Try being a Jehovah’s Witness – we couldn’t even celebrate birthdays!!

Now that I’m an atheist, I’ll celebrate whatever I damn well please, thank you.

Thanks for making that what-should-be-obvious point. When my kids were little we were still Christians (I would call myself an agnostic now), but it never occurred to me to invoke religion to guide their behavior. Rather, I used simple reasoning (yes, you can reason with very small children, they are capable of understanding much more than they are given credit for), like this:

If you lie and cheat, people won’t trust you and good honest people won’t want to be around you. Do you want to be surrounded by people you can trust, or people who lie to you? What kind of people do you want to be around? What kind of person do you want to be?

It’s not a difficult concept at all for a child to grasp, and my now adult children have many very nice friends and, perhaps more to the point, are loved and welcome in the homes of their friends’ parents.

The problem with any reward-and-punishment approach to child-rearing, whether it employs religion or stickers and time outs, is that it teaches the child to fixate on the reward or the punishment, rather than on the fundamental question, what kind of person do you want to be? What kind of community to you want to live in?

We create our own heaven or hell right here, right now, regardless of what we may or may not believe about supernatural beings and an afterlife. Or Christmas, for that matter, coming back to the original point of this post. I rather enjoy Christmas, but then I don’t go to the malls or the supermarkets (at any time of year), so I don’t encounter the crowds and unpleasantness. I shop at the co-op for food and little independent shops for gifts. It’s all quite pleasant.

Just sayin’.

I really wish in supermarkets, around Christmas, they had ‘athiest only’ tills so I don’t have to wait for 20minutes behind people with enough food feed a nation in their trolleys or baskets when I’ve only got a few things to buy.

I’m not saying religion is “the answer”. I’m saying it’s a good tool for basing a society’s core beliefs on. I grew up in a church, and occasionally still visit it, but it doesn’t stop me from being rational. What it did do for me is instill a sense of right and wrong. If nothing is wrong internally, then what keeps people in line? Force does. God doesn’t have to be real to derive societal benefits from behaving as if he might be. And as a basis for law, it’s hard to beat the basic 10 commandments.

OK, much of this has been addressed already, but I’d like to chuck in my twopenn’orth…

Religion is no better as a tool for morality than any other systematic structure of rules. Children start to learn right from wrong at around age 2. Most often, this is along the lines of “don’t do that – it’s not nice” or “how would you feel if other people did that to you?”. It’s not until later that they are capable of being taught about god and the rest of that, and they’re really not capable of understanding the 10 commandments until much later (in particular, could you explain the meaning of “thou shalt not commit adultery ” to a 4-year-old?).

The commandments are a terrible starting point for a moral society. Rule 1: thou shalt have no god but me! Rule 2: thou shalt not worship false idols, i.e. see rule 1. Egocentric much?

You only get useful moral values when you get down to the bottom of the list. “Thou shalt not bear false witness” is a good one. It’s a shame that one gets ignored so often by the religious right, isn’t it?

You say that, in the absence of some internal guide to right and wrong, force keeps people in line. Well, I say this is rubbish. Force does not really work. Or, more specifically, force alone can never work. Look at India in the few years after WWII. Instead, what works is fair and equitable rules applied the same to everyone, with transgressions of those rules punished in some fashion. What works is giving everyone the opportunity to own a stake in the system. Mostly.

I’m not superstitious.

. . .

I don’t need to define myself as atheistic, or agnostic, or anything else based on what I don’t believe in. You could say that I am an empiricist, which I would define as avoiding superstition as much as possible. Reality is enough.

Very well said!

The Atheist’s rationale is mired by dogmatism and is not intelligence based because only fools exclude all possibilities.

One must feel pity for anyone who fanatically tries to disprove something they don’t even believe exists.

You also have demonstrated a misunderstanding of atheism. See my previous comment.

I would guesstimate that 99.9% of atheists have never tried to disprove the existence of god, mainly because it doesn’t matter to them.

If you go back and carefully re-read what prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers actually write (instead of the propaganda written by the Christian right about what they’ve written), you will eventually notice that they also have never tried to disprove the existence of god.

Probably no God? There is no evidence either way therefore making it equally probable that there is a god. Now when it comes to a subject like this you just can’t know whether there is a god or not; it’s impossible. Of course I am a biased agnostic but everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, right?

Of course you’re entitled to your opinion, and others have already pointed out how illogical it is.

However, you seem to have misunderstood the meaning of atheism. To an atheist, religion and god are irrelevant. Whether god exists or not is irrelevant (unless someone discovers meaningful evidence to bring to the issue). Atheism is living without religion, not a professed disbelief in god (although many atheists do believe that there is no god, this is not the definition of atheism).

Ask Richard Dawkins & Christopher Hitchens – they’re theones making atheists look like a-holes by slandering religious folks and using strawmen.

