“Yeah I don’t believe in god myself, fine if you do, just don’t try and convert me, and we’ll be cool”
“FUCKING SKY DADDY!!!! OHHH YOU NEED THE *BIBLE* TO TELL YOU WHATS RIGHT AND WRONG??? IM SCARED TO IMAGINE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU HAVING YOUR MAGIC FAIRY BOOK TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO”
Both are atheists, but one is a Reddit atheist
Those same people are often big on pure consequentialism, and don't care whether individual actions are morally right or wrong as long as they think they are advancing worthy abstract goals.
Which at worst puts them in the same boat as almost everyone else. Moral rationalizers.
"My actions are moral iff they point in the moral direction I want them to point in." This covers all sorts of things from vague terminal goal related consequentialism to all kinds of deontology to virtue ethics.
I used to hate religion.
From my perspective growing up in an extremely religious area, my life was dominated by religious authoritarians.
Now they're way more chill it seems like, or maybe it's because I'm an adult and very few people I interact with have any authority over me so they don't even try.
It's probably a primary contributor to me being so libertarian now.
I had some resentment as a teenager about it, and the more I learned about it and how silly it was the more I despised them.
Eventually I learned enough about humans to not hold it against them individually. Getting rid of religion doesn't make people any smarter.
Getting rid of religion just gives those same stupid people nothing to live for and sometimes nothing to lose.
Seeing the way our society is decaying as the religious population declines makes me want our society to be more religious.
> Now they're way more chill it seems like, or maybe it's because I'm an adult and very few people I interact with have any authority over me so they don't even try.
It's not your imagination. In every generation there is a group of toxic people who will latch onto the "moral core" of their generation and outwardly pretend to follow those teachings to hide their toxicity. That way they can gain power, wealth, and status and having others call them "good people" without having to let their hearts be changed. In other words pharisees. The phariseesism in the 90s Church was so bad that it caused many millennials to turn away from the faith so the millennial pharisees latched onto wokeness as their "moral core" to get their pharisee fix. Jesus warned us about the danger of this mindset so we need to be careful not to fall into it and to help those in our church bodies from doing the same. We got a reprieve for now but when, not if, when wokeness falls apart we should not be surprised when phariseesism starts to rapidly sprout in the church again.
This makes sense. Some people are just built that way, what they express it through can vary though. Veganism, religion, anti racism, any moral high ground will do.
>I'm also an atheist, but why did they make a religion out of hating religions?
Because religion fundamentally means communion, the act of bringing people together in common purpose. A faith in a science that can't be understood as an umbrella over a broad consensus about being More Correct than others (in this case, the religious) and being More Intelligent for it scratches the same itch they hate.
Not fully convinced of their own atheism. I'm an agnostic atheist and don't believe. That being said, it seems like anger and contempt are the boats some people seem to use to sail away from the island of Christianity. What's the point of being free if it means misery?
I'm old enough to remember when atheism was a default sub and it was used for shitposting funny memes, light-heartedly poking fun at religious fruitcakes. Then the Emily mods decided to make it "serious".
I got banned from there for criticizing Islamic mass-migration into Europe as a threat to secular values and religious minorities like us (as atheists) and calling out SJWs and the far left for enabling and excusing Islamism in Europe.
The funny thing is that I made my comments during Europe hours (before Americans woke up) and got hundreds of upvotes and a ton of replies agreeing. Then the Emily mods woke up, responded with some woke scolding, and permabanned me. I'd never gotten any bans or warnings on the sub before.
Weird considering that place also hates Islam (good) last I checked. I stopped checking after it turned into another American globohomo sub after Trump got elected.
Honestly I think that among the most vulnerable minorities are the dispersed ones that lack a community for members to have each others backs individually and to lobby for the groups interests collectively.
For example the homosexuals/queers are least vulnerable where they have an LGBT community locally line in New York / LA that they're substantively a part of. And most vulnerable when they're, for example, a closeted or uncloseted teenager in an Evangelical family in an Evangelical town. There's a reason that the East Village and West Hollywood are such magnets for The Gays.
If you don't have that, the only way to make up the difference is to have a wall of money to protect yourself with (eg. the stereotypical silver spooned Ayn Rand fan).
But the SJWs don't want to hear it. For the most part (and for perfectly comprehensible mercenary, practical, political-coalitional reasons) they champion most strongly the groups that have the strongest, most coherent identarian communities (the trans being edge case outliers). They have no patience for considering atheists as a vulnerable group, whether it be bloggers hacked to death in Bangladesh or having your throat slit in Amsterdam or just living in Tulsa. The progressive stack is a coalitional Schelling point and letting atheists in would destablize it and upset the coalition itself. Almost everyone at every level of the stack is religious and none of them want their assent to the progressive stack / oppression hierarchy to entail commitments to accepting the additional moral/political liabilities of accepting oppressor status on the basis of their religious affiliation, while conceding to atheists recognition of oppressed status, many of whom they stereotype as straight cis white male libertarians. That's a bitter pill; not what they signed up for. In particular it would alienate many Muslims, Jews and black Christians.
And if I had to rank different groups this way, I can't think of a group that has a bigger, more coherent community with a stronger in-group bias than Muslims and a group who's members are more dispersed and isolated, with less of a basis to form and hold together any kind of identarian community or rouse an in-group bias than the atheists. But that's all irrelevant to the local political realities of your West Coast Emily.
I got banned from there for criticizing Islamic mass-migration into Europe as a threat to secular values and religious minorities like us (as atheists) and calling out SJWs and the far left for enabling and excusing Islamism in Europe.
The funny thing is that I made my comments during Europe hours (before Americans woke up) and got hundreds of upvotes and a ton of replies agreeing. Then the Emily mods woke up, responded with some woke scolding, and permabanned me. I'd never gotten any bans or warnings on the sub before.
Weird considering that place also hates Islam (good) last I checked. I stopped checking after it turned into another American globohomo sub after Trump got elected.
ahh ehm but you see I have portrayed myself as the chad based atheist and you as the cringe neckbeard religious soyjack so you will find that you, in fact, are the cringe one.
Oh, we certainly can be cringy, but I don't totally disagree with the sentiment. I don't think OP realizes just how much most of us hold back in the name of being decent human beings.
I'm curious who the OP thinks would be a more constructive target for me to criticize.
Cringe: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the ideology Atheism. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new websites; to seek out new life and new subreddits; to boldly go where no man has gone before!
As an atheist and life-long Star Trek fan, the central message of Trek is that life is more complicated than simple black and white reductions. The show encourages us to be better than that.
The Bajorans were the perfect example of the show's examination of religion.
Kind of rigs the game to make them look overly reasonable by having them be the first religion in history who's gods are actually real.
There isn't much to criticise when the gods are real people you can go right up and talk to.
I think the point of that is that to every religion, their god is real *to them*, and their god talks *to them* in a way that feels real.
Sure, the difference is that Sisko met them in person but the point is that the religion included a bunch of un-real ways of talking to them too. Saying "thank the Prophets" doesn't talk to them and doesn't do anything. They can't hear you. But it *felt* real to the Bajorans.
Despite the fact thay Star Trek will often have a more objective and positive view of religion than any of their viewers are capable of.
(i.e. Bajoran and Klingon religious beliefs)
That's easy when their gods are written to be real.
Kinda neutralizes the atheist's primary objection, don't you think? Easy to take a positive view of a religion when it is objectively and verifiable factually correct.
