The Religious Order of the Jedi

Maybe a Jedi could but those mind tricks are way beyond skill level 10 tasks.

Bingo - religions are not granted the right to be respected either. What bothers me is not a lack of recognition or glorification of atheism. Rather, I am bothered by the high horse that religions get onto regarding their legitimacy through attendance count and the scoffing at less mainstream activity (the aforementioned Scientologists, Wiccans, cults, etc.). If they would practice at home/church and not go on conversion missions, knock on my door asking if I've found Jesus or generally inhibit the rights of others ... then I would be content.

The only reason you find atheists making noise is because we either want everyone else to shut up or figure we can join in the noise-making, too. It is after all, an equal opportunity to exercise the right to express a belief. There are more atheists around today than is commonly believed, most just don't say anything to avoid the questioning or the judging that frequently follows.

Can you explain why you don't believe in Hindu gods?

I'm not quite sure how to respond to this.

Comparing gay marriage to driving on the wrong side of the road? A moment's reflection will easily answer the "why not?" question. The same for switching the roles of children and adults. No such luck on the gay marriage issue, though. Seems pretty obvious that all objections to it are rooted in religion, and that's a pretty lousy reason, in a free country.

First, the idea of a "free" country is rooted in the idea that anything that's not explicitly prohibited is permitted. So when something's prohibited, we are ethically obligated to come up with adequate reasons. Maintaining the status quo isn't one. Offense to religious sensibilities isn't either. So, in a free country, it's the prohibitionists that need to justify it.

And you missed my point when you comment on how little deserving of respect FSM and Jediism are. I didn't say they deserved respect - I said they should get at least as much respect as mainstream religion. In my opinion, none of them deserve respect.

In particular, a government that is constitutionally prohibited from making distinctions between religions is wrong to give tax breaks to churches. The US Constitution says the government cannot establish a relgion, but by adopting a tax law that says, in effect, "these are 'real' religions", and "these are 'cults'", they don't just establish one religion, but a whole host of them.

And let's not forget your misunderstanding of athiesm. It's not a "belief in nothing". It's the absence of a belief in something. These are not the same.

And being neutral on it? Intellectual cowardice.

There's essentially no credible evidence for the existence of any particular deity. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence against the existence of any particular deity.

Since religions claim all sorts of conflicting nonsense about deity, it's somewhat pointless to say that there's evidence against all of them. Deism says a deity created the world but isn't in the world, so there's no way for evidence of its existence or nonexistence to appear. Animism says that the deity is the world, so the existence of the animists deity is trivial - point and say, "See? There it is."

Theism, on the other hand, makes all kinds of testable claims - that prayer works, and that their deity favors those who worship, for example. We can (and have) make experiments to test these claims. Naturally, many believers were looking forward to the vindication of their beliefs. The experiments always come out showing no real effect, and the theists immediately start distancing themselves from them.

The point is that there's lots of evidence that the god of Abraham (whether interpreted through christianity, islam, or judaism) simply doesn't exist.

The agnostic stance is, therefore, indefensible. It's like saying, "there's no evidence that taking this aspirin won't turn me purple and give me cancer, so I won't take it, just to be safe." There's more than sufficient evidence to make a judgement.

And the whole "athiesm is a faith position" line is pretty tired, too. I'll admit that there are things an athiest must take "on faith" - that is, there are things we assume to be true without proof. For the most part, these are things that it would be hard to disbelive - we believe that rational thought processes are effective ways at getting at truth.

We all agree that rationality is effective at finding truth. Tell the most pious man that his daughter shoplifted and he'll demand rational proof. The religous believe there are "other" ways, and that some kinds of "truth" is not accessible to rationality.

When an athiest makes a judgement against religious faith, the complaint is not that it's a "faith position" - it's that there's no justification for the position, and often the position is intentionally obstructive.

This is why even the rare religious scientist is outraged by "intelligent design". It's offered as an "alternative explanation", but it doesn't actually explain anything. In fact, accepting it as an "explanation" actively prevents any further study of the subject.

So, no - athiests don't have more of a religion than they think. Generally, we've thought about it long and hard. It's the theists who believe without thought - as you yourself essentially admit in a later post. I've read serious theology by both christian and buddhist authors, and it's like night and day. The buddhists come across as having really thought it through and understanding what they're saying. The christians come across as guessing and wishing.

So, having surveyed the field, I'd say that the christians and muslims are among the least likely to be "right" about spiritual matters. Maybe that's enough to get you to go out and learn a thing or two about what others have to say. You clearly know nothing about even those who claim nothing more than that your beliefs are wrong.

Well, obviously, it all depends on who you ask, and it's a little difficult to fairly recognize whose credentials are suspect. To me, anyone who's not viewing it primarily as a historical document with no special status, is disqualified from holding a real opinion. But the theists will argue that I'm intentionally disqualifying people who are looking for "their" truth, and thus weighting the results in favor of "my" truth.

