[Tribune7]

This guy is one of WND's best.

[Tribune7]

Here you go :-)

[Blood of Tyrants]

Good article. Of course the athiests will deny every word of it.

[VadeRetro]

This guy is one of WND's best.

"Thank you Henny [Youngman]! You've never been funnier. And it's a damn shame!" -- Steve Allen

[steve-b]

Oh, puh-leeze. One could equally argue that modern Christianity is a "moral parasite" because secularism has forced Christians to give up religious persecution by taking away the power to engage in it.

[Hank Kerchief]

Religion is ... more than useful for a civilized society, though, it is a downright necessity.

This is the basic assumption and working principle of such "civilized" societies as those found in Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example. It works, too.

This is not to say there are no atheists who ... are true to their godless convictions. Today, we call them sociopaths and suicides.

How many atheists these days have you heard of flying planes into buildings killing thousands of people, or strapping explosives to their bodies and blowing themselves and as many other people as they can to smitherines.

Suicides, huh? You mean like the Jim Jones cult, or the Heaven's Gate cult.

Where's this guy been living. The most famous suicides and sociopaths, and the most common, have all been highly religious.

VadeRetro, steve-b; elfman2, thanks for posting some sanity and relief from this "Quakers meeting."

Hank

[general_re]

This guy is one of WND's best.

You'd never know it from this. One very good rule of thumb in debate, rhetoric, polemic, and what-have-you, is that you should be able to give an accurate rendering of your opponent's argument, such that he himself would consider your description of his position a fair description - to not do so is to argue dishonestly. By that very elementary test, this article flunks completely. And that's only the beginning, the basic error of form - then you can get into the factual errors. Socrates was not an atheist. Neither was Nietzsche. And so on.

[r9etb]

This is not to say there are no atheists who are rational, that there are none who are true to their godless convictions. Friedrich Nietzsche is the foremost example....

Nietzsche, who died insane, is perhaps not the best example....

[LiteKeeper]

What a shame that Christianity is blamed for so much that is "un-Christ-like" - and not part of the Faith. There are radicals in every movement - to condemn Christianity for what extremist, untaught radicals do is like blaming Islam for UBL!

[Doctor Stochastic]

Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.

This would seem to imply that the atheist lives by the Golden Rule voluntarily, rather than being forced to do so.

[The Westerner]

"The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing."

This is one of the worst articles yet. This guy is really saying that no one can be sure of anything. He's a modern Skeptic.

[whattajoke]

The article states, "Still, even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics."

And I am to assume those "borrowed ethics" are purely christian? And that they didn't exist at all before Jesus died?

There is so much wrong with this idea, I wouldn't even know how to begin making fun of it.

[nickcarraway]

Doesn't this guy know you aren't allowed to criticize atheists? And if you do, you sound ``uneducated.''

[tortoise]

Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.

Ewwww... This article is out of the gate with a lame assertion. This is like the nutjobs in the crevo discussions who still assert that biology violates thermodynamics. It kind of brings into question the competence of the individual to even be involved in the discussion.

The "Golden Rule", when more rigorously characterized, is mathematically optimal (c.f. "Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma"). Only a fool wouldn't follow the Golden Rule no matter what their religion or lack thereof. The fact that the Golden Rule appears to be universal should be a big clue that it is not a uniquely religious concept (or unique to a particular subset of religions, for that matter).

Other arguments might be interesting, but the assertion that atheists have no reason to live by the Golden Rule is essentially based in ignorance. Trivially falsifiable arguments are pretty distasteful no matter who is making them, and are a net negative.

[Heartlander]

Might makes right.
The end justifies the means.
Survival of the fittest.
It’s all relative.
Random mutations and natural selection.

Is there a common transient theme?

It would appear that we have five statements of rhetoric and one rhetorical question.

[Junior]

So basically, he is saying that atheists would never want to live in peace with their neighbors because such concepts are only to be found among the religious? So atheists are all just mass murderer wannabes keeping themselves in check solely by force of will; while the religious keep their murderous tendencies in check through fear of divine intervention? Interesting world view...

[timm22]

Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have good reason for attempting to live by the Golden Rule – they are commanded to do so – the atheist does not.

So the author is saying the reason to follow the Golden rule (and presumably the rest of religious ethics) is because God commands us to?

Why must we obey God's commands?

[Tuba-Dude]

Although well written, the author has one fact wrong: the thinkers of the Age of Reason were primarily deists, not atheists. Big difference between the two.

[Virginia-American]

Crime stats by religions

excerpt:

In "The New Criminology," Max D. Schlapp and Edward E. Smith say that two generations of statisticians found that the ratio of convicts without religious training is about one-tenth of one percent. W.T. Root, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, examined 1,916 prisoners and said, "Indifference to religion, due to thought, strengthens character," adding that Unitarians, Agnostics, Atheists and Free-Thinkers were absent from penitentiaries, or nearly so.

[xm177e2]

The atheist is without God but not without faith, for today he puts his trust in the investigative method known as science, whether he understands it or not. Since there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, let alone following their implications, and since specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he knows nothing.

You don't need to know high-level physics to understand the scientific method. If people needed to know high-level physics to understand science, we would have never learned even low-level physics.

There is a difference between faith in something without evidence (FAITH) and an understanding of the scientific reasoning (REASON). This is not to knock faith, but it is very different in nature from reason. Faith deals with "revealed truths," whereas reason deals in things we can see for ourselves.

We can devise experiments to learn about the properties of matter.

We cannot devise experiments to learn whether or not God really thinks homosexuality is a sin. We just have to go with what we think the revealed truth is (and different people believe differently on this subject, even if they accept the same version of the Bible (the same revealed truths)).

Scientists might disagree on certain things, but eventually they come to agreement. The same is NOT true about religion, because it deals in revealed truths.

Revelation and reason are fundamentally different. Understanding the difference between the two is one of the key tenets of Western philosophy.

[xm177e2]

Without God, there is only the left-hand path of the philosopher. It leads invariably to Hell, by way of the guillotine, the gulag and the gas chamber. The atheist is irrational because he has no other choice – because the rational consequences of his non-belief are simply too terrible to bear.

Atheists are irrational because we can't handle the terrible consequences of non-belief? Not only can I "handle" the atheist lifestyle, I'm LIVING it.

As far as rationality is concerned, I'm Mensa-quality, just like Vox.

Belief that atheism leads inevitably to mass murder is ridiculous bigotry. Atheists don't have any worse (or better) record than any religious group that has been in power of a major nation.

Atheists at the individual level have not proved to be any worse citizens than anyone else in this country. To make blanket denigrations that we are "immoral" without evidence is prejudice and bigotry. It would be like accusing all Christians of being irrational because they can't handle the illogic of the existence of a benevolent "God," which drives them inevitably to religious persecution of non-Christians and other so-called deviants. That would be a bigoted, false thing to say.