Posted on 10/17/2003 4:04:27 PM PDT by TXLibertarian
Excerpted from a longer op-ed. Author discusses the danger of legal proselytizing by a few firebrand secularists. Worth a read, IMHO.
What Atheists Want
By Chris Mooney
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Unfortunately, in my experience, the U.S. atheist and secularist communities contain a number of activists who are inclined to be combative and in some cases feel positively zestful about offending the religious. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, easily America's most famous atheist firebrand, wasn't dubbed "the most hated woman in America" for nothing. Despite her landmark 1963 Supreme Court victory in a case concerning the constitutionality of school prayer, O'Hair's pugilistic and insulting public persona hurt atheists a great deal in the long run. A head-on attack on the pledge seems to epitomize the confrontational O'Hair strategy.
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(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The sad thing is that sometimes there will be someone there to stop her. In those cases, the person should be immediately fired with prejudice and everyone who cares about freedom should be outraged. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen in this highly PC environment. It is highly understandable that Christians should be upset over these occurrances.
All atheists such as I ask in return for respect for the religious practices of others is to not have those practices and prayers forced upon us.
I am the type that if I had a Christian friend in school, I would help him set up events for the prayer at the flagpole. In actuality, I did do a lot of great work for Army chaplains, mainly because I found them to be very nice and genuinely good people, and I like to help those types. I am already planning to create, for free, a temple web site for my Rabbi friend.
In return, please do not tell me I must be at an event, and then force me to acknowledge your god (or feel ostracized by not acknowledging), or in a graduation tell me that your god helped me get to that point when I know I did it only by myself and with the help of other people. That is insulting just as much as a Christian not being allowed to pray by himself, giving thanks to god for getting him to that point.
No, but by God's command he was sure able to rape and murder, and do all sorts of things that our modern secular society would find reprehensible.
And what you are not acknowledging is that no matter how many times the counter resets, no matter how far down and rediculously impossible the end odds are, those odds will result in a number and we'll call that number variable N. And for any number N, in infinity there is an N+1. The probability always reaches 1.
Also, we are not at infinity.
This was for the infinite monkeys discussion, which involves infinity.
No, I attach to certain people a nobility of purpose, whether or not they are religious.
They all held between them that the principles found in Christianity were important and good enough to found the nation on, whether one himself accepted Christ as saviour or not.
Fair enough, except that the principles of Christianity relating to freedom were already old when Christianity was founded. Some aspects of Christianity may be a popular example of these principles that are good to be followed, but Christianity is and was not required.
As you've seen from my quotes, these people were wary of other principles and aspects of Christianity becoming too prominent in the country they wanted to establish for fear of a loss of freedom.
Which principles of Christianity is so hateful to the atheist?
"Do as we believe or we'll get the police to enforce it." "No matter what you believe, our god is in charge of you." "Because you don't hold our god as true, you are not a good person." And my interpretation of a favorite: "Because you don't waste your life believing in fairy tales, you are wasting your life."
Get it out of your head that odds matter when dealing with infinity.
Quote me some astronomical number of trials it will take for those monkeys to achieve their goal, even if just expressing the number itself fills up my hard drive, although I'd appreciate you not taking up all my space. Just to be on the safe side, square that number a few trillion times (although the whole universe is now out of hard drive space). We then assign that monstrous number that can't even be physically expressed to the variable N.
This is the kicker part, so read carefully. By the definition of infinity, for every number N, there exists N+1. The monkeys are finished.
Of course we're still dealing only with theoretical monkeys.
They do count, as infinity is expressed with them. It's just really not fair to compare a finite number (such as any odds no matter how big) with infinity. The finite number will, by definition, always lose.
I had to read the article and other sources a couple times before before I could shake off my obviously mistaken previous math classes dealing with infinity. It really is a stranger beast than they told most of us in school.
Well you may not think it is required, but that is the contract we operate on as a nation. If they had based the nation on the principles of Islam then we would be operating under those principles. And athesits would not dare utter a peep about their feeling sad about themselves. Your pain would be relieved by removing the pressure of your head upon your neck. You must be very fond of straw dogs, do you decorate your yard with them? "If you don't believe as we do you are not a good person, we will call the police on you", how utterly rediculous. It is because of Christian principles of the rights of the individual that this could never happen.
It could also be that our idea of cause-effect (God-creates universe) in a linear time fashion doesn't apply in the conditions at the beginning of the universe. As someone already mentioned, when you get to extremes of speed, heat and size, we see time and time again that our normal laws tend to break down.
Actually, Islam shares a lot of these fundamental principles with Christianity. It makes sense since 1) they are good ideas for keeping a society together, and 2) Islam stole much of itself from Christianity and Judaism anyway. How the country operates mainly depends on the motives and culture of the people interpreting the book.
Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity; if I were to go to a Christian state of 600 years ago I'd be afraid for my head, too, even if I were a devout Christian but just of the wrong denomination. Actually, I'd be afraid if I went back just 300 years in certain places.
Maybe, but in public schools, college graduations and, for me, PLDC and other Army events, we are kind of stuck in that environment. In Basic training there was the thing of we could work Sunday morning or go to church.
An interesting aside was that in PLDC a Wiccan wanted to deliver the invocation and they wouldn't let him.
This is a good point and one that hadn't really occured to me before. Islam today is where Christianity was about 400-600 years ago in it's struggle for relevance, cohesion, and dominance. If you're curious about this look at the draconian steps the Christian church took in the middle ages to ensure compliance with its beliefs - stonings, beheadings, buring at the stake, and anything else deemed necessary to stamp out dissent.
It eerily mirrors Islam today and followed a similar timeline in it's development.
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