[i]Chris,

Thank you very much for your good response, and I, also, wish to affirm my respect for you as a person and express my appreciation for the fine manner in which you seek to uphold your point of view. I commend you for your thoroughness and forthrightness combined with what I take to be an attitude of humility. I hope you will detect the same attitude on my part for though I vigorously disagree with your main premises (as you do mine) I yet esteem you as one who possesses great inherent value and worth because you are made in the image of God. I have long ago given up thinking I am able to “save” anyone.

THE NATURE OF MIRACLES (TRUE or FALSE)
Current mood: calm

I've always been a Free Thinker for as long as I can remember. To me our personalities our just a collection of Memory, Reason, and Feelings. I believe that what you experience in life makes you as a person no matter what it is, Good/Bad, True/False...It's all about the way you understand the information coming in. Like the whole concept that Wisdom comes with age, or Early Turn out = Early Burn Out (regarding to someone growing up to fast). When you have a child you have a short Time-Window to program their personality to be what you want them to be and the difference between right & wrong. When a child first comes into this existence the parents are its first guide to Fact or Fiction about the world and their Reality of/and Understanding. But the difference with me is that even as a child I learned about the word in a different way, The Logical, Common Sense, and Fundamental Way. I praise my mom for never pushing certain beliefs at me. As a child when All your trying to do is learn about the world, Fit In, and be normal like everyone else, it's hard to make any Logical Sense of existance when most Role Models and even parents are pushing Mythological Beliefs written By PRIMITIVE MEN with NO EVIDENCE to back them up.

What Is An Atheist...? (EVERYONE IS BORN ATHEIST)

Many people don't know it but everyone is born an Atheist, it's not until a child has religious beliefs Pushed on them with out any evidence to support them that they "think" their a Theist. The point is that a child doesn't have the ablility to even know what a religion is to make a educated decision, this is how most are Brain-Washed, they get you when you don't have any common sense. I remember going to Sunday School & Church On The Rock. They use to feed us Candy and Sweets just so we'll come, they also let us play arcade games before bible studies. Religion is just a function based on ones Geological Position, meaning that if a religious person was born in another part of the world, they would have been raised to believe in one of the other religions we have on our planet. EACH of which totally believes that their religion is the correct one, with all the rest of them being wrong. This is why we have Terrorism in the world today. A believe without evidence is a Dangerous thing.

The Argument For Reality Based on Beauty and Feelings...?
Current mood: amused
Category: Life

In My Opinion - To be a Logical and Rational Thinker you have to be able to think above your thoughts to examine different possibilities or better answers/explanations for the subject matters your thinking of. And most importantly you have to not let your Feelings and Opinions get in the way of what's Evident and True to the naked eye, and the naked mind. Being able to understand something is like reaching/approaching a High Mental Barrior. If your mind can't break that mental barrior to think above that subject and it makes sense to "you", you'll believe it without thinking nothing of it. If you can break the mental barrior to think above a subject matter, you'll be able to examine it fully using logical concepts and systems relating to it's functions and properties. You usually have to approach everything with a skeptical mind to realize the Truth and Down To Earth Explaination. How would you begin to find the answer to something like a magic trick? You have approach it with a skeptical mind while everyone else is being fooled by what the magician wants you to see. This is the way that Religious Institutions work, off most Peoples Fears and Willingness to be Fooled without considering Evidence & Facts from the jump.

I am sick of religious fads. Seriously. It's not cool to be Christian anymore so now everyone is following Kabala and Buddhism. If you're rich you're into scientology which is basically L. Ron Hubbard's drunken rebuttal to the bible.

It's all some trend. Next year it might be cool to be a Satanist, then kids everywhere will be "Satanists" and reading all their texts and "cool" for it. It's like the latest shirt. You have to wear the trendy clothes and act the trendy way so of course you put on the trendy religion.

Buddhism is what is bothering me right now. Almost everyone I know is "looking" into it or has looked into it at one point in time and every damn one of them says one day or another that they are Buddhist. I can guarantee you that most of the self-proclaimed religious trendy's don't have a clue what they are talking about or what they are claiming they believe in. It's a joke. Madonna is into Kabala so I have to be too because after all that is the cool thing. Who cares if I don't know anything about it! I'm into Kabala! Yay me!

We’re lucky here, unlike you lot in the USA, in the Isle of Man religion is more of a pastime than a control base of fear. Us non-believers decide the important things. For example, in our schools we are taught evolution aged 13/14, the creation of stars and planets aged 14/15 and basic particle physics aged 15/16. All traces of religions influence are starting to be removed and hopefully in a few years we will laugh about god as we laugh about witches.

In the past few days, after watching a massive amount of YouTube content, I believe a major reason why people believe in god is because as a young child they are not taught the basic facts about how the universe functions. But not only that, it seems children are not taught to question or have logical thought or the need for knowledge. This leads to the following thought patterns.....

Something humorous happened in one of my classes. We were reading a short story about a meeting between a bigot and a homo-sexual minister (it was a strange story). After the class read the story, the teacher asked Jane (not her real name) what she though of it. Jane is the class jesus-freak and always seems to mention God at least every half-hour. She often writes about the 'oppression' of Christians in America (how America will be dominantly Muslim in 5 years?).

Jane responded, "It's completely opposite of what I expected--a gay guy being a minister."

The teacher asked her to elaborate further on her opinion. Jane replied by saying it was strange and weird. Then teacher then mentioned that 3 out of the 4 ministers at her church were homosexual. Plenty of awkward, blank stares ensued.

Gruess euch.

We have a small group of freethinkers through work here in central Ohio. I am new to this site and was attracted to it by the recent Nightline debate on television. Brian and Kelly did a marvelous job in the debate and represented the group very well.

The new Creationist Science museum is opening next week near Cincinnati, which is about two hours from us. Perhaps we'll meet some of you there?

Regards,

Fred

So today I was looking over at Menchi, and I noticed she had a flea. ON NO! Well, as I grabbed the flea to kill the little fucker, a thought occurred to me, "The rest of it's flea-family probably just saw me rip it from her, then deposit the corpse back upon her. They probably think of her as their planet. They probably think 'god' just killed it for _INSERT REASON HERE_." LOL... Now, granted a fleas thought processes certainly can't be as detailed or high as all that, but it really did remind me of the Licecapades episode of South Park. I just started laughing, and thinking about all the religionists of the world. I couldn't help myself... ^_^;

As an Atheist, I do not believe in the fabled after-life. I do not think that there is any concious thought after death occurs. And to be quite honest, this terrifies the living hell out of me. Many easily claim to not believe in the after-life, but I don't think that many truly give serious contemplative thought to what that implys. Now, Don't get me wrong, my fear is not one that is about how when we die, we are afraid to leave our family, experiences, memories, ect behind.

My fear of death is the all-consuming thought that death is the absolute end. Not that I won't be able to look back on past experiences, but that I won't be able to have anymore. Not that I won't be able to look back or be comfortable in the fact that I had experiences or memories, but that I won't be able to create anymore memories. Not that I won't be able to look back on spending time with family, or look back on past adventures, but actually not being able to spend any more time with my loved ones or have any more adventures.