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Well, I certainly don't want to punish innocent Israelis (I suppose their government is similar to ours in terms of their imperialistic-ness).  I'd like to see a cease to the fighting.  I'm really not sure who or what instigated the violence in the first place but it's gone on long enough.  True, I should have thought out the Hamas being elected a bit more (a terrorist organization is not exactly helping anything).  If there was any way to resolve this bloodshed, I'd be all for it (I'm sure 99% of people would be, too). Like Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

I do wonder why we care so much about the fighting going on between those two countries but ignore (for the most part) serious events happening in Africa.

What started the fighting was the fact that a bunch of Europeans came in and said, "We're taking your holy land and giving it to a different country with a different religion. Hope you dont mind." Then they gave a shitload of guns to the new nation they just created, which proceeded to fight and win seven wars with neighboring countries.

So we should punish innocent Israelis for the actions of their democratic government....but not innocent Palestinians for the actions of their democratic government (ignoring the for moment that Hamas' military arm is in fact more of a private militia attached to a political party)?

GREAT IDEA!

Incidentally, I believe the large scale forceable movement of people based on nationality is known as ethnic cleansing and is an international war crime for which you can be tried by any country in the world.

There are Israelis who have been born and lived in Israel all of their lives, just as their are Palestinians who have been born and raised in Palestine all their lives.  Should the Israelis stop being dicks, disband the settlements and not resort to military incursions everytime someone in the Occupied Territories sneezes?  Sure.  Equally, should the supposed Palestinian nationalist movements try not killing innocent civilians, promoting Sharia law and taking handouts from Israel's military enemies?  Again yes, unless they want to be seen as proxies for its eventual destruction.

As it happens, I condemn Palestianians for voting Hamas in, in the same way I condemn Israelis for voting for Sharon or Americans for Bush or Brits for Blair.  Because these people and their political programs are fucktarded in the extreme.  They're free to chose and I'm free to call bullshit on their choices.

As an aside, it was the dissolution of the Caliphate by Kemal Ataturk which really screwed up the Middle East.  That was the regional hegemon, and the Turks were good at enforcing order.  He decided the costs of empire were greater than the benefits and so cut loose much of the Middle East, dumping the mess into the lap of the victors, who obviously had no clue as to what sort of shitstorm they had inherited.

Well said.

When people say "religion has caused more wars than anything else," I tend to disagree.  I doubt anyone would seriously start a war to "convert the heathens."  I'm guessing religion was the card played by the ruling elite to manipualte the people into fighting (with the possible exception of the Crusades, but I'm no historian). 

Well, thats the point. They needed some excuse to fight the war, and religion was handy. The war in Iraq isnt actually about terrorism, that's just the excuse. The main problem with religion is that it suppresses individual thought, making people much easier to manipulate. It's not by any means the only method of brainwashing people, but it is the oldest, and arguably the most successful.

Actually, I have decided to let the lovely Violent Acres to make all my decisions for me from now on, since she has made me nod my head in agreement far too many times already, and I just read this gem

http://www.violentacres.com/archives/352/atheists-are-snobs

The problem with Atheists is most of them are snobs.

Atheists think they're being clever with their spaghetti monster analogies and fairy tale rhetoric, but at the end of the day, they come off sound like condescending pricks.

Furthermore, any group of people claiming superior intelligence that willingly engages in the fight of a losing battle automatically loses credibility. However, Atheists are too dumb to realize they're fighting a losing battle, so they persist with the lecturing and the withering stares. Atheists have singled handedly ruined coffee shops with this crap.

I, myself, have not been able to claim belief in a higher power for many, many years. However, I can still see the value in Religion. Perhaps growing up without a strong parental figure in my life made me recognize the possible value of a loving Father figure up in the sky watching out for me. And hey, I try my best not forget that sometimes we all need something to believe in.

Most Atheists have the tendency to thumb their noses at Jesus, and then log onto World of Warcraft so they can pretend to be an orc for a couple of hours. They sneer at the Bible, but have no problem playing endless hours of vampire role playing games. The message is clear. Fantasies are OK as long as they include gratuitous violence and some sort of porn.

It's no wonder Religious folks don't take them too seriously. Even the Quiet Intellectual Atheist comes across as if he's only denying belief to be aversive. It's hard not to pity the guy addicted to nonconformity like an addict to a needle.

Personally, I don't mind Religion. Religious leaders, on the other hand, really get my goat. But in my experience, when you approach someone by saying, "Hey. I don't mind Catholicism. It's just the creepy priests fucking altar boys that gross me out," members of the congregation are more apt to listen.

My only real issue with Religion (and ultimately, it's a fairly small issue) is that it teaches people to be good for all the wrong reasons. Whether it's the fear of a vengeful God and eternal life spent in the flames of Hell or the possibility of winning a ticket into Heaven accompanied by a boat load of virgins, people are still behaving well to escape punishment or to win everlasting life.