But, as Sam Harris says:

So there are at least a few religious folks in history who've approached it with an open mind and came to the same conclusions as the secular folks did.

Anyway, in general, all of the NT places most of the relevant parts of Jesus' life in Jerusalem, before the Romans sacked it in 70CE. The earliest existing copies of the NT texts are from around 400CE. So these are copies of copies of copies, at the very least. Textual analysis suggests the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) were written a little before the fall of Jerusalem - primarily because they prophesy the fall of the city, but don't crow about it happening. John was probably a little later - around 80CE is a typical estimate.

So these are all at least a generation after the "facts" they cover. Furthermore, Matthew and Luke appear to have very heavily plagarized from Mark and from another (lost) document the scholars call "Q".

So there are essentially "no" primary sources for the gospels. Even their authorship is in dispute. The names "Matthew", "Mark", "Luke", and "John" are basically guesses, based on their content, made by the early church leaders.

Most of the rest of the NT is made up of various letters, the majority of which are attributed to Paul of Tarsus, who ultimately defined most of the doctrine of Christianity (not Jesus, as the bible thumpers often assume). Paul never met Jesus. Rough estimates of the crucifixion - if it ever happened - would place it around 30CE. Paul's death is around 65CE, and he was easily healthy enough to be travelling around the world, so it's unlikely he was more than a teenager at the crucifixion.

With no more than an hour or so of reading, all of this stuff is in Wikipedia.

The problem is that the theists don't really care to know whether the book is historical. Objective study of christianity suggests its ultimate origin is having evolved from the Roman Mithraic cults. It's highly likely that Paul of Tarsus was an initiate of one (most Roman soldiers were, and he was a Roman soldier before his conversion). When christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it was by the decree of Constantine, who was himself an initiate of the Mithraic cults - and who didn't personally convert to christianity until his death bed, years later (and we only have the word of the church leaders of the time that he ever did - the same church that later faked a document in which Constantine granted the church a bunch of property in Rome).

There's plenty of study of the historical veracity of the bible, and it's pretty much always coming out looking bad. But like Popes Leo and Pius, they just plug their ears and say "I do believe in fairies."

Oh, I wasn't trying to suggest the census didn't happen. However, it would have been far more extraordinary for the census to have required people to travel to their "home town" to register, as the biblical accounts have it. So extraordinary that Josephus would almost certainly have commented on it.

And that's common issue in biblical history. There's an account in Hebrews of dead soldiers being brought back to life and returned to their wives - this is a pretty extraordinary event. So much so that you'd think there'd be a lot of contemporary comment on it. Yet no one other than the author of Hebrews seems to have noticed it. Paul of Tarsus also raised a man from the dead, again with no one else commenting on it.

But perhaps it was only the (presumably illiterate) soldiers and their families who knew, so most contemporaries didn't... but what about the battle of Jericho? The freakin' sun stood still for an entire day! You'd think there'd be some guy in India or China who'd have written, "On Tuesday, the sun stopped moving for a whole day - I wonder why?" Followed by much speculation on the part of his fellows. So we note that no one else seemed to notice it and we take the obvious conclusion that whoever wrote the book of Joshua was probably exaggerating a little.

I suppose we indirectly owe Thanksgiving tomorrow to some wankers that were not getting official recognition from the church of England. Those silly separatist pilgrims and their Puritanism!

If that trend (yeah, yeah, a trend of one *smile*) continues, maybe one day there WILL be an Interstellar Day of Peace where we all sit around feasting on stuffed extraterrestrial squid-creatures, watch interstellar football and parades.

Ironically, all those seeking religious freedom in the New World began persecuting each other (to death) for their differing views. Many discussions ago, it was argued that American government's recognition of Christianity was okay because it was the basis of many founding fathers. Using the "let's go back in time to our origins" justification, then clearly we should resume persecuting and killing those non-likeminded people because damnit, we sailed across the Atlantic to get away from persecution so we could persecute others. Right?

True. But nobody pretends they aren't. As opposed to the bible, which has no more claim to truth, but is granted such special status that even it's most outrageous claims are expected to be taken as true.

Dead men walking? The sun standing still? Plants existing before the sun? Snakes and donkeys talking? Men surviving for days inside the belly of a fish? Bread and wine literally turning into flesh and blood (and you eat that!)? Five loaves of bread and two fish feed five thousand people, with leftovers?

But when you say, "these things probably didn't happen", you're called closed minded. Perhaps this is closed-mindedness. But must I believe any nonsense because someone says it in a serious tone? That's not open-mindedness - it's gullibility.

As opposed to "actively seeking to prove"? The theist stretches rationality way beyond the breaking point to justify how the bible might have some remote possibiliity of being accurate, and simply refuses to accept the much simpler explanation that the people who wrote the thing had no better connection to "ultimate truth" than did Shakespeare or Poe.

As I said elsewhere, that's not open-mindedness - it's gullibility.