“Atheism” and “agnosticism” are both poorly understood terms. Gnosticism and agnosticism deal with knowledge. Theism and atheism relate to belief.
Agnosticism, as defined by its creator, Thomas Henry Huxley, is similar to skepticism. It’s a means of examining reality that says, “show me”. Show me the evidence that leads to a certain conclusion, show me the process of getting from point A to point Z that supports the contention that point Z is true. Knowledge should be based on truth and truth claims should be examined skeptically/agnostically to judge their merit.
Atheism is a rejection of the beliefs of those who claim that there are or have been gods. We do not accept the explanations and substantiations offered by believers in support of their beliefs.
I am an agnostic atheist. Agnosticism is the tool I use to examine truth claims and atheism is the conclusion I’ve reached in the matter of belief in gods.
Religious belief encourages shifting the blame, avoidance of responsibility. You can pray for the president to die and blame it all on god, or the Book, or the god’s evil twin/nemesis. Superstitious beliefs encourage putting the blame for our shortcomings on the alignment of the stars, our karma, crystal vibrations or breaking a mirror. It’s a common human tendency to think more highly of ourselves and when forced to acknowledge a failure to live up to our self-image, to find something to blame that on. In others words, to avoid responsibility. Religious belief offers lots of scapegoats. Sacrificial lambs, if you will. They pay for your sins so you don’t have to. How convenient, how irresponsible.
When you strip away the supernatural and superstitious you are left with the inescapable conclusion that each of us is responsible for ourselves. We ought to own both the positive and negative within us.
Gods don’t ask people to kill other people people kill people and blame it on their god. God doesn’t hate anything, people hate things and claim that their god shares their opinions.
It’s pathetic to use religion as an excuse for inhumane behavior. We who do not believe hold every person responsible for their own words, thoughts and actions.
After nearly 20 years on an impersonal commercial strip, the Cathedral of Christ the King moved to a quiet residential neighborhood in the northwestern edge of this metropolis. Church leaders were eager to be part of a community.
Then, on Palm Sunday 2008, they started ringing the church bells every half hour during the day.
The complaints soon began, so church leaders cut back the tolling to once per hour. They put up Styrofoam to muffle the sound. But they didn’t see how they could stop tolling the bells. “We ring our bells as a part of our worship, just like singing, praying and preaching the Word of God,” they wrote in a statement.
The only force that could silence the bells was City Hall.
Prosecutors filed two charges against the head of the church, and last month Bishop Rick Painter, 67, was convicted of disturbing the peace.
Some communities, wary of bells, parochial schools and bustle, have tried to keep out churches with zoning changes and public hearings. But officials with the Alliance Defense Fund, a religious liberties legal group representing the church, said the case is the first they know of in which criminal law has been used to keep a church quiet.
“It’s frankly a little bit astonishing,” said alliance attorney Gary S. McCaleb, contending the case violates the church’s 1st Amendment freedom to practice its religion. “It’s very clearly an expression and outworking of their faith.”
But Phoenix officials and some of the church’s neighbors see it differently. “It wasn’t an isolated incident. It happened repeatedly,” said City Prosecutor Aaron Carreon-Ainsa.
Al Brooks, who lives behind the church, offered a more vivid description. “We were living in a bell tower.”
Due to an error, the first bells rang at 6 a.m. on Palm Sunday rather than at 7 a.m. as intended. The bells rang the hours and sometimes played hymns. They rang for no longer than one minute and fifty seconds, every half-hour, until 9 p.m. Neighbors began coming in to talk to the church soon after.
Painter said the church was sensitive to the complaints. They eventually cut back to hourly bells, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. They took a sound reading and found the bell registered 67 decibels — the volume of a regular conversation.
Some neighbors liked the bells, church leaders said. They heard from people who set their clocks by it, and a postman who used it to time his rounds.
But, Brooks pointed out, none of those people lived next to the bells. He and other immediate neighbors contacted a company that manufactures electronic church bells to ask what distance they should be played from residences. The response: 400 feet.
