Atheism

Some people say that opposites attract, You two do seem to have opposite view points and argue like you are made for one another.

Have you thought about a first date? I hear that a bowling date is a good place to start!

This is a bowling date.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zskK6Iku22E&feature=related

Holy ---

What do you mean {Holy}?
I think that they know I am kidding around but who knows? "it would be a good time for a spring picnic!

A spring picnic!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WZoUbNsk20&feature=relmfu

Some date, is all I will say about the bowling video.

I like the other video better, "It seems more romantic!

Empty insults...you need some substance to them, or it seems like you are a little child crying....for example....

If you really believe I am a war criminal, why dont you do something about it ? Or do you need war to make yourself feel important...all those war criminals and your sad little mind needs them . 300 million in the USA alone....every man woman and child....but not you . You are the perfect example of a "make love not war man" hippy....are you a kind person in your own mind because you come across as a bitter and twisted loon .

Your finest post yet, Mister Ed...but dont stop the self confidence courses yet .

They mean opposites, not one human and an ad for JoinTalibanTerrorism .

You are not at all concerned about the terrorism, the war crimes that the US, Australia, Canada, ... have inflicted upon the country that is Afghanistan.



Everything that Glenn Greenwald says about Iraq covers the situation in Afghanistan. The illegal invasion of a sovereign nation was, "the central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together."

Where were you when the US created the Taliban? Where were you when the US courted the Taliban in order that US business interests would be the chosen ones for a pipeline across Afghanistan?

Where are you now decrying this ongoing "central crime in this pattern of crimes, the kingpin which holds them all together"?

No need to answer. No need to make excuses for your making excuses for the pure evil that has been the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

When you are so much a part of the problem, you can hardly be part of the solution.

You are not at all concerned with what state sponsored terrorism has done to the west...you get your thrills out of attacking your protector . Go fight for the other side, I am sure they need another brain washed sycophant to strap some bombs to....

Where were you when Pol Pot was killing millions ? Where were you when Russia invaded Afghanistan ? Where were you when China invaded Vietnam ? Where were you when Russia fought the Chechnya rebels ? Where were you when Vietnam shot all the officers of the South Vietnamese army ? You were busy feeling all emotional and superior by attacking the USA .

I was serving my country, a concept that is lost on over-fucked unwashed hippies like you .

My my my, but you've covered a lot of ground and time, haven't you?

You say that you were too young for Vietnam, so you obviously weren't in WWII. There have been no wars for you to have served your country in. Australia has been involved in a number of illegal invasions.

Perhaps you consider that tying your wagon to war criminals is the same as serving your country, but that's a terrible disservice to your country if your country happens to believe in the rule of law.

You may find this as odd but I think that the two of you are good people. {both of you}
I know that the both of you think otherwise of each other but could there be a possibility that you are both compassionate about what you consider to be reality?
Is it possible that we misunderstand each other just a little bit because we are defending what we believe to be true? Could we be just a little wrong about each other or does everything that we think about each other have to be our empirical understanding?

Do not get me wrong because I think that we all do evil sometimes because we do not know the ramifications or that some of us have more neurological reasons! {psychopathic} but I do think that most often it is due to Psychological traits because we have been exposed to people that have more traits of psychopathic behavior!

Sorry about my rambling on I just hate to see people clash so badly!


What did you think about the spring picnic? I liked it I thought it was funny! Here it is again just in case you missed it!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WZoUbNsk20&feature=relmfu

Who is helping you write this ?

No, that is Iraq you are thinking of....ever here of Kuwait ?

You have the cheek to mention rule of law ? Was the attack on the twin towers legal to you and your terrorist friends ? The Bali bombing ? The train attacks in London and Spain ? The many attacks that were stopped in the planning stage ? What do you know about the rule of law ? Did some drugged hippy get freaky when you last mentioned it in the 60's ?? Did Hamas cover it in their training of you ?

Yup, I've "hered" of Kuwait, big W writer.

You mean this Kuwait?

"[T]he tiny but super-rich state had been an independent nation for just a quarter century when in 1986 the ruling al-Sabah family tightened its dictatorial grip over the "black gold" fiefdom by disbanding the token National Assembly and firmly establishing all power in the be-jeweled hands of the ruling Emir. Then, as now, Kuwait's ruling oligarchy brutally suppressed the country's small democracy movement, intimidated and censored journalists, and hired desperate foreigners to supply most of the nation's physical labor under conditions of indentured servitude and near-slavery."

Is this your "claim to fame"? Is this where you "served" your country?



I know that those who you have cited here have made no claims to be countries or even people that follow the rule of law.

I know that the rule of law has been used against many of these people but that that same rule of law has not been used against the numerous war criminals of the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, ... .

Contrast that with the US who goes out of its way to brag about it but abuses the rule of law like no other western nation - though you could easily argue that there are others, like the Coalition of the Suck Ups.

"the many attacks that were stopped in the planning stages"; yeah right. You're as gullible as you are dumb.

