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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
And you wonder why people use athiest like a dirty word. Speaking to people that way about something like their faith is why atheists are looked down upon. It is why I shudder at the idea of calling myself one.
I do not want to associate myself with anything that belittles or degrades anyone's faith or lack thereof. I have met probably more chauvanistic atheists than Christians since I have come to university and I go to a fairly conservative college!
I know y'all have a big chip on your shoulder and a big persecution complex. Guess what, nobody cares until you start making it an issue and being offensive just for the sake of being offensive. If you want to discuss what religion is and the bad things it has done, do it like a civilized human being.
You are just as bad as the evangelicals. This is why it is unfortunate I will never associate myself with atheism.
Maher repeats this same argument that you hear all the time in these circles; other similar anti-religious comedians, Hicks, Carlin, repeated it. They say that all the worst wars, or most of them, are owed to religion, or religious hatred. That's bogus. I'm an atheist, and one that will tell religious folks what I think of their dumb ideas, but this 'wars of religion' thing is just another dumb meme.
Take recent history for example. Were the Vietnam or Korean wars about religion? What about the Chinese Civil War? The Japanese invasion of China? What about the Russian Civil War? What about World Wars 1 and 2? The Franco-Prussian War? The Opium Wars? The War of the Spanish Succession? The 100 Years War? The American Revolution? The American Civil War? The Manchu Invasion of China? The Mongol Conquests? The Ottoman Conquests? Wars of the Chinese, Roman, Greek, Persian, and other Empires? None of them were about religion. Most of them were about political, or ethnic conflicts, or about gaining territory. Is that a reason to argue against ethnicity, or policy? If anything, truly religious wars are an exception to the rule.
Saying religion is dumb is fine; just don't employ equally dumb arguments in doing so...
The King James version is jacked in quite a few places. Even full on bible-thumping revival-going christians fight over translations of tiny phrases. Case in point: there are well over 100 translations of the Bible in English. People find one that fits their pre-conceived notions of dogma.
http://www.geocities.com/bible_translation/english.htm
When I was sent to Bible-thumping camps as a kid, someone earnestly told me he'd never read the NIV because they included *gasp* an atheist translator in the team. I knew I'd never be a good young-earth christian because I thought that was a good thing. Of course, there was also the guy who said: "If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me." So maybe I kinda already knew that.
Dont you at least find it a little odd, that in this book, which is "God's Words', God can not find time to come out and condemn slavery, warn against incest, or provide some useful knowledge about the world like that we are part of a solar system or that germs make people sick…….
Yet can devote an entire paragraph to outlining the procedure for dealing with what to do if two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband from the man who is beating him, by grabbing the other man's genitals?
And even so… Why is the woman in the wrong here? She was trying to break up a fight! Shouldn’t she be rewarded?
Honestly speaking, do you see no absurdity in this?
The point has already been made, but people, not religion, are responsible for wars. Or how about this: Sin is responsible for wars. Greed, pride, carelessness for how a man's actions affect his peers (using "man," of course, because most wars are started by men). I think it is more than a bit insulting to say my beliefs, which I would never use to hurt or exploit anyone, are the actual cause of tragedies and atrocities visited on the world by the actions of cruel, sinful men.
I originally had a lot written, but I am not going to waste my breath arguing. Just know that many people who take the Bible seriously are actually pacifists, not warmongers, and are trying to "live a quiet life, at peace with everyone" like the apostle Paul said.
morality, mine or yours does not come from religion!
The morality found in religions was already there, and the religions were built around already existing norms.
Also, as our morality changes, we disregard and change as well.
For example, God kills 70,000 innocent people because David ordered a census of the people (1 Chronicles 21). God also orders the destruction of 60 cities so that the Israelites can live there. He orders the killing of all the men, women, and children of each city, and the looting of all of value (Deuteronomy 3). He orders another attack and the killing of “all the living creatures of the city: men and women, young, and old, as well as oxen sheep, and asses” (Joshua 6). In Judges 21, He orders the murder of all the people of Jabesh-gilead, except for the virgin girls who were taken to be forcibly raped and married. When they wanted more virgins, God told them to hide alongside the road and when they saw a girl they liked, kidnap her and forcibly rape her and make her your wife! Just about every other page in the Old Testament has God killing somebody! In 2 Kings 10:18-27, God orders the murder of all the worshipers of a different god in their very own church! In total God kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered. And I havent even mentioned all the innocent little Egyptian Children.
The God of the Bible also allows slavery, including selling your own daughter as a sex slave (Exodus 21:1-11), child abuse (Judges 11:29-40 and Isaiah 13:16), and bashing babies against rocks (Hosea 13:16 & Psalms 137:9).
This type of “moral” behavior should shock any modern moral person. Murder, rape, pillage, plunder, slavery, and child abuse can not be justified by saying that some god says it’s OK.
To say we get our morals from the bible is absurd, if anything, we have them in spite of..
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