Christians: We Arent Trying To Condemn Anyone

Religion is a facade for control. Anyone with a brain should be able to see through the elaborate web of fabrications sooner or later. The very fact that religion only offers a bribe into believing in God or being subjected to eternal suffering should be setting off alarm bells.

But can you see why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch?

Also atheism isn't an ideology, but nice try.

Every time you post in here you seem to sound so angry Sect. lol

How could I be a moral being in the human sense and support teachings that advocated slavery, genocide and death for breaking the simplest of rules? Working on the sabbath deserved being stoned to death? Did God happen to realize what kind of followers he was shaping by doing this? I tend to hang up on slavery because of the sheer scale of what some simple passages regarding the allowance of slavery did to thinking on this planet for hundreds of years. You had thousands of people living with the idea that God thought keeping another person chained was moral and right. Beat your slaves, it's morally right so long as the victim doesn't die in the process. This is divine morality? If so, some humans have surpassed that in the last few centuries and rightfully so. There is nothing divine about extracting suffering from your fellow human beings. In our modern culture just beating an animal is seen as an outrageous abuse of human power and why is that? Make no mistake, I don't fool myself into thinking that slavery wouldn't exist without the Bible's acceptance of the practice but for a divine author to actually ok such a barbaric process is astounding. Everything tells me that slavery is wrong, abominable and the most disgusting expression of human selfishness and if God professes to be the embodiment of 'moral good' then anything less than an outright rejection of this process is wrong. If a divine entity existed anything like the God of love most Christians profess to worship then the Bible would not be a book it endorsed. Full of violence, threats, death and suffering mixed in with valuable lessons, humanity has outgrown many of the barbaric teachings within the text and only the most hardlined Christians would attempt to defend passages like servants obeying their masters or killing nonbelievers. This thread started with someone who is gay being pulled from a chair yet if you look in the text, there are passages that would support this behavior and any divine text would have no such interpretation issues. We can blame ourselves for being 'unable to understand' but that's hogwash designed to obscure the fact that the text is vague and can be interpreted in virtually infinite ways. If a divine being existed then he'd be much more understanding of the individual thought patterns of people on this planet. This idea of imposing a rigid set of rules upon all humanity screams of a control mechanism designed by humans to facilitate a distinct way of thinking - a holdover from the tribal days of human thought. Religions don't promote learning, they demonize it and discourage any individual learning. If you don't do X, you'll suffer Y eternal punishment. If you don't do X, you'll be stoned to death. X are the chosen people, Y are the blasphemers who must be shunned, kept away from our women and destroyed. I'm sure you can see how such a system is designed to cause eternal conflict between people. When you believe you're chosen, people can be enslaved at will and that the ends justify the means you have what Christianity was up until recently when free-thought took hold among theists and atheists alike. Many of the theists on these boards always seem to miss that their 'feelings' on the Bible would have held no water just a few generations back.

Atheism, like any form of theism, is a belief in something that can never be proved.

You can't prove something does not exist. Logic fallacy 101.

Let me put this another way as I didn't get across what I was trying to say. Say you meet an omnipitent being (not the God in any religion) just some being that is omnipitent and has access to infinite knowledge, power and options. Would you think this person would be able to make a better decision than you?

Sure but within the context of the God we're talking about his decisions have been so characteristically human that I think we could make better decisions.

And thats cause... we have. Slavery anyone?

Let me put this another way as I didn't get across what I was trying to say. Say you meet an omnipitent being (not the God in any religion) just some being that is omnipitent and has access to infinite knowledge, power and options. Would you think this person would be able to make a better decision than you?

I was raised Catholic and that I've taken up the other side of the argument.

Lol. You're the one saying that suddenly we can't *** because we're not putting full force on education now, and now you think that I'm trying to claim we're trying to save the world. Don't think you realize the sarcasm there.

Because I am angry. I am angry at religion. I am angry at the people who rip away the rights of my brothers, who condemn them to an imaginary hell, who murder and mutilate them. I am angry at a lot of things that religion calls for. I have a problem with religion. And we have a lot of ***to deal with of our before we can save the world

Since it looks like you all touched on stem cells and whatnot last night something popped into my head...I never really understood the fundamentalist position on stem cell research. Why wouldn't they be opposed to egg donation too? When I was nineteen I lost my scholarship and this route was suggested to me by a couple of friends who had gone through the process. I never went through with it though, because of the potential long-term ramifications.

(I hope there are no fundamentalist who frequent these boards.) During the process of egg retrieval, they take multiple eggs, and there is no guarantee that a single one of them will be fertilized after they are implanted in the mother...host mother? So, essentially you're taking that gamble on "life".

I don't think they understand that it's not all dead baby fetuses either. Admittedly, I'm kind of wishy-washy about the idea of fetuses being used (Yeah...I know it's somewhat silly, so spare me.), but people still bank their children's cord blood that contains stem cells. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. I'll probably do the same when I decide to have kids.

You can't prove something does not exist. Logic fallacy 101.

As a Christian, I find a hard time following the arguments of fundamentalist on this issue myself. I never really seem to find the passages that condemn humans trying to prolong their lives or improve the quality of their lives. The only instance I would take issue with is if people were aborting fetuses for the sole purpose of harvesting stem cells.

Well, most people who give up their fetuses are usually not simply aborting them because of research, right? I would think that most would have other circumstances that would lead them to consider abortion in the first place, or at least, I would hope so. Yeah...I can't get behind that. Conceiving with the intent of abortion makes me very squeamish.

I identify myself as agnostic, but GDI if I still don't love going to Christmas mass, watching the pageant, taking communion, and belting out 'Hark! The Herald Angels Sing' and 'Oh Come All Ye Faithful', but I think that's more of a community thing for me. IDK...I think the only "spiritual" feeling I've ever taken from a church was in Germany. It was more reverence and awe of knowing that generations of my mother's side of the family had been baptized, confirmed, married, etc. in that church for a century.

/shrug

EXACTLY!!!

Atheism is a belief structure.

EXACTLY!!!

Atheism is a belief structure.

I dunno why people have a difficult time grasping this concept ... but most "non-believers" are not Atheists.

An Atheist rejects entirely the possibility of any type of super-naturalism or divine existence.

Most non-believers simply believe that Christianity (and other related monotheistic religious practices and idols/books) are bunk. That doesn't make someone an Atheist. It makes someone rational.

Anyways, even though this quotation uses the term "atheist" in the sense that just expressed disdain for .... this is good food for thought, I think:

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

There is a chance I misinterpreted that and could be something other than your views on what needs to be changed to "Save the world"

When is is taught in schools do you make sure they have the proper materials and teach it correctly? Do you fund programs and the like to encourage this type of thinking?

And here we go again... You know one thing then play the blame game as to why things have not happened. Religious Fundies are the reason we can't get anything done!!!