Why do Atheists Hate Religion?

[Beliathon]

I dont know why do they dont belive and say that they are right

[1714245579]

1714245579

[BADecker]

I dont know why do they dont belive and say that they are right

Jesus said, Matthew 17:20:

Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.

The only reason you know nothing, Beliathon, is because you don't know the power of Jesus, and having faith in God.

[jaysabi]

I don't see "action" listed as a verb anywhere in the definition.

Since the word "action" is a noun, and it is being compared to "reaction," another noun, Newtons Third Law is talking about "things," which are not verbs.

The WORD action is a noun. Things that ARE actions, are verbs. Are you really this simple?

Actions: Running, breathing, sitting, talking, explaining to BADecker first-grade level grammar rules

Nouns: Electrons, Electrolytes, neurons, anything else you said...

When you look back at your posts, do you even realize that you've demonstrated ignorance of things they teach to 6 year-olds in order to prove your interpretation of Newton's Third Law? Does that not strike you as utterly hilarious?

Okay. Since you are so good at editing out the rest of what I had to say, why don't you explain how brain activity creates free will? Remember, the brain activity action has to produce an equal and opposite reaction.

I edit out all the stuff that has no relevance to a point, since you tend to drone on and on about unrelated things. (see for example: listing 24 definitions of a word you're using incorrectly). And I'm not the one pretending to know how neurons work, you are, remember? My calling your explanations out doesn't mean I'm representing myself as a neurologist. I'm just recognizing when someone else isn't.

[BADecker]

I don't see "action" listed as a verb anywhere in the definition.

Since the word "action" is a noun, and it is being compared to "reaction," another noun, Newtons Third Law is talking about "things," which are not verbs.

The WORD action is a noun. Things that ARE actions, are verbs. Are you really this simple?

Actions: Running, breathing, sitting, talking, explaining to BADecker first-grade level grammar rules

Nouns: Electrons, Electrolytes, neurons, anything else you said...

When you look back at your posts, do you even realize that you've demonstrated ignorance of things they teach to 6 year-olds in order to prove your interpretation of Newton's Third Law? Does that not strike you as utterly hilarious?

Okay. Since you are so good at editing out the rest of what I had to say, why don't you explain how brain activity creates free will? Remember, the brain activity action has to produce an equal and opposite reaction.

I edit out all the stuff that has no relevance to a point, since you tend to drone on and on about unrelated things. (see for example: listing 24 definitions of a word you're using incorrectly). And I'm not the one pretending to know how neurons work, you are, remember? My calling your explanations out doesn't mean I'm representing myself as a neurologist. I'm just recognizing when someone else isn't.

In other words you can't.

There is no free will. Free will is an illusion. Play with all the nouns and verbs you want. According to Newton's Third Law, free will remains an illusion. Look at it again...

----------

electrons, electrolytes, chemicals, all working in the brain = reality = action

free will = illusion = reaction

For every ACTION there is an equal and opposite REACTION.

Reaction opposite action.
Illusion opposite reality.
Free will opposite brain activity.

----------

[Beliathon]

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
-George Bernard Shaw

"With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another."
-G. C. Lichtenberg

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
-Mark Twain

"The security provided by a long-held belief system, even when poorly founded, is a strong impediment to progress. General acceptance of a practice becomes the proof of its validity, though it lacks all other merit."
-Dr. B. Lown (invented defibrillator)

"A man receives only what he is ready to receive... The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe."
- H. D. Thoreau

"When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself."
-Mark Twain

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
-Herbert Spencer

"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible."
-Bertrand Russell

"It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions..."
-Lewis Thomas

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-Isaac Asimov

[MakingMoneyHoney]

quotes

So you went through and bumped your threads, saying you're right. When you bump your threads, like this, you remind me of a Jehovah's Witness.

Why are you so obsessed with being right, and trying to get people to stop believing in God?

[Beliathon]

When you bump your threads, like this, you remind me of a Jehovah's Witness.

