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This was a cartoon. A person behind a podium says "I will now lead you in prayer". Someone in the audience says, "If there was a God, what makes you think that I would want or need you to speak to him on my behalf".

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lol good response. As if the number of people praying would make any difference. Funny how so many theists think god is democratic, and if enough people pray for the same thing he'll give it to them.

50 million people on average die worldwide every year from everything, desease, famine, natural disaster, in birth, old age, crime and war. Yet the believer wants me to believe in prayer, much less an all loving all seeing super hero who watches all this?

Hate to tell believers this, but our species will go extinct, then all life on this planet will go extinct, then the planet itself will die, then the sun will die, and the universe will continue on without any record of us at all.

Prayer is a placebo, it is a crutch, it is merely your own wishful thinking.

Which is why I am abosolutely miffed as to why people have a kneejerk reaction to either Hitchens or my agreement with him in calling religion posion? I agree with 100% of your argument as well.

Gods as concepts and religion as a concept, are an unfortunate part of our evolutionary tribalism. It creates like minded people, however, in creating the increase of oportunity to make offspring, those like minded people can center around an absurdity, like those you mention above and I agree with.

These comic book clubs especially now are distracting humanity around issues that we must address collectively. All the chest pounding and political correctness with how divided our species is now is making things worse, not better.

 

"Can't we all just get along" is not understanding religion. It is precisely because I do understand religion that I should be treated as the poisonious distraction it is.

Nope, not at all. I am saying it is a DISTRACTION. "Not all people" misses the point that it only takes just enough.

Our behavior as a species is NOT in the labels we invent and hide behind, it is in US, in our evolution. Religion is merely a comic book reflection of our tribalism. If more humans would recognize this religion could be maintained to a more pragmatic degree to reduce the divicive nature it creates.

I am not dismissing religion as poison, I am defining it as such.  Dissmissing is what you are doing pretending everything can be peaches and cream all the time when the history of our species does not show that.

What makes me as bad as a fundy theist? That I hate that people read holy books and justify violence, sexism and homophobia? That it teaches humans to simply swallow without question?

You'd be right in equating me to theists IF IF IF IF IF IF I was demanding religion be outlawed. You would be right IF IF IF IF IF IF I was demanding we get violent as atheists ourselves. Simply exposing something in a new view that most people don't think about and challenging them to look at it in a new way is not being fundy or militant.   If anything you behavie like a white male Christian when Susan B Anthony challenged society about how they viewed women. Was she demanding men be oppressed?

Now if you want a good idea of our species totality and how we have behavied watch every single episode of Cosmos. Neil does NOT deal with one religion nor, like he, expects it to go away.  But in every single episode he has addressed our species distractions away from discovering reality because of superstition and religion. The show clearly demonstrates that progress in ours species history does not reside in placating religion or superstition but in challenging it.

Now agian this is not one religion or one point in history. This is the poison of distracition. Untill we as a species can get more over our fear of having our deeply held beliefs challenged, religion will remain that posionous distraction and continue to hinder human progress. No one is talking about physical violence or force, especially not me.

We live in an age of telliscopes and the more we use those rather than use mental kaliedoscopes the more problems our species can solve. You don't do that by never offending it.

 

 

 

 

If religion were as poisonous as you suggest then we wouldn't be here, or it wouldn't be here, so clearly you DO NOT understand religion. iwbiek is right, and you are dead wrong.

No you are saying it is a poison. Distraction and poison are two very different things. And so what if it's a distraction? The entire entertainment industry is a distraction. Anything you do when not eating or sleeping or working to ensure you continue to eat and sleep is a distraction. This web site is a distraction. Your precious football is a distraction.

The FACT is that hundreds of millions of people have been and are living with their religions without hurting anyone or anything. The bible belt hasn't declared war on the rest of the country. For every extremist with a bomb there's a hundred families trying to get by like everyone else.

You're a hypocrite. You blather on about your labels and then you make one yourself.

More proof you don't know shit about religion. Religion is one of the most powerful forces for inclusion that man ever created.

It's the same thing moron.

Straw men on top of your hypocrisy and ignorance. Just like a theist.

I said typical theist, asshole. The vast majority of theists aren't "fundies". Quit making shit up already. Your reading comprehension is horrible.

Funny how people don't need religion to be sexist or racist or justify violence and homophobia. They can do all that just fine without. More proof you don't know shit about religion.

Most theists don't demand atheism be outlawed, so again you merely prove you as bad as a theist, and don't know shit about religion.

I'm going to stop here because I actually get more results talking to a theist than a idiot like you. You are a waste of flesh and air. You are completely irrational and I see nothing redeemable in you at all. Maybe one day you'll open your eyes and prove me wrong, and actually start thinking and learning instead of repeating the same old bullshit over and over again, but I highly doubt it.

no, it's therapeutic in the sense that it eases the symptoms of a fundamental existential malaise for some (not all) people. not even all people experience this malaise, but for those who do, religion may be a viable option. again, i'm sorry if this irritates some of you, but you can't just invalidate a person's subjective, psychological experience because you don't agree with it.


of course religions exclude non-adherents. so do the elks and the masons. nobody's arguing that, not even vastet. there are multiple kinds of "inclusion." perhaps you should ask vastet to clarify before beating your breast and saying he's "spitting" on something.


as for the "bad as any theist" shit, trace the history of these discussions and you'll find brian pulled that card before anyone else, specifically on me. he still claims i'm "part of the problem," just like those "liberal theists" he claims are solely responsible for making it possible for the extremists to operate.


now, if you want to try to throw your weight around (whatever weight you might have) and stop all of us from picking on poor brian, i for one will happily say you're welcome to fuck off. as long as he's spewing his smug, obnoxious horseshit, i'll continue calling him on it whenever i have the chance. just because he's decided to be an atheist doesn't mean he understands shit about ANYTHING. only his comments can verify or falsify that, and so far his comments show he's an ignorant fuck on the subject of religion. yes, he's welcome to his opinion--and i'm welcome to tell him it's shite.


now go huff and puff at somebody else.

