+1

I like him too.  He is a straight shooter.  What he says actually makes sense.

World needs more people like him, freethinkers who can progress humanity.

I don't like philosophy because it's not practical. Philosophy is like science but without experiments or evidence. Look at old school philosophers, they believed in really crazy things sometimes, people too. I don't blame them, obviously the information and knowledge they had at that time was limited and some of the conclusions they arrived at were somewhat logical at the time but they were wrong many times about many things, mainly because all they used was ''thought'' and a lot of assumptions.

Again more philosophical talk, not something I enjoy...

Ok, if it's so simple...
your god is not real.
...
The whole idea of god is... contradictory.
...
So I guess I just proved god is not real, right?

Finally, at the end of his talk, questions were invited from the audience. A man said, "I understand Buddhism does not believe in God. What is your opinion about God? Does God exist or not?". His Holiness laughed, grabbed the hands of the two spiritual leaders on each side of him, lifted them in the air, fixed his gaze upon the audience, and said emphatically, "God exists or God does not exist. Leave it for us. Your task is to learn how to live peacefully."

Your argument only works when you are assuming god actually exists but then again, you would have to prove a god exists and you haven't. If we assume a god exists, picking the ''best'' religion is still not that good because, first of all, how would you ever know, right?

Put simply: a belief is true when we are able to incorporate it in an orderly and logical manner into a larger and complex system of beliefs or, even more simply still, a belief is true when it fits in with the set of all our other beliefs without creating a contradiction.
 
Sometimes this seems like an odd way to actually describe truth. After all, a belief can be an inaccurate description of reality and fit in with a larger, complex system of further inaccurate descriptions of reality, according to the Coherence Theory, that inaccurate belief would still be called “truth” even though it didn’t actually describe the way the world really was. Does that really make any sense?
 
Well, possibly … the reason is because statements can’t really be verified in isolation. Whenever you test an idea, you are also actually testing a whole set of ideas at the same time. For example, when you pick up a ball in your hand and drop it, it isn’t simply our belief about gravity which is tested but also our beliefs about a host of other things, not least of which would be the accuracy of our visual perception.
 
So, if statements are only tested as part of larger groups, then one might conclude that a statement can be classified as “true” not so much because it can be verified against reality but rather because it could be integrated into a group of complex ideas, the whole set of which could then be tested against reality. In this case Coherence Theory isn’t that far from the Correspondence Theory and the reason is that while individual statements may be judged as true or false based upon their ability to cohere with a larger system, it is assumed that that system is one which accurately corresponds to reality.
 
Because of this, the Coherence Theory does manage to capture something important about the way we actually conceive of truth in our daily lives. It isn’t that unusual to dismiss something as false precisely because it fails to cohere with a system of ideas which we are confident are true. Granted, maybe the system we assume to be true is quite a way off the mark, but so long as it continues to be successful and is capable of slight adjustments in the light of new data, our confidence is reasonable.

To me if an action causes harm to yourself or other living organisms (humans included) it is immoral.

Ask yourself this:  Why did God not bother to update these books?  They are obviously wrong on so many levels.  Why not update them?

If this cycle is indeed inevitable in politics, then Bitcoin offers a hope of escape, since Bitcoin (and crypto-anarchy generally) is all about removing politics from life. Instead of trusting a king, an aristocracy, or a majority, you structure things so that everyone is and can reasonably be sovereign over his own affairs.

Paradoxically enough, the release of initiative and enterprise made possible by popular self-government ultimately generates disintegrating forces from within. Again and again after freedom has brought opportunity and some degree of plenty, the competent become selfish, luxury-loving and complacent, the incompetent and the unfortunate grow envious and covetous, and all three groups turn aside from the hard road of freedom to worship the Golden Calf of economic security.

The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more."

Around this time, many countries will have already converted their physical
monetary systems to digital systems, likely using editable ledger systems.
They will not be public, immutable, decentralized, or etc, and will not be
utilized for the purpose of a more efficient and fair monetary system, but
to assist and ensure governmental control and monitoring of their citizens.
Under this system, purchases are recorded and analyzed instantly to
determine the human's probable future actions.

