I’m beginning to think I’m too sensitive to be an atheist writer.
Take out “atheist.” Dude, seriously, grow a few layers of epidermis.
I agree, and how many times have we seen looooooong first-time posts that were from spammers and kooks. Not a good way to begin. And that’s not just here but in every forum I’ve seen.
That’s cool that you’re into Robert Ingersoll. Way ahead of his time. How many lecturers made it through history without writing? Rare person.
I just want to say that it’s a shame that I didn’t receive one comment on the material I presented. There was a lot there that we could have discussed and learned a bit. I’ve gotten hate mail in my time, but it’s even worse when you get insulted by like-minded readers. Makes me feel like a can’t win.
A good and just God doesn’t want you to abandon reason, just overly emotional responses to mediation within a set forum. As a Christian I’d love to see your thesis. Please stay and start with the basic premise then expand as the discussion grows.
A good and just God doesn’t want you to abandon reason, just overly emotional responses to mediation within a set forum. As a Christian I’d love to see your thesis. Please stay and start with the basic premise then expand as the discussion grows.
Dave
A good and just God simply does not exist. The end.
A good and just God doesn’t want you to abandon reason, just overly emotional responses to mediation within a set forum. As a Christian I’d love to see your thesis. Please stay and start with the basic premise then expand as the discussion grows.
Dave
A good and just God simply does not exist. The end.
OK, I’m thinking of expanding the essay to my second Kindle book. I posted it on my blog at the Atheistnexus.com and it’s getting a lot of views. It’s under the title, “Religion Is Abomination.”
Looks like the best thing to do is break it up into sections and then discuss the concepts one by one. I can then transfer anything interesting and relevant to the text itself.
Take hadephobia, for instance. What a terrible curse to impose on people who believe you and follow your dictates. Suppose I tell my kids, “I’m going to torture and kill you if you so much as say a course word.” The kids would be afraid to open their mouths.
But fear of hell is much worse. It’s not only your life that the Lord God threatens to take away but your eternal soul as well. None of the ancient religions, none, even conceived of eternal punishment, and they were some pretty tough people. Hadephobia is a horrible thing to impose on people and can only make them sick.
So I’ll shortly post the essay under, “Religion Is Abomination,” section by section, and hopefully we can have an intelligent conversation, OK?
A good and just God doesn’t want you to abandon reason, just overly emotional responses to mediation within a set forum. As a Christian I’d love to see your thesis. Please stay and start with the basic premise then expand as the discussion grows.
Dave
No, but the priests who made up the god may want you to “abandon reason”
I have to decide whether I have the wherewithal to complete another book. I’m pretty much written out after decades of attempting to “make a difference.” I’ll soon post what I have of “Religion is Abomination,” when I feel up to it, but my personal life is in shambles right now. It’s a long story.
The signature quotation is from the last chapter of Mirror Reversal. My heroine Cynthia, my creation who is as dear to me as anyone I’ve ever loved in my life, is facing being thrown into the “abyss to hell” by a fundamentalist Christian named Mr. Morality. Her answer is to tell him that at she doesn’t need to fear Final Judgment because a good god could never punish her for refusing to abandon reason, that is, having faith in the absurd dictates of the Holy Scriptures and sincere but misguided clergypersons.
“And I know there can’t be an evil God—the god of jealous Iago or the cruel, debonair Scarpia, or the vengeful god of your Bible—because humanity could never have evolved so high on the tree of life. Humanity could never have produced a Mozart or Beethoven, or a Vincent Van Gogh who died trying to warn people not to lose touch with nature and their humanity. If there were a vengeful God, we’d still be living with the lions and hyenas and the Law of the Jungle.”
Hence, hadephobia, thel fear of hell, is a con job, a scam. No ancient religion even came close to its existential horror. It was imposed on believers only after the Council of Nicaea 325, when bishops realized they had Europe and the civilized world at their feet.
Using the threat of eternal hell is a means of aversive control over others.
It seems cruel and grossly unethical to me.
If the idea of an eternal hell is a meme “trying” to survive through the manipulation of others, and the genes that built the brain are “trying” to survive by allowing the brain to be infected (and infect others) by such an idea, then it is neither cruel nor unethical. It just is. The more we understand, the less judgmental we become. Ethics is so 20th-century.
Using the threat of eternal hell is a means of aversive control over others.
It seems cruel and grossly unethical to me.
If the idea of an eternal hell is a meme “trying” to survive through the manipulation of others, and the genes that built the brain are “trying” to survive by allowing the brain to be infected (and infect others) by such an idea, then it is neither cruel nor unethical. It just is. The more we understand, the less judgmental we become. Ethics is so 20th-century.
Having an idea (even a grotesque one), is not in and of itself, cruel or unethical. But using an idea, to aversively control the behavior of others, certainly could be.
And despite our increasing (I hope) understanding, I think that ethics is as important as ever in the 21st century.