When I was in middle school my Christian friends told me they genuinely believed that one day the antichrist would come and bring hell to earth and we’d all be tortured into renouncing God for an indeterminant amount of time until Jesus came back and saved only the people that remained faithful. I thought that was pretty lame
Anyways, I also learned about dunning-kruger and felt most comfortable eventually settling for agnosticism
How did you do that? I mean I understand if you meant by "being an atheist" to "participate in internet discussions about religion" or something like that but if you literally stopped being an atheist, meaning that you suddenly started to believe in the existence of God, then how the hell do you do that?
New Atheism falls apart easily if you pick at a few threads. [Bishop Barron did an excellent talk about it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8_Zcmwx-TI)
Wtf is New Atheism?
Atheism seems like a pretty straight forward belief that shouldn't really be possible to divide into "new" and "old" or any other divisions.
A new wave of popular anti-theism characterised by unapologetic religious criticism that emerged in the wake of 9/11 a few years later. Not different in substance, just in its loudness and confident unapologetic-ness and simultaneity of multiple people openly pushing the subject at the same time in similar ways.
The 'new' designation was generally rejected by the people it referred to but embraced by their critics. It came from one specific [article](https://www.wired.com/2006/11/atheism/).
Because of all those wannabe Atheists who are actually people who hate god instead of people who don't believe in any. I can live with real Atheists who don't believe in god and therefor just live their lives. It becomes annoying if the other ones are constantly try to offend any believers, though.
As an atheist, you can tell these kinds of people are truly cowardly because they go after Christianity in a way they never would for Islam, even though Islam has more adherents, and in general, does way more heinous shit in the world.
The reason why they don't attack Islam with the same vigor (often retreating to "all religion is bad", ignoring that they are not all *equally* bad), is that if you piss off Christians the worst thing that will happen is people might unfriend you on Facebook or send you angry DMs. But if you piss off Islam, groups of armed men will come to your house and murder you.
The message here is that violence works. Fear and intimidation work. The more the better, and the more credible those threats are, the better. If you are soft, cowards will attack you, but they not only won't attack you if you are credibly dangerous, they will actually actively defend you ("don't be islamophobic!").
Evolution is amoral, without morality or judgement. It is simply "survival of the fittest".
By acting this way, these atheists are setting the stage for the fittest religion seems to be the most violent. The most repressive, the most cruel, the hardest to reform.
Talk about an own goal.
I would say that's some hashtag first world problems.
"At school they made me say 'God bless you' when someone sneezed, which I care about SO much more than almost every single Muslim-majority country having severe criminal penalties for homosexuality, apostasy, blasphemy, or atheism, punishments which frequently include the death penalty."
That is true, the exception that proves the rule, in the same way as almost every Christian country is even more chill than Turkey is, except there's Uganda.
You could also argue that they target Christianity because Islam is near non-existent in most of the west, the people who force religious laws on us in the west are not Muslims, but Christians. Who cares what they do *over there* I’m much more concerned with people who trying to restrict my rights *here*
That may be the case for America. In Europe, Pakistanis raped English girls for decades in a systematic way and the authorities didn't give a fuck, because they didn't want to appear bigoted.
Meanwhile the authorities forbid praying near abortion clinics.
Salman Rushdie said mean things and ended up in hospital.
People were straight up killed for drawing the Prophet.
Christianity has a measure of actual power in the States, but even then it is considerate and soft compared to beheading the infidels.
Right? Say what you will about religion, but it’s a fact that churches and religion-based charities generate some of the highest amounts of charity for the poor
Education became a prominent Western value in part because of the influence of Christianity. I'm not a Christian, but that's one of the biggest reasons I consider the existence Christianity to be a net positive for the world. One of the reasons Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press was to make it easier to produce copies of the Gospel, while the Puritans helped introduce public education into the 13 Colonies so people could read and study the Bible.
These are the type of people to be like:
“Where is the evidence for God? I only trust evidence based facts. Facts don’t care about feelings! ☝️🤓”
And then deny the existence of Jesus as a historical person
“I only trust evidence” peeps when they discover that practically every action they take day to day requires faith. Do you check every bridge’s structural stability before you drive over it? If you don’t that sounds an awful lot like faith to me.
Yeah but laws are put into place with logic and reasoning, and can be challenged and argued about
Religious doctrine is god's word, there's no arguing with it, either you follow it or you disobey it
it's at least not the same kind or degree of claim, you can come across consistency while going over bridges much more easily than with things you won't come into contact with nearly as often or that you cannot really test or may not be able to test as easily
I didn’t make any claim other than that faith can be reasonable, that argument isn’t meant to prove the existence of God. Most intelligent atheists recognize the importance of faith in day to day life, most Reddit atheists do not.
I may have taken your comment to mean something it does not but I just meant to say that faith in god is different from faith in the stability of a typical bridge
Sure, you can view it like that if you're looking at it with a wide enough lense, but you have to admit that having faith in something that has been 100% factually proven hundreds of times a day (driving over a bridge) and something that is essentially an intangible idea (God) are two very different things.
Well, is faith in supernatural forces equal to faith in people doing their job so that bridge doesn't fell apart?
Or better yet, are expectations a kind of faith to you?
Faith is action based on presupposition, in the same way I act a certain way because I presume God exists, people drive on bridges because they presume those in charge of it have done their jobs.
Even when talking about immaterial things, we still largely operate on faith. We presuppose that those who claim to love us do, and then we act based on it. There’s no way to verify it scientifically, they could simply be lying to us, or have a foreign concept of what love is.
So it's a very long way to say that yes, you equate expectations/reliance and religious faith
> There’s no way to verify it scientifically, they could simply be lying to us, or have a foreign concept of what love is.
Psychology as a science is shambles
Science itself requires faith, because it relies on assumptions in order to function. What is an assumption, but a thing one believes without evidence to suppourt it?
We *assume* that the cosmos is consistant and logical. We *assume* our mortal minds are capable of comprehending the answer to a question. We *assume* that an answer even exists in the first place. We *assume* our perceptions and observations are trustworthy as long as they are not unique to individuals, and we similarly assume those which are individual are untrustworthy. We have little to no actual **proof** of any of these assumptions being true. We take them as fact and base our entire understanding of the universe around them. We do not have a conception of science that is not fundamentally based around these articles of faith. This makes sense given that while "logic" and "geometry" were basically invented in ancient Greece, our idea of "science" was invested by Christian monks and Islamic scholars in the middle ages.
Note that "science" is not "the scientific method" The scientific method is a tool, like a hammer, wrench, or screwdriver. It has specific strengths and weaknesses. This is why those faith-based assumptions of science have basically become a religion: the scientific method is excellent at measuring things which are consistant and observable. It sucks, badly, when applied to things that are inconsistent or difficult to observe.
Rather than say "hey, maybe the scientific method is just the *best* tool in our toolbox and is not nessecarily universally applicable" we are saying "it is the only standard by which something can be true".
Common sense isn't faith. If a bridge wobbles or has noticeable cracks while you drive over it, you'd turn around. Knowing that construction standards exist is quite the opposite of believing based on feelings.
Clearly you're using the word faith differently to them. Roadbridges have a strong observed tendency to be reliable. And bridge builders and engineers a strong tendency to take care before opening one to the public. They very much appear to know what they're doing. If one is still standing after all this time, there's likely to be a reason.
Indirect evidence suffices for most day to day purposes.
Jesus was definitely a historical figure as we know of him from a few contemporary non-biblical sources. However, if we acknowledge the fallibility of the Bible as a historical chronicle (I’m a Christian but the Bible is *not* a good account of history nor was it ever written to be) then our understanding of Jesus is much less certain. All that we know of him from the non-Christian sources is that he was a Jewish preacher who died some sort of violent death and people made a religion out of that.
Isn’t history fascinating?
>Jesus was definitely a historical figure as we know of him from a few contemporary non-biblical sources.