Based upon this system, in conjunctions with a synthetic implant powered
and secured by the human's nervous system shortly thereafter, it will be
possible to implement an end game scenario where human rights no longer
exist since they can be denied by erasing your existence from their system.
In those countries, citizens who have been "erased" will be unable to even
buy a loaf of bread or be given access to medical service facilities. Any
citizens who come across an "erased" will be accused of unlawful association,
and thus be subject to possible removal from their system. This reinforces
the government's power and control over the human citizens. The humans
in this system can never collectively organize and attempt to overthrow this
totalitarian control system since their future actions are calculated based
upon their recent actions and recent inactions.

At this time, the Bitcoin Network is the only free and fair montary system
that allows humans to survive outside of this future totalitarian system.
Majority of individuals who have been "erased" will form small collectives
which perform services that are legal or deemed illegal by those counties,
and will be compensated through bitcoins. Citizens within these countries
will at times need the services of the "erased" and so some will possess
bitcoins in secret so that they can purchase their particular services.

The purpose of life is to survive and procreate.  It is a common purpose in all life forms, including humans.

You are over analyzing it.  It is pretty simple.  People fear death and develop self coping mechanism to deal with that fear.

Have you noticed that poor and uneducated people are more religious than educated and independently wealthy.  Why is that?

Poor and uneducated have more to fear and need some hope (any myth will do) to help them cope with their problems and questions.

Saying that some bronze stone texts have any insights is like saying that Pinocchio fairy tale is a good source of engineering knowledge.

People are killing and mistreating people in the name of those religious texts.  Even today.  How can you say that slavery is a good thing?
You know it causes harm.  People who wrote these texts were psychopaths.

...
But some SO CALLED SMART ASS looks to deep into shit      BULLSHIT..  Then he thinks of BULLSHIT then tells the world bullshit.
...

WASHINGTON, DC — Persecution against Christians, Muslims, and other religious groups in communist China has escalated as Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s atheist regime attempts to crack down on religion in the country, a top official from a U.S. religious freedom panel and a human rights lawyer told Breitbart News.
Bob Fu, the founder and president of the U.S.-based Christian human rights group China Aid, and Kristina Arriaga, the vice chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), indicated that China’s oppressive tactics employed against Christians have intensified in recent years.

Their comments came in response to a Breitbart News question on the state of Christianity in China posed during a discussion on religious oppression sponsored by the Heritage Foundation on Friday.

“A lot of things have happened in the last few months that are very troubling for the future of Christianity in China,” Arriaga told Breitbart News.

“The situation for Christians there is dire. … One thing we know for sure is that the persecution [against] Christians has doubled in intensity,” she added.

Earlier, she noted that communist authorities recently demolished the Golden Lampstand Church in addition to taking down crosses and religious iconography from various other worshipping centers.

Echoing Arriaga, human rights lawyer Fu told Breitbart News the number of persecuted Christians in China has “dramatically increased” over the last year.

“The number of people we documented who are persecuted among just Christians alone last year reached 223,000 compared to these 48,000 in 2016,” the human rights lawyer explained, adding:

When the communist party took power the number of Christians was estimated [to be] about less than 1 million in 1949, but now according to the Purdue University sociologist research, the number of Chinese Christians already reached over 100 million. They projected that by 2030 the number of Christians would reach at least 224 million. So it is a staggering development.

Fu noted that persecution has only fueled the growth of Christianity in China to the dismay of Xi.

“Apparently the persecution will only help accelerate the growth,” he proclaimed, noting that even the number of Christians “who worship at the government churches had dramatically increased.”

“You can see that he [Xi] has particular animosity against Christianity in particular,” Fu told Breitbart News, acknowledging that the communist regime has identified “underground churches” as a “severe national security threat,” along with political dissidents and human rights lawyers.

Fu is a Christian refugee himself who fled China after Beijing imprisoned him and his wife for two months for “illegal evangelism” in 1996.

Holding her young child, Li Aijie, a U.S.-based Christian refugee who fled Chinese persecution, shared her ordeal during Friday’s event, stressing that Beijing sentenced her husband to 19 years in prison for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party on social media.

Her plight highlights the Communist government’s brutal treatment of Christians and other faith adherents who refuse to conform to the party’s atheist views.

The human rights lawyer noted that China had expanded its surveillance tactics to monitor all religious Chinese, particular Muslim Uighurs (or Uyghurs) in the province of Xinjiang and Christians.