Because knocking on people's doors, bothering them in their home is the same thing as writing openly on the internet, where readers must navigate here themselves to read it. Do Jehovah's witnesses carry with them a magic "ignore" button you can press to silence them forever? Because I do, it's right there beneath my name.

[MakingMoneyHoney]

When you bump your threads, like this, you remind me of a Jehovah's Witness.

Because knocking on people's doors, bothering them in their home is the same thing as writing openly on the internet, where readers must navigate here themselves to read it. Do Jehovah's witnesses carry with them a magic "ignore" button you can press to silence them forever? Because I do, it's right there beneath my name.

That wasn't what I was comparing it to. You edited out the line that furthered my point.

"Why are you so obsessed with being right, and trying to get people to stop believing in God?"

You are obsessed with being right and trying to prove what you believe in is right, and everyone else is wrong, in the same way they are obsessed with converting people.

And I would never ignore you. I am very anti-censorship.

[Beliathon]

And I would never ignore you. I am very anti-censorship.

That's not what the word censorship means. Censorship is the practice of officially examining literature/media/art and suppressing unacceptable parts. You ignoring me only affects what information you're exposed to - no one else is affected whatsoever.

If my writing here truly bothers you that much, why not simply ignore me and be done with it?

[TheBlueEyedBitcoinDragon]

@MakingMoneyHoney, well, you did compare him to people that go about, knocking on people's door. That is an unfair comparison.
I don't really follow this forum all that much, so I cant really pass judgment on how obsessed he is on being right. Me, I can't debate God for more than the equivalent of one or two pages of this forum, then, we just end up repeating ourselves and (the other guy) changing definitions halfway through to make his argument more feasible, correcting for flaws without admitting them.
But I digress, the point is that I think we atheists tend to be a bit sensitive to comparisons with religions because we hear over and over again "you've just replaced one religion with another", dismissively , from people who used to share a religion with them. Though that's a bit dismissive to all religions... which is a bit odd, now that I think about it.

[Beliathon]

EDIT:

"Why are you so obsessed with being right, and trying to get people to stop believing in God?"

You are obsessed with being right and trying to prove what you believe in is right, and everyone else is wrong, in the same way they are obsessed with converting people.

I consider the liberation of your mind from the lies of superstition to be among my ethical duties as a person possessing exceptional intellectual acuity who is also a compassionate citizen of this hivemind we call the internet.

Though that's a bit dismissive to all religions... which is a bit odd, now that I think about it.

Dismissing a superstitious belief system for which there is no supporting evidence is not "odd", it's science.

Let me tell you a story about poor pattern recognition en masse. In September 1969, a rumor circulated that the Beatles' Paul McCartney was dead, killed in a 1966 automobile accident and replaced by a look-alike. The clues were there in the albums, if you knew where to look.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band's "A Day in the Life," for one, recounts the accident: "He blew his mind out in a car / He didn't notice that the lights had changed / A crowd of people stood and stared / They'd seen his face before / Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords". The cover of the Abbey Road album shows the Fab Four walking across a street in what looks like a funeral procession, with John in white as the preacher, Ringo in black as the pallbearer, a barefoot and out-of-step Paul as the corpse, and George in work clothes as the gravedigger. In the background is a Volkswagen Beetle (!) whose license plate reads "28IF"--Paul's supposed age "if" he had not died.

Spookiest of all were the clues embedded in songs played backward. On a cheap turntable, if one moved the speed switch midway between 331/3 and 45 to disengage the motor drive, then manually turned the record backward and listened in wide-eared wonder. The eeriest is "Revolution 9" from the White Album, in which an ominously deep voice endlessly repeats: number nine ... number nine ... number nine.... Played backward you hear: turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man ... turn me on, dead man....

In time, thousands of clues emerged as the rumor mill cranked up (type "Paul is dead" into Google for examples), despite John Lennon's 1970 statement to Rolling Stone that "the whole thing was made up." But made up by whom? Not the Beatles. Instead this was a fine example of the brain as a pattern-recognition machine that all too often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life.