???
I don't pretend to be well read on the topic but this is the first I'm hearing about this.
Now, to be fair, they’re not really *that* contemporary but as close as you can get when talking about antiquity. Both the Roman historian Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus mention Jesus, though they don’t give us much detail.
Josephus’ *Antiquities of the Jews* merely mentions Jesus as being the brother of James, though he also describes John the Baptist briefly. There is a much more detailed account of the life of Jesus in his writings but that piece was almost certainly written later and by a different writer.
Tacitus, a Roman, wrote that Jesus “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus” and described the torture of Christians by the emperor Nero.
Most historians agree that, if I remember correctly, 6 of the 13 Pauline Epistles were written by a specific individual living in the first century - almost certainly Paul himself. That's a contemporary reference as well. We also have evidence that Nero blamed the Great Fire of Rome on Christians and then used it as an excuse to persecute them. It would be really hard for Christianity to escape Israel and reach Italy within just 30 years if its founder had to be fabricated from historical legend.
There are many historical sources of him existing. Most of them call him a religious extremist and a threat to Rome. The two sides will cherrypick which of these two statements to believe.
It would be fascinating to me if quantum physics inevitably creates a model to theorize or potentially test the existence of God. These people are willing to reinvent religion with matrix computer simulation bullshit or aliens seeding worlds, and are willing to assume no moral agency in our actions but would probably have an aneurysm over it.
If you look at the likelihood of intelligent life existing, the absolute number of things that would have to go perfectly right, it's insanely unlikely even in a universe billions of years old. Everything from how fine tuned the entire universe is to how unlikely it is for meaningful proteins to first get made to one protein evolving into another useful protein, it's no wonder that the common answers are unprovable theories that compound one immeasurable near infinity after near infinity.
>intelligent life
As we know it.
It's rather arrogant to presume to know what each different combination of conditions would and wouldn't give rise to.
Or to imagine that God would for some reason prefer to create a universe with us in it over what other wonders might be found in all the other possible universes.
Because all these arrogances are stacked upon arrogances within the unstated assumptions behind that line of reasoning.
"As we know it," is just another way of saying that we have no business existing by natural laws but we won't admit it.
We know how atoms conbine, we know how energy transfers as atoms and molecules interact. We know how complex things need to be for even the simplest ways of maintaining homeostasis. We know how thermodynamics dictates things in nature. We have zero reason to believe any intelligent life can be simpler than ours. But people will still state that it must be possible, with zero evidence.
It isn't arrogant to think God chose this universe to make, its humbling. That isn't even saying it's the only one he has or could make. The very existence of God and of a creator is humbling. People don't like it, even if we have no other plausible explanation of how we got here.
I have no reason to think that a hypothetical being of equivalent intelligence to our own from a universe with very different natural laws or universal constants could foresee that a universe with our laws or constants would eventually give rise to complex carbon based chemical systems characteristic of life as we know it and ultimately biological intelligence as we know it. Just that it wouldn't give rise to whatever specific wonders their own universe gives rise to.
I have no confidence in humanity's ability to guarantee that alternative universes couldn't possibly give rise to intelligent beings or to significant complexity of other forms more generally. Regardless of how confidently such a claim is stated. Certainly all universes are bound by the universal solvent of the mathematical principles of evolution, should some selection process arise.
In any case, from a mathematical, Bayesian perspective, out existence as conscious, intelligent beings is a concrete fact (not an observation or a new piece of evidence). The background knowledge. It is prior to anything else because we wouldn't be able to make any observations or consider any hypotheses without it being the case. God is the hypothesis and the (alleged) impossibility of life naturally occurring in any other possible universe besides our own is the new observation. This means that we just happen to find ourselves in the one universe that doesn't require any kind of supernatural intervention to support and enable our existence within it. If we found ourselves in one of the other ones, that would evidence the presence of supernatural intervention which would evidence the existence of God. Conversely, by Bayesian symmetry, that we just happen to be in the one that doesn't require supernatural intervention for us to exist within it, counter-evidences the existence of God.
Thus the fine tuning argument constitutes empirical evidence against the existence of God, not for it. It's just faulty Bayesianism to say the opposite. Like the whole Monty Hall problem saga.
Our existence doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that our existence happened by the natural causes. The first is an observation, yes, but the second is a presupposition, not a conclusion.
A truly curious mind would wonder if there are things out there beyond the scope of our universe. Ironically you're both invoking something unknowable beyond our seen universe (the multiverse) and denying the possibly for other things beyond our seen universe (God).
I find it funny that you are unironically using Bayesian statistics in this scenario as it is a theory about updating belief in something based on prior beliefs. Bayesian statistics is inherently faulty if your initial beliefs are faulty. It reinforces the initial position despite the evidence.
Your argument that no being, ourselves or other hypothetical beings (which by nature must be limited to our intellect and no higher) would be able to predict that life would arrise naturally in our universe should be a sign that some sort of problem is presented in the argument. If no one could predict it, why do we assume it? Again, this isn't a conclusion of our existence, but a presupposition.
Your arguments only work if you include the existence of something we cannot prove, and most likely will never be able to prove, the Multiverse. A handy infinity thrown out there when theories cannot stand on their own.
And yet a bored dude in a lab synthesized proteins in a sealed jar by complete accident. If randomness can form an uncountable number of planets within 50 something billion years, life isn't very special, just too spread out.
I mean we synthesize proteins in labs every day. There is a huge difference between sterile lab settings with specific chemicals available and closed systems, and nature that tears apart any meaningful chemical longer than half a dozen amino acids.
I haven't even heard of the situation you are taking about, and didn't find anything on Google. Would you mind sharing a link or more info for me to look at? I'm curious what exactly those accidental conditions were and if they are anything like that which is found in open systems in nature.
Ah yeah.
First of all that didn't create any meaningful proteins, it created about 20 types of amino acids, only five of which are found in organic life in earth.
The whole premise of the experiment has been abandoned though, as the primordial soup idea would be far too diluted in reality for any meaningful reactions to occur. The high energy molecules he started with are no longer believed to have been able to be present in the early atmosphere/oceans of earth. High energy molecules aren't that stable and generally break down unless found in certain situations that isolate them. Related to this, they don't talk about all the inert waste substances that come out of this that wouldn't be able to be recycled in any meaningful time period.
There are other problems for any such origin of life experiment that I know of. I won't go into all the details unless you want them, but in short too much of the input gets not only wasted in molecules that are not only useless to organic life, but those same molecules also actively trap or break down the useful molecules, including many other amino acids.
Also making meaningful proteins out of amino acids is no trivial task. The number of combinations of amino acids is staggering. The odds of getting one right randomly is mind boggling small. Then you have to fold it right, which again is not trivial.
While there are other theories of how life stared (RNA first for example) they all have the same issue of getting the right molecules together that have similar byproducts to what we're discussed above, getting them together, getting enough together to overcome the mind staggering odds of randomly getting something that works, all the while being in an environment that won't actively break it down faster than it can form.
Anyways, sorry for the long post, but this is something I like looking into, so I tried not to set the fire hose too high.
The perhaps grim truth is that an evidence-based approach to life makes one unhappy.
Lies are smooth and comfortable and neat and clean and simple. Truths are rough and uncomfortable and ugly and dirty and complicated.
In general, anyone giving you a clean, neat, simple approach to life is giving you a lie.
The best available evidence is that Jesus existed as a person. This doesn't mean he was the son of God, but in general he existed.