Beijing has “forced” churches to install “face recognition systems,” Fu revealed.

“Every church [in China] is forced to install face recognition systems and every church building … is forced to put a sign [up] banning children, students, civil servants, military personnel, and communist party members from entering,” Fu noted during the discussion.

“They use the face recognition systems to record the image and try to purge the communist party member who dared enter the church,” he continued.

Consistent with the tenets of communism, China’s government prohibits employees from practicing religion.

Arriaga described the predominantly Muslim autonomous province of Xinjiang and the adjacent Tibet Autonomous Region as “police states,” noting:

Thanks to government policy, the Tibetans and the Uighur Muslims basically live in a police state. The state not only bans the practice of religion, it’s also suppressing any cultural practice associated with religion. For instance, Tibetans, as you know, cannot study their language or their culture.

The Xi administration is an equal-opportunity oppressor, indicated the official from the U.S. commission, explaining that “all faith adherence in China are subject to extrajudicial detention.”

“People are held against their will for months at a time without contact with their family and the outside world under horrible conditions,” she said.

Li confirmed that China is keeping her husband under deplorable conditions. While thanking U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration for granting her refuge in America, she asked for help in liberating her husband.

Arriaga acknowledged that the Trump administration is taking action to promote religious freedom in China.

Xi stressed at the quinquennial Communist Party conference last year “that all religions must be ‘Chinese-oriented,’ as part of his effort to ‘Sinicize religion,’ or make it more Chinese, by instilling socialist core values,” reported Newsweek in October.

You have to redefine what religion is because what you have does not make sense.  Flying horses, virgin conceptions, resurrection, spirits, 6000 year old Earth, creating woman from a rib bone, or man from dirt, talking snakes, etc., etc. All utter nonsense.

Keep re-writing it, eventually you'll get to the truth.  Life is not unique in this or other universes,  humans might not be the surviving lifeform in few thousands/millions of years.  Humans are not special animals, we are like all other monkeys, we are just smarter and can talk.
 

Don't consider me an atheist, I'm not and I really don't like to consider myself any name. ''Muslims have a choice, they can continue Islam or pick one of the other thousands of religions but why would they do that? They are probably thinking the same about you, there is a muslim badecker out there telling them that christians have a choice, continue their faith or accept the real god from the Quran. You are too blind to see it though.

Are you trying to say that you can't look up the definition of religion? Are you trying to say that you can only find one little part of the definition? The definition is pretty broad. All you need do is look it up in dictionaries and encyclopedias.

My ''religion'' doesn't teach me what to do, unlike yours.

Actually what I'm saying is that your particular religion is bad and doesn't teach morals.

You use a lot of philosophy in your arguments but they are not logical sometimes. ''The choice then is not choosing which religion is right but choosing which religion represents the least distorted simplification that you personally can grasp and follow. '' You are saying that we somehow know a god exists but we don't know much about it and then we have to pick the least distorted religion. Yet for thousands of years religions have existed, science has advanced a lot and here are, not any closer in discovering which religion is the best, everyone still believes in the same religions as before, you don't see a lot of muslims converting into Christianity just like you don't see a lot of Christians convert to islam. You wanna know why? Because 99% of religious people, no matter which religion, believe in what they believe because they were taught that way not because they wanted to find out the truth. Again, that's the problem with religions and its followers.

You keep talking about ''accepting the reality of the infinite'' like it means something but it really doesn't.

You are close to understand the obvious flaws of religions but not quite there. You said it yourself, you thank god because he put you in this situation, meaning that god doesn't want Muslims, for example, to find out the real truth, he wanted you to find it but not others, isn't that a bit unfair? That's the fundamental problem of religion, you are sure you believe in the right religion now just like you would be if you were born there, you would think like now, that the islamic faith is the real faith.

...
I was raised as a Methodist minister’s daughter and later attended various churches: Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopal… I attended vacation Bible school, made crayon drawings of crosses and doves, memorized Bible verses, and went on church retreats twice a year. Still, I wasn’t sure what I believed, deep down.

By the time I got to college, I defined myself as a seeker. I went to youth fellowship meetings, read about Buddhism, took a World Religion course, and even thought seriously about joining the Baha’i faith. Nothing fit, but I remember knowing that the search was important. I was 19, and I said out loud, “If God exists, then learning more about God is the most meaningful thing I’ll ever do.”