What we have here is a signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association learning--associating the causal connections between A and B--as when our ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals. We are skilled enough at it to have survived and passed on the genes for the capacity of association learning.

Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations--A appears to be connected to B, but it is not (the baseball player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on false association learning.

Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition (Google key words for visuals): the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

Anecdotes fuel pattern-seeking thought. Aunt Mildred's cancer went into remission after she imbibed extract of seaweed--maybe it works--maybe it doesn't. Either way, there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. Only when a group of cancer patients taking seaweed extract is compared with a control group can we draw a valid conclusion. We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes.

The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon of superstition has endured the winnowing process of natural selection. The Darwin Awards (honoring those who remove themselves from the gene pool) will never want for examples. Because anecdotal thinking comes naturally, while science requires training and discipline.

[MakingMoneyHoney]

And I would never ignore you. I am very anti-censorship.

That's not what the word censorship means.

The practice of officially examining literature/media/art and suppressing unacceptable parts. You ignoring me only affects what information you're exposed to.

No one else is affected whatsoever. If my writing here truly bothers you that much, why not simply ignore me and be done with it?

I know that. I had explained further, but didn't want you to take the line I had written as being against you (it's not), as I know you had recently put someone on ignore. I don't like putting people on ignore, I don't think it's right to block people out of your (in the plural sense) world. I feel it's like sticking your head in the sand.

I never said you were affecting others. And no, it doesn't bother me, not in the slightest.

For some reason my point continues to go over your head.

Let me try again.

You continue to try to "convince" people who don't agree with you that you are right and they are wrong.

Jehovah's Witnesses continue to try to "convince" people who don't agree with them that they are right and others are wrong.

Similar? Yes. That's how I meant it, and only how I meant it.

@MakingMoneyHoney, well, you did compare him to people that go about, knocking on people's door. That is an unfair comparison.
I don't really follow this forum all that much, so I cant really pass judgment on how obsessed he is on being right. Me, I can't debate God for more than the equivalent of one or two pages of this forum, then, we just end up repeating ourselves and (the other guy) changing definitions halfway through to make his argument more feasible, correcting for flaws without admitting them.
But I digress, the point is that I think we atheists tend to be a bit sensitive to comparisons with religions because we hear over and over again "you've just replaced one religion with another", dismissively , from people who used to share a religion with them. Though that's a bit dismissive to all religions... which is a bit odd, now that I think about it.

I don't believe all atheists replace one religion for another. But I believe Beliathon has. A true atheist shouldn't care to convert others, etc. There are other reasons, but I don't need to get into that again.

[Beliathon]

Let me try again.

Please refer to the edit I added to the post above, reposted here for your convenience:

EDIT:

"Why are you so obsessed with being right, and trying to get people to stop believing in God?"

You are obsessed with being right and trying to prove what you believe in is right, and everyone else is wrong, in the same way they are obsessed with converting people.

I consider the liberation of your mind from the lies of superstition to be among my ethical duties as a person possessing exceptional intellectual acuity who is also a compassionate citizen of this hivemind we call the internet.

[MakingMoneyHoney]

I consider the liberation of your mind from the lies of superstition to be among my ethical duties as a person possessing exceptional intellectual acuity who is also a compassionate citizen of this hivemind we call the internet.

Just as someone who believes you're going to hell would want to save your immortal soul.

Two peas in a pod.

[the joint]

EDIT:

"Why are you so obsessed with being right, and trying to get people to stop believing in God?"

You are obsessed with being right and trying to prove what you believe in is right, and everyone else is wrong, in the same way they are obsessed with converting people.

I consider the liberation of your mind from the lies of superstition to be among my ethical duties as a person possessing exceptional intellectual acuity who is also a compassionate citizen of this hivemind we call the internet.

First, let me acknowledge that I'm a narcissist.  But, hey, at least I acknowledge it.  

