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Anyone here like metaphysics?

That sentence is the very essence of smug, old chap.



While I am in agreement with those that do not believe that prayer should be mandated in schools, if you think the "non-religious" do no attempt to force others into non-belief, or at least silence about their beliefs, you're living on a planet very dissimilar to the one where I currently reside. We live in a society where it is suggested on a regular basis that people should cease engaging in word or deed because someone has taken 'offense.' When it is suggested, often is with an expectation of compliance, that people cease completely innocuous activity like prayer or discussion of their faith because someone is 'uncomfortable,' people of faith face the choice of silence or disdain...and receive the disdain even if they choose to be silent.

Please provide an example of the "vice-versa" that you speak of that has occurred in your lifetime.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

Because it's not in a school's education curriculum to practice prayer. Religions (plural) and morality should be taught, yes, but not limited to a favourite one. The alternative is indoctrination and there's no other ways you can put it. (we agree here anyway it seems)

The history of religions and the peoples of the regions is particularly important. How many people are aware of the Islamic golden age, when Baghdad was the intellectual center of the world, open to anyone of any faith to share ideas, and developed or invented an enormous amount of things and methods we use today whilst the rest of the world was crusadin'? That's where the scientific method closest to what we use, peer review and when experimental science really kicked off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_in ... eval_Islam



I live in a society where schools are not allowed to indoctrinate but do teach about the variety in religion, and recently it was written into law that state-run daycare and kindergartens are not allowed to teach religion to the young, or show symbols, or anything. There was very little outrages, and eventually the leaders of various religions come to terms with the logic behind the decision: young children are not to be indoctrinated while in a institution of learning or supervision.

So basically, a secular society.

Religion demographics for Quebec: Roman catholic: 83%; Protestant christian: 4.71% Orthodox christian: 1.41% Muslim: 1.51% Jewish: 1.26% No affiliation: 5.80% (5.62% "No religion/don't care" responses 0.06% Atheist responses, 0.02% Agnostic responses)

Now for Montreal, this is 6 million people living on a rather small island (demographics are very similar). Plenty of churches, some synagogues, some mosques. There's rarely any tension between religious group, a little more between ethnic groups/languages and the majority accept evolution as a more likely scenario to the origin of species (59% in Canada, you could say it would be higher in a metropolitan area like Montreal, though)

One can congregate, pray and believe anything they want and no one really cares. I rarely hear about religion, religious debates, creationism vs evolution junk, and it's not even a topic in elections, at least not that I've ever noticed.

Don't get me wrong, we have our idiots too and the loudest ones are separatists who haven't gotten over it. Just even in the recent past we even had terrorists, but it's slowly phasing out.

Now why am I saying this? Because we (Quebec) recently came out of an era that we call the Great Darkness, where health care and education was in the hands of the Catholic church, with a religious and corrupted leadership that focused on rural development, opposed another religion, was anti-union and even pulled some horrific scam in cooperation with the Church for federal money. You can read some about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_revolution

Or for your own history, you can look at England at the time of the American Revolution.



I realize that this is a question directed at him, but the fundie evangelist movement speaks for itself.

I think that there's no point in trying to convert. What the atheists, agnostics and skeptics are trying to do is reach the masses who fall prey to the fundamentalist charlatans and make them think, and realize that it's possible to have faith without being batshit, hating other beliefs or lack thereof, invoking Satan and superstitious nonsense and preaching that everyone else is going to hell.

Now I'm going to show you the scary: the Discovery Institute. A public policy "think thank" (buzzwords for lobbying) that advocates intelligent design, creationism and the teaching of them in public high schools. Okay, that's not so bad. Here's a document of their "wedge strategy", posted by themselves on their website. They aknowledge and defend it.

http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf

People who think religions are evil should also think that guns kill people, spoons make people fat, and cell phones cause drunk dialing.

the REAL problem is the Evil of Man, and that would persist if Religion never existed.

Religion is not evil in itself. It's a good opportunity however for evil charlatans to gain power over large amounts of people and scam people into doing evil things.

It gives them justification and even removes fear through the promise of heaven and martyrdom.

And it happened again, and again, and again, and again, and again throughout history.

(I watched the 2nd plane hit live and almost shat my pants)


I don't like the thought of a Palin-type with codes to launch LGM-30 Minuteman missiles. (extreme example)

right, but before religion people were still bashing other peoples heads in with rocks.

people can use anything to justify evil. hell we used the constitution to justify slavery.

evil (like nature for you michael criton fans) always finds a way.

I think the gun helps.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh

The time before religions were the time when people lived in caves and fought for women, food, and shelter. Religion has always been a part of humanity and killing someone in your god's name is as much a human past time as fucking and breathing.



No one used the constitution to justify slavery, the constitution came well after slavery and was written at a time when it was widely accepted. The Bible was one of the most common justifications for slavery.

Dvergar /
Quisling

I don't see the point of either practice. There are too many other subjects that are of greater importance, at least during mandatory pre-college schooling, to be wasting time on ancillary subjects, though including some information regarding religion in the teaching of history is probably unavoidable due to the impact of religion.



If you've read any of the works of Bernard Lewis, his main question is 'how do we get back to that?' His works are an excellent primer for anyone not familiar with Islam and its history.



"The fundie evangelist movement speaks for itself" is not an example. Where in this country is some adult being forced into a religious belief against their will? An example would be, "on May 7, 2003, Jane McFlake was forced to pray to Jesus by her local church group." It doesn't happen. You're just saying that those people are...I'm not even sure what adjective to put in here because that sentence is so vague...because...well, I don't even know why they're so whatever-it-is-that-they-are because you really don't explain that, either. Reading that just tells me that you have developed some negative associations with some amorphous entity or entities you have labeled "fundies." I'm left to assume that the people you're talking about are basically the silly monkeys that have been in the videos you've been linking, but if you're basing your opinion of a religion, or even one of the larger sub-groups of a religion, on that kind of insanity, it's no wonder you think everyone that believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is some kind of fucking nutter. I'm pretty sure there's a term for reducing groups of people to their lowest common denominator in this fashion and using that minority as an argument against the whole, but I can't remember it at the moment. It's still a terrible way to view the world and/or make a point.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

While being confident in correctness is the definition of smug, the only time I ever hear anyone call another person smug is when they've clearly lost an argument and must resort to criticizing the latter's delivery of the facts. Being correct in a given situation shouldn't carry a negative connotation.


As far as the "vice-versa" situation goes, why should it have to limit itself to my lifetime?

The Crusades were merely an attempt to convert the Muslims and East Orthodox Church while plundering the settlements of the eastern Mediterranean and extending the reach of Catholicism even further into the territory of the Islamic caliphates. The Catholic church suppressed the ideas of Renaissance scholars (mostly in Italy and France) in order to limit the skepticism of the masses which no doubt would have questioned their faith and broken away from the church. The Spanish Inquisition speaks for itself. The Spanish and Portuguese conquests in the Americas forcibly converted the native peoples to Catholicism on pain of genocide. Hell, they still ended up killing off most of them even if they did convert.

There are numerous examples in the last three hundred years if you'd like me to list those as well.

Still, what could possibly give Christians the notion that they're the ones who are right without taking into account the (often equally gnostic) superstitious beliefs of their contemporaries?

Oh, that's right. Ignorance and a desire to return to the Middle Ages, where religious officials reigned supreme in lieu of the scientifically-minded.

anyone who knows anything about the middle ages would disagree with:


People don't have anything against scientists themselves, just like we don't think religious leaders are all fine and dandy(thank you televangelists and your hookers, also the catholic priests and little boys gettin fucked)

I'd LIKE to think we all know better, but i dont think we do.

Whenever a society embraces theism, it spells out decline. Considering that a near-majority of Americans believe in creationism (and not just "God had a hand in evolution") as truth despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that contradicts the theory and its various components, we're going to fall to evangelism eventually.

every society fails, every society has some form of religion.

they're not necessarily connected

An adult is less likely to switch faiths. Children will believe the first one that they are convinced of, and it's easy. Plant the seed of fear of hell and superiority of your religion over others at a young age, and it's hard to remove it. Add ignorance to the mixture, shake well, and you have yourself a holy warrior. (Jesus Camp is a scary documentary about this, although I think, and hope, that it's not widespread)



My point is exactly the contrary, that being religious doesn't necessarily make you insane, I wrote down the demographic statistics of religions in a secular society that I know well and the vast majority is religious and not insane.

However, I've shown evidence of at least one lobbying group (that racks in and spends quite a bit of money) that influences those 'silly monkeys' (I like that) and vice-versa (namely a circle jerk) and has an actual written plan for creationism to be the most accepted theory of our origins. Their strategy includes polluting scientific publications with false evidence, publishing books on the subjects with made up evidence, and influencing the public opinion using this structured network of lies. A lot of those scientific papers get into journals for peer review (surprise, science is fair), then the creatonists can point to a publication (that gets debunked but they don't mention that) and claim the existence of evidence.

There is also an accredited Christian university, Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell and was somehow given University status and can grant higher education degrees including doctorates of education. But hey, they have 3000 years old dinosaur fossils.

The list of "megachurches", preachers, evangelists, TV evangelists, faith healers and such pseudoscience crap is growing.

Then they are empowered with "evidence" and support, and they can claim superiority and dogma in the scientific community. God 3.0 is way better than God 2.0 over there in the middle east, and they're going to hell so you are allowed to hate them. Divine justification.

That's the problem, and I don't understand why the average sane person with or without faith doesn't call them out for the bullshit that they are.

Being religious doesn't automatically warrant respect and is not a sign of a good person, just like being a parent or leader doesn't. That's a notion that's implanted into our brains somehow.

A good book on this process is Mein Kampf.

And that's the problem we have with modern Americans. Vocal atheism has spurred equally vocal (although, for the most part, far less eloquent) responses from the religious community. The faux-revolutionary Tea Partiers are attempting to undermine the authority of the Constitution by fusing church and state once again.

While every society does indeed have a religion of some sort, the ones who are more successful than us have at least quarantined the spread of those religions to a minority. To say that we should let religion freely influence government-run institutions (e.g. the military, public schools, and courts) is un-Constitutional.