Island Man
JoinedPosts by Island Man
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7
Whats it like being an atheist and still going to meetings?
by Crazyguy inanyone fall into this category?
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7
Whats it like being an atheist and still going to meetings?
by Crazyguy inanyone fall into this category?
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Island Man
It's the intellectual equivalent of having to endure skin crawlingly obnoxious sounds like nails scraping on a chalk board.
It's like attending a gathering filled with smiling people who are adamantly convinced that puppies are evil demons, and you have to sit quietly and watch as they cruelly torture them to death, while convinced that they're doing the right thing, and anyone who questions them is of the devil and needs to be dealt with.
Sometimes you can feel the frustration welling up inside you and you feel strongly tempted to just drop a TTATT bomb on them! But you have to exercise great self-control and bottle it all up. Sometimes it gets to the point that you actually feel physically sick!
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The people are mobilizing Mr Drumpf
by Simon inprotesters shut down a trump rally.
massive numbers of people are out in chicago and have shut his event down.
there were scuffles inside the event.. despite his lame attempt to pretend the violence he instigates is nothing to do with him it's clear that it is as the cnn quotes during the last event showed only too well.. this doesn't happen at anyone else's events - candidates have even given up the stage to protesters, not called for them to be beaten and punched.. trump is an ugly person and this is just a small taste of what a future under his rule would be like.. shame on the gop for not kicking his ass out.
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Island Man
Racism against blacks is because blacks have made the news more for crimes and violence and wearing their pants on the ground, etc.
You have that all wrong. The disproportionate amount of black Americans being in the news for crimes and the wearing of their pants on the ground, etc are all symptomatic of problems in the American black community that are the result of them being subjected to decades - centuries - of racism.
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Why Faith is Self-Defeating
by cofty inthe god of christian theism values faith.. "without faith it is impossible to please god, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists" - heb.11.
faith and evidence are inversely proportional - the more evidence there is that god exists the less faith you need in that proposition and vice-versa.. so how can a christian criticise any other faith-based belief?
for example they can protest that all the evidence is against the claims of scientology, but that just means that scientologists require more faith than christians.
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Island Man
Here's a real life example from the news, highlighting the folly of faith.
Another thread by Cofty? Dang bro/sis. You are getting out there and living a full life, right?
I don't know JACOB Meza but I hope he is not one of those theists that attempt to shame voices of reason into silence by saying things like he said. No fuller life can be led than making intellectual contributions aimed at transforming human society for the better, in this case, by exposing the folly of faith.
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Why Faith is Self-Defeating
by cofty inthe god of christian theism values faith.. "without faith it is impossible to please god, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists" - heb.11.
faith and evidence are inversely proportional - the more evidence there is that god exists the less faith you need in that proposition and vice-versa.. so how can a christian criticise any other faith-based belief?
for example they can protest that all the evidence is against the claims of scientology, but that just means that scientologists require more faith than christians.
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Island Man
Here's a fictional scenario that highlights the folly and danger of faith:
A deeply religious man starts hearing a voice in his head. The voice tells him that it is God. "God" tells him that it would make a great nation out of him if he obeys his commands.
The man tells others about it, but they don't believe that it's really God talking to him. He doesn't seem crazy though, everything else about him is normal except for him hearing the voice. He develops strong faith that it really is God that is talking to him.
One day he has a terrible seizure followed by a coma that lasted a couple days. Doctors scan his brain and discover a tumor in his brain. Because of the location of the tumor, doctors know that it is the cause of the auditory hallucinations the man has been having.
They inform the man but he refuses to accept it. He has faith in his "God". By faith, he perceives that the doctors are misled by Satan. He perceives that they were sent by Satan in a bid to destroy his faith. It was a demon that entered into him and gave him the seizure. The whole incident was all an elaborate machination of Satan to get the man to renounce God! This he perceives clearly, by faith.
Later, "God" speaks to the man and asks him to sacrifice his three year old son to him. His wife and son come to the hospital to visit him shortly after this and when his son hugs him, the man, by faith, grabs his son by the head with both hands and snaps his neck.
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Why Faith is Self-Defeating
by cofty inthe god of christian theism values faith.. "without faith it is impossible to please god, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists" - heb.11.
faith and evidence are inversely proportional - the more evidence there is that god exists the less faith you need in that proposition and vice-versa.. so how can a christian criticise any other faith-based belief?
for example they can protest that all the evidence is against the claims of scientology, but that just means that scientologists require more faith than christians.
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Island Man
The requirement of faith also exposes the fact that the God of the bible is man-made and not a real supremely wise, truth-loving being.
A real supremely wise being that values truth would not value faith as a virtue because faith leaves people vulnerable to being deceived and is no way of determining what is really true.
Every single major religion uses faith as the cop-out to justify belief in the unproven. They even use faith to justify belief in claims that can be, and have been, scientifically disproved!
So faith actually serves as an excuse to believe lies and pretend that they are true. A truly wise supreme being would know this and would not require faith of his worshipers knowing what it leads to.
But humans who want to deceive and control other humans by getting them to accept their unproven claims - religious con-men - they value faith, because it serves their ends. It gets people to credulously drink, hook, line and sinker, their ridiculous claims while telling themselves that they are good and noble for being credulous!
