Atheism

Maybe some people may do that ci. but you have no excuse because I have pointed out to you that God is the personification of the wisdom of our world and the Pope is the accepted representative of that for a large number of people. Darwin is for others.

The choice of which to live by is personal. Atheism provides the scope to live by anything. 308 million atheists in the USA, which has to be what you want, is a recipe for the wisdom of the party in power.

spendi, Your imagination is on over-drive. Atheists don't try to convert others to atheism; we know it's an impossible task. Atheists understand this through our life experiences, and what we observe. I have never seen any atheist trying to convert anyone with any religious belief into not believing. This has to be done by the individual, and even then they claim to be agnostics.

Spendius you claim to be an atheist! Are you saying that it would be OK to convert others to atheism but only if we teach them your way of thinking?

Spediosusis way of thinking is simple...two cups of this and that a forty four gallon of the other... insert into a small vacuum... bend over and expel whilst walking backwards.

A site calling itself American Atheists have presented the following about atheism. -They are attempting to build a movement among atheists, it would seem, looking around at their issues and articles.
http://www.atheists.org/

Atheism is the lack of belief in a deity, which implies that nothing exists but natural phenomena (matter), that thought is a property or function of matter, and that death irreversibly and totally terminates individual organic units. This definition means that there are no forces, phenomena, or entities which exist outside of or apart from physical nature, or which transcend nature, or are “super” natural, nor can there be. Humankind is on its own.

The following definition of atheism was given to the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Murray v. Curlett, 374 U.S. 203, 83 S. Ct. 1560, 10 L.Ed.2d (MD, 1963), to remove reverential Bible reading and oral unison recitation of the Lord's Prayer in the public schools:

“Your petitioners are atheists and they define their beliefs as follows. An atheist loves his fellow man instead of god. An atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now – here on earth for all men together to enjoy.

An atheist believes that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it, and enjoy it.

An atheist believes that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment.

He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man.

He wants an ethical way of life. He believes that we cannot rely on a god or channel action into prayer nor hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter.

He believes that we are our brother's keepers and are keepers of our own lives; that we are responsible persons and the job is here and the time is now.”


How they can know that this is what we all want, I have not been able to ascertain - edgarblythe

And we will never be able to ascertain why so many humans rely on gods to do their bidding with the hope of having an everlasting life in a "heaven."

I would think that for the most part they were taught their beliefs but if you listen to coast to coast radio like I do {Because I study human behavior and I also get a kick out of what people believe} You will see that some of these people are born or develop a creative imaginations later in life!

In Maurice Lever's justly famous biography of the Marquis de Sade (translated by Arthur Goldhammer) there is this on page 121--



The same argument applies to my supposed misogyny. My "sacrilege" about women is a recognition of their fearsome power which I see as harmful to men if uninhibited, and, indeed, harmful to women themselves. Those who accuse me of misogyny must not recognise the power women have presumably because in their world it does not exist and women are nonentities to them despite them being cossetted, tamed and boxed off in pretty gilded cages. Patronised in other words. They are "my wife" or somesuch just as "my golf clubs" are mere instruments of their egos.

I know who the real misogynists are just as M.Lever knew who the real atheists are.

It is a theory of mine that de Sade was a true Christian who employed the heaviest irony known to literature to expose the logic of atheism in all its resplendent glory just as Swift exposed the cruelty of the English government's response to the famine in Ireland by recommending that the Irish eat their babies.

Want more - The last three pages are here:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/june/aynrandled.html?start=2

Ayn Rand changed my life. When I embraced her philosophy, Objectivism, the conversion was far more dramatic than my decision, several years later, to follow Jesus Christ—more dramatic, but in the end transitory. Yet Rand, the novelist, philosopher, and uncompromising atheist, inadvertently opened a door for the gospel. I don't believe dead people spin in their graves, but if they did and she could read these words, I imagine Rand would be twirling violently.

As many have noted, Rand's ethic of rational self-interest is incompatible with the gospel, and leads to social as well as spiritual disaster. "Most observers see Rand as a political and economic philosopher," wrote Gary Moore last year in Christianity Today. "I believe that she was first and foremost an anti-Christian philosopher." A six-foot dollar sign wreath towered over her casket, Moore pointed out, an icon of the false gospel she labored to proclaim. I agree entirely that Christianity and Objectivism are utterly incompatible. But my gratitude to Rand remains profound.

My First Conversion

In the spring of 1962, an awkward and philosophically oriented 15-year-old raised in an utterly secular home, I read The Fountainhead and then Atlas Shrugged. Those books triggered a philosophical (and, unknowingly, spiritual) revolution. One evening, immersed in Rand's writings, I listened on the radio to a re-broadcast of a lecture she had delivered a year earlier at the University of Wisconsin, during a symposium called "Ethics in Our Time." Even at a distance of 48 years, I can still hear her heavily accented voice as she quoted from John Galt's speech, the long and detailed summary of Objectivism that appears near the end of Atlas Shrugged: "Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil …. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality … but to discover it."

For three years I followed Rand, read every word she published, studied Objectivism and its moral, political, and economic implications, and even tried to imitate the heroes in Rand's novels. Several times, the central character in The Fountainhead, Howard Roark, is accused of staring at people, his piercing eyes making the novel's villains feel judged and found wanting. And so I practiced widening my eyes and keeping them open for extended periods. No one, however, seemed daunted by my gaze.

Because my family lived in New York City, I was able to enroll in a 20-session "Basics of Objectivism" course at the Nathaniel Branden Institute. (Branden, an early Rand associate and a psychologist by training, spent many years teaching Objectivism in partnership with Rand.) The course included sessions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political and economic theory, with a heavy emphasis on laissez-faire capitalism. When Branden finished his lecture, Rand herself would often answer questions. Among the memorabilia from that period of my life is a scrap of paper with Rand's autograph, the letters sharp and angular. I also enrolled in "Objectivist Economics," taught by a very young Alan Greenspan.