My search turned up all kinds of answers, some of which were in direct conflict with each other or with what felt true to me. I decided to keep searching, while adhering to the Golden Rule of treating others the way I would want to be treated. Now, in my mid-40s, my conscience still feels pierced when I fail to treat others with kindness. I also make time for active meditation, the only kind I can stand: I give my mind time to slow down, making room for contemplation and silence while doing something physical like walking, folding laundry, or emptying the dishwasher.

I found that the Golden Rule structured my behavior in the world, while active meditation offered space for my mind to enrich itself through introspection, self-examination, and appreciation. For me, that combination worked, and it felt right.
...

It may be true that religion makes people happy because it gives you an alternative to death, however, it is an illusion, you will eventually die and there will be no heaven, no after life, no purpose, no meaning only emptiness, that is life, no that is special, we are really just something going and no purpose. Knowing this fact would be of no use to the happiness of anybody but apart from feeling it is still the truth

We all live by faith. To a great extent it is your choice regarding which faith you attempt to have. Examine, extensively, whatever it is that maintains your faith, and the truth of the direction you want your faith to move in. Make sure it is correct. That is the best you can do.

See that's the problem, if God is real and the only proof left for his existence is a book, I would expect that book to have something different from other books like explaining in detail how we have free will or the rules of heaven, instead you have catholics, baptists, orthodox and a ton more, interpreting the book their own way.

1. If that's really the case that also means all kind of rapists, murderers are given that chance too and you find yourself in heaven with all of them, you did good all your life and they didn't and yet you are in the same place, what was the point of life on earth anyways then? Why is this not clearly explained in the bible?

2. No it doesn't. The point is, how is god going to prevent humans from committing sin in heaven, it is not explained in the bible as usual.

3. A god omnipotent and all powerful certainly would not care or need to be worshiped at all.

4. Although you can fully repent, how can god prevent the person from committing a sin afterwards.

1. Even if it didn't, you would still have to live in heaven knowing that your wife, mother or anyone who didn't believe in god are gone forever

2. It actually makes a really good point which is: how can heaven be evil free without turning humans into mindless robots

3. The idea to worship god forever is quite disturbing.

4. Living in heaven with someone that raped you when you were a kid is also quite disturbing.

5. You get to worship god forever and ever, such a meaningful life, right?

Speaking of dark matter, here is a video that says what I usually want to say about religion and heaven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GjCRWeG_AQ

It's short but straight to the point, enjoy, maybe it changes your mind at least just so slightly.

Annihilationism (also known as extinctionism or destructionism[1]) is a belief that after the final judgment some human beings and all fallen angels (all of the damned) will be totally destroyed so as to not exist, or that their consciousness will be extinguished,[2] rather than suffer everlasting torment in hell (often synonymized with the lake of fire).

Annihilationism is directly related to the doctrine of conditional immortality, the idea that a human soul is not immortal unless it is given eternal life. Annihilationism asserts that God will eventually destroy the wicked, leaving only the righteous to live on in immortality. Some annihilationists (e.g. Seventh-day Adventists) believe God's love is scripturally described as an all-consuming fire[3] and that sinful creatures cannot exist in God's presence. Thus those who elect to reject salvation through their free will are eternally destroyed because of the inherent incompatibility of sin with God's holy character. Seventh-day Adventists posit that living in eternal hell is a false doctrine of pagan origin, as the Wicked will perish (as the Bible says) in the Lake of fire.[4][5][6][7] Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that there can be no punishment after death because the dead cease to exist.[8]

Annihilationism stands in contrast to both the traditional and long-standing belief in eternal torture in the lake of fire, and the belief that everyone will be saved (universal reconciliation or simply "universalism").

The belief in Annihilationism, has appeared throughout Christian history, but has always been in the minority.[9]

Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes -- wrongly -- it has no enemies.

In Sweden, by 2050, almost one in three people will be Muslim.

The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that "evil" comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male -- and never from non-European cultures. Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the "other", above all the migrant.

A tiredness seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.

Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue taking away human lives and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia.

In a prophetic conference held in Vienna on May 7, 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl said, "The greatest danger to Europe is tiredness". Eighty years later, the same fatigue and passivity still dominate Western European societies.

