs (or the differences among religious beliefs) did not exist, there would be no motivation for the violence.
Edited by Otto Tellick, : No reason given.

autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.

This message is a reply to:
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New Cat's Eye
Inactive Member


(4)
Message 10 of 61 (697873)
05-01-2013 10:28 AM
Reply to: Message 9 by Otto Tellick
05-01-2013 8:16 AM


In religious conflicts, it is specifically the identification of persons with particular religious creeds that drives the selection of victims in targeting violence. If the religious beliefs (or the differences among religious beliefs) did not exist, there would be no motivation for the violence.
I wonder how true this is. I'd bet that many "religious" conflicts were actually political in nature but the leaders just realized that they could gather the troops better if they said that it was for religion.
But I'm not sure how we could tell...

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Taq
Member
Posts: 9973
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.7


(1)
Message 11 of 61 (697876)
05-01-2013 10:53 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Alter2Ego
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


Considering that atheists have themselves committed human rights violations under the banner of non-belief in a supernatural God or gods, can one successfully argue that "belief in god" is not the actual reason behind crimes against humanity? Or, in the alternative, can one successfully argue that it is indeed because of belief in God that people commit human atrocities?
I have always been fond of this quote:
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evilthat takes religion."--Steven Weinberg
That sums up my view as well. Religion causes people to subvert their own reason and follow the edicts of the priesthood. What follows can be quite evil.

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Rahvin
Member
Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


(5)
Message 12 of 61 (697884)
05-01-2013 12:09 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by Taq
05-01-2013 10:53 AM


I think the real crux of the issue is the human tendency to believe unsupported assertions coupled with a strong bias towards positions of emotional preference.
Religion is just a single (and easily visible) symptom of the greater disease. One could easily throw "statism," various cults of personality, and other non-religious fountains of irrational zeal into the same pot. There are plenty of irrational atheists, and it doesn't take religion to make them do bad things - the capacity for inhumanity is both ironically and tragically human.
The subversion of reason in favor of authority is perhaps most obvious in religion, but it doesn't have a monopoly.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995.

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Rahvin
Member
Posts: 4032
Joined: 07-01-2005
Member Rating: 9.2


(1)
Message 13 of 61 (697885)
05-01-2013 12:16 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Alter2Ego
04-28-2013 10:20 PM


I know you've already been dogpiled, so I'll be brief.
The Supreme Court is a court of law - their findings are relevant for the purposes of law, and do not dictate reality.
For the purposes of legal application of freedoms, non-religion or "atheism" qualifies for exactly the same rights and freedoms that does any religion. The Freedom of Religion means that in the US everyone is free to worship according to the dictates of their own personal conscience without interference from the government, and these rulings affirm that the government has no right to infringe on those who do not worship, just as it has no right to infringe on those who do. That's all.
It doesn't change the definitions of terms. Atheists still don't believe in gods. Many (most?) atheists are not religious in any consistent definition of the term, and to describe the religion of those who most typically self-identify as "atheists," an accurate analogy would be that "atheism" is to "religion" as "bald" is to "hair color."
But if it makes you feel better, I could point out that there are atheist religions - Buddhists do not believe in any deity and are therefore atheists, but are certainly religious. There are many "spiritual" forms of worship, from worshiping natural spirits to ancestor worship, that do not profess a belief in deities and are therefore atheistic, but are also still religions.

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995.

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Taq
Member
Posts: 9973
Joined: 03-06-2009
Member Rating: 5.7


Message 14 of 61 (697895)
05-01-2013 1:21 PM
Reply to: Message 12 by Rahvin
05-01-2013 12:09 PM


I think the real crux of the issue is the human tendency to believe unsupported assertions coupled with a strong bias towards positions of emotional preference.
Religion is just a single (and easily visible) symptom of the greater disease. One could easily throw "statism," various cults of personality, and other non-religious fountains of irrational zeal into the same pot. There are plenty of irrational atheists, and it doesn't take religion to make them do bad things - the capacity for inhumanity is both ironically and tragically human.
The subversion of reason in favor of authority is perhaps most obvious in religion, but it doesn't have a monopoly.
Completely agree, and I think that is the sentiment that Weinberg was trying to convey. Worship of the State can result in just as many atrocities as worship of a god.

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New Cat's Eye
Inactive Member


(1)
Message 15 of 61 (697912)
05-01-2013 2:53 PM
Reply to: Message 12 by Rahvin
05-01-2013 12:09 PM


Religion is just a single (and easily visible) symptom of the greater disease.
I think it's telling that, rather than realize the greater issue, the OP wants to bring atheism (what they feel is) downward towards being a religion.
"Atheism is so bad, its like a religion"
Its as if they already think deep down that being a religion is a bad thing. And I doubt that at the surface they're willing to face that.

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 Message 16 by hooah212002, posted 05-01-2013 3:21 PM New Cat's Eye has replied
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