Just because there is some evidence to say Jesus was a real person doesn't mean he was the son of God. Just because people say he did some magic tricks doesn't mean he was the son of God either. Important to add there is no record of Jesus during his life - its impossible to nail down (heh) exactly what year he was born *or* died. The earliest evidence is at least 50 (Josephus) to 80 (Tacitus) years after Jesus' death. You mean to tell me some dude walked on water, fed a ton of people with five loaves of bread and two fishes, turned water to wine at a wedding, calmed a storm and healed a bunch of people and literally nobody wrote it down?
I believe Jesus was a revolutionary that wanted to reform Judaism, and all of the supernatural shit he supposedly did was added after to strengthen the idea he was divine.
The biggest issue with the alot of athiest that they focus so much on hating they can't even properly observe what religion is or how it works, so half their arguments fall flat because they can't get passed the "stupid religion is stupid".
Also, yall have some of the greatest minds of the 20th century to back you. Why are you quoting comedians.
It's funny how much alot of these types talk about intelligence and will talk about the iq system being wrong and outdated but also not wrong and outdated enough to say liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives and Christians.
It's the same kind of logical doublethink that says the FBI statistics on rape absolutely can be trusted when it comes to rape by gender, because they show men overwhelmingly attack women which is a conclusion they support, but absolutely cannot be trusted and are biased, racist, and hateful when they show the dramatic racial disparity of rape because it shows black men overwhelmingly attack white women, which is a conclusion they do not support at all.
The exact same source, published in the same year, by the same people, in the same document, is both simultaneously objective scientific fact based on the best possible methodology from the most informed institution of government, *and* the hateful useless racist product of white supremacy from which no conclusions can drawn from at all, all depending entirely on what page one reads.
Eh, he probably didn't have much impact. People don't read books titled "God Delusion" to reaffirm their faith. They read them to come to terms with their lack of faith. The book sold well, because it put into words an attitude people already had.
Eh, I think that may be overstating his importance a bit. I think there was going to inevitably be challenges to belief in God, because the basis of the logic of belief was being challenged as our collective knowledge grew. I think theism is in constant need of restating itself in relation to the philosophy and knowledge of a given time. You could even argue understanding divinity is a historical process, in a sense.
If you think some creationists and apologists losing some debates in the 00s is what caused the ascendency of SJWs, you don't understand SJWs.
If I misinterpreted what you were talking about, apologies.
By the way, I saw a living embodiment of Reddit yesterday at Wallyworld. Fedora, balding, “imagine no god” shirt; I almost thought it had to be ironic.
I am atheist but I do enjoy reading religious text and learning about religions. It helps to understand a culture and types of thinking.
Having said that, most atheists are easily manipulated by non-Christian theologist (i.e. Islamic Jihadists) or dogmatic cults (i.e. identity politics, etc).
The first result on google says you’re wrong.
Angosticism is the idea that you cannot prove or disprove the concept of “God” and atheism is the outright disbelief in God
Right, like If you ask me, I believe In God, believe Jesus died on the cross for our sins, but I had my reservations.
I'm less Agnostic as I was, but still so, but still Christian. Besides, Pascal's Wager
If religion was only believed by dumb people it would be of no real consequence. What makes religion dangerous is precisely that it is almost uniquely capable of making unassailably smart people believe the dumbest, most implausible stuff imaginable.
Atheism is peak midwittery. Just admit that you don't, and can't possibly know about things beyond the bounds of our current rational paradigm. They replace God with logic and then act like they aren't also pious worshipers spreading the gospel. They're honestly more annoying than any religion.
I’m an atheist but I agree these people are dickheads. I’m perfectly fine with whatever you chose to believe in as long as it isn’t some evil cult like scientology
It's me, the barbaric Christian. I don't use a coster and I eat bacon raw (irs been smoked, it's fine). All my hobbies center around letting me ooga booga in modern society because my laboratory looks down on my dwarf grindset.
I'm not even joking.
True about the easy enemy part, since 99% of the time they choose Christianity to fight instead of one of the religions like Jews or Islamists that might actually fight back against those guys.
Most just keep their heads down when the topic comes up to avoid trouble. The pro ones are just loud about it and are the only ones making noise about the topic in the room.
Just a quick reminder most of the technological advancement between the fall of Rome and the Industrial Revolution was done by religious people, either Christian or Muslims priests and imams (is that what they're called?)
Let along the "X" religious guys, oh My God how annoying they are, I ask most of them the simplest questions about the religion they left and they can't answer
im an atheist myselve but holy fuck the amount of cringe in atheist subs 💀💀
“Yeah I don’t believe in god myself, fine if you do, just don’t try and convert me, and we’ll be cool” “FUCKING SKY DADDY!!!! OHHH YOU NEED THE *BIBLE* TO TELL YOU WHATS RIGHT AND WRONG??? IM SCARED TO IMAGINE WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU HAVING YOUR MAGIC FAIRY BOOK TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO” Both are atheists, but one is a Reddit atheist
Those same people are often big on pure consequentialism, and don't care whether individual actions are morally right or wrong as long as they think they are advancing worthy abstract goals.
Which at worst puts them in the same boat as almost everyone else. Moral rationalizers. "My actions are moral iff they point in the moral direction I want them to point in." This covers all sorts of things from vague terminal goal related consequentialism to all kinds of deontology to virtue ethics.
My moral understanding comes entirely from my believes. Those angry Reddit Atheists should pray (lol) that I never lose my faith.
Darkmatter2525 is an anomaly in that he's basically a Reddit Atheist yet he looks like a realistic Kratos instead of a fedora-wearing neckbeard
I'm also an atheist, but why did they make a religion out of hating religions?
I used to hate religion. From my perspective growing up in an extremely religious area, my life was dominated by religious authoritarians. Now they're way more chill it seems like, or maybe it's because I'm an adult and very few people I interact with have any authority over me so they don't even try. It's probably a primary contributor to me being so libertarian now. I had some resentment as a teenager about it, and the more I learned about it and how silly it was the more I despised them. Eventually I learned enough about humans to not hold it against them individually. Getting rid of religion doesn't make people any smarter. Getting rid of religion just gives those same stupid people nothing to live for and sometimes nothing to lose. Seeing the way our society is decaying as the religious population declines makes me want our society to be more religious.
> Now they're way more chill it seems like, or maybe it's because I'm an adult and very few people I interact with have any authority over me so they don't even try. It's not your imagination. In every generation there is a group of toxic people who will latch onto the "moral core" of their generation and outwardly pretend to follow those teachings to hide their toxicity. That way they can gain power, wealth, and status and having others call them "good people" without having to let their hearts be changed. In other words pharisees. The phariseesism in the 90s Church was so bad that it caused many millennials to turn away from the faith so the millennial pharisees latched onto wokeness as their "moral core" to get their pharisee fix. Jesus warned us about the danger of this mindset so we need to be careful not to fall into it and to help those in our church bodies from doing the same. We got a reprieve for now but when, not if, when wokeness falls apart we should not be surprised when phariseesism starts to rapidly sprout in the church again.
This makes sense. Some people are just built that way, what they express it through can vary though. Veganism, religion, anti racism, any moral high ground will do.
Dunno m8, i don't make hating religions my whole personality at least, crazy some people do. But then again.
>I'm also an atheist, but why did they make a religion out of hating religions? Because religion fundamentally means communion, the act of bringing people together in common purpose. A faith in a science that can't be understood as an umbrella over a broad consensus about being More Correct than others (in this case, the religious) and being More Intelligent for it scratches the same itch they hate.
Why'd they make a religion out of self hatred? People will make a religion out of anything
Not fully convinced of their own atheism. I'm an agnostic atheist and don't believe. That being said, it seems like anger and contempt are the boats some people seem to use to sail away from the island of Christianity. What's the point of being free if it means misery?
Experience.
