God so loved the world that he sent Darwin to explain it

[source]

Is The Bible Still Relevant Today?

I hope it were Christopher Hitchens instead of Richard Dawkins attending this BBC One debate. Dawkins is just too polite and gently that he has not gotten the message across strongly.

If you want to claim the decency of modern western civilization as coming from the bible, you cannot discount the same cultural teachings were the basis of genocides that European conquerors inflicted on lesser advanced cultures everywhere they went.

Atheist Calls Religious People 'Idiots' On British Debate

Pointing out a fact (that religious people are idiots) is not silly nor rude. This society has given those claiming to have the truth an unfair privileged position which they do not deserve. Blind faith is blind, dangerous and totally unproductive. We should get rid of the dogma that these people holding unsupported belief as somehow clever or intelligent. The fact is that they are not. Their logic does not work!

After posting this, will I get the same kind of comments directed to Kate Smurthwaite

Christianity is immoral

Where does moral come from?

The bible contains good things and bad things. The fact that you do not follow many of the commands in the bible, the fact that you can cherry-pick means that there is something outside of the bible to guide you. That's your moral, a result of your upbringing, social influence and possibly your reading of works from great minds.

Are atheists morally inferior to believers? Certainly not. In fact, many atheists can think though this question of moral and come to a concrete conclusion on how we should behave. Statistically, the USA prison system is under-represented by atheists indicates that atheists are in generally more law-abiding.

Good man does good thing and evil man does evil thing. For a good man to do evil thing, it takes religion.

Dear Apologetic...

Dear Apologetic,

I like to discuss with you why I think your apologetic position about the bible is untenable.

The bible is either
A. literally true,
B. metaphorical, or
C. partly literal true and partly metaphorical.

You obviously do not take position A because of the various contradictions in the bible to our best observed facts.

If your position is that the bible is metaphorical, then you have to also take the position that god in the bible is also metaphorical and hence you are just an atheist like me - who do not believe in the existence of the bible god.

The interesting part is of course the position that some parts of the bible is true and some is metaphorical and you believe that god exists - that's the true part at least. Think about this: How can *anyone* distinguish between metaphorical parts and truths in the bible? The bible itself does not expressively say which part is metaphorical and which part is not. We need an *external* agent (meaning evidence outside the bible) to determine which part is true and then the rest is metaphorical.

Now show me, using evidence besides the bible and derivative works from the bible that the bible god exists. Over the past 2 centuries, no one has even been able to do so, else we would not still be discussing this thing.

Without any evidence to show that the bible god exists, what would be the most *simple* conclusion one can draw?

Yours,

An atheist

Religion is a cancer

Religious killed children

See the report at youTube.

Avoid at all cost to books like this:
To Train Up A Child

Where is God when there is a need?

Let me assume that god exists

There are some arguments put forth by the theists that god exists. See e.g. here Let's assume that god exists, now HOW do you know that "that god" is YOUR god. Specifically, how can you show that the bible authors have special privileges to access god and the words as recorded in the bible is a fair and true description of god.

On the contrary, if the bible is truly a faithful record of god, then it should contain no error, no ambiguity, no falsehood and immense insight which human-kind will find enlightening and amazed. The sad fact is that the bible is littered with error, falsehood and nothing is enlightening or amazing. The bible is more a compilation of deluded men trying to stitch together a story which may sound reasonable. The historical background of the bible writers (that a special class of parasites on the Jews people) and their inter fighting to amass power and influence is everywhere. The current version is a poor attempt of stitching together several contradicting versions in an attempt to please the majority. The tactics depended on the illiteracy of the common people at the time. Common people could not read the book nor remembered every details of the book. So contradiction in plain sight could be ignored.

For any person to have a mental capability to think and to believe in the incoherent stories, this is an illustration of the failure of current education system.

I am a creationist

Moses is a terrorist

Spain: The Stolen Children | European Journal

and from BBC and the program

Morality from the bible

Crimes commited by the Churches

RC Church have committed many crimes throughout its history of existence - crusades, inquisitions, torture in the past. More recent crimes includes hiding child molesting priests from justice, stole babies (both in Australia and Spain)

PsiCop asks

And how long will it take the Catholic Church to admit its criminality, apologize for it, and make amends?

Unfortunately, unless we, common sane, people unite together and drag the monster out to face justice, it will never admit anything wrong as long as it is able to do so. Meanwhile, if we continue to let insanity rule, we shall see more crimes being committed.

If I am a boss...

If I am a boss looking for someone to do some manual tasks, I would not mind how s/he thinks, what and what not s/he believes in as long as s/he is physically capable of doing the tasks.

If I am a boss looking for someone to do some tasks which involve logic, evidence-based reasoning, I do not care if the applicant is physically disabled as long as s/he is capable of thinking logically based on evidence. A religious applicant automatically disqualified him/herself by believing in an imaginary friend who looks after everything.

