Atheism

I like your sign off on that post, JNation.

Okay, I've been zeroed so I'll elaborate. I've had family friends who were jesuits. Smarts. I regret they didn't use them at the time.

From what I have read of history, sometimes intense and sometimes spotty, and never remembered photographically, much action has had to do with power, control, money. All sorts of skullduggery all over the place. The older I get, the more the heretics!! inquisition!! years seem not to be about faith.

You know concerning the universe being without wonder or meaning unless there is some silly human type god running it, I can still remember my feelings of wonder and awe lying in a hammock on clear dark night looking at the stars as a teenager.

Thinking of how many eyes of other intelligent beings might be looking back and wondering about my possible exists as I was wondering about theirs.

I never had a need to belief in some silly illogical god to feel wonder concerning this vast universe we find ourselves living in.

In fact if the religion ones among us would happen to be correct that would reduce the wonder not increased it for me.

I'm in the same boat here that I am on the evolution threads. All on my own.

And fresco put a geographical table of atheism up which showed the US in 44th place with 3--9% atheists which is a derisory figure and not enough to get one single MP elected here under our first past the post system.

Anybody reading this US forum would think the opposite. They would think that the US is No 1 with 90% atheists and that every elected person would be an atheist. One commentator I read opined that a monkey would get elected president if it stood against a declared atheist. And I must admit that I would vote monkey too. What this bunch of atheists, and I presume they are typical atheists, would make of government I shudder to think.

So there's something fishy going on.

A2k must not be representative of US opinion. And not by a long way. It must be a gathering of oddballs which is not to be wondered at considering the ridiculous mode of discourse I am having to put up with.

So--in order to defend the 91--97% of Americans, who have obviously given up trying to reason with atheists, I claim the right to answer the posts of atheists one at once and reject any silly assertions that I am making serial postings because it is serial posts from atheists, which are all of one voice anyway by necessity due to there being no difference of opinions in science, that I am responding to.

I also reject the assertion that I am drawing attention to myself anymore than any other poster is doing and that I am making the thread about me.

I can provide a simple example of ridiculous discourse. When I made a couple of posts farmerman suggested I had nothing happening here. On the same day Setanta made 56 posts. The reason I was picked out for that slur was quite simple. Setanta is on the atheist side and I'm not. He also said I had Googled my contribution, which I hadn't, and I challenged him to link the Google entry from which he had asserted I had drawn my remarks. Naturally there is no response.

It's no wonder Americans would choose a monkey before they would an atheist. At least the monkey would do nothing. Atheists would paralyse the government and prevent all other expression, would distort everything and the idiotic statements of farmerman would become the law of the land and his famed "re-education" camps would become the biggest growth industry ever seen on earth.

You know, folks, so long as you respond to Spurious, he will attempt to make this thread about himself, and not about the experience of atheism. This is essentially the same kind of drivel he puked up in the "atheists your life is meaningless" thread, and it was shite like that, as well as his idiocy in general, that has lead me to stop reading his posts altogether.

Now i come back to a thread i've been enjoying, and it's just one post by Spurious after the other, or people here responding to him. Wake up, people, he's suckering you into trashing your own thread, because the only thing he ever wants to discuss is the excellence of his own mind (putative, undemonstrated).

Please, will people just ignore the gobshite?

It used to be a good thread.

It's a great thread Ed.

So, make it good again.

Joe(no more answers to the funny man.)Nation

Well Spendius no one had claimed that I am aware of that the able2know users are a one to one statistically identical group with the US population as a whole.

No reason to assume that it would be the case in any regards so why are you so surprise at the greater numbers of free thinkers in this group compare to the population as a whole?

As far as your interesting comment on the evils that would occur if the evil atheists was in control of the government and how they of all people would limit freedoms I found myself rolling on the floor.

The men who set up this government in the first place had far more in common with our evil anti-Christen way of thinkings on this group then your Spendius, including the main writer of the constitution and later President Thomas Jefferson.

This comment coming from a follower of a religion that had a long long long sad history of torturing and burning to death anyone who did not at least pay lip service to all its beliefs in detail!!!!

You do need to roll on the floor at times.

I'm beginning to think Bill that you get a frisson talking about torturing and burning to death. You do go on about it.

What you fail to realise is that not only are such things irrelevant today and for a long time past, the electric chair having been phased out, but terrible punishments were inflicted on people for all sorts of reasons in the the old days and not least on Christians.

Roman executioners competed with each other at who could torture and burn people best. Slaves were routinely tortured when their master got in trouble with the authorities. There are stories of slave girls being broken on the torture wheel for spilling the soup. Some have been whipped to death for no other reason than that a visitor expressed a wish to see how such a procedure is carried out. I have read that that sometimes happened in the plantation states not all that long ago. Two thieves are said to have been hung on a cross on either side of Jesus.

