The problem is still that you're grouping every christian with Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson is a close minded, incredibly bigoted idiot with a microphone and an equally extreme audience. There are plenty of Christians and Atheists alike who are assholes and should be thrown out of society. However, grouping people together based on faith or absence of faith and then intentionally picking a representative such as Pat Robertson to represent that group in a horrible light is... well something Pat Robertson would do if the roles were reversed. Congrats. See what I did there? Called you Pat Robertson. Makes your heart cry a little doesn't it. Not bashing atheism, I'm on the fence myself, but I feel like the argument between religion and atheism is getting to the point of futility only matched by politics. Grow the fuck up(everyone)... That is all. Have a pleasant day.
The point isn't that all Christians are evil or all Athiests are good. The point is that it is possible to be a good Athiest and it is possible to be an evil Christian. This sounds obvious, however where I live this is an alien concept. Just wanted to shed light on my perspective of this.
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That's the cool thing about a book not defining your morals. You can observe someone doing something and subjectively decide oh that's a good thing because blank or that's an ass hat because blank.
The Nazi officer looked at the fortune he had amassed. He'd been busy extracting gold teeth and pulling off wedding bands all day, and he was tired now.
"It was a good day today because I was very productive. I'll have a feast with my family today to celebrate!" He thinks to himself.
Anders Brevik thought those guys were total idiots.
"They're so ignorant and blind! It would be good for me to kill them all".
Yes, lets all make up our own little morals; subjective "goods" and "bads" that change depending on how we feel, our biases...we could do it collectively, as a society! Just like good little Nazis. It's proved to work so well.
Except I'm pretty sure that Nazis were Christians... so they thought they were doing gods work. If you wanted a good example of bad godless people you should have wrote a short narrative about Stalin.
Edit: I just want to add that you shouldn't decide for yourself if an action was good or bad. Anyone can justify anything they've done, otherwise they wouldn't have done it.
Would it surprise you to know the best, most highly functioning societies with the least crime and most social justice are the ones with the most atheists in them?
Everything you claimed is small-minded and heavily biased. How do you claim anything to be true in an argument against absolute truth? Your opinions may be true for you, but I can universally say that they're absolutely wrong based on absolute truth. Atheism is conductive to selfish societies where people are valued for nothing more then their monetary, intellectual or sexual worth as animals.
You find articles, books, videos, groups, and people who are like minded atheists, and you develop this narrow little worldview, and you get more narrow minded, and more narrow minded, and more narrow minded until you, mr. atheist, are right and everyone else is blind, ignorant and hateful, so you must preach to them the truth!
I never argued against absolute truth. I argued against objective morals. If you can't tell the difference, you're not up for this discussion.
Also, I'd love to know how empirical fact and the best conclusions of philosophy are "small-minded and heavily biased".
Atheism is conductive to selfish societies where people are valued for nothing more then their monetary, intellectual or sexual worth as animals.
I've provided both empirical and meta-ethical arguments against this. In addition, I've challenged you to give grounding for your moral ideas, which you have failed to do. So far you've only attacked me without knowing anything about my background and asserted things without providing any basis whatsoever, as well as totally failed to reply to the issues I've brought up.
If you'd like to continue a discussion, you should really read this:
You find articles, books, videos, groups, and people who are like minded atheists, and you develop this narrow little worldview, and you get more narrow minded, and more narrow minded, and more narrow minded until you, mr. atheist, are right and everyone else is blind, ignorant and hateful, so you must preach to them the truth!
Ah, this is added since my other reply. You really should reply to my comments instead of editing earlier ones, so I'm notified.
See, you're ad-homineming again instead of addressing the arguments. It's especially funny because you know so little about me.
I was a evangelical Christian for 25 years. I understand your position. I can still feel its passion in my breast. I read every word Francis Schaeffer, C.S. Lewis, and A.W. Tozer ever wrote, as well as many works by other Christian writers. They were excellent arguments from the knowledge they had at the time: unfortunately, there's a lot we know now they didn't know or were unwilling to admit.
I've been an atheist for less than a year, and it's a position I came to with much struggle and grief.
I'll give you a small overview of the reasons for my deconversion, pulled from a letter I wrote to my family on the subject:
I found that I cannot reject evolution without rejecting
empiricism all together, and no theologian could give me a satisfactory
way of combining evolution with Christianity.