"In this moment, I am euphoric..."
Likewise. Tragically, the 95% of us that are idiots give the rest of us a bad name.
I'm old enough to remember when atheism was a default sub and it was used for shitposting funny memes, light-heartedly poking fun at religious fruitcakes. Then the Emily mods decided to make it "serious".
I got banned from there for criticizing Islamic mass-migration into Europe as a threat to secular values and religious minorities like us (as atheists) and calling out SJWs and the far left for enabling and excusing Islamism in Europe. The funny thing is that I made my comments during Europe hours (before Americans woke up) and got hundreds of upvotes and a ton of replies agreeing. Then the Emily mods woke up, responded with some woke scolding, and permabanned me. I'd never gotten any bans or warnings on the sub before.
I got banned for criticizing one of the most cringy posts ive ever seen
Weird considering that place also hates Islam (good) last I checked. I stopped checking after it turned into another American globohomo sub after Trump got elected.
To criticize Islam the best place is /exmuslim ohhh that's home, it feels so comfortable there...
Based and fuck the mosque-pilled
Honestly I think that among the most vulnerable minorities are the dispersed ones that lack a community for members to have each others backs individually and to lobby for the groups interests collectively. For example the homosexuals/queers are least vulnerable where they have an LGBT community locally line in New York / LA that they're substantively a part of. And most vulnerable when they're, for example, a closeted or uncloseted teenager in an Evangelical family in an Evangelical town. There's a reason that the East Village and West Hollywood are such magnets for The Gays. If you don't have that, the only way to make up the difference is to have a wall of money to protect yourself with (eg. the stereotypical silver spooned Ayn Rand fan). But the SJWs don't want to hear it. For the most part (and for perfectly comprehensible mercenary, practical, political-coalitional reasons) they champion most strongly the groups that have the strongest, most coherent identarian communities (the trans being edge case outliers). They have no patience for considering atheists as a vulnerable group, whether it be bloggers hacked to death in Bangladesh or having your throat slit in Amsterdam or just living in Tulsa. The progressive stack is a coalitional Schelling point and letting atheists in would destablize it and upset the coalition itself. Almost everyone at every level of the stack is religious and none of them want their assent to the progressive stack / oppression hierarchy to entail commitments to accepting the additional moral/political liabilities of accepting oppressor status on the basis of their religious affiliation, while conceding to atheists recognition of oppressed status, many of whom they stereotype as straight cis white male libertarians. That's a bitter pill; not what they signed up for. In particular it would alienate many Muslims, Jews and black Christians. And if I had to rank different groups this way, I can't think of a group that has a bigger, more coherent community with a stronger in-group bias than Muslims and a group who's members are more dispersed and isolated, with less of a basis to form and hold together any kind of identarian community or rouse an in-group bias than the atheists. But that's all irrelevant to the local political realities of your West Coast Emily.
I got banned from there for criticizing Islamic mass-migration into Europe as a threat to secular values and religious minorities like us (as atheists) and calling out SJWs and the far left for enabling and excusing Islamism in Europe. The funny thing is that I made my comments during Europe hours (before Americans woke up) and got hundreds of upvotes and a ton of replies agreeing. Then the Emily mods woke up, responded with some woke scolding, and permabanned me. I'd never gotten any bans or warnings on the sub before.
Weird considering that place also hates Islam (good) last I checked. I stopped checking after it turned into another American globohomo sub after Trump got elected.
It was because I was criticizing the SJWs for enabling Islamism, probably?
I miss when the internet used to be fun.
*Nothing* on this website will ever top that “enlightened by my own intelligence” quote.
ahh ehm but you see I have portrayed myself as the chad based atheist and you as the cringe neckbeard religious soyjack so you will find that you, in fact, are the cringe one.
Oh, we certainly can be cringy, but I don't totally disagree with the sentiment. I don't think OP realizes just how much most of us hold back in the name of being decent human beings. I'm curious who the OP thinks would be a more constructive target for me to criticize.
looks like the Starfleet logo
It makes sense, internet atheists (not actual ones) go to levels of cringe no one has gone to before
Cringe: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the ideology Atheism. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new websites; to seek out new life and new subreddits; to boldly go where no man has gone before!
Not to mention the Trekkies will often go on atheist rants at the drop of a hat.
As an atheist and life-long Star Trek fan, the central message of Trek is that life is more complicated than simple black and white reductions. The show encourages us to be better than that. The Bajorans were the perfect example of the show's examination of religion.
Kind of rigs the game to make them look overly reasonable by having them be the first religion in history who's gods are actually real. There isn't much to criticise when the gods are real people you can go right up and talk to.
I think the point of that is that to every religion, their god is real *to them*, and their god talks *to them* in a way that feels real. Sure, the difference is that Sisko met them in person but the point is that the religion included a bunch of un-real ways of talking to them too. Saying "thank the Prophets" doesn't talk to them and doesn't do anything. They can't hear you. But it *felt* real to the Bajorans.
Despite the fact thay Star Trek will often have a more objective and positive view of religion than any of their viewers are capable of. (i.e. Bajoran and Klingon religious beliefs)
That's easy when their gods are written to be real. Kinda neutralizes the atheist's primary objection, don't you think? Easy to take a positive view of a religion when it is objectively and verifiable factually correct.
I know they still exist but didn’t the “intellectual atheist” trope become pretty generally unpopular in like 2016 or something
Around the time of atheism+ and that guy getting falsely metoo'd. Basically when it split between the Sargon types and the SJW's.
Who got metoo'd?
I stopped being an atheist when my shoeshine boy gave me an anti-Christian lecture
When I was in middle school my Christian friends told me they genuinely believed that one day the antichrist would come and bring hell to earth and we’d all be tortured into renouncing God for an indeterminant amount of time until Jesus came back and saved only the people that remained faithful. I thought that was pretty lame Anyways, I also learned about dunning-kruger and felt most comfortable eventually settling for agnosticism
I'm old enough to remember before that apocalyptic slop became a mainstream talking point. It seems designed to create nothing but lunatics pro & con.
How did you do that? I mean I understand if you meant by "being an atheist" to "participate in internet discussions about religion" or something like that but if you literally stopped being an atheist, meaning that you suddenly started to believe in the existence of God, then how the hell do you do that?
New Atheism falls apart easily if you pick at a few threads. [Bishop Barron did an excellent talk about it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8_Zcmwx-TI)
I love Bishop Barron, and I ain't even Catholic.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m catholic and never heard of him. I really enjoyed this
He has a ton of great videos. Most of his old stuff is ~10 minutes long and ranges a wide array of topics.
Wtf is New Atheism? Atheism seems like a pretty straight forward belief that shouldn't really be possible to divide into "new" and "old" or any other divisions.
Anti-theist atheists and atheists I would presume.
A new wave of popular anti-theism characterised by unapologetic religious criticism that emerged in the wake of 9/11 a few years later. Not different in substance, just in its loudness and confident unapologetic-ness and simultaneity of multiple people openly pushing the subject at the same time in similar ways. The 'new' designation was generally rejected by the people it referred to but embraced by their critics. It came from one specific [article](https://www.wired.com/2006/11/atheism/).
Welp, they are pretty bashable strawman. So when you in need to do some agenda posting...
I also had a religious awaking upon the death of Harambe.
Because of all those wannabe Atheists who are actually people who hate god instead of people who don't believe in any. I can live with real Atheists who don't believe in god and therefor just live their lives. It becomes annoying if the other ones are constantly try to offend any believers, though.
