Some of you may know that I've been trying to find the common source for all this nonsense about "worldview" that Paisley, AtheismIsNonsense, caposkia, truden, et al have been peddling. They use the same words to express the same ideas, and often defeat arguments that nobody has raised (strangely, they all use the same ones).

So I decided to Google "materialistic worldview", as they all use that as a phrase, and "worldview" as a compound word, which is unusual in English.

Look what I #@#*$^&#$ found:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v2/n1/atheism-irrational

...

Yeah. That's right, we've been arguing with a gentleman named Jason Lisle through what can only be described as random minions.

Reviews of Mr. Lisle's works are often more entertaining than the original work:

http://hjhop.blogspot.com/2008/03/jason-lisle-if-words-dont-have-meanings.html

...

But I can't help but feel a little let down. I admit that my arguments are often not as good as, say, nigel's, Bob's, Hamby's, todangst's, deludedgod's (actually, I could just keep going, so let's stop there), so I'll borrow ideas from those guys, and re-work them in a way that makes sense to me. But using someone else's stuff verbatim? That's just embarrassing.

I didn't know where to put this, so I put it here (TWSS)

I'm a religion major. So for this thread I'm going to use my definition of religion (although I'm borrowing ideas from Wilfred Cantwell Smith, the chief scholar on comparative religions).

Here is my definition of religion:

1) A religion is a group organized around a particular discernment of ultimate reality.

2) A religion associates various practices that coincide with their discernment of ultimate reality.

Both qualifications are necessary for a group to be designated as a religion.

For #1, I demand a discernment of ultimate reality (God, gods, the divine, the other, whatever you want to call it). Thus, I don't qualify nationalism or fascism as religions. In terms of Atheism, I count a rejection of God and theism as a discernment of ultimate reality. That's certainly a debatable aspect of this proof.

For #2, a discernment of ultimate reality needs to have some kind of communal practices to qualify itself as a religion. Practices may include but are not limited to: liturgy, yearly rituals, elevated literature, weekly gathering (for worship or just a community event). Thus, Deism is not a religion by my definition. Furthermore, Atheism as a whole is not a religion based on this definition. There are no significant common practices for an average Atheist that you may find in a Christian.

Kevin and I got into a spat on Hamby's blog over the AiG ad

I then posted this link from the AiG website. Which says that the ad does not mean shoot atheists in the face

http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/features/you-matter-to-god

For those who do not want to increase their traffic

...And I'm just curious:

Does it ever at all bother any of the Christian visitors here that they're religion just bastardizes Pagan holidays and pretends that they represent significant historical events for the church while not actually having any roots in said church whatsoever? I mean, Easter, Christmas... I'm always baffled when I hear religious lobbying groups lamenting about the 'secularization' of 'their' holidays... when, in actuality, they were secular to begin with.

Fucking brilliant! From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVbnciQYMiM

Props to Mr804 for finding these:

,,,Oh, poor and helpless Christians. Whatever will they do if The Gay are allowed to be married? It essentially strips them of all of their freedoms when two people unrelated to them are allowed to be legal spouses, and when schools teach their children to be tolerant.

/sarcasm

[url=http://www.NationForMarriage.org]Here's their website[/url].

Man, some people are so fucked-up.

I'm new here - I do believe in some sort of God and I'm fascinated by other perspectives.  Although I was raised in a baptist church (and I am still very active in that church), my image of God is no longer defined by those biblical or traditional christian beliefs.  My image of God might be closer to something like Pantheism or Panentheism, although I admit I know very little about these.  They are simply the closest perspectives I have been able to find which line up closest to my ideas.

Most of the posts and arguments I see here seem to be debating those biblical and christian perspectives.  So my question for the atheists is, is there room for other perspectives of God for atheists?  Can there be a "rational" perspective of God, or is any belief in a higher power contradictory to atheism?

I was thinking of the possibilities of God's existence and came to a very simple conclusion: 

God is messing with us.

I think it's the only way a personal God could exist.  He must be making it seem that he does not exist in effort to smite us all in hell.

Perhaps it's because he's bored or something.  Especially if it's his third creation or something.  That would suck for us to be the bored creation, wouldn't it?

He's not too bored, though, because he isn't randomly killing... that I know of.  

But that brings us back to the God is actively and continuiously messing with us part.  Just wondering what your take is on that kind of god existing.

One more thing about the agnostic and atheist thing: what about a schrodinger's belief of sorts?  Simultaniously believe that a god exists and 

does not at the same time?  Well, whatever, do and do not believe, if you want to be semantic.... I know I can be, anyway.  But I think the point still

stands.  It's like the cat, except with God.

Personally I'm vying for the god that makes it so that whatever you believe (or not believe) affects you after you die.  So, therefore, I believe that when 

I die I will go to a tropical island with lots of curious bisexual women ... or perhaps that's a tad bit too juvenile.  I'll have to think about that one.

Anyway; hello.

...I just can't resist any longer.

I would do one on Bush as well, but - frankly - Cheney was effectively the Commander in Chief of the United States for the past 8-ish years.

Richard Bruce Cheney is the individual arguably the most personally responsible for the deployment of the American military into Iraq, the obscene treatment received by PoWs in Abu Ghraib Prison and the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. In my opinion, he is demonstrable psychopath and pathological liar, and should currently be behind bars rather than lounging in his estate for transforming a slowly progressing (if still rather dreary) nation state into a smoldering charnel house.

Cheney's academic record is rather poor, but by no means abysmal: He flunked-out of his first attempt at post-secondary education (in Yale); curiously, Cheney most credits his attitude regarding foreign policy to Professor Bradford Westerfield, whom he failed to attain passing grades from. He later would go on to successfully obtain a BA and MA in Political Science from the University of Wyoming, and then went on to begin working towards a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin Madison (but did not complete his study).

Below is a link to a "YouTube" video furnished by the "GlobalOnessProject." Here parapyschologist Dean Radin discusses the results of an ongoing experiment  to test for what effect, if any, that the collective "attentiveness" of a group of human beings may exert on random number generators. The experiment is fairly simple. Can the attentiveness of a group of people change what is intrinsically a random and disorderly process into one that exhibits order? The theory is that the more human beings who participate, the greater the effect. I think the results provide evidence that minds are "entangled" and can be forged to form a collective consciousness. The implications for both science and religion should be obvious.