Don’t Replace Religion; End It
nytimes.com
Don’t Replace Religion; End It
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#2Amen (lol). Favourite line ... "Religion also includes fellowship, joy, compassion, service and great music, and those can be replaced by ... fellowship, joy, compassion, service and great music."
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#3"January 22, 2013"
I thought I've seen this posted before. I'm not entirely sure if I have seen it posted here on Hacker News before.
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#4"January 22, 2013" I thought I've seen this posted before. I'm not entirely sure if I have seen it posted here on Hacker News before.
Truth be told, on submission I expected to get the past submission and was looking forward to reading hacker comments.
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#5" Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. "
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#6London has an atheist church? Geez! Atheism is the opposite of religion. It is a LACK of belief. I'm atheist because I don't believe the claims of the church but I'm not making any claims myself. For all I know, there might be a god. The evidence just doesn't support it right now.
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#7Atheism, is still a faith-based judgment call. Atheists BELIEVE that there is no god. I think agnosticism is a better goal.
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#8" Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. "
If we must have religion then, let it be untainted by theism.
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#9Albania was the first nation in the world to officially declare itself atheist, after World War II. Members of my family were there and they do not remember it as a happy time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism#Albania
http://www.amazon.com/Banishing-God-Albania-Giacomo-Gardin/d...
Penn Jillette has proof by assertion and snarky facial expressions to back up the Reign of Terror and the massacre of the Vendee in France, the mass closing of schools under the Third Republic, the liquidation of the kulaks under Lenin, the Great Purge and the Holodomor under Stalin, the Cultural Revolution under Mao, the killing fields of Cambodia, and, and, and,...
And in the 1980s, I came home from school to find my father sitting on the couch dumbfounded, with tears in his eyes, holding a letter telling of how his youngest brother had been shot trying to escape from the kind of society that achieved what Penn Jillette advocates. The look on my father's face was very different from the smug condescension on Jillette's. Bastard.
Here's a cute pattern to ponder. Many atheists claim that most wars have been caused by religion. For the past two centuries, religion has declined in influence in the West. Over that span, the wars only got deadlier. There was the French Revolution, followed by Napoleon, Europe steadily turning into a powder keg from the Great Game, the two World Wars, then the fate of the world hung in the balance with the Cold War. Something to think about.
Re: Don’t Replace Religion; End It
#10Atheism, is still a faith-based judgment call. Atheists BELIEVE that there is no god. I think agnosticism is a better goal.
Ahhh, this old chestnut. It does not take "faith" to believe that something does not exist. There are literally an infinite number of things that you believe do not exist, simply because there is no evidence that they do. For example, if I told you that there is an invisible elephant in the boot of your car right now, would you consider yourself on the fence as to whether I was telling the truth? Or would you simply reject the idea as absurd, until shown evidence to the contrary?
Agnosticism is fine, but for people who place the burden of proof on those who make extraordinary claims, atheism is not a faith-based decision.