Brooks’ house is 40 feet from the building with the bells.
The trial in front of a municipal court judge lasted only a few hours. In the end, Judge Lori Metcalf gave Painter a 10-day sentence — suspended as long as the bells remained quiet and the bishop stayed out of trouble.
She permitted the ringing of bells only on Sundays and certain church holidays. (Source – L.A. Times)
Here’s what I don’t get. Why the “only on Sundays” exemption. The complaint wasn’t over what day of the week they were ringing the bells. I don’t see where the story implies the bells rang on any other day of the week. Evidently they only rang them on Sunday. It was the frequency of their ringing that was being challenged.
I use to live a block away from a Viet Namese church. They broadcast their services over loudspeakers on their roof clearly aimed out at the community. I considered it rude, let alone presumptive. They never asked if I wanted to listen to them chanting and singing. The only saving grace was that Viet Namese is a musical language, so it was unbearable to a lesser degree than had it been Fred Phelps or the Pope.
Could you imagine being an atheist living across the piazza from the Vatican? Oy vey.
I despair when I encounter people like this in RL and on the net. They should be the punchlines of jokes, they ought to be caricatures. But they’re real, they really exist, really vote, really have kids and most likely an active sex life. THAT RIGHT THERE PROVES THERE’S NO JUSTICE IN THIS LIFE!!
I feel so sad for humanity knowing people who “think” like this are still around. These are the guys who fly planes into buildings, or would if they could and if Christian fanatics had as big a pair of balls as the Muslims. Instead they kill doctors and innocents, justifying it by blaming it on god, using an idea to excuse their inhumanity.
Beliefs like these stifle human progress, they retard our evolution. Religious belief is essentially retarded (note: I’m not calling believers retarded, not explicitly anyway). It can never advance in understanding past its origin 2000 years ago (or less depending on the religion). At the time Christianity was invented, for example, it proclaimed itself to be the ultimate truth, the zenith of knowledge. Implicit in that belief is the sad fact that nothing more could be added to the “wisdom” in the Bible. Access to further knowledge and understanding of our universe was closed. Everything you needed to know, would ever need to know, was in the Bible. Of course not just anyone could read and interpret the holy writings. We needed a priest class to act as intermediaries between just the words claimed to be god’s and humanity. Others claimed to be intermediaries between the god itself and humanity. Lay people, ministers and theologians have been at each other’s throats ever since.
Humanists and atheists don’t accept limitations on knowledge. We confess our ignorance of so much. But we, like everyone else, have a standard that has to be met when it comes to what we’ll accept as truth. Not absolute truth, conditional truth is as good as it gets. Our standards are high, our tolerance for bullshit low. If we’ve listened to what you have to say (and I don’t know an American who hasn’t heard what Christians have to say), and we’ve dismissed it as inadequate, don’t be obnoxious and try to imply there’s any aspect to your religion we haven’t already considered and discarded. It’s a done deal. Unlike Christians, we don’t want to answer 21st century questions with 2000 year old answers. Humans have developed tools and techniques unknown to ancient goat herders that allow us to answer questions we didn’t even have 5 years ago.
Yet humanity, by and large, prefers to embrace superstitions rather than face realities.
At some point in the (near, I hope) future the psychiatric community is going to have to admit that religious belief is a potentially harmful delusion.
Religious belief has caused parents to turn against children and children against their parents. Differing religious beliefs have caused some of the most violent and deadly wars humanity has suffered. Religious belief has produced as much or more damage to humanity as it has good deeds.
Too often we try to soft peddle our attitude toward religious belief, we don’t want to offend. We’ve had too many people blaming their religious beliefs for their inhumanity recently. It’s unacceptable. We shouldn’t accept religious belief as an excuse for inhumane acts.
The church can judge its own by its own standards, I don’t care. But its affect on people is a contributing factor of the crime, not an excuse for it.
I think I use the term radical rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously.
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