Posted on 03/30/2007 6:20:58 PM PDT by buccaneer81
Atheists Split Over Message By JAY LINDSAY
BOSTON -
Atheists are under attack these days for being too militant, for not just disbelieving in religious faith but for trying to eradicate it. And who's leveling these accusations? Other atheists, it turns out.
Among the millions of Americans who don't believe God exists, there's a split between people such as Greg Epstein, who holds the partially endowed post of humanist chaplain at Harvard University, and so-called "New Atheists."
Epstein and other humanists feel their movement is on the verge of explosive growth, but are concerned it will be dragged down by what they see as the militancy of New Atheism.
The most pre-eminent New Atheists include best-selling authors Richard Dawkins, who has called the God of the Old Testament "a psychotic delinquent," and Sam Harris, who foresees global catastrophe unless faith is renounced. They say religious belief is so harmful it must be defeated and replaced by science and reason.
Epstein calls them "atheist fundamentalists." He sees them as rigid in their dogma, and as intolerant as some of the faith leaders with whom atheists share the most obvious differences.
Next month, as Harvard celebrates the 30th anniversary of its humanist chaplaincy - part of the school's chaplaincy corps - Epstein will use the occasion to provide a counterpoint to the New Atheists.
"Humanism is not about erasing religion," he said. "It's an embracing philosophy."
In general, humanism rejects supernaturalism, while stressing principles such as dignity of the individual, equality and social justice. If there's no God to help humanity, it holds, people better do the work.
The celebration of a "New Humanism" will emphasize inclusion and diversity within the movement, and will include Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist E.O. Wilson, a humanist who has made well-chronicled efforts to team with evangelical Christians to fight global warming.
Part of the New Humanism, Wilson said, is "an invitation to a common search for morally based action in areas agreement can be reached in."
The tone of the New Atheists will only alienate important faith groups whose help is needed to solve the world's problems, Wilson said.
"I would suggest possibly that while there is use in the critiques by Dawkins and Harris, that they've overdone it," he said.
Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," sees the disagreement as overblown. He thinks there's room for multiple arguments in the debate between scientific rationalism and religious dogmatism. "I don't think everyone needs to take as uncompromising a stance as I have against faith," he said.
But, he added, an intellectual intolerance of people who strongly believe things on bad evidence is just "basic human sanity."
"We do not jail people for being stupid, but we do stop listening to them after a while," he said in e-mailed comments.
Harris also rejected the term "atheist fundamentalist," calling it "a silly play upon words." He noted that, when it comes to the ancient Greek gods, everyone is an atheist and no one is asked to justify that to pagans who want to believe in Zeus.
"Likewise with the God of Abraham," he said. "There is nothing 'fundamentalist' about finding the claims of religious demagogues implausible."
Some of the participants in Harvard's celebration of its humanist chaplaincy have no problem with the New Atheists' tone.
Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker said the forcefulness of their criticism is standard in scientific and political debate, and "far milder than what we accept in book and movie reviews."
"It's only the sense that religion deserves special respect - the exact taboo that Dawkins and Harris are arguing against - that people feel that those guys are being meanies when applying ordinary standards of evaluation to religion," Pinker said in e-mailed comments.
Dawkins did not respond to requests for comment. He has questioned whether teaching children they could go to hell is worse in the long term than sexually abusing them, and compares the evidence of God to evidence for unicorns, fairies and a "Flying Spaghetti Monster." His attempt to win converts is clear in "The God Delusion," when he writes of his hope that "religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down."
A 2006 Baylor University survey estimates about 15 million atheists in the United States.
Not all nonbelievers identify as humanists or atheists, with some calling themselves agnostics, freethinkers or skeptics. But humanists see the potential for unifying the groups under their banner, creating a large, powerful minority that can't be ignored or disdained by mainstream political and social thinkers.
Lori Lipman Brown, director of the Secular Coalition of America, sees a growing public acceptance of people who don't believe in God, pointing to California U.S. Rep. Pete Stark's statement this month that he doesn't believe in a supreme being. Stark is the first congressman to acknowledge being an atheist.
As more prominent people such as Stark publicly acknowledge they don't believe in God, "I think it will make it more palatable," Brown said.
But Epstein worries the attacks on religion by the New Atheists will keep converts away.
"The philosophy of the future is not going to be one that tries to erase its enemies," he said. "The future is going to be people coming together from what motivates them."
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Heat upon the water... you always have a previous mover... sorry, try again. That bubble did not appear without outside influence... keep trying.
"The preferred definition of atheism refers to the belief that the evidence for the existence of deity is so weak that it's safe to assume in practice that it doesn't exist, even though in principle (in theory) deity may in fact exist."
