Does Ath*ism have a future? NEVER!

[Guest TrueMetis]

Atheism specifically, or lack of religious participation?

I should like to think that most ordinary individuals belongs to the "Just don't care" camp.

According to this about 26% don't believe in a God. My link Not sure how reliable it is though. The 2001 Statscan report says that 16.2% of Canadians have no religion which includes many catagories. StatsCan

[eyeball]

I think this idiot has been here before.

He reincarnated?

[wyly]

I think this idiot has been here before.

he has... new name same shitte

[wyly]

According to this about 26% don't believe in a God. My link Not sure how reliable it is though. The 2001 Statscan report says that 16.2% of Canadians have no religion which includes many catagories. StatsCan

a lot of people still lie about religion preferring to keep their atheist beliefs to themselves for fear of a backlash from friends and family...and many agnostics are "chicken atheists" saying they're unsure takes the pressure off admitting atheism...as the boomer generation dies off atheists will begin to dominate our society's direction, we're following a European trend where some countries have a 70, 80 and 90% atheist populations...

[Bonam]

People are shedding beliefs in supernatural entities at a rapid rate. The growth of the number of people who do not believe in god is more rapid than the growth of any religion by leaps and bounds. For example, consider this data for the US:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Religions_of_American_adults

Atheist+Agnostic:

1990: 14 million

2001: 29 million

2008: 34 million

138% growth in 18 years

Christians:

1990: 151 million

2001: 159 million

2008: 173 million

14% growth in 18 years

10 times faster growth in lack of religious belief. Religion is a fading force that belongs in the dustbin of history, and will get there sooner than some might think.

[bush_cheney2004]

....10 times faster growth in lack of religious belief. Religion is a fading force that belongs in the dustbin of history, and will get there sooner than some might think.

Maybe yes...maybe no. Islam is growing...not fading.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/worldrel.htm

[GostHacked]

Wait, we've seen this flick before already, right?

[Guest TrueMetis]

Seems like a youtube video is an appropriate response.

[maple_leafs182]

Debunking religion doesn't mean you can debunk god.

I kind of understand the whole Christianity thing now.

I don't think god is a super being or anything like that but god is love, forgiveness, honesty, hope, faith. And following God isn't worshiping a man in the sky, its following your heart and loving others. God is the right side of our brain.

I think I finally get what is going on in the world, it's the same thing that is going on in our heads. Western society represents the left side of our brain. It believes in rules, laws, and structure. The Middle East and around there is the Right side of our brain. They are more religious.

Right now both sides are at wars trying to suppress each other. The same battle is going on in all of our heads whether we are conscious of it or not.

Humans have a dualistic nature, we should be embracing both sides.

We are all made up of atoms, everything is, we are just the end result of frequencies speeding up and slowing down the vibrations of these atoms to form shape. We are all apart of this same energy force, we are all the same. This energy is God. or you can call it the Universe. They are the same thing.

[Bonam]

Debunking religion doesn't mean you can debunk god.

I kind of understand the whole Christianity thing now.

I don't think god is a super being or anything like that but god is love, forgiveness, honesty, hope, faith. And following God isn't worshiping a man in the sky, its following your heart and loving others. God is the right side of our brain.

I think I finally get what is going on in the world, it's the same thing that is going on in our heads. Western society represents the left side of our brain. It believes in rules, laws, and structure. The Middle East and around there is the Right side of our brain. They are more religious.

Right now both sides are at wars trying to suppress each other. The same battle is going on in all of our heads whether we are conscious of it or not.

Humans have a dualistic nature, we should be embracing both sides.

First, you don't seem to have a very good conception of neuroscience. The left and right sides of the brain, while they do differ somewhat in functionality, are deeply interconnected and can both contribute to a variety of thought patterns. Secondly, that which you attribute to the "right side" of the brain is not god or religion, it is thought to do with emotion. Emotion can arise perfectly well without any religious influence. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, joy, pleasure, happiness, sadness, all these and many others exist without needing a religious frame of reference.

We are all made up of atoms, everything is, we are just the end result of frequencies speeding up and slowing down the vibrations of these atoms to form shape. We are all apart of this same energy force, we are all the same. This energy is God. or you can call it the Universe. They are the same thing.

Pseudo-scientific nonsense.

Edited April 22, 2010 by Bonam

[maple_leafs182]

First, you don't seem to have a very good conception of neuroscience. The left and right sides of the brain, while they do differ somewhat in functionality, are deeply interconnected and can both contribute to a variety of thought patterns. Secondly, that which you attribute to the "right side" of the brain is not god or religion, it is thought to do with emotion. Emotion can arise perfectly well without any religious influence. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, joy, pleasure, happiness, sadness, all these and many others exist without needing a religious frame of reference.

