longweekend58 wrote on May 2^nd, 2011 at 6:33pm:


That's a point I pondered when I was thinking about how many have died for religion.   I think though that Mao, Stalin etc were more interested in killing the power wielded by the Church than in killing their congregations.  Frighten off their worshippers and the Church loses it's power over them.  The worshippers were collateral damage.  In short I don't believe the commos gave a toss about what anyone believed as long as they toed the line and ceded power to them. Politics was their creed, not atheism. They are no more typical of atheists than Savanarola was typical of the average Sunday churchgoer.

Why do people see atheism as  anti religion?? That's like saying that  air is anti vacuum,  or fire is anti ice or light is anti darkness.  They are just states of being in which the other element is absent. Atheists are just content to exist with an absence of religious belief, what is so hard to understand about that??  
I don't understand why religious people give a stuff if atheists go to hell, nor do I understand why atheists feel they have to stand  and fight to uphold their belief in nothing.  
If people want to believe in gods, fairies, Santa or UFOs...well, good on 'em, knock yourselves out,  just pleeease don't come knocking on my door because I don't believe you and I'm not in need of saving. OK?  

freediver wrote on May 2^nd, 2011 at 7:40pm:


Can't speak for Grey's motivations but I wonder if it's more to do with putting up resistance to the power and mind games that churches play than with atheism per se.  People at a distance from the spin and bs have a clearer vision of the con and want to do something about it.  Personally I think the 'faithful' get what they deserve for being gullible.


"Really?" what?  you mean you can explain what rights the virtuously heaven bound have to force their dogma down the throats of people who don't want a bar of it?  Do tell so I can stop being annoyed at them ringing my doorbell!  I never feel compelled to  ring theirs!

Please note that this particular post isn't arguing religion or lack of it..it's arguing personality traits displayed by people who desperately need everyone to believe what they do in order to bolster their irrational hopes of 'life after death'. They seem to think that if everyone would just believe it then that would make it true.  Duh.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on May 3^rd, 2011 at 9:53am:


The mind is the software, the brain is the hardware.  Without the hardware (including the memory), the software can't exist.

The mind exists as a phenomenon that may be intrinsic to the brain, but it's still easier to talk about it separately in an empirical sense. Even looking like it that way, if I choose to define that fact as 'supernatural', who cares? It's still a duality of sorts.

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With atheists in charge it might not be dark. But this is just flogging a dead horse, I've made it clear many times that i'm not ion favour of banning things, I wanted to discociate myself from the argument that the burqa was bad because it covered faces and said ironically,  I'd be more infavour of banning all religious uniforms.

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There is a pretty big gap between resisting mind games and trying to ban something.

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I was referring to your alleged inability to understand why they care.

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So your version of a government imposed utopian society would magically work better than every other attemp merely because it is founded in atheism - an ideology defined only by what it lacks?

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No you haven't. All you have done is contradict yourself and give brief, vague explanations.

That is an odd criteria for something to be supernatural. The conventional view of time and space has already been disproved, and our current concept of causality is also being challenged.

Postmodern Trendoid III wrote on May 3^rd, 2011 at 6:09pm:



Meaning nothing of the sort. Time, space and causality are categories of reason, not of 'nature'.
(viz Critique of Pure Reason, 1781.)

Soren wrote on May 3^rd, 2011 at 7:19pm:



I am not interested in Kant's idealism here. Time, space, and causality can be empirically measured.