Where did this come from? Somebody forgot to inform Webster of this definition!
There's no need to keep on trying. You don't really know why the bubble appears. You don't know why virtual photons arise out of the vacuum. The heat does not cause the bubble to appear in the pot of boiling water. The heat simply corrects for heat loss to the universe. In the case of the appearance of the universe, there is no heat loss. The physics it arose out of is simply another phase.
Note that in the cases of a bubble in a pot of boiling water, and a photon arising out of the vacuum, the phase transitions have no mover, or outside source. The transitions are due to the properties of the system, and nothing else. In the case of the universe, it is similar to a virtual photon emerging from the vacuum. There is no heat required for the photon to appear. There's simply a probability that it will. The photons appear and will return to their former phase. In the case of the bubble in a pot of boiling water, w/o gravity, the bubble will return to the former phase.
Phase change does not occur without ouside influence.
I've seen many pots of water, never seen one develop bubbles without heat being added.
Matter does not change phase without outside influence. Water does not phase to ice, without loss of heat, ice doesn't melt to liquid and then turn to gas without the addition of heat.
Nothing moves without being shoved.
It always does. You need to know the science of the matter in order to make claims such as that.
"I've seen many pots of water, never seen one develop bubbles without heat being added.
You may see a pot of boiling water, but you neither know what it is about, nor do you understand it. It involves fluctuations in local density, which are akin to excited states in the medium. A phase change involves a discontinuity in the state of the medium where whole set of energy configuations chages abruptly.
The concept of adiabatic applies. That means the medium, such as water, is an isolated system. In this case, insulation would be the appropriate isolation. The only reason heat needs to be applied is to move the system to the critical point. That's the point where both phases are in equilibrium. If all conditions are right, separate phases can not be distinguished at all. If you place water in an isolated system, at the appropriate temp, it will boil continuously w/o stopping with no added heat. I could change the liquid to methylene chloride, place it in an enclosure, take it to the tropics and it would boil in that container endlessly, just sitting on a table. Note that there's absolutely no outside influence in that container of methylene chloride. The phase changes occur all by themselves.
The same thing happens with virtual photons popping out of a vacuum.
"Matter does not change phase without outside influence.
Then you can ahow that the decay of a neutron is due to an interaction with some external entity. Or that virtual photons are caused by an interaction with an external entity. Or, that bubbles in a pot of boiling water are caused by an external entity.
"Water does not phase to ice, without loss of heat, ice doesn't melt to liquid and then turn to gas without the addition of heat.
Water at the triple point is an equilibrium between all 3 phases. The moecules, will move between the phases as time passes.
"Nothing moves without being shoved.
You can not justify this statement, because you don't know the physics involved in reality. This universe appears as an adiabatic phase change.
Morality and all of those associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.
Just as I have said...
It is no coincidence Islamic pagans hate Israel, Jews, Christians and Western Civilization. The entire basis of Western Civilization is Mosaic Law, something both the Neo-Pagan Left and the pagan Islamic thugs cannot abide and wish to destroy.
The very idea that human beings have individual rights not subject to the whims of an earthly monarch, but subject to the laws of Yahweh, is directly from Moses.
Historically, this is proven over and over again with the successive conflicts between the forces of paganism and the Judaic culture. (This includes the idolatry of cultural Marxist paganism.)
A greater number of "atheists" and "pagans" adopt the same hackneyed tenets of a faux Judaic-Christian ideal (golden calf). They also subscribe to the Judaic fetishism of "sin," but will fight to their death in denial of it.
Most of them are so wrapped up in their own polemics that they have become nothing more than pathetic anti-Christians with the same false hypocritical philosophy. They just slap a new label on it hoping nobody will notice - - they replace the idea of "avoiding sin" with "morals."
Morality and all of its associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct in human behavior.
Today, "morals" are a religious pagan philosophy of esoteric hobgoblins. Transfiguration is a pantheon of fantasies as the medium of infinitization. Others get derision for having an unwavering Judaic belief in Yahweh or Yeshua, although their critics and enemies will evangelize insertion of phantasmagoric fetishisms into secular law.
Mosaic Law (of which the Ten Commandments is just a part) is the foundation of Western Civilization. Genesis is the primary focus of the Declaration of Independence, from where our Constitutional rights are derived. The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our judicial system.
Moses wrote Genesis. This is why such people will jump up and down screaming when the Ten Commandments are displayed or the Creationist idea of monogamy from the book of Genesis is introduced.
The latter (Genesis) also ruins the illogical and non-biological arguments of homosexual monogamy. In a secular sense, homosexuality is an idolatry of perversion. It is in no way an anatomical function of the human organism, but a phantasmagoric creation from within the mentally disturbed human mind, a social psychosis, naked and on full exhibitionist display.
