Indeed, and that diseases are cured by casting out evil spirits...(by those who have been given special powers)! I wonder what evil spirit causes the flu...? :)
James C. Bennett wrote: “LOL, it would now seem that if we understand metaphysics, we can accept that donkeys can talk, snakes can charm and humans can stay alive inside fishes”
kosta50 replied: “Indeed, and that diseases are cured by casting out evil spirits...(by those who have been given special powers)! I wonder what evil spirit causes the flu...? :)”
YOU MAY BE A FUNDY ATHEIST IF....
You consistently appear on discussion lists demanding that Christians accept your literal interpretation of various scriptural passages just so you can then launch into the usual “argument by outrage” - despite being told over and over that no learned Bible scholar shares your particular bizarre literal interpretation.
You complain that “Christian Apologists warp the definitions of words to make the Bible say what they want it to say.” And then you go on to say that in the Bible, “feet” means “genitals” and “thigh” means “fetus”.
You become upset when a Christian says that not everything in the Bible should be taken literally.
You pontificate about the Bible as if you are an expert in theology, textual criticism, ancient languages & cultures and much more besides, when your knowledge of the Bible is just cut and paste from atheist discussion lists which cut and paste it from atheist websites which cut and paste it from embarrassingly unscholarly rantings by the likes of Messer’s Freke & Gandy and Acharya S, etc.
When a Christian’s interpretation of a passage (based on the social/literary context) solves one of your favorite contradictions, it is only their personal interpretation, and can be dismissed as such. But your interpretation (based on a “plain” reading of the text) to arrive at the contradiction in the first place is entirely objective, and is obviously THE correct interpretation.
Your only knowledge of The Bible comes from searching ‘bible contradictions’ in Google.
You debate (argue, vilify, etc.) as if every theist was a Jack Chick fan.
You think Richard Dawkins’ analogies of God and theism are sound and the examples of the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” and Zeus make an excellent argument against the existence of God.
You label all scholars that actually believe the Bible as “biased fundies” while those who don’t believe it are known as “honest” and “accepted scholarship.” Yet you find you have a grudging respect for fundy theists for ‘sticking to their guns’ even while complaining they don’t think for themselves. ‘Thinking for yourself’ means adopting an atheist viewpoint.
You think that Isaac Asimov was a world-class authority in Biblical Studies.
You’re infuriated by the term “village atheist.” You prefer “right-thinking urban humanist.”
Everytime you don’t understand a passage in The Bible, instead of researching the legitimate scholarship, you blame God for not writing it better.
You think that God would have made things a lot clearer for everyone, ranging from the medieval knight to the Chinese peasant, had He inspired His Word in modern English in words and concepts you could understand. You also ask, when told of the scarceness of paper in the ancient world, why God didn’t provide enough paper to write a longer story.
You create a web site: http://www.EvilBible.com, and post an Evil Bible Quote of the Day on usenet. The quotes always end with: “What kind of person would get their moral guidance from an ancient book of myths and magic that says it is OK to murder, rape, pillage, and plunder?”
You claim to hold no Dogma. Yet, you’re just as rigid and stubborn with your beliefs as any Dogmatists.
The only reason you go to hear a concert pianist play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is to complain to him afterwards about the name. Obviously it was chosen as part of a conspiracy to hide the fact that the Bible’s mentions of the moon giving light were errors rather than phenomenological language.
You claim that there is no way a book thousands of years old can be relevant today, but refuse to do the necessary homework to see how it could apply in modern situations, preferring instead to argue that God should have provided an updated version.
You can’t understand why people can’t see the logic in your question,”The Lord of the Rings is a book. The Bible is a book. What makes one fiction,and the other true?” And if they say they don’t see the logic in that question, they MUST be lying!
You leave ‘freethought’ tracts lying around, like the littering missionaries. Although you are a ‘free-thinker’ and ‘rational’ person, you lose all reason when reading The Bible. You can gladly believe any number of conflicting philosophical positions, as long as they’re atheistic!
You start a local Atheists and Agnostics Society, the goal of which is to prove through good deeds that atheists and agnostics can be just as generous and caring as some Christians are. When nobody joins, and the club eventually unfolds, you are flustered. You have no idea why a group of people who by definition do not base their morality on anything greater than their own ideas wouldn’t jump at the chance to be self-sacrificing for no logical reason.
You get a big kick out of either spamming online Christian forums with offensive material or posing as a grossly over-the-top parody of a Christian on such websites.
You quote The God Delusion like Christians quote the Bible.
You are part of a non-belief organization such as American Atheists, Church of Freethought, Humanist Association of Canada, Student Freethought Alliance and/or the Council of Secular Humanism. You claim these organizations have absolutely no creeds and that the people involved independently think of different things from one another. Yet of course, on your organization’s website they define the commonalities that all non-believers follow. Is that not the definition of creed?