My commitment to Rand and her philosophy, however, did not survive my early years in college. Two figures intervened.

The Unscrupulous God

The first was Plato. In Rand's teaching, Aristotle served as a kind of philosophical hero. Plato, with his tendency toward mysticism, represented philosophical depravity for Rand. So I entered college predisposed to reject Plato, and came armed with Objectivist and Aristotelian weapons for the battle. Then I actually read Plato in a philosophy class. I was shocked to find much to commend his vision of a Reality that is more than the reality we can see. "A young man who wishes to remain an Atheist," C. S. Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy, "cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."

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The Phaedo was particularly disturbing, as Plato's Socrates prepares to die and in the process comforts his friends with an admittedly non-Christian notion of the afterlife. What troubled me most was that it made sense, that the one-dimensional universe of Objectivism did not do justice to the facts. Could Rand be wrong? My certainty began to crumble. Much later I stumbled onto a hymn that points to Plato and Socrates as unwitting precursors of the gospel:

For Socrates who, phrase by phrase,
Talked men to truth, unshrinking,
And left for Plato's mighty grace
To mold our ways of thinking;
For all who wrestled, sane and free,
To win the unseen reality,
To God be thanks and glory.
I still remember my breathlessness as I read the Phaedo for the first time. But Plato merely set the stage for something, Someone, more profound.

The second figure was Jesus. In my sophomore year, I enrolled in a two-semester "Bible as Literature" course. I was majoring in ancient history, and biblical history figured into the wider picture. But the ground softened by Plato presented itself to the plow of the gospel, and I was changed forever.

The process, however, has its own bizarre twists and turns. These courses were taught by a former pastor turned agnostic, a delightful and humorous man who enjoyed introducing conservative Christians to historical-critical methods and shaking their faith. Students often emerged from Bible as Literature predictably unbiblical in their perspective. For reasons known only to the Holy Spirit, the system didn't work in my case. Reading the Bible for the first time, encountering the text and laying aside the professor's debunking attitude, I met a God who laid claim to my life, a Savior who invited (or, more precisely, demanded) my allegiance.

Over the course of two semesters, something happened. I can't precisely date it. But friends tell me that they noticed a change. By the time I was halfway through the New Testament course, I was referring to Jesus in the present rather than the past tense. Later, under the guidance of those same friends, I learned the vocabulary—about committing my life to Jesus, receiving him as Savior, following him as Lord. Paul describes the experience of his Corinthian converts, and my own experience, with overwhelming and almost inarticulate joy: "You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" (1 Cor. 6:11, RSV). But the deed was first done surreptitiously, as I read the Bible and met the One who is King of kings and Lord of lords. Lewis was right: God is indeed very unscrupulous.

The Truth of Ayn Rand

And what of Rand? I quickly relegated her to my intellectual and spiritual past. Friends from my Objectivist period drifted out of my life. As a new Christian, I immersed myself in the Bible, Christian literature, and the Christian community. Only occasionally, in the intervening decades, did Rand enter my consciousness—once again with the recent release of the movie Atlas Shrugged. In reflecting on how she inadvertently influenced me, I've seen God's hand work through her in a number of ways.

Hey, if you don't like what I say, argue with me. Posting down is adolescent. We post down if someone abuses the terms of service and sometimes re ordinary courtesy, not for disagreement. Man up, or woman up, and learn to argue. Pouting is not useful.

Don't feel all alone stranger, I am sure that you me and others have these same thoughts but we can not make other people do what we might think to be moral or what ever you would like to call it but I do like what your thinking!

Nods to rl. ; )

The problem with my post was that you could take it as anti adolescent. Which is too bad, as some are most mentally sparked in adolescence. So, I didn't mean it that way.

Over many years there have been numerous threads about religion, agnosticism, and atheism. The most recalcitrant person ever, that no one can best, or shut up, is Frank Apisa, re the matter of being agnostic. Most of us love Frank, somewhat, she says, kidding. He drove me crazy, but I'm still fond of him.

This was one small thread for atheists to talk amongst ourselves.
I highly doubt we'd want to be some kind of club or official group. You know about cats.

All of us here know the nature of how threads go, but a lot of us also know courtesy. The thread has been effectively obliterated. We get it, that is the way of the internet.

I don't invade serious religion threads. Years go by without my posting on one of those.

We non believers get to have monkeys on our trail for the sheer fun of it (oh, hi, Spendius).

Tenderfoot, in the meantime, could have read the first post of the thread.

Courtesy is still extant.

You, reasoning logic, are among the biggest blowhards tilting at atheist windmills, when asked not to.

I put them all on ignore. I get blank pages at times, but that's an improvement.

Why thank you I take that as a complement coming from you!

So, hi, Eb.

The christians across the street from me just moved (they never did save me, their introductory comment), too many black widows and other complaints, so I sympathize. New people today, a family. Father was backing in with an added rigamarole and wanted me to go around, but I needed to angle to my driveway. Well, it worked out. We quickly met, soon talked about groceries. Glad to see a family.

The house across the street from me is empty. I hope no low-life atheists move in.

What are you, five years old?

What a thought.

I've been lucky with neighbors. I lost a dear neighbor back in Eureka; she was in her eighties but sparky. She would see me working in the yard in a late afternoon and ask me in for a small drink. True, they were small, even wee, but it was fun. We could look out her kitchen window at my yard in progress and talk about life. She had a macroglobulinemia that didn't seem immanently dangerous, but I guess it was, at least in that town re med care. When she died, that blew out my sense of balance re where I lived.