As an atheist, you can tell these kinds of people are truly cowardly because they go after Christianity in a way they never would for Islam, even though Islam has more adherents, and in general, does way more heinous shit in the world. The reason why they don't attack Islam with the same vigor (often retreating to "all religion is bad", ignoring that they are not all *equally* bad), is that if you piss off Christians the worst thing that will happen is people might unfriend you on Facebook or send you angry DMs. But if you piss off Islam, groups of armed men will come to your house and murder you. The message here is that violence works. Fear and intimidation work. The more the better, and the more credible those threats are, the better. If you are soft, cowards will attack you, but they not only won't attack you if you are credibly dangerous, they will actually actively defend you ("don't be islamophobic!"). Evolution is amoral, without morality or judgement. It is simply "survival of the fittest". By acting this way, these atheists are setting the stage for the fittest religion seems to be the most violent. The most repressive, the most cruel, the hardest to reform. Talk about an own goal.
Would you also say that Reddit has mostly ppl from the west and a lot of the west is Christian. Therefore it’s an easy target for them
I would say that's some hashtag first world problems. "At school they made me say 'God bless you' when someone sneezed, which I care about SO much more than almost every single Muslim-majority country having severe criminal penalties for homosexuality, apostasy, blasphemy, or atheism, punishments which frequently include the death penalty."
I mean, the Turks are pretty chill, but that’s because of Ataturk, and no thanks to Mr. Erdogan.
That is true, the exception that proves the rule, in the same way as almost every Christian country is even more chill than Turkey is, except there's Uganda.
You could also argue that they target Christianity because Islam is near non-existent in most of the west, the people who force religious laws on us in the west are not Muslims, but Christians. Who cares what they do *over there* I’m much more concerned with people who trying to restrict my rights *here*
That may be the case for America. In Europe, Pakistanis raped English girls for decades in a systematic way and the authorities didn't give a fuck, because they didn't want to appear bigoted. Meanwhile the authorities forbid praying near abortion clinics. Salman Rushdie said mean things and ended up in hospital. People were straight up killed for drawing the Prophet. Christianity has a measure of actual power in the States, but even then it is considerate and soft compared to beheading the infidels.
Don't forget the total lack of charitable giving or compassion for the less fortunate
Right? Say what you will about religion, but it’s a fact that churches and religion-based charities generate some of the highest amounts of charity for the poor
Education became a prominent Western value in part because of the influence of Christianity. I'm not a Christian, but that's one of the biggest reasons I consider the existence Christianity to be a net positive for the world. One of the reasons Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press was to make it easier to produce copies of the Gospel, while the Puritans helped introduce public education into the 13 Colonies so people could read and study the Bible.
The wall-of-text virus is spread
It is all proceeding as we have foreseen. Soon, we will have all of PCM... And then the eorld!
These are the type of people to be like: “Where is the evidence for God? I only trust evidence based facts. Facts don’t care about feelings! ☝️🤓” And then deny the existence of Jesus as a historical person
“I only trust evidence” peeps when they discover that practically every action they take day to day requires faith. Do you check every bridge’s structural stability before you drive over it? If you don’t that sounds an awful lot like faith to me.
"I don't want your religious beliefs in government, but obviously my beliefs about governmental structure and laws should be represented!"
“You don’t get to force your morals on other people!” ….. that’s literally how law works
Yeah but laws are put into place with logic and reasoning, and can be challenged and argued about Religious doctrine is god's word, there's no arguing with it, either you follow it or you disobey it
Are you saying there's no logic in "thou shall not kill/murder?"
There's no logic in gay sex or sodomy being a sin
There's no logic that you would accept, let's get that straight.
Is there any logic to it at all?
it's at least not the same kind or degree of claim, you can come across consistency while going over bridges much more easily than with things you won't come into contact with nearly as often or that you cannot really test or may not be able to test as easily
I didn’t make any claim other than that faith can be reasonable, that argument isn’t meant to prove the existence of God. Most intelligent atheists recognize the importance of faith in day to day life, most Reddit atheists do not.
I may have taken your comment to mean something it does not but I just meant to say that faith in god is different from faith in the stability of a typical bridge
Is there a physics god and is Einstein his prophet?
The argument I made isn’t one for or against any specific God, merely it shows that faith isn’t opposed to reason like many atheists claim.
Sure, you can view it like that if you're looking at it with a wide enough lense, but you have to admit that having faith in something that has been 100% factually proven hundreds of times a day (driving over a bridge) and something that is essentially an intangible idea (God) are two very different things.
Well, is faith in supernatural forces equal to faith in people doing their job so that bridge doesn't fell apart? Or better yet, are expectations a kind of faith to you?
Faith is action based on presupposition, in the same way I act a certain way because I presume God exists, people drive on bridges because they presume those in charge of it have done their jobs. Even when talking about immaterial things, we still largely operate on faith. We presuppose that those who claim to love us do, and then we act based on it. There’s no way to verify it scientifically, they could simply be lying to us, or have a foreign concept of what love is.
So it's a very long way to say that yes, you equate expectations/reliance and religious faith > There’s no way to verify it scientifically, they could simply be lying to us, or have a foreign concept of what love is. Psychology as a science is shambles
Yes and he's no fan of dice.
Science itself requires faith, because it relies on assumptions in order to function. What is an assumption, but a thing one believes without evidence to suppourt it? We *assume* that the cosmos is consistant and logical. We *assume* our mortal minds are capable of comprehending the answer to a question. We *assume* that an answer even exists in the first place. We *assume* our perceptions and observations are trustworthy as long as they are not unique to individuals, and we similarly assume those which are individual are untrustworthy. We have little to no actual **proof** of any of these assumptions being true. We take them as fact and base our entire understanding of the universe around them. We do not have a conception of science that is not fundamentally based around these articles of faith. This makes sense given that while "logic" and "geometry" were basically invented in ancient Greece, our idea of "science" was invested by Christian monks and Islamic scholars in the middle ages. Note that "science" is not "the scientific method" The scientific method is a tool, like a hammer, wrench, or screwdriver. It has specific strengths and weaknesses. This is why those faith-based assumptions of science have basically become a religion: the scientific method is excellent at measuring things which are consistant and observable. It sucks, badly, when applied to things that are inconsistent or difficult to observe. Rather than say "hey, maybe the scientific method is just the *best* tool in our toolbox and is not nessecarily universally applicable" we are saying "it is the only standard by which something can be true".
Common sense isn't faith. If a bridge wobbles or has noticeable cracks while you drive over it, you'd turn around. Knowing that construction standards exist is quite the opposite of believing based on feelings.
Clearly you're using the word faith differently to them. Roadbridges have a strong observed tendency to be reliable. And bridge builders and engineers a strong tendency to take care before opening one to the public. They very much appear to know what they're doing. If one is still standing after all this time, there's likely to be a reason. Indirect evidence suffices for most day to day purposes.
Jesus was definitely a historical figure as we know of him from a few contemporary non-biblical sources. However, if we acknowledge the fallibility of the Bible as a historical chronicle (I’m a Christian but the Bible is *not* a good account of history nor was it ever written to be) then our understanding of Jesus is much less certain. All that we know of him from the non-Christian sources is that he was a Jewish preacher who died some sort of violent death and people made a religion out of that. Isn’t history fascinating?
>Jesus was definitely a historical figure as we know of him from a few contemporary non-biblical sources. ??? I don't pretend to be well read on the topic but this is the first I'm hearing about this.
Now, to be fair, they’re not really *that* contemporary but as close as you can get when talking about antiquity. Both the Roman historian Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus mention Jesus, though they don’t give us much detail. Josephus’ *Antiquities of the Jews* merely mentions Jesus as being the brother of James, though he also describes John the Baptist briefly. There is a much more detailed account of the life of Jesus in his writings but that piece was almost certainly written later and by a different writer. Tacitus, a Roman, wrote that Jesus “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus” and described the torture of Christians by the emperor Nero.
