Bill O'Reilly gives his "premium" members an insightful treat!

[RandomGuy]

I don't think lack of religion caused the Soviet Union to crumble, I just don't think a truly Godless society would be the utopia that Proxy suggests it would be.


I hope Proxy never wants to be a Free Mason. They don't accept atheists.

Fair enough, I would tend to agree.

A society with a lack of religion would not be sufficient by itself to really create an ideal society. Humans are way more complex than that.

[DarrinS]

It is indeed. None of that evidence we have thus far found requires an omniscient ominipotent God for our existance.

As I stated in an earlier post, if you and I walked upon the pyramids at Giza, we could both agree on the physics and engineering principles of the structure, but disagree on how it came to be. I might think it was purposely build by an intelligent being, while you might think it came to be by some random process.

[DarrinS]

To be fair, I think there are some very irrational beliefs in organized religions. I don't go to church and I think the Bible is just an anthology of legends and morality.

[Proxy]

I took your point to be that the world would be much more advanced if only everyone were athiests. I thought I addressed that point rather well by pointing out the failed Soviet Union.

There is a smugness about you and the OP, who think you are so much more rational than someone who believes in a supreme being. It's ironic that someone can dig up an artifact and declare it a tool, designed by an intelligent being, but cannot apply the same logic something much more complex.

give the reasons of the soviet union's downfall.

and I am more rational than someone who worships some supreme being that has never shown itself. I can admit that we as a race will never know the true genesis of everything. It is irrational to think that our insignificant speck of a planet in this vast universe is the center of everything.

[MiamiHeat]

You know, there was a country that wanted to replace religion with atheism.

The Soviet Union

Sure worked out great, didn't it?

Is this trolling?

You attribute the fall of the Soviet Union to atheism?

and you try to discredit atheism by using that example?

[DarrinS]

Is this trolling?

You attribute the fall of the Soviet Union to atheism?

and you try to discredit atheism by using that example?

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...&postcount=178

[DarrinS]

and I am more rational than someone who worships some supreme being that has never shown itself.

I don't worship it, merely acknowledge its presence.

[Proxy]

I don't worship it, merely acknowledge its presence.

acknowledge what? why?

[RandomGuy]

A man's hypothalamus that developed incorrectly is a genetic defect.

Not necessarily. There are lots of environmental factors that affect fetal development.

Some of those affects are very obvious, such as fetal alcohol syndrome, and some not so obvious.

A surprising amount of things have to happen in a very precise order.

[RandomGuy]

As I stated in an earlier post, if you and I walked upon the pyramids at Giza, we could both agree on the physics and engineering principles of the structure, but disagree on how it came to be. I might think it was purposely build by an intelligent being, while you might think it came to be by some random process.

I would not think something like the pyramids would be built by a random process. There is simply no evidence for such a thing, that I am aware of.

That is not a very good analogy.

[Spurminator]

A lot of issues could be avoided if the religious and non-religious would stop treating science and religion as mutually exclusive concepts.

[RandomGuy]

A lot of issues could be avoided if the religious and non-religious would stop treating science and religion as mutually exclusive concepts.

A lot of issues can't be avoided, because there are places where some religious concepts and understanding of science are mutually exclusive, i.e. the earth is less than 10,000 years old, or really the bones of a long dead giant, or the back of a giant turtle.

[baseline bum]

A lot of issues could be avoided if the religious and non-religious would stop treating science and religion as mutually exclusive concepts.

Treating them as non mutually-exclusive is essentially just putting kiddie gloves on. Faith vs. observation/experiment are about as diametrically opposite as ideas can get. Faith in an idea can point one in the right direction;e.g., Einstein had faith that the laws of physics were simple, so Galileo's principle of relativity for mechanical phenomena should also hold for electromagnetic phenomena such as light, which of course led to his monumental theory of special relativity. However, it can never be used as any reasonable standard to establish scientific truth. For example, Einstein's faith in his view of the simplicity of physics led him astray as people like Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, de Broglie, etc. left him in the dust with their study of the atom.

[LnGrrrR]

Everything has a genesis.

Including God?

[LnGrrrR]

and by the way, Einstein is overrated.

He did not discover E=mc2, other scientists did before him. It was even in a scientific paper. The only thing Einstein did was grab pieces from different places and put it together to explain how some things worked. Not very genius like, imo. He didn't create the work, and he never did anything else ever again after because he was incapable of it.

So quoting this old dude in an effort to legitimize your own point of view is a logical fallacy and a waste of time.

His discovery/testing of light being a wave and particle was pretty important, IIRC.

[LnGrrrR]

Evidence is all around you, if you're looking for it.

I thought about Hootie and the Blowfish, and their song just came on the radio!

[LnGrrrR]

Atheism is a faith; it's the belief there is no God -- something you can't prove.

A = without

Theism = belief

Atheists don't have belief. They can be agnostic as well.

A = without

Gnostic = knowledge

I'm an agnostic atheist.

[LnGrrrR]

It's a belief there is no IPU. Frankly, I think it takes more faith to believe that than it does to believe there is a IPU.

fify

[baseline bum]

A = without

Theism = belief

Atheists don't have belief. They can be agnostic as well.

A = without

Gnostic = knowledge

I'm an agnostic atheist.

Technically, you'd think atheist might mean one that doesn't believe in a theist god who listens to one's nightly whinings and interferes in the world. It's never used in that way though.

[LnGrrrR]

Technically, you'd think atheist might mean one that doesn't believe in a theist god who listens to one's nightly whinings and interferes in the world. It's never used in that way though.

I know it's not, but only because people are ignorant of what the words actually mean. I feel it is a small duty to educate.

[baseline bum]

I know it's not, but only because people are ignorant of what the words actually mean. I feel it is a small duty to educate.

What I meant was it's possible to not believe in a theistic interpretation of a god. e.g., believing in a god that isn't jealous, genocidal, racist, misogynistic, phobic, eavesdropping, and prone to fits of anger. Perhaps gods not created in man's image, such as a deist interpretation of the idea. A deist should technically be an atheist.

[redzero]

Bill O'Reilly has taken the position of Thomas Aquinas with the first cause argument. Aquinas' position was logically fallacious.

[Vici]

Everything has a genesis.

Where did god come from?

[Mr. Peabody]

Where did god come from?

God has always existed . . . Doh!

[DarrinS]

I would not think something like the pyramids would be built by a random process. There is simply no evidence for such a thing, that I am aware of.

That is not a very good analogy.

But you can look at a DNA sequence and think it's random?