Apparently christianity is bullshit...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Here's where it breaks down...

A significant proportion of people who would define themselves as religious do not sheepishly follow their church. Protestantism was largely founded on the idea that a personal relationship with God can be infinitely more fulfilling. The reason there are so many sects within religions boils down to disagreement, which you wouldn't have if people blindly submitted to authority. Some people might. Most people don't; they self-edit, they pick and choose which bits they want to believe in, and which they don't. That's why you'll never beat a fundamentalist with bible quotes. They are fundamentally committed to the pieces they like. The pieces they don't, they are happy to ignore.

Loudmouths with extremist views get a lot of attention, because loudmouths with extremist views get a lot of attention in any group. Faith is a personal thing, and even within the same church, let alone the same religion, you'll find people who have varying beliefs.

Religion doesn't make sense to you... and that's fine. I get that you've had bad experiences with it. But projecting the bad experiences you've had and assuming that it is the same for everyone else is patronizing. I would expect that most of the people on this board who have faith, have examined that faith and thought extensively about it. I doubt anyone likely to read your posts here will have uncritically absorbed religious beliefs. I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who have, but again, that's not something which is a necessity with the entirety of all religious experience.

Spirituality can be damaging, but it can also be profoundly helpful. Particularly when dealing with death and loss, but also as a gateway into all sorts of deeper ethical dilemmas. Quite aside from that, holy books can often be moving and beautiful. Just saying 'go with your gut' is fine, but there's a lot of times my gut doesn't know what to think, and then I tend to fall back on the philosophy and theology I've read to come up with an answer. I don't even consider myself to be religious or spiritual, but I've found uses in my day to day life for the ideas I've picked up from them along the way.

The Chao Te Ching is a great example of what religion can provide in modern life, IMO. Complicated ideas illustrated in brief through metaphor.

Like Roger keeps saying, there is no way to know whether there's a God or not until we find out the hard way. Continuing to use these tooth fairy/sky daddy strawmen is just... wrongheaded. It can not make sense to you and make sense to other people and both attitudes are equally valid. The difference between calling someone a 'faithfool' and calling someone a 'teabagger' is that the teabagger's positions can be taken apart through rational argument and discourse. You won't know if you're right or the religious individual is until you are dead. You might have strong beliefs on the subject, but hey, so do they. That's the nature of belief.

Thanks for completely conflating faith and spirituality, after I'd gone to great pains to draw the distinction I'm making between the two terms for the purposes of this discussion. Fair enough, disagree on my usage of the ambiguous as hell terms. You choose option b - ignore that and tell me why I'm wrong.

Note: this a discussion about whether or not it is good form to take the piss out of people who believe in invisible sky gnomes. There is no right and wrong.

It's a bullshit distinction, is why, and you're presuming to make it for other people.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

In science, you can't ever prove anything, you can only falsify it. If there is no way to falsify it, then it's outside of the scope of science. In order for a hypothesis to be scientific, it has to be testable. The goal of testing is to see if you can prove the hypothesis wrong. If you can't, that doesn't make it proven, it just makes it less likely to be false. If you can't test something, it's not science.

Just because I can't use the scientific method to find that answer, that still doesn't mean I get to make stuff up. It feels to me like that is breaking some kind of rule.

I'm guessing it is an aesthetic rule I made up myself for myself to follow, because I can't articulate an objective justification to that rule.

That rule would be something like asking myself "do I have to believe this?" where most other people would ask "am I allowed to believe this? why the fuck not, no one can prove me wrong!"

Do whatever you want with it, I don't care and what you decide for yourself has no effect on anyone else.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Even the most ignorant and hateful Southern Baptists I've had the misfortune of interacting with didn't believe in "invisible sky gnomes." Mostly they believed in themselves, they believed they were Right, and that anyone who didn't agree with them 100% was worthless trash. They're problem wasn't that they (allegedly) believed in a higher power, but that they were dicks.

And this. Religion, including Atheism, is just a tool people who have decided they're Right use to shit on other people. The real problem is that they have decided that they're smarter and better than anyone who disagrees with them, and therefore have a right to decide how everyone else should think. Whether they use religion or some other tool to facilitate their delusion is irrelevant.

[Cain]

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[Suu]

Update: Atwill is officially a moron:

At the 'Covert Messiah' conference, to be held at the Conway Hall in Holborn a week on Saturday, Mr Atwill will present his theory that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they entirely fabricated the story of Jesus Christ.

Outlining his ideas in a blog posting on his website Mr Atwill writes: "Christianity may be considered a religion, but it was actually developed and used as a system of mind control to produce slaves that believed God decreed their slavery."

Mr Atwill says that acts of insurrection by Jewish sects, who were awaiting the arrival of a so-called 'warrior Messiah' in Palestine, were a perpetual problem for the Roman Empire and that after the Empire had exhausted all traditional means of dealing with the problem they resorted to psychological warfare.

"They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system," Atwill told PRWeb.com

"That's when the 'peaceful' Messiah story was invented.

So what are the chances the one and only time in all of Roman history something like this is prepared...and the fabricated religion turns out to be Christianity?

You'll also note a complete and utter lack of documented evidence to support the notion of these mysterious, unnamed, first-century Roman aristocrats.

Also, peaceful Messiah?  Uh yeah, he just hung around with a Zealot, and said "I come not to bring the peace, but a sword".  Real peaceful, right.

I gotta show this shit to my classical history professor. Mind control for slaves? Really?

From what I have gathered, Christianity was the urban religion for rich brats, the new "it" thing, like Scientology today. It was not practiced by slaves or poor workers. It was an underground cult for much of its early years.

[LMNO]

Did you come to that conclusion after researching many studies?

[Cain]

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[The Good Reverend Roger]

It was not practiced by slaves or poor workers.

So all that early Christian grafitti in Roman slave quarters was put on the wall by the masters?