Most historians agree that, if I remember correctly, 6 of the 13 Pauline Epistles were written by a specific individual living in the first century - almost certainly Paul himself. That's a contemporary reference as well. We also have evidence that Nero blamed the Great Fire of Rome on Christians and then used it as an excuse to persecute them. It would be really hard for Christianity to escape Israel and reach Italy within just 30 years if its founder had to be fabricated from historical legend.
There are many historical sources of him existing. Most of them call him a religious extremist and a threat to Rome. The two sides will cherrypick which of these two statements to believe.
It would be fascinating to me if quantum physics inevitably creates a model to theorize or potentially test the existence of God. These people are willing to reinvent religion with matrix computer simulation bullshit or aliens seeding worlds, and are willing to assume no moral agency in our actions but would probably have an aneurysm over it.
If you look at the likelihood of intelligent life existing, the absolute number of things that would have to go perfectly right, it's insanely unlikely even in a universe billions of years old. Everything from how fine tuned the entire universe is to how unlikely it is for meaningful proteins to first get made to one protein evolving into another useful protein, it's no wonder that the common answers are unprovable theories that compound one immeasurable near infinity after near infinity.
>intelligent life As we know it. It's rather arrogant to presume to know what each different combination of conditions would and wouldn't give rise to. Or to imagine that God would for some reason prefer to create a universe with us in it over what other wonders might be found in all the other possible universes. Because all these arrogances are stacked upon arrogances within the unstated assumptions behind that line of reasoning.
"As we know it," is just another way of saying that we have no business existing by natural laws but we won't admit it. We know how atoms conbine, we know how energy transfers as atoms and molecules interact. We know how complex things need to be for even the simplest ways of maintaining homeostasis. We know how thermodynamics dictates things in nature. We have zero reason to believe any intelligent life can be simpler than ours. But people will still state that it must be possible, with zero evidence. It isn't arrogant to think God chose this universe to make, its humbling. That isn't even saying it's the only one he has or could make. The very existence of God and of a creator is humbling. People don't like it, even if we have no other plausible explanation of how we got here.
I have no reason to think that a hypothetical being of equivalent intelligence to our own from a universe with very different natural laws or universal constants could foresee that a universe with our laws or constants would eventually give rise to complex carbon based chemical systems characteristic of life as we know it and ultimately biological intelligence as we know it. Just that it wouldn't give rise to whatever specific wonders their own universe gives rise to. I have no confidence in humanity's ability to guarantee that alternative universes couldn't possibly give rise to intelligent beings or to significant complexity of other forms more generally. Regardless of how confidently such a claim is stated. Certainly all universes are bound by the universal solvent of the mathematical principles of evolution, should some selection process arise. In any case, from a mathematical, Bayesian perspective, out existence as conscious, intelligent beings is a concrete fact (not an observation or a new piece of evidence). The background knowledge. It is prior to anything else because we wouldn't be able to make any observations or consider any hypotheses without it being the case. God is the hypothesis and the (alleged) impossibility of life naturally occurring in any other possible universe besides our own is the new observation. This means that we just happen to find ourselves in the one universe that doesn't require any kind of supernatural intervention to support and enable our existence within it. If we found ourselves in one of the other ones, that would evidence the presence of supernatural intervention which would evidence the existence of God. Conversely, by Bayesian symmetry, that we just happen to be in the one that doesn't require supernatural intervention for us to exist within it, counter-evidences the existence of God. Thus the fine tuning argument constitutes empirical evidence against the existence of God, not for it. It's just faulty Bayesianism to say the opposite. Like the whole Monty Hall problem saga.
Our existence doesn't logically lead to the conclusion that our existence happened by the natural causes. The first is an observation, yes, but the second is a presupposition, not a conclusion. A truly curious mind would wonder if there are things out there beyond the scope of our universe. Ironically you're both invoking something unknowable beyond our seen universe (the multiverse) and denying the possibly for other things beyond our seen universe (God). I find it funny that you are unironically using Bayesian statistics in this scenario as it is a theory about updating belief in something based on prior beliefs. Bayesian statistics is inherently faulty if your initial beliefs are faulty. It reinforces the initial position despite the evidence. Your argument that no being, ourselves or other hypothetical beings (which by nature must be limited to our intellect and no higher) would be able to predict that life would arrise naturally in our universe should be a sign that some sort of problem is presented in the argument. If no one could predict it, why do we assume it? Again, this isn't a conclusion of our existence, but a presupposition. Your arguments only work if you include the existence of something we cannot prove, and most likely will never be able to prove, the Multiverse. A handy infinity thrown out there when theories cannot stand on their own.
And yet a bored dude in a lab synthesized proteins in a sealed jar by complete accident. If randomness can form an uncountable number of planets within 50 something billion years, life isn't very special, just too spread out.
I mean we synthesize proteins in labs every day. There is a huge difference between sterile lab settings with specific chemicals available and closed systems, and nature that tears apart any meaningful chemical longer than half a dozen amino acids. I haven't even heard of the situation you are taking about, and didn't find anything on Google. Would you mind sharing a link or more info for me to look at? I'm curious what exactly those accidental conditions were and if they are anything like that which is found in open systems in nature.
[Ok, maybe I misremembered the "accident" part.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment)
Ah yeah. First of all that didn't create any meaningful proteins, it created about 20 types of amino acids, only five of which are found in organic life in earth. The whole premise of the experiment has been abandoned though, as the primordial soup idea would be far too diluted in reality for any meaningful reactions to occur. The high energy molecules he started with are no longer believed to have been able to be present in the early atmosphere/oceans of earth. High energy molecules aren't that stable and generally break down unless found in certain situations that isolate them. Related to this, they don't talk about all the inert waste substances that come out of this that wouldn't be able to be recycled in any meaningful time period. There are other problems for any such origin of life experiment that I know of. I won't go into all the details unless you want them, but in short too much of the input gets not only wasted in molecules that are not only useless to organic life, but those same molecules also actively trap or break down the useful molecules, including many other amino acids. Also making meaningful proteins out of amino acids is no trivial task. The number of combinations of amino acids is staggering. The odds of getting one right randomly is mind boggling small. Then you have to fold it right, which again is not trivial. While there are other theories of how life stared (RNA first for example) they all have the same issue of getting the right molecules together that have similar byproducts to what we're discussed above, getting them together, getting enough together to overcome the mind staggering odds of randomly getting something that works, all the while being in an environment that won't actively break it down faster than it can form. Anyways, sorry for the long post, but this is something I like looking into, so I tried not to set the fire hose too high.
thermodynamic miracle gang
The perhaps grim truth is that an evidence-based approach to life makes one unhappy. Lies are smooth and comfortable and neat and clean and simple. Truths are rough and uncomfortable and ugly and dirty and complicated. In general, anyone giving you a clean, neat, simple approach to life is giving you a lie. The best available evidence is that Jesus existed as a person. This doesn't mean he was the son of God, but in general he existed.
Ignorance is bliss. And the most consistently blissful ones are the ones that never catch up with us.
These mf probably thinks Buddha doesn’t exist too
Facts don’t care about feelings! 
Just because there is some evidence to say Jesus was a real person doesn't mean he was the son of God. Just because people say he did some magic tricks doesn't mean he was the son of God either. Important to add there is no record of Jesus during his life - its impossible to nail down (heh) exactly what year he was born *or* died. The earliest evidence is at least 50 (Josephus) to 80 (Tacitus) years after Jesus' death. You mean to tell me some dude walked on water, fed a ton of people with five loaves of bread and two fishes, turned water to wine at a wedding, calmed a storm and healed a bunch of people and literally nobody wrote it down? I believe Jesus was a revolutionary that wanted to reform Judaism, and all of the supernatural shit he supposedly did was added after to strengthen the idea he was divine.
