Greatest I Am's anti-religion thread

Discussion in 'Alternative Theories' started by Greatest I am, May 3, 2017.

  1. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    21,634
    No, religion is about belief. It's what sort of mythology you believe in.

    Don't believe me? Compare the ethics of Bono, Scott Roeder, Albert Schweitzer, Anders Breivik and Pope Francis. What do they have in common in terms of ethics? Nothing. What do they have in terms of belief? They are all Christians.

    If someone judges them to be all the same because they are Christian, they are no better than someone who judges all blacks to be the same because of their skin color.
    "Hey, whatever he believes that's OK, as long as it doesn't get in the way of work." - (Muslim co-worker when asked by his boss if he could work with a pretty vocal right-wing Christian guy.)
    ???
    Uh - surely you have read the dozens of threads here about the unethical aspects of several texts? Where is that "silenced?"
     
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  3. birch Valued Senior Member

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    that seems to be true because i never could really figure out what the motivation for an obsessive belief in god was about when it came to my so-called caregivers. in germany, that woman would pray early in the morning too and singing hymns waking up people above or below us in military housing. she also would hang a tapestry of the lord's supper and hang a crucifix of her husband's dead uncle's casket above my bed. they were just fixatedly religious to a disturbing degree but the rituals weren't as bad as the fact they had no respect for ethics at all which is what confused me the most. there was always a contradiction in their outward persona in public and church versus their version of god and who they were away from it BUT what did unify them with other christians seemed to be something in common as no one could tell or noticed anything wrong and that i know is because most of them were also uncaring or were in it for the social aspect or rituals of society. only one woman sunday school teacher in all the years i was forced to deal with church sensed something was not right with the picture, that's because she actually cared, not about a club/member mentality. all i could figure was they saw god as some medium of power to draw from. anything they could use or take advantage of to implement their plan even if it was obscene or immoral.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2017
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  5. Stephen H Banned Banned

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    A phobic person is someone suffering from IRRATIONAL or uncontrollable dread. I don’t choose to regard my own apprehensiveness about Muslim violence as groundless or illusionary or IRRATIONAL. Muslims want to kill us in the name of Allah and Islam simply for not believing, So I have very valid and RATIONAL reasons to fear both.
     
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  7. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    No they don't want to kill "us", whoever "us" is supposed to be. That's a quite false and ignorant statement.

    So your fears are irrational.

    Which makes you an Islamophobe.

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  8. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    If you fear Muslims more than you fear coal power plants, you have an irrational, uncontrollable phobia. Coal plants kill far more people in the US in the real world.
    And Christians want to kill immigrants in the name of God. Same same.
     
  9. Stephen H Banned Banned

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    I am sorry. I should have made it clear, it was ignorant of me.
    The "us " I refer to are non believers, the kuffar, the infidel and pagan.

    phobic
    ˈfəʊbɪk/
    adjective
    1. 1.
      having or involving an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.
      "she's phobic about spiders"
    noun
    1. 1.
      a person with an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something.
      "a snake phobic"
    Now when I see children blown to bits in Manchester in the name of Islam, I believe it is rational to fear Islam and the muslims who carry out these violent acts. I also have rational reason to fear Islam when I read Quranic verses instructing followers of Islam to:
    fight them [ non believers] until there is no fitnah and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah. And if they cease - then indeed, Allah is Seeing of what they do.Quran 8:39

    And

    "Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them and seize them,confine them, and lie in wait for them in every place of ambush".Surah 9:5 -


     
  10. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Precisely; which is why your fear is irrational. A phobia, in other words.
     
  11. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    What did you feel when you saw a Protestant child blown to bits in N Ireland, then? Or a Catholic one?
     
  12. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    One of the symptoms of irrational thinking is the belief that you're the only one who's rational.
     
  13. Stephen H Banned Banned

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    interesting that.
     
  14. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Poor irrational Galileo...

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  15. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Did Galileo think that everybody else was irrational? I don't think so.

    You can use Galileo as an example only because he turned out to be right. For every Galileo there are a thousand gullible nuts who swallow everything from flying saucers to ghosts.
     
  16. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    5,902
    True. The suffix '-phobe' has kind of been hijacked in recent years for political purposes. It's seemingly used today to refer to anyone who doesn't like something the speaker likes and wants to enshrine as immune from criticism.

    It's just another one of the lazy pseudo-intellectual cudgels that less thoughtful people use to bash opponents in the head. Words that can be invoked with almost magical effect to dismiss rhetorical opponents, taking the place of thought or argument.

    I'll say quite frankly that I don't like Islam. (I'll probably be flamed for saying that by many of the same atheists who freely insist that they can't stand Christianity.) Islam seems to me to combine all the least attractive features of all the other religions, in one package.

    The thing is that there are lots of different kinds of Muslims and Muslim theology out there. I don't find all of them nasty or objectionable, only some of them.

    The variety of Islam that I like the least is the highly legalistic Salafist version that's currently on the rise in most of the Muslim world. This form of religiosity imagines Islam as a divinely-revealed social order, a system of divine law applicable to the entire human race. It's the duty of Muslims to spread it and to subject the rest of humanity to what they believe is God's will. Since that social order is divinely revealed it is unchangeable for all time, subject to continuing interpretation but impossible to repeal. And unfortunately, the fundamentals of that social order represent the mores of crude desert tribesmen from the 7th century.

    Many Muslims today are hugely alienated. They are ruled by brutal secular tyrants (Saddam in Iraq, Assad in Syria and Qaddafi in Libya are examples) and secular law has become thoroughly discredited. And big-picture, the whole Muslim world, what they like to believe is the world's foremost civilization, fell prey for centuries to European colonialism, to rule by godless barbarian kuffars, which again discredited the idea of secular this-worldly leadership in the people's eyes.

    Man's law is perceived to have failed. So millions of Muslims are ready for reform. And 'reform' in that context means going back to the fundamentals of their religion, to strict adherence to God's law and God's will. Only then will the hand of god again intervene in history on their behalf, as it so clearly (to them) did in the 7th century when Islam swept miraculously from the Atlantic to India in the space of little more than a single generation.

    I believe that the varieties of Islam that can most easily assimilate into diverse and secular Western societies are varieties of Islam that imagine Islam as a personal religion, not as a divinely mandated social order. I've met Muslim Sufis who were among the most spiritually beautiful and pure people that I've ever met. They impressed me a great deal. Their religosity was a deep and private thing to them, not a matter of outward observance for the entire community.

    And that's the way that Islam needs to fit into a diverse society where most people don't share their religion or their ways.

    In their own way, these remarks are applicable to Christianity too, and to all religions. If they are going to succeed in our modern secular world, religions need to be personal and private matters of individual conscience. Of course Christianity has been undergoing these slow and sometimes turbulent transformations for centuries. It hasn't been easy. And Islam has just embarked on them. In Islam's case, it isn't obvious what the ultimate result will finally be.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2018
  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    And in any case all Galileo did was support the already existing and well-known ideas of Copernicus. So he was not on his own at all.
     
  18. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Galileo the conformist sheep..lol!
     
  19. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    "Galileo turned out to be right. Therefore I am right." What's the name for that fallacy?
     
  20. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    The Bozo Fallacy?

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  21. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Who said anything about being right?
     
  22. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    I can translate for you if you like: "Galileo was rational. Therefore I am rational."
     
  23. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Who said that? You?

    Here's what you said:

    "One of the symptoms of irrational thinking is the belief that you're the only one who's rational."
     

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