Atheism

Thanks panzade! I'm not proselytizing though...honest!


(well, at least not consciously)

You mean there might be unconscious proselytizing? LOL

I don't mean to argue with your connection and I probably envy it, but I remain incalcitrant. Any group that would have me..

kidding. But I see no reason to gather except social.

Hi cicerone!

Yes, IMO we don't always understand our motivations for what we do.

Advertisers understand this, and spend billions on what Vance Packard many years ago called, "Hidden Persuaders".
... Actually I have been carrying on a little, less-than-rigorous, experiment
for many years re the affect of advertising on behavior:
I ask people if their decision to buy this or that product was influenced by the manufacturer's advertising. People almost never say 'yes'.
Then I say: 'Gosh, in that case the advertising industry has been scamming manufacturers out of BILLIONS of dollars every year!'

osso
I respect your opinion. 'Different Strokes' as they say. Still, I must quibble about your use of the term 'social' -at least if you mean it in the usual colloquial way.
Many people feel a need for connectedness and community that is deeper and more important than mere 'socializing'. It includes the sharing of joys and concerns, but it is even more than that. Once again I turn to my 'friend' (and atheist) Philip Larkin.
In his poem 'Church Going' the speaker (presumably Larkin) stops in a vacant church. He is drawn to it. He expects the day will come when it (and conventional religion) will be abandoned, but even as he reflects on that, he confesses an attraction to the place and says (of the church):

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Larkin, whom I respect, is not me. I am not drawn to churches for community. I tend to be repulsed.
Least of all that I am presently reading Al Filo del Agua.

I suppose I like the battery of talk, the years of differences.

I rarely look back at the old church, and this book catapults me to remembrance -
by Agustin Yanez, The Edge of the Storm, Al Filo del Agua.

I have been know to challenge neighborhoods, but not about all this stuff.

"...I am not drawn to churches for community. I tend to be repulsed..."
osso, You should, of course do what is right for you. I really do believe that everyone has to find their own way in this life... you are fine just the way you are. I have no need to have you live (or think) the way I do.
All the best to you, my friend!

We do agree,on that, which is tricky, and likely on much else.

There are people I revere here, you're up there.
So, I figure reverence will annoy you and we could just visit your local ice cream parlor.

Seems to me that that's all you've been doing for several posts.

Sorry if I've annoyed you Setanta.

That's some shitty passive-aggressive you've got going on there, Bubba. You don't annoy me, you're nothing to me. Promotional pep rallies for the UU hardly constitutes a discussion of what it means to be an atheist.

Ignore is selective sleep. That's really passive. Expression is then monopolised by aggression.

I think you confuse passive-aggressive with trying to be civil. Funny, I remember you as being witty, but not so hostile.

I don't know what's funny about you using more passive-aggression to label me as "hostile." I just found the drivel you were posting about UU not to be relevant to the thead. I do have a right to make such a comment, you know.

bye

See ya

If passive and aggressive constitute a spectrum then the mid-point, the neutral in this case, is like the mid-point in a line.

The mid-point in a line becomes smaller the more it is magnified until, theoretically, the mid-point is infinitessimal. Which means that all expression falls to one side or the other. It is either passive or aggressive.

It is a social skill to recognise which in the greenish/orange area around the mid-point and orient one's relationships according to choice. The outer zones are straightforward.

The difficulty is that putting on an act of being passive is easy in the performance of many social acts. The humility of the Christian penitent set beside the the chap stood next to a tiger he has shot with an implement it had no defence for. Hemingway's problem I think.

When people say the same thing a lot of times it expresses a need for certainty and reassurance in what is an uncertain world. And all conversations become open-ended and limitless and go nowhere in case, if they did, a limit would be reached and nothing more could be said.

I saw this and I liked it:

"Atheism is not a vitamin deficiency."

A
R
T

...Although it is also true that atheists used to become the common meal of lions and leopards in the African Savannah...so mostly a "deficiency" in the instinct to survive...

...upon belief: those who used to just think it was the "wind in the bushes" would easily dismiss the danger and end up dead...reason why, so "they" say, most of us are religious by natural selection intervention...

...that lack of insight could be well explained by missing the sufficient supply of nourishment and vitamins in some elements of the tribe and not just by a factor of a superior intelligence...that is, there are at least two kinds of atheists and not all of them are smart...not that "God" exists anyway !...