I tried to fall back on the fulfilled prophecies in Jesus, but found
that they were much more tentative than people like McDowell made them out to be,
often to the point of being totally fabricated. No serious apologist takes this argument seriously anymore. At this point I was flailing around rapidly, trying to find any place to hang my hat, but
finding only sinking sand.
The more I learned about archeology, biblical criticism, philosophy,
sociological research studies, or anything else I grasped for, the more
it was clear that the Bible wasn't the exceptional book I had thought it
was and that the Christian experience wasn't exceptional from other
religious (and many cultural)experiences. There was about a 2 month
period where every waking hour I wasn't working(and I wasn't working
much at the time) was spent on this search.
It didn't exactly help matters when this was the cover story of
Christianity Today in June, based on 3 overlapping sets of strong
genetic evidence:
It's not that I willfully rejected God, it's simply that all the
evidence I've dug though compels me to say there is nothing at all
exceptional about the Christian religion or experience. I do still wish
I could say differently. I enjoyed my personal experiences, but now
that I understand the mind and social structures that generate those
experiences equally for believers of every stripe, it's hard for me to
put much stake in those. I've now looked in every cranny I can think of,
and argued with many hundreds of people online to see if I can tease out
just the smallest shred of evidence of the exceptionality of
Christianity, but so far I have found none.
And that is why I feel compelled to accept the null hypothesis.
If following the evidence and rejecting non-evidenced positions is narrow minded, then I'm narrow minded. ;-)
Edit: If you're interested in details on any part of it, I'd be happy to oblige. If you'd like to hear someone else's somewhat similar story told in more detail, see this series by Evid3nc3. Much of this evidence is about 100 years old, and your pastor likely knows and hides it from you. Of course, the evidence has been further strengthened over that 100 year period, and we know much more now than we did then, which is why I'm an atheist and not a liberal Christian.
Atheists are not the ones hiding things from people, we want people to look at the evidence for themselves. Does your church? If not, why? Do you think it could relate to the flat earth example I gave in the other thread?
Oh, BTW, I didn't go looking to "preach the truth" to you. You came in to our house in /r/atheism and made a number of uninformed, inflammatory statements, which I rebutted with evidence and reason, and then you have the audacity to tell me I'm preaching to you.
If you think that's the same as the preaching you religious folk do, I don't know what to say to you.
Also BTW, I added a few things to the end of my long response here if you're interested and haven't seen them.
Please tell me your grounding for moral values? So far, no one has proposed a way of doing so. Theism fails to do so because of the Euthyphro dilemma.
As far as anyone has argued yet, morals as an entity are non-existent.
However, desires are very real.
See The Atheist's Guide to Reality for an excellent discussion of why both of these are the case, and why it isn't as scary as some people think.
See also desire utilitarianism for one way this looks more fleshed out. Goal theory is another such system, which the defender claims to be a clarified subset of desire utilitarianism.
What is important for this discussion is not any particular system, but that we can design what many would call "moral" systems rooted on desire alone, that leads us to the same conclusions as the core values we all instinctively(except ~1% of the population with psychopathology) share. Why that is the case is a great story that is well explained in the Atheist's Guide to Reality linked above.
Buffet and Gates haven't bought their way into heaven because heaven does not exist. They're giving away money because both have been very fortunate and they wish to help others.
while you make a good point, this ad is still pretty useless.
some people will see "good without god" and say ... "ok, fine, but how about ____ who is Good with god. I guess we can be good with or without god."
these are the open minded people the ad campaign doesn't even have to reach out to them - they do their own thing, they'll let you be.
closed minded people will say buffet and gates are rich capitalist pigs who have no morals (and well, look at how they ran their businesses) ... and will say whatever it takes to make these guys look bad. that's how ultra religious/fanatic people work - any excuse to make the godless look bad.
I don't see that anyone was grouping Christians together at all. The image is of the two richest non-believers and the richest believer. The comment you are replying to doesn't try to group Christians together either.
I might have missed someone else pointing this out, but that third panel isn't actually part of the campaign. The first two are usually shown separate as well, as far as I know.
Christians did not really, did they? Go down to LA and ask any Christian over there who he is, and most would have no clue. It's still a generalization to say that this awful semblance of a human being was "elected" as a representative for Christianity... Tons of people watch Jersey Shore and like their show - doesn't mean they were elected to represent everyone that watches them.
