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IMPORTANT // Please look after your loved ones, yourself and be kind to others. If you are feeling that the world is too hard to handle there is always help - I implore you not to hesitate in contacting one of these wonderful organisations Lifeline and Beyond Blue ... and I'm sure reaching out to our PRE community we will find a way to help. T.
Atheism
- Thread starter Disco08
- Start date
Philosopher Cheney sums it up best for me.
I may not believe in God
It doesn't mean I'm a lesser person
I still have a heart
And I know what it feels like to be broken
I may not believe in Jesus
But I believe in sacrifice
Life doesn't always stand a reason
And no one ever gets a chance to live it twice.
I may not believe in regrets
But I believe in salvation
Some things I'd rather forget
We choose what we see
And we see what we choose to believe
In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost
I'm not concerned with religion,
After all it's what’s inside that matter's most
I'd rather risk my fate
Then to lose my faith
With the lovin', the hatin'
The constant debating
The chaos, the calm
Raise the Alarm
Believe it, we'll die
The constant deny
The chaos, the calm
Raise the Alarm
I may not believe in God
It doesn't mean I'm a lesser person
I still have a heart
And I know what it feels like to be broken
I may not believe in Jesus
But I believe in sacrifice
Life doesn't always stand a reason
And no one ever gets a chance to live it twice.
I may not believe in regrets
But I believe in salvation
Some things I'd rather forget
We choose what we see
And we see what we choose to believe
In the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost
I'm not concerned with religion,
After all it's what’s inside that matter's most
I'd rather risk my fate
Then to lose my faith
With the lovin', the hatin'
The constant debating
The chaos, the calm
Raise the Alarm
Believe it, we'll die
The constant deny
The chaos, the calm
Raise the Alarm
:headscratch can I make this my argument from dubious authority icon?antman said:
Look, Alvin is a pretty well respected guy in his field. Don't take my word for it, look him up on the web! Just because Evo and Panther spent 5 minutes skimming an article that took me an hour or more to digest, then declared it 'special pleading' doesnt mean it is.
jayfox said:
Not that this has any relevance, but this is just wrong. There are 14 billion or so people on earth. The odds of knowing one of the million or two that claim to have seen or been abducted by an alien are remote, especially assuming that many with these experiences are likely to feel ashamed by them and be reluctant to talk to people about it.
FWIW, I know quite a few people who claim to have seen UFO's.
jayfox said:
The difference between the meaning of the two or how they effect your life is irrelevant. The point is that you use the argument that billions of people having supposed personal experiences of God is proof of His existence, yet you don't accept that millions of people having supposed personal experience with aliens is proof of their existence.
jb03 said:
Lovely poem, JB. Enjoyed it.
That brings me to another point. Why do Atheists have the moral sense they do? One of the arguments for God is that He has implanted this moral code on us, so, regardless of our philosophy on life, we have an urge in us to do good and be moral. This doesn't make a lot of sense from a purely naturalistic POV, as the four Fs: feeding, fighting, fear and reproduction ought to be our main behavioural drivers. How can this be explained?
(What I'm NOT saying: Atheists are amoral lowlives)
Six Pack said:
I'm talking about our sense of right and wrong more than anything. Not religious practice. Where does it come from?
Panthera tigris FC said:
I don't think so. We've done other stuff to death though!
We skirted around it, you have mentioned evolutionary explanations but not fully.
jayfox said:
I am a non-believer and I don't have all of the answers and believe that you have no confusion or doubts over your faith.
So you really can't see how the human personal experience, or perception is potentially misleading? There are many examples of where things aren't what they seem. That is why the scientific process relies on controlled experiments, to try to reduce the variability of the experimenter's perception. To equate material evidence and experiential evidence is naive IMO.
As for your cold virus analogy....I can certainly test for the presence of the cold and if I want I can visualise it with the proper equipment. There is no such test for your God and no evidence of his existence. How do you know that you are not deluding yourself? Wish thinking can be quite seductive and surety in this life is a comforting thing. This may come across as derogatory, but I am honestly asking how you rule this out?
We have been having this discussion for some time and it seems that the basic principles of evolution still seem to elude you. You don't even seem to have grasped that one of the major driving forces of evolution, natural selection is the opposite of chance! Yet you and other creationists continue to harp on about how you can't believe that everything evolved by chance. Guess what? Neither do I, nor any other evolutionary biologist! If you actually took a little bit of time and looked at the principle (like I said in a recent post, it is simple enough for a child to grasp) I think you would see the role that chance plays in the evolution of complex, adaptive traits...ie. 0.
Yet you seem to understand it with 100% surety. ???
The morality preached in the Bible is, at best, mixed.
Adherents pick and choose what to apply in their day to day life. What criteria do they use to make these decisions? Their inherent morality. As Disco points out this is influenced by a number of factors and does change over time.
Adherents pick and choose what to apply in their day to day life. What criteria do they use to make these decisions? Their inherent morality. As Disco points out this is influenced by a number of factors and does change over time.