If I am a voter and there are candidates who want to be leaders making many decision for me, a candidate publicly announces his/her religion affiliation has just disqualified to get my vote. If s/he truly believes in an imaginary friend in the sky, s/he is mentally not capable of leading the country. If s/he does not truly believes in god, but pronounces that s/he is to "buy" vote from the religious, then s/he is not honest and I cannot trust his/her ability to make decision unbiased.

Finally, justice may prevail

For the first time in the US, an actual member of the Roman Catholic hierarchy has been indicted for his role in a priestly-pedophilia scandal. - source

The Catholic Church and the priests working in communities outside of Vatican are not outside of the law of the countries in which they commit any crime.

Bishop Finn is accused of neglecting to report abuse that occurred as recently as last year — almost 10 years since the nation’s Catholic bishops passed a charter pledging to report suspected abusers to law enforcement authorities.

Full force of the law should be applied to those committed horrible crimes, especially against innocent children.

Burden of Proof

Qi

Watch this video, do you agree with the existence of Qi?

America's 5 Favorite Ways to Ignore Jesus

Religion to coexist?

This is a christian propaganda. See if you can find out what's wrong with it.

Answer: (highlight the following white space to see.)

Christians have traditionally killed many non-christians - check your history re; crusades and inquisition. So saying the Christian poses not threat to the others is completely rubbish.

Religions bound people into cages with arbitrarily doctrines based on poor imaginations of people many years ago. Human is ONE species and we are mutually interdependent. We coexist regardless of religion. We kill each other when religion becomes the dividing line. We do not need religions to coexist. We need no religion to coexist.

What kind of atheist am I?

Austin Cline described the work of George H. Smith about the term critical atheism.

Explicit atheist sees no reason whatsoever for believing in a supernatural being because of the failure of theism to provide sufficient evidence of it.

Strong Atheist would say "The existence of a god is impossible" after examining the absurd or contradictory concept of god. Just like a "square-circle" does not exit. God is a logical impossibility.

Noncognitive atheist whose position is that until "god" is well defined, there is no discussion possible. An example would be to discuss the existence of "unie" before someone defines what is "unie".

I think I am a strong atheist, at least to the religions related to the Abrahamic god. After reading the bible, I have concluded that the god in the bible was a monster and luckily it does not exist.

Iranian actress sentencd for a role she played in a film

The film in question is My Tehran for Sale. The story line (from IMDB):

Marzieh is a young female actress living in Tehran. The authorities ban her theatre work and, like all young people in Iran, she is forced to lead a secret life in order to express herself artistically. At an underground rave, she meets Iranian born Saman, now an Australian citizen, who offers her a way out of her country and the possibility of living without fear.

When religion trumps reason...

They say their religious sense of modesty is offended by the sight of the girls and their families passing their homes on their way to school, even though the families themselves are also from an orthodox community. BBC

See the video here.

It is not barbaric to cut off someone's hand surgically

If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell. - Matthew 5:29 - 30

Are we going to see surgically removing eyes from the Bible-believing Christians?


Bonus: Woman's stoning

Pascal Wager

Quotes

The Bible. That is what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach, and young children are made to learn by heart. - Voltaire

I believe in the religion of reason - the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world. - Robert. G. Ingersoll

Baker's wager

Did Jesus die for Klingons too?

If 100 YEAR STARSHIP program is a part of the Star Trek story, it would be most appropriate for a professor Weidemann to append to the fiction another fiction.

"the death of Christ, some 2,000 years ago, was designed to save all creation.

However, the whole of creation, as defined by scientists, includes 125billion galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars in each galaxy.

That means that if intelligent life exists on other planets, then Jesus or God would have to have visited them too, and sacrificed himself equally for Martian-kind as well as mankind.

The alternative, posits Weidemann, is that Jesus chose earthlings as the single race to save and abandoned every other life form in the galaxy."

Believers are getting more and more creative when science discovers more and more about the myths which are not substantiated by evidence.

Compare this and the last one

Compare the argument put forward in the first 1 minute with this which I reported in the last post. [This is the slippy sloop argument fallacy]

Why women should not drive - according to a Saudi Arabic man

From BBC

"It's not good for some girl to show her body, wear very short skirts. This is not about Saudi Arabia, it's about Islam. We've got a generation who were raised watching Gossip Girls and other [similar] series. They only want to be like that, dress like that, drive like that. It's not about need.

...

"I believe it will hurt our community. I understand the US traditions and I respect them so other people, outsiders, need to understand our traditions and respect them."

Oh yeah, Islam traditions are demanding respect because it is not worth respecting.

“For God, nothing is impossible,” Ozorowski said.

“For God, nothing is impossible,” Ozorowski said.

Oh, yeah, in one's stupid imagination, nothing is impossible too.