Professor Skinner, the renowned American atheist and behaviourist, said woe betide a state which does not use torture. A recommendation.

Fielding, in Tom Jones, writes of pregnant single girls being whipped at the tail of a cart through the town and then sent into the workhouse. In 18th century Russia people were broken on the wheel for smoking.

Cervantes describes a petty criminal being slowly put to death in the town square in Don Quixote in front of a fashionably dressed crowd.

The atheist governments of the ex-Soviet Union and China used torture, possibly still do, to terrorise their populations.

And the nation which is reckoned to be the most Christian on earth is horrified at waterboarding and the alleged Detroit airplane bomber walked into court as if he had just come from a ball game.

We have passed through barbaric times and your selective and continuous and anachronistic references to it are ridiculous. They demonstrate your emotional need to attack Christianity. The whole barbaric world has a long long long sad history of torturing and burning to death anyone who got on the wrong side of any authority.

And who said I am a follower of the Christian religion? I didn't. I recognise that it has dragged us slowly and painfully out of such a horrorshow. What else could have done?

And Umberto Eco gives a short but accurate portrayal of the Gallileo incident in The Island of the Day Before. A longer version can be found in Koestler's The Sleepwalkers. Read that before doing your name-dropping trick which is only impressive to dimwits.

Give it a rest willya--you are making yourself look stupid.

Sorry there are areas of the world that at this very moment in time Christians are killing Muslims and Muslims are killing Christians in mob actions. In Ireland Christians had only in the last few years stop killing each other.

In fact the hate you had shown toward us evil Atheists on this website prove that point fairly well that Christians had not change from the good old days.

Sadly such nonsense is not in the dead past.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601116&sid=aazzBY__K3jE

Nigeria Names Panel to Probe Christian-Muslim Clashes (Update1) Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A
By Paul Okolo

Feb. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Nigeria appointed a 15-member panel to find ways of ending recurring clashes between Christians and Muslims in the central city of Jos, where more than 300 people died in three days of fighting last month.

The team includes members of both religious groups, as well as politicians, former army generals and women’s rights activists, Ima Niboro, spokesman for Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, said in an e-mailed statement from the capital, Abuja, late yesterday.

Solomon Lar, a former civilian governor of Plateau state, of which Jos is the capital, and Yahya Kwande, a former diplomat, will lead the panel jointly, according to the statement.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with 140 million people, is divided between a predominantly Muslim north and a largely Christian south. In 2001, more than 700 people were killed in sectarian violence in Jos. Three years later, another 500 people died when violence broke out in the Plateau town of Yelwa between Muslim Hausa-speakers and Christian Berom people.

Jonathan, who is running the country in the absence of ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua, ordered troops to take over security in Jos on Jan. 21 to stop the violence spreading to other parts of the country.

The panel’s task includes finding ways to “ensure that the crisis is resolved once and for all,” Niboro said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Okolo in Abuja at [email protected].

Last Updated: February 2, 2010 06:21 EST

Yet this is the system of morals we are supposed to be inextricably attached to, and it is impossible to continue civilization without it.

Joe(paging Spinoza, Mr. Spinoza, please)Nation

Good Christian’s leaders in Ugandan and the US see nothing wrong with executing people for being gay.

Don’t you love this silly and whenever they get the upper hands a deadly religion and this is the news today not in the evil past.

Well at least the Christians and the Muslims both people of the book can stop killing each other for a short time to go hunt down and kill gays.



By Pumza Fihlani
BBC News, Johannesburg


Since a Ugandan MP proposed the death penalty for some gay people, homophobia has been on the rise in other parts of Africa.

Earlier this month, US President Barack Obama's criticism of the Ugandan proposals led to huge anti-gay rallies in neighbouring Kenya.

Soon after, rumours of a gay wedding near the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa resulted in several arrests - although no evidence was produced and no-one was charged.



Rights groups criticise Pastor Martin Ssempa's fiery rhetoric
For the past few weeks, police in Malawi have been openly pursuing gay activists and anyone suspected of being homosexual.

The Malawian authorities say gay activists should be more open - but say if they do come out into the open they will be arrested because homosexuality is illegal.

Monica Mbaru, from the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, describes these crackdowns as a ripple effect from the Uganda situation.

She says many African leaders and communities remain hostile to gay people because of pressure from religious leaders.

"Our politicians have great respect for religious leaders and are careful not to disagree with them, especially not on homosexuality," she says.

"So they pretend that homosexuals do not exist or that they can be 'cured' and communicate this message to the community."

'Flush out gays'

Both Christian and Muslim clerics have publicly condemned homosexuality for many years - describing it as a sin, abnormal or immoral.

One of the most extreme examples of religious leaders advocating repression of gay people is Ugandan Pastor Martin Ssempa.