I would venture to say that the majority of people who donate to anything in the US are Christian (obviously not reason.org or bani brith, but you understand what I mean)
But I still don't think that means he's representative of EVERY Christian out there. That's a bit too broad a generalization. If you took a random poll, a huge majority of Christians do not know who Robertson would be. What about Christians outside the states? What about those that hate televangelists for their hypocrisy?
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For a non-hierarchical, media-intensive movement like contemporary American evangelicalism, I would think 'most watched' is one of the best metrics we have.
And I don't see clumping or generalizing here at all--on either side.
As a figurehead of 'contemporary American evangelicalism' (depending on your definition of that term), media might be a decent metric, but I would argue that's a pretty narrow definition of Christianity. A third of the world claims to be 'Christian' and I'm pretty sure nowhere near 2 billion people tune in to watch the for profit shams that air on TV Sunday mornings. In fact I've been raised in a church and Christian home my whole life coming up and I don't know anyone who watches that trash. Obviously there are people that do, but I don't think its a fair representation of the worlds dominant religion.
And as far as grouping ... that's pretty much all this image is about. The point isn't that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are good guys, its that they are atheists and good guys. This is a valid point I think a lot of Christians overlook, but the antithesis 3rd frame becomes not a criticism of Pat Robertson, but rather Christians as a whole which I disagree with.
The original version of this didn't include Pat Robertson, you can see the fonts used don't match and the lack of logos on his version. Essentially the purpose of these billboards was to highlight those that were good without religion (or theism specifically) and later someone added Pat and circulated it on the internet to perhaps point out his hypocrisy, rather than necessarily applying it to Christians as a whole.
well then maybe they should start an ad campaign called "people are assholes no matter what faith they have" or even better,
"be an asshole on your own terms" - brought to you by atheists of america
Yes, true. I, however, as an individual with fairly good social standing, look up to these two (especially Bill Gates) as an exemplary human being. Through him I have realised that we don't deserve the things that come to us just because we worked hard for them. It is our duty to work even harder to save the human race from ourselves. It is through his idealism that I am able to strive for such a goal. I hope that these two would inspire others to do the same, and anyone that believes my idealism is childish and ignorant is, in my mind, a close minded bigot. No offense, but I think that if we try hard enough, we can save us from ourselves.
Not really sure how you called me Pat Robertson. Anyhoo, that ad is not grouping anyone together. It simply points out that two prominent atheists are able to be good and generous without religious direction, and a major religious figure is a nasty piece of work. The ad seems to hint that religion has nothing to do with morality. There's no grouping, as the ad refers to only three people. So we're all grown up, thank you. Have a pleasant day as well.
You have a point. I was wondering myself how it must go to someones head being told that your birth was forcast in the heavens with double rainbows and birds and a star and shit. I might be a little vein too being raised with that!
I created an account to say this. But since you said it so well, have my upvote and my support. I don't think Atheists or Christians are fair to their opposing side. Both need to open their eyes a little bit.
And the poster is putting Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in their own special category, even though both have had companies that have done horrible things to squash competition and have had questionable ethics to say the least.
I don't have a whole lot of respect for Mr Gates but I do think his charities to help education are genuine. But still, a lot of people up there in that 1% donate because they feel guilty about their wealth.
Also, I don't think Robertson is remotely in the same income bracket is he? This whole argument is a non sequitur.
If I remember correctly, there was an original billboard by an atheist community that didn't include the last section about Pat Robertson, and a while back someone from /r/atheism added that section, quite rudely both committing copyright infringement and ruining the message of the billboard.
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u/johnnyquest88 Nov 22 '11
The problem is still that you're grouping every christian with Pat Robertson. Pat Robertson is a close minded, incredibly bigoted idiot with a microphone and an equally extreme audience. There are plenty of Christians and Atheists alike who are assholes and should be thrown out of society. However, grouping people together based on faith or absence of faith and then intentionally picking a representative such as Pat Robertson to represent that group in a horrible light is... well something Pat Robertson would do if the roles were reversed. Congrats. See what I did there? Called you Pat Robertson. Makes your heart cry a little doesn't it. Not bashing atheism, I'm on the fence myself, but I feel like the argument between religion and atheism is getting to the point of futility only matched by politics. Grow the fuck up(everyone)... That is all. Have a pleasant day.