Letters to the Editor
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We are working...
Everybody get back to WORK! Stop thinking!
Ah, Ok Wilson, if someone calls themselves an evolutionist, you wouldn't say they had a 'belief system' would you? Or someone says they are an 'environmentalist" you wouldn't say they had a belief system, would you? Well, maybe you would. How about the 'belief' in gravity. Atheists call themselves that not because they have a belief alone, but because their investigation of the world, and others' investigations (science), have lead them to conclude there is (probably) no God.
As a prior post pointed out, if you could prove it scientifically, us Atheists would be on board. So we actually are talking about belief in science. I am also an environmentalist, an evolutionist and a believer in gravity, though I know they could all be disproved someday.
Are we 'polarizing' the debate? Well, between two poles there is a very large continuum, as we all know, and everyone places themselves on it somewhere. What you are hinting at is that the fundies should have no 'pole' of opposite and equal attraction. I.E. you are a centrist arguing, actually, that the fundies provide the only pole.
As we all know in dialectics (we do, don't we?) thesis and anti-thesis produce a new "synthesis." That is why Atheists don't mind being a pole, to move the folks in the middle perhaps a nudge over, and create a new American 'synthesis' of religion. And we are, as prior posts have pointed out, having an effect. Look at Europe, your future, Wilson, where religion is more and more the province of history and ... Muslims.
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Let's not forget...
that almost every significant aspect of bibilcal mythos was someone else's creation and represented somewhere else first.
The Sumerians, for one, had many "christian" stories long before there was even a Jew, including a creation story, adam & eve and a babel story. Christians also grossly misinterpreted the old testement, most strikingly in their changing the hebrew word for "miracle", which means "a sign", into the suspension of the laws of nature.
Have your belief, but know where the heck it comes from for crying out loud.
Oh, and all those holidays...yup, those were taken from other traditions too. Look it up.
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Wilson, you misunderstand....
you fight isn't with atheists.
It is with your coreligionists, who have make turned your religion into a hilarious parody of faith.
Don't get mad at atheists if they notice it and comment on it.
We have no dog in this fight.
You guys are on your own.
And congratulations on failing to see that you have nobody to blame but yourselves.
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Let Us Prey
[eom]
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Fundamentalists
Christianity. Judaism. Islam. Nouns that identify great systems of faith and belief that have changed the world.
Put the word "Fundamentalist" in front of them and they become adjectives, describing the color of the shit they have been turned into.
No wonder fundamentalists see eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge as a sin, since they celebrate moron stupidity as "faith."
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not self-correcting
Dumb is a self correcting problem over time. Eventually dumb loses just like the dinosaurs that Miss Eden Year 1 rode her hot naked ass to church on.
In fact, correcting this stuff takes effort and is not remotely a foregone conclusion.
The recent victories over creationist attempts to shove biblical literalism into the elementary schools under the guise of "Intelligent Design" were hard fought, very close, and could have gone the other way.
Ridicule and shame are in fact, part of those confrontations. It's not possible to convince creationists of their errors, but it is possible to reveal the depths of their ignorance and the sneakiness of their political agendas to everybody else.
And it's the everybody else who ultimately count.
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Not all Christians are morons
Just so you know, some of us are science-literate and mortified that Christianity has become sononymous with this sort of willful stupidity.
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They Ate Of...
...the fruit of knowledge. That must be why right wing religions and republicans want to end public education. Now that the right wing religions are united by the republican party and have become as one I wonder how long it will be before they are at each others throats regarding which religion is the best.
The pope may be in for something he is not able to take on when the evangelical fundies attack the catholic fundies.
The pope has the SCOTUS but I don't think that will work for him.
When all of these right wing religious haters attack each other the pope will have to defend himself against his pro-life friends.
I may be a catholic but I don't intend to become a part of the right wing hate machine. It's just not my thing, I wasn't raised that way.
Now the the evangelical fundies have caught up with the catholic fundies in rabid religious fundamentalism the pope will have to get Opus Dei and the other secret catholic organizations that us catholics in the center and those on the left are only now slowly finding out about, will have to come to the aid of the church that now hates us. Hello, O'Reilly, Russert, Hannity, Noonan, Schlafly, Chris Mathews, William Donoghue, Tom Monoghan, Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Joe Scarborough are you listening. You all have sown hate and intolerance and that is what you will reap.
You people are not my idea of what catholicism once was, or maybe it never was.
Are Hitler and the Nazis going to come back for you or for the southerners. You both like/liked them and their kind of thinking. And keep your war somewhere in the south, Kentucky would be a good place for your righteous struggle against each other. Right where that screwy museum is located.
And yes I'm very angry at what you two stupid religions have done to wreck America and our now shredded Constitution. And may you all end up in GITMO.
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Speaking from the synthesized portion of the debate -
"As we all know in dialectics (we do, don't we?) thesis and anti-thesis produce a new "synthesis." That is why Atheists don't mind being a pole, to move the folks in the middle perhaps a nudge over, and create a new American 'synthesis' of religion." -ELYDOG
Yes, thesis and antithesis produce synthesis, a third thing. But this paradigm does not reify either side of the dichotomy, or even the synthesized results. It's good to see yourself as part of a dialogue—would that more of us did—but too many on either "pole" of this particular dialogue refuse to talk to not only their opposite pole, but those of us doing the synthesizing.
I'm an agnostic who finds theism useful. I've been a militant atheist and an agnostic who found atheism useful. My personal investigation of reality, well grounded in science (biology, physics, psychology, neuroscience), as well as the history of science, has led me through this development into who I am today.
I know a PhD in biology who worked at Woods Hole for years (excellent bona fides if I ever heard of them), who is a Jesuit priest. Actually, I've known several scientifically degreed priests, as well as dozens of lay people who believe in evolution and also believe in God. They understand that God is a personal experience, and evolution is a scientifically demonstrated fact.
I know a few physicists who found in their work, as I did in my physics studies, serious reason to believe some kind of observing intelligence must exist, in order to provide a ground of being for the universe we live in. They were in the minority at the SSC, but there they were, working on science, looking for particles, and doing it all with a belief in God. Hmmm....
I think the synthesis has been around for at least a century, if not longer. I think the sudden increase in both militant atheism and fundamentalist Christianity is a backlash, because now that the information age is upon us, the new synthesis is "out there" and threatening to the false dichotomy of the old poles. Else why is it that neither militant atheist nor fundamentalist Christian will talk to the true agnostics looking to science to understand their world? We are reviled by both sides, yet we offer hope for sanity in dealing with these issues. Certainly we offer a better option than the creation science/IDers, or the few (but loudly speaking) elitist, insulting atheists.
I think most people are humbler than these two poles, and less able to tell another human "I'm right and you're wrong." We're doing our best. And for those on both sides who see themselves as part of the larger dialogue, please—be more open to seeing the synthesized results already around you.
My deepest wish is that humans stop seeing the knee-jerk viewing of thoughts in either-or terms, and realize that any two and perhaps many more options might be right, viable, or useful in different circumstances. Try stepping away from either-or beliefs and into your personal experience (the only thing you truly "know" is the present moment), and see what the world has to say.
People who force the world to fit their beliefs, instead of experiencing and learning from existence, believe not in God or science, but themselves.