It is the sort of exhaustion that we see in Europeans' falling birth rates, the mushrooming public debt, chaos in the streets, and Europe's refusal to invest resources in its security and military might. Last month, in a Paris suburb, the Basilica of Saint Denis, where France's Christian kings are buried, was occupied by 80 migrants and pro-illegal-immigration activists. The police had to intervene to free the site.

Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary's University in London, recently published a report, "Europe's Young Adults and Religion":

"Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good – or at least for the next 100 years," Bullivant said.

According to Bullivant, many young Europeans "will have been baptised and then never darken the door of a church again. Cultural religious identities just aren't being passed on from parents to children. It just washes straight off them... "And we know the Muslim birthrate is higher than the general population, and they have much higher [religious] retention rates."

Richard Dawkins, an atheist and the author of The God Delusion, responded to the study's release by tweeting to his millions of Twitter followers:

Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let's not forget Hilaire Belloc's menacing rhyme:
"Always keep a-hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse."


Dawkins is apparently concerned that that after the demise of Christianity in Europe, there will not be an atheistic utopia, but a rising Islam.

That is the major point of what Philippe Bénéton in his book The Moral Disorder of the West ("Le dérèglement moral de l'Occident"): Islam is filling the cultural vacuum of a society with no children and which believes -- wrongly -- it has no enemies.

According to Radio Sweden, fewer newborns in that country are being baptized due to the demographic shift. By 2050, almost one in three people in Sweden will be Muslim, according to a recent Pew report

The European mainstream mindset now seems to believe that "evil" comes only from our own sins: racism, sexism, elitism, xenophobia, homophobia, the guilt of the heterosexual white Western male --and never from non-European cultures. So Europe now postulates an infinite idealization of the "other", above all the migrant. The heritage and legacy of Western civilization gets sectioned off piece by piece so that nothing remains; our values are mocked and our survival instinct is inhibited. It is a process of decomposition that Europe's political authorities seem to have decided to mediate, as if it were inevitable. Now, the European Union waits to receive the next surge of migrants, from Africa.

In German Chancellor Angela Merkel's major speech in the Bundestag after the unprecedentedly long and difficult process of forming a new government, she struck a conciliatory tone on immigration while offering an inclusive message on Islam. "With 4.5 million Muslims living with us, their religion, Islam, has also become a part of Germany", she said.

The most powerful politician in Europe capitulated: she evidently forgot (again) the difference between the civil rights of individuals, which Muslim citizens enjoy in Germany, and the sources of a national identity, on which Europe is based: humanistic, Judeo-Christian values. This realization may why a week earlier the new German Interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said that "Germany has been shaped by Christianity" and not by Islam.

Europe's tiredness can also be seen in a generational conflict embodied in the alarming rise of public debt. In Italy, the political establishment was recently shaken up by the election of two major populist parties. It is a country with a public debt of 40,000 euros per capita, and a tax burden equal to 43.3% of GDP. The average age of the population is the third oldest in the world, together with one of the lowest birthrates on the planet, one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe and the highest social security spending-to-GDP ratio in the Western world. It is also a country where pensions account for one-third of all public spending and where the percentage of pensioners in proportion to workers will rise from 37% today to 65% in 2040 (from three workers who support one pensioner to three workers who support two pensioners).

An Islamist challenge to this tired and decaying society could be a decisive one. Only Europe's Christian population is barren and aging. The Muslim population is fertile and young. "In most European countries—including England, Germany, Italy and Russia, Christian deaths outnumbered Christian births from 2010 to 2015," writes the Wall Street Journal.

Terrorist attacks will continue in Europe.Recently, in Trèbes, southern France, a jihadist took hostages in a supermarket and claimed allegiance to ISIS. It seems that Europe's societies consider themselves so strong and their ability to absorb mass immigration so extensive, that nothing will prevent them from believing they can assimilate and manage terrorist acts as they have automobile fatalities or natural disasters. A tiredness also seems to be why these countries do not take meaningful measures to defeat jihadism, such as closing Salafist mosques or expelling radical imams.

Muslim extremists understand this advantage: so long as they avoid another enormous massacre like 9/11, they will be able to continue murdering people and undermining the West without awakening it from its inertia. The most likely scenario is that everything will continue: the internal fracture of Europe, two parallel societies and the debasement of Western culture. Piece by piece, European society seems to be coming irreparably apart.