I know the brain is interconnected. Fear is generated in the left side of our brain, Love in the right. God is love. Nothing to do with religion. God is love, or what people refer to as following god.

Pseudo-scientific nonsense.

"Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter". -Albert Einstein

It isn't nonsense.

The Right side of our brain is responsible for the left side of our bodies. Our hearts are on the left side of our bodies. You can feel love in your heart, that feeling is god.

Bill hicks was awesome.

"How about a positive LSD story, that would be newsworthy. Don't you think? Anybody think that? Just once, to hear a positive LSD story. "Today, a young man on acid, realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves... here's Tom with the weather".

Edited April 22, 2010 by maple_leafs182

[Guest TrueMetis]

"Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter". -Albert Einstein

It isn't nonsense.

It's nonsense and I doubt that qoute is actually from Einstein.

[Bonam]

It isn't nonsense.

Trust me, when it comes to matter and energy, I know nonsense when I see it.

[maple_leafs182]

It's nonsense and I doubt that qoute is actually from Einstein.

Frequencies and vibration create form

And yes Einstein did say that. Einstein wasn't atheist.

[Bonam]

Frequencies and vibration create form

What do you think that video shows? It is a simple matter of the matter coming to the energetically favorable configuration following the least action principle. That whole phenomena is easily explained and can be derived from first principles on paper in about 15 minutes using the formalism of Lagrangian dynamics. The shapes you see are simply the normal modes of the oscillation given the boundary conditions and forcing frequency.

There is nothing mysterious or supernatural going on there, it is all easily understood linear phenomena. Those are nothing more than steady state solutions of the wave equation.

Edited April 22, 2010 by Bonam

[maple_leafs182]

here watch this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTo1QSrdBGM

[Bonam]

here watch this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTo1QSrdBGM

Sigh, so much nonsense. It's sad that people fall for this stuff. Particularly blatant is the part where he goes on about how galaxies are formed and kept together through "sound". Now, you don't have to be a scientist to know that this is BS. Even a typical laymen should know that sound cannot propagate through space, it needs a relatively dense medium (such as air, water, solid matter, etc) to propagate through. Without such a medium, there can be no sound, and thus it can play no role on galactic scales since space is not filled with a dense medium.

[Handsome Rob]

And yes Einstein did say that. Einstein wasn't atheist.

If you actually read up on einstein quotes, and not just quote him directly without the context, I think you'll find that Einstein's "god" was the physical laws, properties and perfection of the natural universe.

It's up to how one views things though, I don't believe he actually ever directly discussed it. I'd say string theory & quantum mechanics are after his time though.

[GostHacked]

When threads like this keep getting made, it makes atheism stronger !!!!

[kimmy]

See? I told you I have the gift of prophecy.

Kimmydamus vindicated again.

-k

[ToadBrother]

If you actually read up on einstein quotes, and not just quote him directly without the context, I think you'll find that Einstein's "god" was the physical laws, properties and perfection of the natural universe.

It's up to how one views things though, I don't believe he actually ever directly discussed it. I'd say string theory & quantum mechanics are after his time though.

Einstein was a Deist. In other words his beliefs, such as they were, would offer little comfort to theists or atheists, though both groups have long tried to assert that he was one of them. At any rate, you won't find a single published scientific paper by Einstein talking about supreme beings and so forth. Whatever his own personal beliefs, his science was profoundly in the world of empirical reasoning.

Edited April 22, 2010 by ToadBrother

[maple_leafs182]

It's not the sound, it's the frequencies.

Air, water, solid matter, they are all the same thing. They are energy, atoms.

When you play a computer game, what do you see, colours, maybe some people and trees, but that is only on the surface. A game is more then what you see on the screen, it's lines and lines of code the computer then interpretes and displays it on the screen.

That is how our brains work, it sees all these atoms vibrating and interprets them to see the physical world as we see it.

[Oleg Bach]

Faith and belief is hope..remove hope and you remove the future...atheism is hopeless and hoplessness always leads to a depressive end...sinisterism is literally sin...or going the left when the flow that leads to life is right and righteous..There is no such thing as super natural just high natural..the universe consists of laws based in physics and super physics....good law - God law ...common sense..death and atheism are the same thing..both have no future.

[Bonam]

Faith and belief is hope..remove hope and you remove the future...atheism is hopeless and hoplessness always leads to a depressive end

There is nothing hopeless about not believing in a mystical all-powerful entity.

[maple_leafs182]

There is nothing hopeless about not believing in a mystical all-powerful entity.

There is an all powerful entity, the universe.

The only thing that is real is consciousness.