You seem to be using the exact technique that you aim to criticise. Perhaps, before making claims of slander and strawman arguments, you should actually quote what these people have written to demonstrate that you argument holds water, rather than simply (and rather naively) assume everyone will choose to believe you because you say it is so.

I’m sorry, but am i the only one who finds the God debate to be time consuming and fruitless? While there is no real evidence of any all powerful supreme being, there is no way to prove otherwise. You cannot “know” that there is no god…..you can only assume that he doesn’t exist.
I assume that there is no monster under the bed….but until i look there is no way to be sure. Of course, if he is an invisible monster….i may never know. How convenient that all of man kind’s gods are invisible :< )

You may have a point here. We can never know for sure. However, we can look at the universe and say: “We observe natural processes. These natural processes have outcomes, and give rise to an illusion of design. They alone are able to account for everything that we observe in the universe (allowing some room for stuff we have not yet discovered or fully worked out, like quantum gravity). There is no need to attribute any of this to a divinity.”

Thus, applying the principle of parsimony, it is only logical to assume that there is no god unless we discover evidence to the contrary.

So, while we cannot disprove that there is a god (which is pretty much an impossibility – after all, could one ever hope to prove that there are no swans with pink feathers?), we can know that belief in a god is irrational (and, alas, therefore only too human).

OK that was ignorant of me. I just think it is pointless, and rather stupid, to claim that there is or is not something when you have no evidence to back it up! Maybe the world would be better without religion; maybe it wouldn’t be. We can’t know until we’ve had it both ways. If somebody wants to start some sort of movement to abolish religion be my guest but think if it really would be better.

And about God, Chef says “there can never be evidence for or against”

By that logic, both God and the incorporeal dragon in my garage (thanks Carl) have equal validity.

And to say there is no evidence against YOUR god, Chef, is absurd. Whatever YOUR god is, most of the world doesn’t believe in it. And we have the evidence of thousands of gods left abandoned along the road of human history – evidence that can quite appropriately be used to challenge the existence of YOUR god.

Claims of alien spacecraft or working witchcraft or ghosts have failed scrutiny so many times, that it is natural and appropriate to view such claims with extreme skepticism.

Failed claims of divine intervention VASTLY outnumber the above examples, so any claim of divinity should be greeted with disbelief by any rational person. The claims of god/gods have been replaced with natural explanations time and again, but the reverse has NEVER happened.

The Sun – was a God, now explained by science
The Moon – was a God, now understood by science
The stars – were God, now science
The tides – were attributed to God, now science
The seasons – attributed to God, now science
Earthquakes – were God, now science
Lightning – was God, now science
Rain & drought – was God, now science
Health & disease – was God, now science
Schizophrenia – was demonic possession, now science
Epilepsy – was divine possession, now science
Origin of species – was God, now science (evolution)
Identity & personality – was the soul, now neuroscience

To equate belief and non-belief as equally valid starting positions is to ignore history and surrender rationality.

No, hang on, that doesn’t sound right. Are you saying that any thing for which there’s no evidence still has a 50% chance of existing?

Do you feel the same pity for atheists who doesn’t bother to disprove the existence of God?

Believe me, most atheists don’t go around constantly repeating Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy – we just don’t think about God at all.

Also, religion is not intrinsic to morality, just as morality is not intrinsic to religion. Far more damage has been perpetrated on humanity in the name of religion than it has in its absence. This is not even debatable. Religion is regressive, superstitious pap that we would all be better off without. Everyone knows it, whether they can admit it or not. That is why people lash out so harshly in defense of their crooked faiths; deep down they know it is all a fraud.

Human society can sustain itself just fine without bible-thumpers or fire-and-brimstone bullshit. It is every human being’s duty to learn as much as they can about themselves and the universe to attain enlightenment, not pick an answer that was indoctrinated into them as a child and run with it, refusing and rejecting objective fact because it’s inconvenient. That’s ignorance. That’s failure. That’s weakness.

I’ve had to dump one-too-many girlfriends when I found out they were infected with faith. Some of them genuinely harmless, innocent types, never tried to push it on me at all. But I just can’t concern myself with people who demand that everyone walk on eggshells for them whenever the conversation gets too deep and philosophical and especially scientific just to respect their stupid beliefs. Drove some of them mad. But then, that sort of self-reflection on their part is kind of the point. Being cold and alone and friendless inspires self-reflection.

I think religious people in the world today, despite being an apparent majority, are extremely lonely and isolated in their own ways, from themselves and each other, by their existential ignorance.

“…Yes, there are militant a-hole atheists. But they are very few and far between. Can we stop perpetuating this stereotype?”

Ask Richard Dawkins & Christopher Hitchens – they’re theones making atheists look like a-holes by slandering religious folks and using strawmen.

Look at the case of Oliver Cromwell who tried to do exactly that in England circa the 17th /18th century. This was post chopping off the head of King Charles I. Cromwell was a puritan who thought Xmas was too pagan & not (puritanical) Christian enough. I think? (Speaking from memory here.)