Athiesm vs Judaism

[ricdes]

In my opinion, there is no versus. As long as you dont kill anyone because of their beliefs, every religion that doesnt encourage you to kill yourself or persue any other violent illegal activity has the right to exist.

Hell, I have jeweish, catholic, reformed and islamic friends. We honestly don't really care about what religion your parents have, we're just friends. And when I meet someone new I dont really care if he's a jew or whatsoever.

I think religion is overrated these days. Like someone said before in this thread: What matters these days is education, not your religion.

 

[ckclark121]

Hell, I have jeweish, catholic, reformed and islamic friends. We honestly don't really care about what religion your parents have, we're just friends. And when I meet someone new I dont really care if he's a jew or whatsoever.

Likewise

 

[BluuueJammm]

Atheism is its own religion.

No, it's the exact opposite.

When you open a jug of milk after its been pasteurized and find life. I will convert.

Right, because the Earth was just like a jug of pasteurized milk when life began.

Oh yeah and dont give me that same line "well after billions and billions of year" after billions of years Santa and his rain deer will came visit you too.

Well the Earth has been about for around 4.5 billion years and I ain't seen Santa yet! Are you saying that it hasn't been around for that long?

 

[ckclark121]

No, it's the exact opposite.

Your definition of 'religion' must fall somewhere along the lines of “the service and worship of God or the supernatural.” By this definition, Atheism is clearly not a religion. However many atheist define religion as "a belief in the existence of God" and feel they are warranted the same protection as all other religions. Which brings me to this. Are atheist confused or having just a really hard time agreeing? My intentions are not confrontational, only conversational.

 

[pat J]

Your definition of 'religion' must fall somewhere along the lines of “the service and worship of God or the supernatural.” By this definition, Atheism is clearly not a religion. However many atheist define religion as "a belief in the existence of God" and feel they are warranted the same protection as all other religions. Which brings me to this. Are atheist confused or having just a really hard time agreeing? My intentions are not confrontational, only conversational.

Atheism is as much of a religion as theism. There are atheistic religions and theists that are non-religious.

Is it really that hard?

 

[xentech]

I believe in God as such I've said it a billion times...

I don't believe in hell. It's a stupid concept not alligned with goodness

Could you explain to me in specific why hell is any more a stupid concept then God?

Your definition of 'religion' must fall somewhere along the lines of “the service and worship of God or the supernatural.” By this definition, Atheism is clearly not a religion. However many atheist define religion as "a belief in the existence of God" and feel they are warranted the same protection as all other religions. Which brings me to this. Are atheist confused or having just a really hard time agreeing? My intentions are not confrontational, only conversational.

Atheism is the LACK of belief in a God. Atheism is in no way a religion. If somebody tells you they are an atheist, there is only ONE thing you can retain from that piece of information: they do not believe in a God. You cannot presume anything else from knowing that, they simply lack a belief in a deity.

re·li·gion
1.
a. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe.
b. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship.

2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order.
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader.
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.


Atheism is not a religion.

 

[xentech]

All current life comes from other life. Which leads me to believe there is a designer that made everything with purpose and gave us the ability to choose and think.

Could you please explain how the observation you mentioned leads you to believe that? I can't see the connection...

 

[xentech]

Sorry about the multiple responses. :updown:

im pretty sure the image is a animated gif that actually does turn both ways.. if u watch it enough youll see it switch..

No, it's an optical illusion.

Agnostics suspend judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God is very probable although impossible to prove. After reading Einstein's works, I take he partially fell into the above category.

Do you hold that the existence of God is very probable? If so why?

 

[emp]

Atheism is not a religion.

Atheism is to religion as baldness is to hair color.

::emp::

 

[allco]

The woman is spinning to her right, and to the viewers left. If you were looking from above her, she would be spinning to the right. If viewing from below her, spinning to the left. Of course his point - it's all about perspective. And I suppose we communicate it as left and right because we were taught what left and right is.

When a child is born. He/she is clean slate, a fresh mind, maybe even with great knowledge but incapable of communicating and using all the body functions because the brain is in early development.

This is when the child has to be taught by his/her parents (first and foremost). The parents are teaching the child "their" beliefs from what they were taught and what they have experienced in their lives.

When the child is old enough, through the teens, he/she needs to rebel the parents (which is healthy), as he/she are starting to form their own ideas and beliefs. Then as an adult and through the rest of life, the goal is to shed the "conditioning" from childhood and to experience life as an individual.

Hopefully the parents encouraged the child early on to find his/her own individual perspective and possibilities outside of their beliefs.