Ideally, people would be good because it's the right thing to do. Not because they want good Karma to come back on them and not because they're hoping for a personal cloud to lounge on in the sky, but because doing the right thing is its own reward. I'd like to live in a world where people aren't secretly hoping for a payoff for every single good dead they've ever done.

But then again, most of society today seems almost completely lacking in any moral compass whatsoever. So if 'God' does his part to scare some little bastard out of stealing my fucking car, I guess I can't complain too much.

Any Atheist who does seriously needs to reevaluate his priorities.

Sorry, I tried to post the url in for the quotes.
The first one
The second one
And I found them here. (along with a shitload of similar quotes)

And yes, those people are being completely and totally serious.

Oh, well.  forums. Thank goodness for that.  I was afraid they'd been said by real people. 

Some of them have.

Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It's no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.

Pat Robertson

One theory is that the pre-Flood Earth had a canopy of ice above it that squeezed the atmosphere down to, say, 15 miles [...] If you squeezed the air down to 15 miles - instead of 100 - it would be more clear because there would be less distortion - atmospheric twinkle it's called. And probably this canopy of ice would act as a photo-amplifier where you would actually see things much more clearly. That's one theory that [in] the pre-Flood world you don't need a telescope - you could see incredibly well.

Kent Hovind

Scary shit.

I doubt that's a troll. If something sounds ironic beyond belief, then chances are it is, but if it's just stupid/clueless/bigoted, it's probably genuine.

As has already been said in this thread, a lot of "skeptics" arent really thinking for themselves; they're just blindly buying into a different story. See also: ZOMG23PINEALFNORD

According to my German teacher, Sie should be used basically whenever you address someone who's not a real close friend or family. People have to work together for literally years before they call eachother du. Now, that's all according to my German teacher, and having never actually been to Germany, I cant verify it.

Sorry, I tried to post the url in for the quotes.
The first one
The second one
And I found them here. (along with a shitload of similar quotes)

And yes, those people are being completely and totally serious.

I hate to be a lulzkiller, but a lot of the quotes that end up on fstdt are actually from trolls. I, myself, had two quotes put up there after I went trolling on Rapture Ready. My guess is that those two are both trolls. They're just TOO loaded with irony.

Man, I checked this thread like 4 or 5 hours ago and there was only 1 page.

You mean as in going against the mainstream, who seem to be caught up in a Christian/Muslim spag-fight/hissy fit of epic proportions?

Atheism is the new emo.  It allows intelligent and well educated people living in first world countries to feel oppressed.

I do think thats a little unfair, though. I mean, do you want your kids (if you had kids) being taught "intelligent design"? Not that it's a lot worse than some of the other shit that gets taught in school, but that doesnt mean we should just ignore it.

They're actually fairly vocal now.  They forced a couple of issues on Parliament recently....but I don't feel especially under threat from them, because the Commons is made up of people used to getting their own way, and because no-one in the UK besides a few BNP-esque nutters and a few Muslims wants religion to have anything to do with politics.

Sure, in cases there are problems where religious people want to try and force their inanity on everyone else.  And they should be stopped.  But many of the ethnocentric Atheists, such as Sam Harris, seem to feel the existence of religious people is de facto a threat to their personal well-being, regardless of their beliefs.

Of course, I also find their 'skepticism' annoying, since it only seems to extend to dismissing the easiest and most facile philosophical arguments ever.  Hume and Nietzsche were skeptics, many of these guys are clowns who have no interest in the truth, only of proving their own superiority over/persecution at the hands of the 'religious people'.

And those are the sort that annoy me.

Agreed. An enforced atheist state is just as retarded as an enforced religious state. What it's about is freedom. The reason I call myself an atheist is because I want to let people know were I stand without having to go through the whole, "I'm an agnostic, but..." thing. In terms of the Christian old man in the sky god, I'm agnostic in the same way I'm technically agnostic about Russel's Teapot, lizard Jew people, and the Matrix. In terms of a deist type god who doesnt interfere with the universe after he creates it, I have to say I'm agnostic, since we dont really have any way to know what happened before existence. I do think M Theory has some pretty interesting ideas, and I lean towards that more than some creator, but we really have no way to know. Of course, at that point it's all philosophical, since the whole point is God doesnt interfere. Which is why I call myself an atheist.

[The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed.]

A curious feature of this kind of atheism is that some of its most fervent missionaries are philosophers. Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon claims to sketch a general theory of religion. In fact, it is mostly a polemic against American Christianity. This parochial focus is reflected in Dennett's view of religion, which for him means the belief that some kind of supernatural agency (whose approval believers seek) is needed to explain the way things are in the world. For Dennett, religions are efforts at doing something science does better - they are rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense. "The proposition that God exists," he writes severely, "is not even a theory." But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.

