RayR wrote:This is interesting...
Read the article... same tired trend...
1. Look, there's the evil enemy.
2. Here's why they're evil.
3. Here's how they want to get you (or turn you evil).
4. Here's the solution... pray and go to church and don't learn anything worldly because it's evil.
Same tired game plan, same tired playbook.
Christianity somehow became the top alpha entity, not just any God mind you, specifically the Abrahamic god. Somehow 2000 years ago, they figured it all out despite believing the world was flat, basic elements were earth, wind, fire and water...
Yeah, they had it all figured out.
What did they figure out?
1. It's easier to rule by fear than reason.
2. It's easier to group people together and get them all on the "same page" if they could point at a common enemy.
3. It's way easier to keep them inline if they can never actually see their leader (God) nor the leader of their enemy (Satan)
4. Then they use the long lasting assumption that they are "correct" as an axiomatic base for their "logic".
Meh... tired.
The more I read about it, the more I like to think of it as the grand gaslighting...
Every preacher I ever heard...
We are all sinners, I'm a sinner (obviously... not me, the preacher dumb azz), you're a sinner...
Then go through a bunch of wild azz reasons for your sin trying to hit pretty much everything to ensure that everyone is in fact a sinner (and if not, they should be thinking they are after getting beat down for 15 minutes).
Then provide the cure (Tithing makes everything better and will help wash away your sins).
Meh
Ok, for the article!!!
Who thinks there's nothing? There's obviously something. We live in a place which we call a universe, a think that's a good start to an axiomatic base.
The Universe Exists (pretty sure we can all agree on that one).
So I'm not sure who's saying there's "nothing", but clearly that's not the case.
So I guess the idea is "meaning" or lack there of.
I disagree that if you are not Christian or otherwise do not believe in any other deities, it does not imply that you have no "meaning" in your life.
I believe meaning is relative to the observer... aka, life is what you make of it.
If you want to sit around b*tching about liberals and heathens all day? Then I guess that's the meaning of your life.
Listen, this thing we live in, call it what you want. We have no idea the shape of this thing, whether this thing is sentient, if it is sentient, we can't see the bounds of it, have no idea what sentience would look like at that scale... yet these people 2000 years ago some how figure out what "it" wants.
Right....
It sounds to me like atheists like myself (specifically atheists with my hobbies), want what you want... To know more about this beautiful, wonderful structure we live in... call it what you will, God, the Universe, Nature, what ever... we all strive to understand it better, but we choose to go about it in different ways.
The fact that I choose to study math, physics and computation as opposed to burying my head in a Bible does not make me evil.
Throughout history, the church has shown time and time again that it would prefer to lock heretics like Galileo away then let them speak... their livelihood literally depends on people NOT UNDERSTANDING THE WORLD AROUND THEM.