Posted on 12/18/2004 9:17:33 PM PST by CHARLITE
First, I have to confess that I never got that line about how "love is to never have to say you're sorry." I'm still married to the same woman I fell in love with when I was a teenager and if I hadn't learned early on to accept blame for mistakes, bad moods or stupid remarks, I think my rump would long ago been found sitting at the end of a skid mark between the front door and the curb. I've also received a few apologies in my life and always regarded them as thoughtful, considerate, kind and selfless.
Atheism, on the other hand, is a study in egocentricity and self-absorption. Heck, a devout atheist assumes the posture of being the highest form of intelligent life in the universe. No Creator to thank for inalienable rights nor for any other endowment - heck, not even creation. And no need to say please to for daily bread, forgiveness or the mental alertness to come up with the winning answer to a Jeopardy question.
The real danger in atheism is that at its core, it seeks to turn the clock back to a time prior to the Age of Reason. One of the fundamentals of rationality is the premise that it is not possible to prove a negative. Where a person of faith might say, "God only knows" and an agnostic can say "I don't know" the devout atheist doesn't hesitate to say, "I know what is NOT out there anywhere in the vast universe and what did NOT happen billions of years ago."
Religious Americans have long taken the "you go to your church and I'll go to mine" approach to religious tolerance, but atheists can NOT tolerate religion. In their own minds they are already at the top of the food chain and hold as self-evident that they know it all. And should they have any crisis of faith, a good shrink, a plastic surgeon and a pocket full of pills will suffice to get them past the moment.
Faithless faith and devout belief in disbelief aren't very satisfying as creative creeds. Nihilism is no foundation on which to build anything, hence the prerequisite destruction of what all others have accomplished.
Thank God, the atheists are losing and will lose. Constitutional casuistry is based on shifting sands.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
Atheism is the highest form of arrogance.
This is the argument used to remove all references to Christianity from our government, schools, and courts. I will accept it as a valid and honest motive from the individual or group that files suit demanding their right to work Christmas day and not get extra pay or an alternate day off. Otherwise it is a hollow excuse to justify attacking Christ and His church.
I think that when Malachi wrote that, there was never any intimation of giving anything to a Christian cause.
I can only think this person took O'Hair's brand of in-your-face atheism personally and never got over it despite her curious death several years ago.
Thought I might add some instructive levity to the thread. Seems an American tourist in Ireland was waylaid on a back road by a masked band of armed terrorists manning a checkpoint. The spokes-terrorist poked a rifle barrel in the man's window and inquired "be ye a protestant or be ye a catholic?" Not wanting to guess which faction held his life in their hands, the tourist replied he was an atheist. The gun went away while the masked men conferred. Then the gun pokes back in the window and it was demanded, "be ye a protestant atheist or a catholic atheist?"
How anyone can ignore the long history of religious oppression by whichever faction held power at a given moment escapes me. I don't recall ever reading a news lead that opened, "The well known atheist terror group sosandso has (bombed, shot, kidnapped, etc.)
I agree that Christianity is not the only arbiter of moralness.
This kind of propaganda is exactly what I was referring to. Afterall, what should we do to people like "Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc."?
You think the evidence that the universe is expanding is bad? The evidence that the space-time continuum is not interrupted in biological processes is bad?
Let's face it folks. You just can't Torquemada anything. < /rimshot>
"So all you Muslims and you Jews, we got big news for all of yous: You'd better change your point of views todaaaaaaay!"
God's favor through works, eh?
The motives for humans' beliefs are certainly not random, but typically emotion, and emotions are rooted in past experiences and innate drives. Theists and nontheists are typically motivated by the same human emotions that aver them to uncertainty. But, theists find it possible to believe things that nontheists cannot.
Anything capable of forming value judgements is an arbiter of moralness. Anything capable of forming value judgements and being factually and logically correct is a potential arbiter of rational moralness. Facts and logic being objective, the latter are also prone to consensus of the rational.
Now that's funny!
Merry Christmas!
The difference between an Atheist and an Agnostic is subtle, and generally relates to a difference in philosophy, not aim. Agnostics and atheists share the same aims, to a degree, and the same creed of progress by proper application of rationalistic principles.
The only real difference is this: whereas an atheist is positive that no god exists, nor has at any time, an agnostic prefers to leave the question open.
An agnostic will also note that history reveals no Divine Guidance or Plan. On the contrary, what we learn from history is the inexorable succession of effect after cause, of consequence after choice.
On the matter of whether or not a god (or gods) exist, the agnostic prefers to remain silent. It can be shown that the Judeo-Christian god has a mundane history, a biography if you will. In general, humankind creates gods and devils in their own image. This, however, still does not preclude the existence of a silent Deity, or of an unconscious force that works to create order from chaos. These are questions that cannot, as yet, be answered.
The agnostic simply prefers not to take a stand until all the evidence is in, something which may not happen for a very long time, and something which, in fact, may not happen at all.
On the matter of the human soul, the agnostic generally agrees with the atheist that no such thing exists. The marriage of modern neuroscience with cognitive psychology has revealed that the incorporate entity, which we call "mind", can be explained as the workings of an incredibly complex organ, the human brain. This organ contains hundreds of billions of neurons, with literally thousands of billions of connections between them. This incredible mass of wiring gives rise to consciousness. At the end of the day, everything that makes us human, our mind, our emotions, our judgment, our perception of reality, all are generated by the conscious organ that each of us carries in our heads.
Both the atheist and the agnostic are of the opinion that ethics and morality derive from humanity, not divinity.
All systems of ethics can be viewed as necessary attempts to regulate human interaction.
Finally, atheists and agnostics are usually grouped together under the label "freethinkers". This group, which includes other viewpoints such as Secular Humanism and Rationalism, is united by a number of common aims and creeds, chief among them the notion that all truth must be derived from, and tested by, the principles of rationality.
Edited from:
What is an Agnostic?
Address:http://www.2think.org/hundredsheep/agnostic.shtml Changed:2:03 PM on Sunday, December 19, 2004
Yeah.... what he said.
My behavior? You mean I should instead have said something civil like, "theists creep me out"?
You needn't respond. Not everyone is suited for point-counter-point. You probably should just continue in your swirl of emotions. Stick with your aptitude.
An agnostic does not deny the existence of God and heaven, for example, but rather holds that one cannot know for certain if they exist or not. The term agnostic was fittingly coined by the 19th-century British scientist Thomas H. Huxley, who believed that only material phenomena were objects of exact knowledge. He made up the word from the prefix a-, meaning “without, not,” as in amoral, and the noun Gnostic. Gnostic is related to the Greek word gnosis, “knowledge,” which was used by early Christian writers to mean “higher, esoteric knowledge of spiritual things”; hence, Gnostic referred to those with such knowledge. In coining the term agnostic, Huxley was considering as “Gnostics” a group of his fellow intellectuals—“ists,” as he called them—who had eagerly embraced various doctrines or theories that explained the world to their satisfaction. Because he was a “man without a rag of a label to cover himself with,” Huxley coined the term agnostic for himself, its first published use being in 1870.
--American Heritage Dictionary
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