Zowie, what a b*tch!   I've had friends with parents like that.  Way to intimidate your kid into resenting organized religon for life.

I read Amanda's post above, and I think what is a drag is people prostelitizing ( sp) ? You know preaching to people, warning them they better get with it. I could give a sh-- if someone is an atheist or not. You are the same person to me.

AS I discussed once with Booth and Erwin -wish he was around, I miss that guy- I take the Pascal's wager aproach. And when I am on my deathbed

I will be a believer out of fear of dying-which could be just the big sleep-I don't know.

O'Reilly is lying for his Christian Right audience. Without their support, he couldn't pay for thai hookers and crack. I also know he turns into a werewolf during full moons because of a pact he made with the devil.

By the way, what is it about the way that English people talk that makes Yanks sound like such coarse, mouthy dumbasses? 

Raymond

Yes - Amanda's is a good voice of reason on this topic.  Basically most religious types I know aren't out on a crusade pushing their views on anyone who gets close.  They don't doorknock.  They don't hand out pamphlets.  Most don't ever bring the topic up in conversation.  Most just live good lives, often extraordinary lives - and as a result of that people become curious about how they got to be how they are.

Equally, most atheists I know don't push their views with zealousness either.  They just go about their business, and believe their views are right.  Most don't feel the need to convert people to their way of thinking.

What I enjoy about forums like this is they offer the opportunity to discuss sometimes the hard issues that you'd normally be too polite to bring up for fear of offending someone's personal beliefs.  Not that we set out to be rude or anything, but we can be more direct and honest about these topics. 

Fred's a good example - he was confident in his views on evolution, put his case, provided plenty of evidence to back him up, and left it at that.  I have done the same to him.  In the end, we leave with mutual respect, possibly having learnt something from each other.

Now the peanut gallery will persist with stereotypes of door-knocking nutty christian crusaders, or devil-worshipping, I-am-God attitude atheists who think they know everything.  But the reality, as Amanda pointed out - is far different, and it was nice to hear that voice of balance which we hear all too rarely.

Agree, Cyba!

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

You are so cute, Booth! 

Good point.  

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

...which is what I took you to mean.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

I just listened to the O'Reilly-Dawkins interview.  Thanks alot for making me sit through 4.40 minutes of that!  Anyway, I heard Dawkins say, "I don't deny that" in response to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao as not having moral foundation.  Not "I don't either."  I won't be listening a second time though. 

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

If an atheist thought they were God then that would be an inherent contradiction of their atheism. So if this is a stereotype, it's also impossible.  No one can worship anything if they think they're God, except maybe themselves. 

Even with Cottard's Syndrome, the Atheist would still need to believe in resurrection for them to have any divine power surely?

With regard to the Cottard's symptom of the person believing they don't need to eat - have you heard of the Breathairians?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia

There was one on "Wife Swap" once - she came from a home that shared her unusual beliefs and into a home of down-to-earth American hunters.  Needless to say her idea that you didn't need to eat meat, or even food - didn't go down too well. 

The hunter asked her a stumper - "if all you need is sunlight, then how come you have so many people starving in Africa - seems like they've got more than their share of the sun?".

You can be pretty sure that the Cotard's syndrome sufferer would not also be afflicted with Jerusalem Syndrome.  God would never be that cruel.

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

http://images.google.com/images?q=harlequin%20fetus&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi

Ugh. I think God is probably pro choice. 

Uber classy. It even sounds like he has evidence to back that statement about school shootings up....

NOT.

If all they're doing is trying to disprove evolution, that still doesn't prove God exists. Yes, please. Let some media whore and his ratings pimps and his bitch Mike Seaver from Growing Pains Let the world know that science (other wise known as atheism or something) is an intellectual embarrassment.

As for that goofy website, which does makes this guy that much more credible, he has to know that Buddhists and Hindus are peaceful and non annoying. I mean, he's a walking example of why Christians get picked on. He wants to have a public confrontation so he can make sure everyone knows his name. Well, that's mighty Christian of him! I'm sure this will do wonder for the slipping popularity of his religion while everyone is taking him so seriously (as the banana guy)

There are " Christian" kooks who have to be exhibishionistic in there belief. It is a waste and hurts the quiet Christians - those without an axe to grind. Why don't these types just render unto Jesus what they choose to, and render unto science what is do the scientific disipline? They need not be mutually exclusive IMO.

It's  all just choices we make on these disciplines anyway. I for sure don't know the answers to the big questions -not with any certainty and not enough to tell someone to get on board and see things my way, or else you are damned.

side subject :  For instance I am pretty well bought into ' cause and effect' which makes free will a bit more difficult to accept. So, I play life " as if" free will exists. I don't go around challenging other peoples beliefs- it is usually a waste of time and not a positive discussion of ideas-ideas are just abstract things we have in our minds for some reason ( and subject to change ).

It's no great challenge to find articles about intellectually challenged individuals who happen to be Christians. So the what?

There IS a growing preoccupation with denigrating Christianity and Christians as ignorant rubes these days. Citing the numbnut televangelist or one-time child actor or the lone kook Baldwin brother and trotting them out as examples of why Christians are stoopid seems so pointless. It's like the phony debates arranged on college campuses where someone like the KKK's David Duke is on one side arguing against affirmative action and a reputable professor is speaking on behalf of same.

Were we to backtrack throughout the history of Western civilization, identifying the highest functioning minds of Europe and the United States with a checklist of which ones were Christians, a comparitive intellectual argument might be more worthwhile. Ben Franklin versus Albert Camus or something.

Should we expand that checklist to all of history's most celebrated creators, thinkers and intellectuals and determine which of them believed in God, it becomes even more difficult to use the commonplace facile atheist arguments, snickering away in pompous certainty over one's atheist superior mental capacities. Ghandi or the Dalai Lama versus Nietsche or Karl Marx. THAT sort of discussion would interest me more.

What continues to fascinate me are those atheists, with a near missionary (pardon the expression) zeal, who prosthletize their views by ridiculing the "opposition" in books and magazine articles. And that obsessive quality, in my opinion, is the difference between the atheists of yore, who held their iconoclastic ideas as a part of who they were without feeling this compulsion to demean the greater percentage of the earth's population who hold the opposite view. That feels like the main difference between the earlier incarnation compared to the current crop of activists.

March 31, 2007 Newsweek article of interest:

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin