Atheism

Good post, Seed.

And Tko, that made me laugh, true as that might possibly be.

Me too. I think I had it too easy in this regard. I spent my entire professional career in physics and engineering, where people are either atheists or tolerant of atheism. The same is true for my family.

Even so, there are people I don't speak up to about it. They are my friends in St.Louis, who are devout Missouri-synod Lutherans. And even with them, it's more about not wanting to waste time than about feeling unfree to speak out. I usually see them over long weekends such as Thanksgiving. "Coming out" to them would probably drown one weekend in agitated debates. That's not what I'm travelling to St.Louis for.

And to make things even more complicated, I tend to like the non-theological, cultural aspects of the Lutheran church: the architecture of the churches, Luther's influence on German literature, and especially the church music from Luther to, say, Brahms. (Of course Bach tops them all.) I also like their grassroots approach to running a community, as contrasted to the Catholic Church's chain of command.

How do I come out out as an atheist, make all these distinctions on a time budget, without cutting so many rhetorical corners I come across as totally disingenuous? I don't know. And so I keep procrastinating about it.

The Young Earth Creationists are a small minority of the Evangelical clan. Their need for a literal interpretation of the Bible is tightly tied to much of their doctrines that require hard control over the faithful. Most Christianity either has a doctine of Theirstic Evolution or a modern transcenednt Gos who just hadnt messed with the "day to day management of a cosmos".

BILLRM-I was talking about ADAMS's second term . He lost to Jefferson in ADAMS run for a second term, not Jeffersons. ADAMS never had a second term, and he lost because Jefferson was a lousy backbiting dirty tricks meister who personally sought to destroy his friend by several major mistatements and outright lies.

ALL the founding fathers were subject to the frailties of anyone else. Jefferson never ever learned to balance a budget and was a man of cat-like morals,(just like many of todays theistic politicians)

That's why my religious affiliation on Facebook is Church of Beethoven. Somehow it satisfies the assumption without professing to a religious belief. And it's an awesome place. I hereby proselythise that everyone who visits Albuquerque should drop by.

And I suppose I should...

Yea I just wish I could find one that went with evolution along with creation

Exactly. Travel to St. Louis is best spent enjoying...

1. Toasted Ravioli
2. Fitz's Rootbeer
3. Ted Drewes Frozen Custard
4. Cardinal's games at Baseball Heaven

That's what it's all about.
K
O

T
K

Ha. Why didn't I think of something like this, Thomas? I could belong to The Church of Handel! (very fond of loud bursts of the Messiah). Come to think of it, Buddhist chanting appeals very much, too, & is often heard coming from my house. The neighbours might well believe that there's a very confused religious fruitcake living amongst them!

In reply to what you were replying to.

Even those who don't believe in a god or a supreme being take being an atheist to an almost religious point. And it is consider I think (mind you I think) to be a religious standing point

I don't agree with you. Some atheists do that, but I don't believe the majority take it to an almost religious point. Some persons online and a person like Madelyn Murry O'Hare are the only atheists I have seen take atheism to that point.

Think about it, seed. Look at the people who you know who are saying here that they are atheist. Have any of us taken it to a religious level?

agreed.

I like all of the flavours.

but don't pray to any of them...

You do it every day little. No kidding. I have seen a few on here do it. But they were mostly trolls or just didn't stick around.

I only say that because the ones I have come in contact with face to face have been like that. Though I do agree you guys keep your cool about it for the most part.

There are two big problems with atheism:

One, it almost has to go hand in hand with believing in evolution, and evolution has been overwhelmingly disproven.

And two, there is an irrefutable historical case to be made that Jesus was seen by large numbers of people over a period of 40 days or thereabouts beginning three days after he had been crucified.

The stories about walking on water or changing water to wine you can take or leave but the story about the resurrection cannot be pooh-poohed. At the time when Jesus lived, several centuries had passed since the old religious practices intended to communicate with the spirit world directly had ceased to work, and by that I mean prophets, the Greek oracles, "familiar spirits" such as the familiar ghost story in the OT involving King Saul, the prophet Samuel, and the "witch" of Endor, electrostatic devices like the pyramids or the "ark", and a number of other things. Zechariah even went so far as to admonish parents to simply kill children who went on trying to do prophecy kinds of things, because the information which the practice had produced in past ages had turned into mush.

People were starting to become atheists and evolutionites even as they are now. Jesus basically said something like "Hey, I'm going to DEMONSTRATE the basic problem with these ideas in such a way as to leave no doubt in anybody's mind, I'm going to simply hand myself over the the pharisees and Romans and let them kill me in their usual gruesome fashion, and then in three days I'm going to come BACK, and then proceeded to do just that so that NOBODY needs to be an atheist.

I think you may want to tell this to the 300 million Buddhists. Buddhism is a godless religion, yet none of the Buddhists I know make much of their atheism. As far as I can tell from Google searches, the existence of gods is simply not an important question in Buddhist theology.

"And two, there is an irrefutable historical case to be made that Jesus was seen by large numbers of people over a period of 40 days or thereabouts beginning three days after he had been crucified."



they got video evidence and everything?


how gunga is that...?

To you.

Please don't go into the debate on this particular thread, though.

Where do you think body double came from! just kidding.

We are letting the conversation go into "some atheists do such and such," which is a distraction from k's discussion of why we can't be open and accepted by society.