That was a riot

History of Modern Atheism

Introduction: the Difficulty with Histories of Atheism

There are many accounts of the history of atheism, but they disagree substantially over its beginnings and its main protagonists.[1] Part of the explanation for this is that many of these accounts - for example, Fritz Mauthner's Atheism and its History in the West [Der Atheismus und seine Geschichte im Abendlande] (1922-24), and Michael Hunter and David Wootton's Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992), to name just two prominent ones, work with too broad a definition of atheism, which besides strict negation of God's existence also covers various forms of religious criticism, heterodoxy and nonconformity. As the German contemporary scholar of atheism Winfried Schroeder points out, a 'history of atheism' can often in fact amount to something more like a history of various religious departures from orthodoxy than of atheism in any strict sense.[2] Schroeder notes that in Hunter and Wootton’s view the church critic Paolo Sarpi, the deist Jean Bodin, the Jewish questioner of the authority of the Torah and the immortality of the soul Uriel da Costa and the strictly atheistic clandestine text Theophrastus redivivus are all lumped together under the broad catch-all term 'atheism.’ In fact only the latter text has a clear claim to being described as atheistic.[3] However, Hunter and Wootton's fusing of the history of atheism with the history of certain forms of heterodoxy can gives the impression that there has been a continuous history of atheism from the Reformation (or earlier) to the Enlightenment, a thesis which is open to question.

By contrast, Lucien Febvre's Le probleme de l'incroyance au XVIe siecle (1942), and Paul Oskar Kristeller's The Myth of Renaissance Atheism and the French Tradition of Free-Thought (1968) employ a narrower (and more modern) definition of atheism that more strictly distinguishes blasphemy, heresy and anticlericalism from direct questioning of God's existence. [4] They conclude that there is no good evidence for atheism (in this stricter sense) prior to the seventeenth century. According to these historians, accusations of atheism in the sixteenth century and earlier amount to nothing more than an indication that the accuser was in some respect or other hostile to the position of the accused, not that there was any genuine atheism around.[5]

Depending on the history of atheism consulted, the interested reader can come away either with the impression that contemporary atheism has a long lineage stretching back through the atheists of the French Enlightenment, the Paduan Averroists of the sixteenth century, the middle ages and back to antiquity; or that it appears surprisingly late in history, no earlier than the mid seventeenth century.

In one respect historians defending their employment of a broader definition of atheism obviously have a point. Strict philosophical atheism (in the narrow sense of the denial of God's existence) did not come from nowhere, and as Schroeder has noted, a range of heterodox strategies employed by deists and pantheists from radical biblical criticism, religious comparativism, the undermining of Christian revelation and the establishment of natural religion can be identified as important factors determining atheism's first appearance. However, these cannot be identified with atheism, even if they prepare the way for it.

These differences between accounts often have ideological bases. It is tempting for sympathisers of atheism to lend greater legitimacy to their position by appealing to a long lineage of atheistic thinkers stretching back to antiquity. Conversely, it is equally tempting for religious apologists to stress the exceptional nature of atheism in human history and present it as an anomaly.

The historians employing a narrower definition of atheism have it in their favour that at most only a 'practical' as opposed to a philosophical atheism seems to have existed prior to the seventeenth century. It is sometimes objected by historians who favour the 'broader' definition that this usage is justified by the fact that the modern definition of atheism is anachronistically applied to past societies, since they did not have such a definition themselves. However, this seems mistaken; as Schroeder points out, past societies did have synonyms for the narrower (modern) definition of atheism as negation of God's existence - variously expressed as 'atheismus kat'exochen', 'atheismus consummatus', or 'atheisme A la rigueur' - so had atheism in the narrower sense existed, it could have been identified as such.[6] It therefore seems reasonable with Febvre, Kristeller, and Schroeder to prefer the employment of the narrower definition of atheism by historians, and accept the consequence of this, namely, that atheism in the strict sense as captured by the modern definitions (i.e., denial of God's existence) is not encountered in the West prior to the seventeenth century.

A further difficulty which besets histories of atheism is the problem of crypto-atheists. It can reasonably be assumed that there were atheists who disguised their convictions in the seventeenth century and perhaps earlier, and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Spinoza (1632-77), and (in the eighteenth century) Hume (1711-76) are commonly assimilated into the ranks of the atheists. However, it is questionable whether one can increase the number of early modern atheists by going beyond the explicit documents of philosophical atheism to include early modern writers whose atheism is inferred by historians reading 'between the lines' of their surviving works.[7] Unless they left documentary proof of their crypto-atheism, such as in the case of the posthumous manifesto of Meslier (1729), the attribution of atheism in uncertain cases must always remain dubious.[8]

For the purposes of understanding the immediate context of the 'New Atheists' the difficult question of the existence of a premodern atheism and of crypto-atheists can be set aside, since the context that matters is that of modern atheism. However, the difficulties of constructing a history of atheism, and the ideological interests which play a role here must constantly be kept in view.

The above introduction appears here, and the text is on the web site.
http://www.investigatingatheism.info/history.html

Thanks! I was looking for a video that showed how to can pickles and I came across this video and I thought that he may have others that could be funnier!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRrxdOCkezw&feature=channel_video_title