>> I know it's comforting for you to think that >>atheism is only a competing religion, and given the
>>way theism works of course you're going to firmly
>>believe anything that makes you feel good regardless >>of evidence, but it's still not true. Get over it.
>
>As strenuously as you may deny it, I gotta say, you're >the most obsessive religious zealot GMAST has got.
>
>(Barring, maybe, someone who just hasn't hit this
>point in the threads. But I really don't think
>anybody's going to be able to top your performances.)
I've said in the past that there are times when I agree with Karen. This is one of them.
Atheism, particularly the evangelical theism we're dealing with here, is a perfect example of how belief systems are so often circular. For example, Communism and Fascism, two very disparate sides of the polical scale, tend to blend themselves when you get truly extreme about it. In this case, we have an atheist who stands on his bully pulpit screaming at the masses about his particular belief structure, many of whom could care less about his, in my opinion limited, view of the world and life.
Atheism is, indeed, a religion, just like any another. It is a supposition of how the world functions based on the information at hand and the expansion of that information. Atheists, for the most part, believe that you cannot believe in something for which there is no evidence. That is based upon a faith in the repeatability and constancy of reality. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support that evidence is needed for a truth to exist. Indeed, historical evidence suggests very much otherwise.
Examples 1: As several greek philosophers (whose names I cannot remember) noted, we cannot actually prove that our reality is the true reality. Maybe I'm the only one that exists and my consciousness got so bored with non-reality that it has created all of you as fantasies. That's always a fun one.
My point is, if we presume that the reality we see is false (much more likely, by the way, again based on historical evidence), then science and proving things through evidence is also false.
Example 2: Early thinkers noticed that the stars rotated around the earth on a nightly basis. They also noticed that some of those stars roamed strangely across the sky. Based on the evidence they had, they posited a universe with the Earth at its center with the sun and mooon rotating around it and a great celestial sphere with holes in it rotating around all that. That was Truth. Then Galileo came along and told everybody how wrong they were...those rogue stars were other planets, of which we were only one. Indeed, we weren't even in the center of the universe...the sun was, thus accounting for the eccentricities of the rogue stars. That was Truth. Then others came along who proved not only are we not the center of our solar system, but we are not the center of our galaxy or even universe. We are only one of a near infinite number of planets. That was Truth.
Then Einstein started talking about dimensions, and our collective heads exploded.
Anyways, my two examples above are meant to illustrate how no one can truly know what existence is all about, so we must all construct a belief system that suits us. Kam believes in a world where only the provable exists. Of course, there's no proof that the unprovable cannot exist. Thus, he has faith that the unprovable does not exist. Others have faith that the world was created by a divine force that gives us a reason for existing. Other than some books and traditions passed down through the ages, there's little reason to believe this. But there's as much reason to believe in a deity as there is to believe there's not. And both are equally valid faiths.
Unfortunately, Kam is giving a bad name to atheists just like Jerry Faldwell gives a bad name to christians. And for the same reasons.
Personally, I'm not interested in what Kam has to say on the matter. I don't want to be converted to Atheism any more than I want to be converted to Christianity or Islam. Especially by someone who decides to take as rude and overbearing an approach as he does. Unfortunately, I doubt he realizes that his evangelism likely runs as many people away from his religion as are successfully converted, if not more.
Lucifer >:}
p.s. I got rid of the [OFF] part of the header because I'm still of the opinion that every discussion we have here is off-topic...
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