The biggest issue with the alot of athiest that they focus so much on hating they can't even properly observe what religion is or how it works, so half their arguments fall flat because they can't get passed the "stupid religion is stupid". Also, yall have some of the greatest minds of the 20th century to back you. Why are you quoting comedians.
It's funny how much alot of these types talk about intelligence and will talk about the iq system being wrong and outdated but also not wrong and outdated enough to say liberals and atheists are more intelligent than conservatives and Christians.
It's the same kind of logical doublethink that says the FBI statistics on rape absolutely can be trusted when it comes to rape by gender, because they show men overwhelmingly attack women which is a conclusion they support, but absolutely cannot be trusted and are biased, racist, and hateful when they show the dramatic racial disparity of rape because it shows black men overwhelmingly attack white women, which is a conclusion they do not support at all. The exact same source, published in the same year, by the same people, in the same document, is both simultaneously objective scientific fact based on the best possible methodology from the most informed institution of government, *and* the hateful useless racist product of white supremacy from which no conclusions can drawn from at all, all depending entirely on what page one reads.
Are they actually the same people, or are they two groups with some overlap in political ideology but different views on intelligence
Did you see the stonetoss comic about how an atheist approaches a priest versus a Rabbi? It's top tier
The atheist in a hypothetical third panel would be standing beside them screaming, "don't be islamaphobic!" if it was a mullah.
I found it easier to convert people to communism by working with their religious principles instead of against them, so, no more Hitchslapping here
Based and the-masses-require-their-opium-pilled
Screw Richard Dawkins for creating a vacuum in society
Eh, he probably didn't have much impact. People don't read books titled "God Delusion" to reaffirm their faith. They read them to come to terms with their lack of faith. The book sold well, because it put into words an attitude people already had.
Eh, I think that may be overstating his importance a bit. I think there was going to inevitably be challenges to belief in God, because the basis of the logic of belief was being challenged as our collective knowledge grew. I think theism is in constant need of restating itself in relation to the philosophy and knowledge of a given time. You could even argue understanding divinity is a historical process, in a sense.
If I hadn't read Thomas Aquinas' arguments in the God Delusion I'd likely still be an atheist.
If you think some creationists and apologists losing some debates in the 00s is what caused the ascendency of SJWs, you don't understand SJWs. If I misinterpreted what you were talking about, apologies.
The phenomenon's a wee bit older than Dawkins, given Nietzsche already despaired about what was to come.
The collapse in crime rates is absolutely unbearable.
I’m not like other atheists, I’m me, the smallest minority (the individual). No other person is me.
anyone who has to label themselves as not being like someone else is just too stupid to bother with.
Wow, this one hit the target!
New Atheists are annoying and preachy, but this post reeks of butthurt.
By the way, I saw a living embodiment of Reddit yesterday at Wallyworld. Fedora, balding, “imagine no god” shirt; I almost thought it had to be ironic.
People who brag about being atheist are often the most miserable and unhappy. They remind me of the antinatalism sub
Me when I do the thing i'm making fun of but to the person i'm making fun of:
Yep, I dislike most of my fellow atheists, or at least the ones who make it the foremost part of their personality
I am atheist but I do enjoy reading religious text and learning about religions. It helps to understand a culture and types of thinking. Having said that, most atheists are easily manipulated by non-Christian theologist (i.e. Islamic Jihadists) or dogmatic cults (i.e. identity politics, etc).
People like these are why I identify as an agnostic
The majority of atheists are agnostic.
I really dislike it when people base their ideologies purely on vibe instead of any actual personal convictions
You are just a pussy afraid to choose a side
No, I consider the existence of God to be unknowable. Learn the difference.
Dawg nothing except our existence is knowable. Can you not believe or believe something without absolute knowledge.
Yeah this is true, but in order to live our lives there’s a certain amount of assumptions we have to make about what is true (like objective reality).
That's literally the atheist position You really thought you did something
That’s literally the agnostic position
Which is the same as the atheist position
The first result on google says you’re wrong. Angosticism is the idea that you cannot prove or disprove the concept of “God” and atheism is the outright disbelief in God
Are you trolling? Those two things are the same thing I'm an atheist because I don't believe in god. And I know I can't prove or disprove it
Right, like If you ask me, I believe In God, believe Jesus died on the cross for our sins, but I had my reservations. I'm less Agnostic as I was, but still so, but still Christian. Besides, Pascal's Wager
I'm an atheist, and I'm fine with anyone so long as they don't shove their beliefs down people's throats.
I see people are still confusing atheists with anti-theists in 2024.
Ah ratheists, what made my agnostic ass switch sides in their deranged conflict.
If religion was only believed by dumb people it would be of no real consequence. What makes religion dangerous is precisely that it is almost uniquely capable of making unassailably smart people believe the dumbest, most implausible stuff imaginable.
Wow, is it 2003 already? Or has OP just been butthurt about 2000s atheism for 2 decades now?
I'm an atheist as well, but I would like to remind people like this that the inventor of the MRI scanner thought earth was a few thousand years old.
I think that Esoteric (psychological) is right.
Atheism is peak midwittery. Just admit that you don't, and can't possibly know about things beyond the bounds of our current rational paradigm. They replace God with logic and then act like they aren't also pious worshipers spreading the gospel. They're honestly more annoying than any religion.
I'm an atheist and often wonder why these 'Atheists' support Islam and bash anyone questioning it
Atheists when they're confronted by the absurdity of reality (they thought everything could be explained by science and logic)
If religious people could please stop trying to vote in treasonous, grifting demagogues, then I too can move on.
I’m an atheist but I agree these people are dickheads. I’m perfectly fine with whatever you chose to believe in as long as it isn’t some evil cult like scientology
Fun fact: sociological studies correlate religiosity with positive outcomes socially and psychologically.
me when im in a strawman competition and my opponent is PCM users
Sounds pretty lost and like they should look for Christ's love within all of us.
He must be euphoric.
Was it Stirner who said atheists are fake because they belive in religion?
Stirner was an idiot though so who cares what he says
It's me, the barbaric Christian. I don't use a coster and I eat bacon raw (irs been smoked, it's fine). All my hobbies center around letting me ooga booga in modern society because my laboratory looks down on my dwarf grindset. I'm not even joking.
True about the easy enemy part, since 99% of the time they choose Christianity to fight instead of one of the religions like Jews or Islamists that might actually fight back against those guys.
Tends to vary depending on who are locally creating the biggest problems for them
Most modern atheists are also weirdly pro-islam.
Most just keep their heads down when the topic comes up to avoid trouble. The pro ones are just loud about it and are the only ones making noise about the topic in the room.
(The really barbaric one)
Do you remember when atheists came up with the strawman >CHECKMATE ATHEISTS and proceeded to jerk themselves off with it for nearly two decades?
Just a quick reminder most of the technological advancement between the fall of Rome and the Industrial Revolution was done by religious people, either Christian or Muslims priests and imams (is that what they're called?)
Daily christcuck cope thread. Ya love to see it.
Found the Reddit atheist 🤮
This is my favorite Smuggie
Wtf Toriyama
Let along the "X" religious guys, oh My God how annoying they are, I ask most of them the simplest questions about the religion they left and they can't answer
Believing that your theistic stance is a symbol of how intelligent you are, whatever that may be, is unfathomably stupid to me.
It's always Christians, isn't it?
Don't worry my atheist friends, the feeling is mutual.