This is the whole crux (pun intended) of their attack on creationism - - they are really frustrated by Genesis, but cannot destroy the axiomatic state of procreant human biology, it does not fit their religious agenda.
Homosexual monogamy advocates seek ceremonious sanctification of their anatomical perversions and esoteric absolution for their guilt-ridden, impoverished egos.
Neither of those will satisfy their universal dissatisfaction with mortality or connect them to something eternal. With pantheons of fantasies as their medium of infinitization, they still have nothing in them of reality, any more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream.
Homosexual deviancy is really a pagan practice (and a self-induced social psychosis) at war with the Judaic culture over what is written in the book of Genesis (1:27, 2:18).
This is exactly what the National Socialists were at war with... so, when someone uses the term "Gaystapo," they might not realize how close to the truth they really are, especially when you consider their eugenic breeding programs.
Many will seek ceremonious sanctification and esoteric absolution in some type of marriage rite, but that still fails to give them a connection to the eternal in both a religious and temporal, procreant sense - - the union does not produce offspring.
Dissatisfaction with inevitable mortality only feeds the impoverishment of the ego further. Homosexuals really hate human life; their whole desire is rooted in the destruction of it...
Abortion is akin to slavery... life to be bought and sold...
Contemplate the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars of conceit dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice before pagan idols.
It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler (whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race," among other things). In effect, these genocides are a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols. The abortionists, like the National Socialists, incinerate the remains of their victims.
Aleister Crowley, who openly supported the National Socialists, was affiliated with Ordo Templi Orientis, A.A. (Order of the Silver Star) and other such occult lodges all across Germany.
Crowley engaged in all manner of deviancy, homoeroticism, sadomasochism and murder. Much of the occultism in National Socialism is derived directly from there. Crowley envisioned himself as the Great Beast (To Mega Therion), just as der Fuhrer made himself in that image. Hitler's life as a struggling, inept artist was where that association blossomed.
Crowley's creed, "Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the Law," (which is actually from Francois Rabelais) and used by Neo-Pagan nutcases without attribution for obvious politically correct reasons, is with certainty no different than the National Socialist "will to power," or their ubermensch mentality.
It is also no accident Nietzsche's "over-man" and nihilist philosophy and resulting insanity from venereal disease closely mirrors the insanity of der Fuhrer. These occult orders, sex and drug cults still survive today, as do the Neo-pagan, Neo-Nazi groups, black supremacist Rastafarian potheads, prison gangs and other related filth.
Crowley occultism is also from where L. Ron Hubbard emerges with Scientology. Note the NAZI symbolism of that kooky cult of weirdoes and their deviant adherents. Hollywood Cultural Marxists love Scientology.
Ah, Hollywood! The fountain of fantastical images, perverts and hypocrisies! It is by no accident the Cultural Marxists of Hollywood are flaming haters of America, Israel and Christendom, and advocate the most bizarre and psychotic.
Germany cracked down hard on the Scientologists for that reason and because they are using similar mind control techniques as the National Socialists....
I am an atheist who seriously doubts evolutionary theorists.
There is no more evidence that any species evolved on this planet than there is for it to have been engineered or delivered by extraterrestrials...
The earth is not the center of the universe.
How would the evolutionists feel if we taught that life came from outer space in the public schools? They already teach the Big Bang theory, don't they?
I think evolutionism is on educational welfare and that evolutionists feel they are entitled to some kind of affirmative action in the classroom.
Strictly speaking, since God is not a "thing" there is no logical contradiction between the assertion that "Anything that exists was created" and the assertion that "God exists". In other words, if Rutles4Ever's "anything" is understood literally as any thing then the assertion that there is a logical contradiction between the two propositions is based on a common category error and is itself illogical.
Cordially,
Mr. Whitehead is contradicting John the Apostle. I pointed out what John said in John 19:12. Since John is an expert in the matter and has first hand knowledge of what went down, I'll take his word, not Whitehead's. Matthew backs up John and contradicts Whitehead.
Matt 27:15-25
Now it was the governor's custom at the Feast to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. At that time they had a notorious prisoner, called Barabbas. So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, "Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?" For he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him.
While Pilate was sitting on the judge's seat, his wife sent him this message: "Don't have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him."
But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed.
"Which of the two do you want me to release to you?" asked the governor.
"Barabbas," they answered.
"What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?" Pilate asked.
They all answered, "Crucify him!"
"Why? What crime has he committed?" asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, "Crucify him!"
When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. "I am innocent of this man's blood," he said. "It is your responsibility!"
All the people answered, "Let his blood be on us and on our children!"
You have had scurvy?
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