You guys don't like my "poison" analogy, or my "volcano" analogy, fine try this.

Back even before I took drivers ed in high school my dad used to say about cars "treat your car like a wepon". Now certainly you wont get rid of cars, but he was right, they are weapons. You have to assume the other driver is an idiot, and you yourself have to keep your eyes on the road and keep your distance and be aware of what is going on around you. If you literally had a nuclear bomb strapped to your bumper with a hair trigger you would drive more carefully.

Religion is a poison in much the same way. Most people drive it like nothing will ever go wrong and drive it like they and they alone own the road and are unaware of the dangers it causes. Once you take away religion as an excuse to do anything good or bad, by treating it like poison, it makes that individual more responsable like a driver who takes their car seriously.

Now again, in context I am not talking about one religion or one nation or one period in time. I am talking about human's flawed perceptions that give rise to religion as a form of group think which ends up causing division and alows humans to hog that road and compete for that highway instead of understanding that there is a bomb strapped to the front of their car.

You cant make it go away nor is that a pragmatic goal on a planet of 7 billion, but it cannot nor should not be treated as ice cream either.  Lion cubs can look cute but are very dangerous when they grow up.

And I also include atheists in this too. There has been a recent trend for atheists to start their own churches. Short term I am sure they start them with good intent, but when you go beyond calling something a mere club, and make it a ritual with mission statements, long term it has that same danger to become a religion, a weapon  to become a political tool and cause division. So again, when I call religion a poison I am talking about what humans do in setting up group tribalism which allows us to ignore long term our common existence.

Again, you cannot stop humans from grouping in evolution. But the cure is to put things in a better priority by making more people aware that the natural reality of why we do good or bad is in our evolution, not in the labels we hide behind. It wont make a perfect world but it can make more humans better drivers as far as priorities.

 

There's a huge leap in logic from "religion is dangerous" to "religion is poison". The first is true, the second is false. Lots of things are dangerous, that doesn't make any of them poison.

By using such terminology you deny dialogue. When a theist goes up to you and says atheism is poison, you're not bloody likely to listen to anything else they have to say. By listening you can then debate and point out where they are wrong. By telling them the thing they've devoted their life to is poison, you're shutting them out and giving them no opportunity to choose to abandon it in the face of coherent. logical arguments.

You are poisoning them, to use your own favourite word.

once again, of course brian has every right to express whatever the fuck he wants. so do i. so does vastet. i've never once suggested brian should be silenced. true, i've told him what i think he SHOULD say ("you might have a point there," "i stand corrected," etc.), but never to my knowledge have i told him he should shut up. if i ever have, it's been a rash expression of anger and i unqualifiedly retract it.


as for this bullshit about crying "unfair," no one's done any such thing. i merely suggested you might want to ask vastet for clarification as to what he meant by "inclusion." i don't need clarification on what brian means by poison. he's explained it a thousand times, as if he believed i can't possibly understand it, otherwise i would see it for the brilliant piece of profundity it is. you might not agree with "religion is a force for inclusion," fair enough, but at least it has some philosophical content; it's not a vapid, sophomoric analogy.


now, as far as the personal attacks go, if you've truly been doing nothing but reading, you should know i started by trying to explain to brian where his points were wrong/oversimplified. i met with nothing but dismissal. i was told i was being "politically correct," that i wanted to give religion "a pass," and that i was just "offended" by his "blasphemy." when i and others tried to explain to him that this was not my position and that nothing i had ever said could remotely be construed that way, he merely ignored our objections and continued his tirade unaltered. the only time he actually addressed my protestations, he basically said, "well, i know that's what you're thinking." after a few of these exchanges, i could only come to the conclusion that he had made a conscious choice to misrepresent my position--in other words, to lie. i attack liars. i'm sorry if that upsets you, but i think he deserves every bloody attack he's been given by every person here who's attacked him. god knows he's dished out enough of them over the years.


what i'm hearing from you is that i need to change how i approach brian. i say no, i won't. the way i see it, you have three options how to react: you can accept it and move on, you can continue to badger me about it, or you can make good on your threat and fuck off forever. it makes utterly no difference to me which path you choose.

"defending a loser who alienated half the forum through his own actions"

Interesting.

I have seen it from a completely different way.

Do you spend much time in introspection?

Perhaps you should pray on it.

I read your responses to theists and wonder if it's the same person.

i agree with vastet here. a few months ago, i really did try to take a hands-off approach to brian and just ignore him, but he started replying to various comments i’d made on multiple threads, threads where he hadn’t even posted before, with totally off-topic attacks on my fucking avatar of all things. not only is that stalker-ish, but also childish as hell.