Some people think religion was created as a form of control (on the masses) like a government and also a reason to give people a sense of purpose and explanation of life itself. To give comfort, knowing that you are living for a reason, and something out there is watching out for you and there may be more after life for you.

If GOD is the father of creation, human beings. Then we are all the children - we all have god within us. Which means we are all equal to it and to each other, and free to have different experiences and perspectives in living our individual lives.

And what about reality as a whole, how we perceive and experience it. Is is possible that there is more than one reality or dimension, more than one consciousness? Are we as a consensus on the same frequency perceiving one single reality? Is there one single energy force (or GOD) which this or all realities stem from?

Life certainly presents us all with challenges to overcome from within ourselves. I think the end goal is to find happiness within yourself and your brothers and sisters and contribute in any positive way you can.

Science / Metaphysics

Don't kill dolphins!


/you are what you is

 

[xentech]

The woman is spinning to her right, and to the viewers left. If you were looking from above her, she would be spinning to the right. If viewing from below her, spinning to the left.

What? That's completely incorrect. If she was spinning to the right you would see that whether you were looking from above or below. Maybe your thinking of looking through a mirror..?

And what about reality as a whole, how we perceive and experience it. Is is possible that there is more than one reality or dimension, more than one consciousness? Are we as a consensus on the same frequency perceiving one single reality? Is there one single energy force (or GOD) which this or all realities stem from?

Of course all of those things are possible, but we simply don't know. However, we also don't know whether or not the universe was created by an Octopus named Steve in an old instance of reality, but just the same as with religion, we have no reason to believe it.

 

[allco]

What? That's completely incorrect. If she was spinning to the right you would see that whether you were looking from above or below. Maybe your thinking of looking through a mirror..?

huh.... it looked like she was spinning to her right... hmmm...

If we were facing each other, and there was an arrow between us. If the head of the arrow was pointing right from your view, it would look like it's pointing left from my view. Is what I meant.

 

[blueRAP]

The spinning girl is an optical illusion. You can trick yourself to seeing her spin in either direction. The way I make the switch is to look at her feet and imagine her spinning the other way. Takes practice but its pretty frikkin' neat! lol anyways..

If GOD is the father of creation, human beings. Then we are all the children - we all have god within us. Which means we are all equal to it and to each other, and free to have different experiences and perspectives in living our individual lives.

And what about reality as a whole, how we perceive and experience it. Is is possible that there is more than one reality or dimension, more than one consciousness? Are we as a consensus on the same frequency perceiving one single reality? Is there one single energy force (or GOD) which this or all realities stem from?

See now you're just talking out of your ass (in all due respect). Anyone can say these types of things, but it doesn't mean anything because NO ONE REALLY KNOWS.

Oh and there goes Rusky babbling about life coming from life so there "must be a creator." Rusky that would have to mean that the creator has a creator too right? And so on.. and if this "creator" somehow doesn't itself have a creator, did it just emerge out of ...nothing? Uh oh, if that is what you believe, then you contradicted yourself.

However, if this creator formed out of other things (this is called emergence), then why can't the same apply to everthing else in the universe in the absence of a creator? Creator or not, emergence, or "cause and effect," rules everything in the universe, even creators, because, simply put, "things come from other things."

This defeats the purpose of serving or believing in any creator(s) and it is superstitious to do so.

The best we can do as human beings is to do what we can to understand human nature. scubaslick made a great point a few days ago:

We are genetically programmed pattern seekers and capable of imagining things so vividly that our body systems (endocrinal, hormonal, etc) react to purely imaginary "visions" with physical manifestations like elevated blood pressure, dilated pupils, adrenal response etc. We are all human, we all have these same basic systems and chemical chains, we all look for patterns to help us survive and have the same primitive level physical reactions to finding "patterns" in things. On the savanah, being the first to recognize the motion in the tall grass that might be a lion kept us alive longer so we could spread our "lion seeing" genes around a bit more. Fortunately, it's not ALWAYS a lion, but we have to have the reaction to get our bodies ready to run every time, even when it's not a lion, just so we don't get eaten.

It helped us flourish and thrive. Unfortunately it's also the root of the causal imaginative nonsense we typically call supersition/mysticism/religious experience.

Billions of people (like all of them) have an appendix. That doesn't make it useful or necessary. Religion is just a chemical reaction. Continuing to believe that it's a great sky-father is also standard human behavior: it's easier to avoid change than to face the "shame" of family ridicule, or even national ridicule since the Christofascists have basically taken over the country. So most people won't bother. It's less uncomfortable for them to keep fooling themselves into believing than it is to change... so they don't.

 

[stmadeveloper]

Wait......

The world ends in 2012 anyway. You'll find out then. The Mayans said so.