When you deny people the right to be who they are, you are forcing them underground and ultimately they rebel

Monica Mbaru
International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
He openly endorses Uganda's anti-gay bill, and last week screened gay pornography at a church in Kampala to drum up support for the proposed legislation.

In Kenya, too, religious leaders have been at the heart of anti-gay campaigns.

In a statement last week, US-based Human Rights Watch quoted witnesses as saying Christian and Muslim leaders had joined together to call for communities to "flush out gays".

The group wrote to the Kenyan government calling on it to end the attacks on gay people, which it described as planned rather than spontaneous.

"The police need to arrest the attackers and put a halt to what appears to be a co-ordinated nationwide attack on people perceived to be homosexual," said HRW's Dipika Nath.

No understanding

While HRW describes a climate of fear in Kenya's gay community, other rights groups say the upsurge in homophobia is encouraging gay-rights campaigners to be more forceful.



Rights activists around the world have condemned the Uganda proposals
Ms Mbaru says activists are rising up against homophobia.

"Many see this as unjust and have begun to co-ordinate with each other and put pressure on retrogressive societies," she says.

"When you deny people the right to be who they are, you are forcing them underground and ultimately they rebel."

Gay-rights group Behind the Mask believes there is a lack of understanding of gay issues, fuelled by misrepresentations in the press and fiery speeches by religious leaders.


I am a preacher I should be spreading love, not hate

Reverend Michael Kimundu
"When many hear the word homosexual they immediately think of sodomy, paedophilia," says the organisation's Noma Pakade.

"They don't understand that a homosexual relationship can be a commitment between two consenting adults based on love, just as it is with heterosexuals."

Homosexuality is illegal in many African countries - particularly Arab North Africa and those with a British colonial past such as Kenya, Uganda and Malawi.

British colonial legislators outlawed "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal".

It is that law which Uganda is now proposing to strengthen, from a 14-year sentence to prison to life.

The bill also proposes the death penalty for a new offence of "aggravated homosexuality" - defined as when one of the participants is a minor, HIV-positive, disabled or a "serial offender".

'Love, not hate'

There are small pockets of resistance within the religious community - but theirs is a hard fight.

Reverend Michael Kimundu served the Anglican Church in Mtwapa, Kenya, for 30 years.



To make his point, one gay Ugandan did a news conference in a paper bag
But recently the Church expelled him because leaders found out that he headed a religious organisation called The Other Sheep, which preaches tolerance towards gay people.

"I am a preacher I should be spreading love, not hate - that is why I don't believe in treating the homosexual community with disdain," he says.

"My Church didn't want to be associated with such beliefs.

"Because of my stance I have had many people accuse me and many of the pastors I work with of being gay because we refuse to let this injustice continue."

Rev Kimundu says he has not had an income for some months, but says his sacking was a blessing.

"I'm free to minister and give counselling to whoever I want to now without worrying what conflict it will cause with my leaders," he says.

"Educating the community and breaking the myths about homosexuality is my calling."




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What are these?

I don't know I can have shown hate toward any athiests when I don't feel any. It's a bit paranoid when you start thinking anybody arguing with you hates you. I don't think you are evil. The atheists I have known were all jolly decent coves. Would give you a three-foot putt when they were 4 up and 5 to play and you still pissed from the night before and them having done 10 miles at dawn with a backpack with bricks in it. None of them had a thought to convert anybody to atheism. One would only ever find out they were atheists by either asking them outright, which is considered very ill-mannered here, or by some chance remark maybe after months or years of knowing them. To talk about such subjects in pubs would bring out some mighty frowning and if that doesn't work some space around the talker.

I can't say I ever met anyone I hated. I can see your point. Bu there's a duality between knowledge and action. Is the knowledge point any use in action. Well it is up to a point unless we go the whole hog to where knowledge is the only point which not many would wish to do. And "up to a point" concedes a space for the action. The militant atheist has to claim the whole point for knowledge being the lord of action. No concession. Brain has it. Body obeys.

Who wants that? Knowledge would say, and quite rightly, that it was irrational to allow the population to choose what it wanted to eat. And damaging to the national interest. And as for everybody going to and from work at the same times ---well, that's ridiculous. Maybe the ovaries might have to be patrolled. To be absolutely logical based on the best knowledge we have at this moment in time when all our futures are--blah blah blah.

I know there are all these places where there are bad things happening. Bad as they are they used to be worse. Things are improving. Because there are black spots, and you are right to draw attention to them, does not mean that there hasn't been progress. There has been massive progress. The best brains in the world are working on it.

Yes, and those brains are liberal, secular and democratic.
Joe(All small initial letters)Nation

We agree that things are getting better but I am sure we do not agree to the reasons they are getting better.

To me the reason things are getting better is that religions of all types are slowly losing their holds on the mind of mankind.