Well, I cant speak for any other atheists, but I dont have a problem with religion unless they try and dictate how other people should live their lives. If you want to do religion, thats fine with me, just dont try and make me do it. I have pretty much the same view of drugs. If you want to do crack and heroin and meth, thats your call, as long as you dont come near me while you're high.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts to explain the appeal of religion in terms of the theory of memes, vaguely defined conceptual units that compete with one another in a parody of natural selection. He recognises that, because humans have a universal tendency to religious belief, it must have had some evolutionary advantage, but today, he argues, it is perpetuated mainly through bad education. From a Darwinian standpoint, the crucial role Dawkins gives to education is puzzling. Human biology has not changed greatly over recorded history, and if religion is hardwired in the species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education could alter this. Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory, and I cannot help being reminded of the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses.

What Dawkins actually said about evolution and religion was that it was advantageous for young children to believe what adults told them without question. The value of this is pretty obvious (dont go out in the forest alone, there are saber tooth tigers), but it explains why religion has stuck around for so long. Also, humans have a natural need to explore and understand the things around them, which makes sense evolutionarily. Religion got started as a way to explain how the world worked before we could answer the question with science. However, there's no natural need for religion like there is for sex. If a child grew up never hearing about religion, chances are the idea wouldnt just randomly occur to them. The only thing that would make that happen is the question, "What happens after we die?" which is another example of the drive to explore and understand.

Contemporary opponents of religion display a marked lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of "scientific atheism" - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies. But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means.

If atheism becomes a state project, it becomes just like any other religion, that can be used to manipulate people. The whole point of atheism is that it's nothing. If you never heard of religion, you would automatically be an atheist. If you turn atheism into something, it becomes just another religion, with beliefs, priests, sacred laws and the whole thing. Not that I dont think Stalin and co genuinely didnt believe in God, but for them, it was Atheism, whereas for us, it's atheism. The real point was Communism, of which atheism was just a part. Our atheism doesnt imply anything about our other beliefs and principles.

Nowadays most atheists are avowed liberals. What they want - so they will tell you - is not an atheist regime, but a secular state in which religion has no role. They clearly believe that, in a state of this kind, religion will tend to decline. But America's secular constitution has not ensured a secular politics. Christian fundamentalism is more powerful in the US than in any other country, while it has very little influence in Britain, which has an established church. Contemporary critics of religion go much further than demanding disestablishment. It is clear that he wants to eliminate all traces of religion from public institutions. Awkwardly, many of the concepts he deploys - including the idea of religion itself - have been shaped by monotheism. Lying behind secular fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.

A secular state in which religion has no role is two different things. Right now, we have one (sort of), but obviously not the other. If any atheist liberals do believe that religion will automatically decline in a secular state, they need to take a look at the numbers. America was founded by Puritans, and it would take another revolution to get rid of them.

But the belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism. Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species. In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs. One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.

Of course all civilizations fall eventually. What I would hope is that a civilization such as Dawkins and co describe would last long enough to get us past the point were we could easily blow ourselves up. It could last for 200 years, it could last for 200,000 years, as long as it lasts long enough to get us past the danger zone. Also, I'd kind of prefer it if it could last until after I'm dead.

Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it. This is what Nietzsche did when he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century, but almost none of today's secular missionaries have followed his example. One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The reason, no doubt, is that he did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values - on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms - rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.

I havent heard this before. How did liberalism come from Christianity? Was it from some offshoot like Quakerism or something? Anyway, liberalism and atheism arent really connected for me. I'm an atheist because that's the logical conclusion of the scientific method, and I'm a liberal because I believe that people deserve to be free and able to make their own choices.

Religion has not gone away. Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise. In the 20th century, when it commanded powerful states and mass movements, it helped engender totalitarianism. Today, the result is a climate of hysteria. Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence. There is an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the Earth exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share. There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways, and no religion has the right to break the peace.

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms. A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come. Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

I dont want to repress religion, I just want religion to stop repressing me. Remember, there are more religious people who want world government than secularists. It's not an atheist thing. The only real thing standing in the way of world government is barriers of ethnic and religious hatred. Now, that's obviously a rather large roadblock, but if you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

I would hope that society would come crashing down, because otherwise I would be spending a rather long time in jail.

I'm up for hitting runescape. That game pisses me off to no end. Plans?

I discovered Discordianism a couple of months ago, and I immediately liked it because I had already come to pretty much the same conclusions on my own, and it was nice to see that if I was crazy, at least there were other people crazy in the same way. Welcome.

Dennis the Menace illustration: Dennis and his parents are sitting down eating dinner. Dennis looks up at his mother and speaks.
Mismatched caption: I see your little, petrified skull...labeled and resting on a shelf somewhere

http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/
It takes a random family circus cartoon and pairs it up with a random Nietzsche quote