 

[allco]

The spinning girl is an optical illusion. You can trick yourself to seeing her spin in either direction. The way I make the switch is to look at her feet and imagine her spinning the other way. Takes practice but its pretty frikkin' neat! lol anyways..

Man, that is weird ... looked at it again... all I distinguish is that her arm and leg is spinning to her right.... strange.......

See now you're just talking out of your ass (in all due respect). Anyone can say these types of things, but it doesn't mean anything because NO ONE REALLY KNOWS.

Like Jim Carey? (haha), seriously - I totally agree - we were not there to see it with our own eyes.

What I wrote was just a different theory (philosophy) which has been written about and some studies have been done on. It's just coffee talk. Nothing I'm serious about. To be taken with a massive grain of salt. Not my personal belief.

The best we can do as human beings is to do what we can to understand human nature. scubaslick made a great point a few days ago:

That is an interesting post. Agree also. And the best way to understand human nature is by communicating with each other and sharing our thoughts and ideas, imho.

At the end of the day, for me, I think balance is most important, and to enjoy the life we are living now.

cheers!

 

[Rusky]

 

[hannahmcintyre]

Actually, that same god thing gets a little tricky. Whilst it should be the same god, logically speaking, there's a good rason why a lot of hardcore nutters insist it isn't.

A lot of people don't know it, and Muslims are loathe to admit it, but for a while there, Islam was actually duotheistic, with Allat as the female goddess. She was a pre-existing god in the area and kept to win over converts, similar to the way in which a lot of Catholicisms angels & saints are actually older European local gods (although some of the demons are gods from people that didn't convert easily).... But Allat made it kind of awkward when you get to commandment #1, so she quickly got slammed into the Kitab al-Asnam, or book of false gods.

What I don't get is how Catholics gel the first commandment with a god that is clearly not "one and only".

Well shit, you learn something every day!

That's actually a really interesting fact!

 

[xentech]

For starters, that isn't what atheism means and it doesn't represent atheists in any way. However, I could make a similar picture illustrating religion in a similar fashion, which would represent religious thinking quite well.

Could you answer the question I previously posed?

 

[BluuueJammm]

It's amazing just how ignorant you are about Atheism. You are probably an atheist towards 99.9% of all Gods, atheists just go one further. Oh, and if you want to start with the pics, here's a good one:

 

[zimok]

I have a few personal opinions on religion and I would love a faithful to chime in with your beliefs on these and how they might not be true. I'm agnostic for the simple fact that we will never know, but I have 0 belief in any diety.

These points have become part of MY reality and is not an attack on YOUR beliefs.

There's been some good debating already and here's to some more...

1. They are a shackle on your true potential.
How can something that wants you to believe things on faith, be of any use to your throughout your life? These faith based beliefs often contradict what reality tells us, and we convince ourselves that they aren't true. While all this time we could of been enlightened by the new found knowledge, we simply ignore it and pass it off as a reality outside our own.

2. What makes yours true?

You believe what you believe because at the tender age of childhood, you were exposed to a set of structured beliefs that you incorporated as your own just like a child does with Santa. Unlike Santa, you were never told he didn't exist.

We evolved to take "things as true" from guardians, it's what got our species this far. We have no concept of skeptical inquiry or rational reasoning at this young age and the word of the people we look up to are incorporated in our reality.

Everything we learn from our childhood is lived through this reality, making a false reality become truer to yourself as you continue to deceive yourself that your experiences are supportive of your beliefs. The longer you go on with these beliefs, the harder it becomes to detach yourself from it.

3. Prayer obviously doesn't work.
Power of prayer flunks an unusual test - Heart health- msnbc.com, so that establishes that prayer is just repeating a mantra in your head and quite obviously if I repeat to myself a few times a day that "I will do X", my subconscious mind will begin creating opportunities for me to accomplish X.

4. If there is a god, he is completely and unalterably indifferent.
Based on human history, how can anyone say he isn't?

5. Every religion is riddled with inconsistencies
I don't mean things that can/could/should be interpreted as something else, I mean blatant inconsistencies, factual falsehoods and obvious untruths.

6. A Religion is only as good as the people who support it
For the larger part of human history no religion that is currently supported was there back then. What happened to all these people? We're they not as "special" as us?

7. Religion is a perfect "idea"
We're obviously never going to figure out what happens when we die, so why not construe a story that will have a positive outcome for those who follow X. As a means of control, money making opportunity, and power for those who lead it. Just like there's a business in every niche, there's a religion in everything gap who has a perfect outcome waiting for you if you're willing to follow and support it.

Looking forward to see what you guys have to say.