You see the claims of religion cannot stand up to scrutiny and logic so religious con-men had to come up with a way of demonizing scrutiny and logic in order to survive. So they came up with the idea that God wants people to whole-heatedly believe and accept fanciful claims without doubting. And they also demonize doubt. The whole concept of faith was created by very early religious con-men as a means of countering logic, reason and evidence.
It's so fricking obvious! Faith is not a virtue but the enobling of credulity to get people to believe insanity. Faith is no way of knowing what is true but a way of justifying believe in just about any crazy claim. Why can't religious people see right through it?!
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Why Faith is Self-Defeating
by cofty inthe god of christian theism values faith.. "without faith it is impossible to please god, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists" - heb.11.
faith and evidence are inversely proportional - the more evidence there is that god exists the less faith you need in that proposition and vice-versa.. so how can a christian criticise any other faith-based belief?
for example they can protest that all the evidence is against the claims of scientology, but that just means that scientologists require more faith than christians.
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Island Man
i thought faith was to do with trust
Faith is about belief. Trust can be considered as a form of belief. To trust someone is to believe that they are dependable either as a safe person to be with or a dependable person to rely on. So So faith can involve trust. But trust is not the only kind of belief so faith cannot be limited to trust. Faith applies to any and every kind of belief that does not involve definitive detectable evidence.
Faith is about believing without seeing. "The evident demonstration of realities that are not seen"; "Happy is he that believes without seeing."; "Walk by faith not by sight"
Every time JWs and others say that faith in not blind, THEY ARE LYING against their own holy book!
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Why Faith is Self-Defeating
by cofty inthe god of christian theism values faith.. "without faith it is impossible to please god, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists" - heb.11.
faith and evidence are inversely proportional - the more evidence there is that god exists the less faith you need in that proposition and vice-versa.. so how can a christian criticise any other faith-based belief?
for example they can protest that all the evidence is against the claims of scientology, but that just means that scientologists require more faith than christians.
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Island Man
Faith is the assured expectation of what is wished for. The pretentious demonstration of unproven fantasies. For by means of it, the men of ancient times deluded themselves and others into religious servitude. Faith is the enobling of credulity. Faith is folly dressed up as a virtue. Faith is religion's shield against the fatal missiles of evidence and sound reasoning.
By faith religious people perceive that each different species of animal was magically brought about by an invisible man in the sky, so that all the scientific evidence proving evolution has to be ignored and denied.
By faith the religious mind is blinded so as not to see, far less admit to, scientific evidence contradicting the claims of ones cherished fantasies.
By faith there exists myriads of contradicting religions, for by logic and evidence they would all be discarded as rubbish.
Faith is adult-approved childish behavior; adult approved belief in imaginary friends; adult-approved make-believe.
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This thread is for proof that God exists
by juandefiero inhowever, i haven't found any evidence to support that belief.. have you?
if so please, show me the evidence that god exists, and i will believe along with you.. criteria:.
(1) you must specify which god you are talking about;.
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Island Man
That guy who said religion is the opiate of the masses - he was so very right!
Belief in God is not founded in facts and reality. It's founded in all things emotional, all things subjective. It produces a psycho-emotional "high" in its adherents allowing them to cope psychologically with problems like: coming to terms with mortality; enduring illness, poverty, injustices, etc.
Religion helps people cope in much the same way that alcohol and drugs help people to cope. But just like the high produced by drugs is all in your head and does not really solve the problems in your life, so too it is with religion.
Just as drugs have the ability to damage the brain and cause people to think and act irrationally, so too it is with religion.
Religion, period, has been an evil scourge on humanity. It has been a fetter to progress. It has been a provocateur of bigotry, tyranny and atrocities. People who believe irrational things without proof can easily justify atrocious behavior without shame or guilt.
"However, if some have a view that God exists, they don't need a pass from you or me or anyone else. "
Any extraordinary claim that is promoted as truth but that cannot be substantiated with evidence deserves to be treated as a lie! Lies are dangerous because they don't conform to reality and when they influence people to act in a manner that does not conform to reality, they or others end up getting hurt - sometimes killed! - by reality. That is the danger of lies! That is the danger of theism!
Unproven religious beliefs do not deserve respect just as lies do not deserve respect. Disproven religious beliefs deserve strong ridicule! Lies only harm society in the long run.
Respect religious lies today and next thing you know they're national laws tomorrow! Next thing you know, it's ok and justifiable to burn albinos as witches because the belief that albinos are witches is widely respected and believed to be true - because no one was brave enough to ridicule it for the nonsense it is when it first started a century ago.
Thousands of years from now. Humans will look back on our time with incredulity at the fools who advocated respect for unproven, wishful-thinking, harmful, toxic, family-destroying, progress-hampering religious beliefs. Just as we today find it hard that people justified owning and mistreating people as slaves so too people will look back at the folly of religion.
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TALKING NONSENSE by using words attached to nothing
by Terry inespecially in listening to people who "believe" things (spirituality, faith, etc.
) do i hear words being used which are nonsense.. i'm a person who cherishes words in a weird, almost fetishistic way :)i discovered this quite young.
i was drawn to complicated word patterns and liked to repeat them.
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Island Man
Terry, you should take up learning Esperanto if you haven't already. You might find it very fascinating. It's one of the easiest languages to learn and it allows for very creative ways of expressing things. It's almost like playing with lego - linguistically speaking.