Second, that being said, what does your "intellectual acuity" suggest to you when you -- intentionally or unintentionally, I do not know -- fail to respond to the instances in which your core arguments against Intelligent Design have been proven totally false beyond all possible doubt?

Examples:

1)  You close your case (i.e. "case closed") against a belief in God based upon the premise of a total a lack of empirical evidence, though it has been both proven and referenced to you that this is a completely invalid and irrelevant argument.  We can toss that argument of yours in the trash.

2)  There is no #2.  Number 1 is all you've proposed, and it's false.  You've demonstrated no other argument.

Here is your debating style in a nutshell:

You:  There is no evidence for God or unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.

Correct person:  False analogy, and it's also irrelevant in that, axiomatically, physical evidence can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something with a non-physical component(s).

You:  Blah blah blah, superstition.

Correct person:  But, you didn't even rebut the point.  You just kept going.

You:  I am so smart.

Correct Person:  

...And repeat.  Sound about right?

Wow.  Some acuity.  You're essentially a character foil to BADecker.  It seems no amount of sound reason will convince either of you to admit you're wrong.  I readily await the ad hominems to follow --  unless, you know, you actually want to discuss ideas.

[g1974ak]

WHY DO ATHEISTS (like me) HATE RELIGION ?

This can be known only by you. But I think that this is not true for all atheists. They don't believe but this doesn't mean that they hate the people that believe in God. Everyone has its choices in life and every choice is right until doesn't hurt the others.

So you cannot generalizes your case. I know atheists that are good friends of believers and discuss with each other about their points of view.

[Tusk]

I consider the liberation of your mind from the lies of superstition to be among my ethical duties as a person possessing exceptional intellectual acuity who is also a compassionate citizen of this hivemind we call the internet.

Atheism is a superstitious religion just as much as any other theist belief system, failing to recognise that Atheism is also a superstition would be unethical, or sign ignorance. Since there is no definitive proof the ethical stance is to be agnostic. i.e. keep an open mind. While there is no proof for intelligent design there is an abundance of circumstantial evidence to support it. Just because we have no comprehension of the universe outside of our very limited shared experience, we should not allow our own limitations to prevent others from appreciating life's mysteries to their fullest.

[Tusk]

Sorry MakingMoneyHoney, fixed it, I had nested quotes in there, my bad

[MakingMoneyHoney]

Sorry MakingMoneyHoney, fixed it, I had nested quotes in there, my bad

Thanks.

[Beliathon]

Atheism is a superstitious religion just as much as any other theist belief system

Incorrect.

Superstition and scientific skepticism are mutually exclusive patterns of thought. Our primate brains are imperfect pattern-recognition machines, which all too often finds nonexistent signals in the background noise of life. It's a classic signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association learning--associating the causal connections between A and B--as when our ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals. We are skilled enough at it to have survived and passed on the genes for the capacity of association learning.

Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations--A appears to be connected to B, but it is not (the baseball player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on false association learning.

Consider a few cases of false pattern recognition (Google key words for visuals): the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich; the face of Jesus on an oyster shell (resembles Charles Manson, I think); the hit NBC television series Medium, in which Patricia Arquette plays psychic Allison Dubois, whose occasional thoughts and dreams seem connected to real-world crimes; the film White Noise, in which Michael Keaton's character believes he is receiving messages from his dead wife through tape recorders and other electronic devices in what is called EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is another version of what I call TMODMP, the Turn Me On, Dead Man Phenomenon--if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

Anecdotes fuel pattern-seeking thought. Aunt Mildred's cancer went into remission after she imbibed extract of seaweed--maybe it works--maybe it doesn't. Either way, there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science. Only when a group of cancer patients taking seaweed extract is compared with a control group can we draw a valid conclusion. We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes.

The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not necessarily get us killed, and so the overall phenomenon of superstition has endured the winnowing process of natural selection. The Darwin Awards (honoring those who remove themselves from the gene pool) will never want for examples. Because anecdotal thinking comes naturally, while science requires training and discipline.