You think that spamming Christian chatgroups and discussion lists with expletives and insults demonstrates superior free-thinking, rational, atheistic logic.
You think that it is possible to talk meaningfully about “good and evil” “right and wrong” when decrying the sins of the Church while simultaneously subscribing to the notion that neither sin nor good and evil exist as ultimate categories but only as personal and social constructs.
You have never pondered the question: why does a smart guy like Richard Dawkins regularly give atheists a bad name by putting his foot in his mouth with his inane and ridiculous pronouncements about God and religion?
You have never pondered the question: why did a really smart guy like Bertrand Russell write such a pathetically limp, uninformed and adolescent critique of Christianity in “Why I Am Not A Christian”?
You assert that “faith is believing things which you know aren’t true”. You really “believe” that many human beings actually believe things they know aren’t true.
You believe the movie Dogma gives the most accurate portrayal of Christian theology.
You feel that prefacing your responses to Christians with the word bull$#@! somehow makes your argument a little more valid.
You deny that someone can possibly know they know the truth (’It’s just belief, not knowledge,”) while at the same time claiming to know the truth. You think that logical fallacies are only fallacies when theists use them. Your favorite word is “ad hominem”,even if you can’t spell it.
You don’t eat at Church’s Chicken, and it’s NOT because the chicken’s too greasy.
You go to an Atheism versus Christianity debate in which you must vote for whoever you think wins. The Christian side is represented by a highly prestigious historian and theologian, and the atheist side is represented by a dog that’s able to bark the theme song to “I Dream of Jeannie” off key. You vote for the dog.
You try to prove that the bible contradicts itself by producing out of context quotes like “God...is...a...liar....” (Genesis 1:3 - 1 John 3:4)
You consider “Ha, ha, ha” a substantive rebuttal to an argument.
You can’t believe in a book that was created over two thousand years ago because “we’re not sure WHAT happened”, but you know for a fact that religion was created tens of thousands of years ago specifically to control the brainwashed public.
You feel guilty whenever you use the word faith and have decided to remove it from your vocabulary.
You believe any person who writes a book critical of Christianity is doing it for “education” purposes. Conversely, you believe that any person who writes a book defending Christianity is “just in it to make money.”
You go around amazon.com posting 1000 word prefab rebuttals to religious books you’ve never actually read.
Your best argument against Christianity is the fact YOU don’t believe in it.
Most of what you’ve learned about God comes from the Computer game ‘Black and White’.
You atempt to make an objective list at amazon.com entitled “Did Jesus Exist?”, and cite “The Da Vinci Code” as a work that argues for the historicity of Jesus.
You think the fact that something isn’t flying out of your butt means it doesn’t exist.
You criticize Christians for not accepting the reasons for your deconversion to atheism yet you consider yourself “a former fundamentalist.”
You say that religion is ruining your life and the society you live in and you spend every day of your life obsessing on ways to rid the world of it.
You say that having faith in something is “evil” yet you do not believe in absolute wrong or rights but despise the words “moral relativism” when attributed to atheism.
You want to make widely known that the Founding Fathers were “deists” and “freethinkers”, yet you applaud and praise “Letter To A Christian Nation” by Sam Harris.
You believe that because someone is an atheist, they are more educated and more open minded than a religious person.
You perceive that religious people and theologians sincerely believe in an “invisible man” who is literally sitting on a cloud high up in the sky.
Ridicule and sarcasm are your best weapons in an informal debate. However when Christians do those things you will say “How Christian like of you!”
You claim to know more about the Bible and Christianity then 99.999% of Christians, then go on to say that Jesus is a rip-off of Mithra.
You claim all thinking men are atheists, but ignore the fact that the best thinking men in history have been theists.
You think that the word ‘Christ’ comes from Krishna, and therefore Christianity is a lie.
You mock the Bible as as a fairy tale because the KJV mentions unicorns in passages like Deuteronomy 33:17. When a Christian points out to you that the Hebrew word re’em means “wild ox” and that every modern English translation renders it like that, you still insist that the KJV’s rendering must be the best one and continue to mock the Bible for mentioning unicorns.
You have your own list of how to tell who is a Christian that itself runs on Fundy Atheist principles.
You get apoplectic about being called a Fundy Atheist for believing all those self-evidently true propositions above. And you label all theists as “fundies”.
You find the term ‘fundy atheist’ meaningless, baffling, illogical and just plain oxymoronic/self-contradictory even though the two terms are not exclusive of each other (except in the minds of fundy atheists, of course). ~ tektoonics