Atheists for Ron Paul - Let's Gather for a Rational Discussion before the Debate tonight.

[jmdrake]

He is trying to generate controversy so he can debate anyone with religious beliefs, and when the debate has ended, he will continue screaming and shouting from the rooftops hoping that someone is listening to him.

When he goes home after he realizes everyone hates him, he will go to reddit, go to r/Atheism, make a post about it and will continue the never-ending cirlclejerk.

All that, due to what are probably problems developing from childhood, and his everlasting need for attention.

+rep

 

[RiseAgainst]

Wikipedia says atheism is the absence of faith. There's a difference between having faith that there is no higher power, and having an absence of faith that there is.

In the theoretical Godless society where they have never considered the idea of a higher power, the people there aren't "agnostic". Agnosticism is the belief that religion is unknowable, but they don't even know what religion is, so how can they be agnostic? They are atheist, because there is a distinct lack of belief in any deity.

The difference between agnosticism and atheism is this: Agnostics consider religion to be plausible, but unknowable. Atheists consider religion to be absurd.

You don't have to conclusively rule out absurd ideas to be an atheist. Religion to me is an absurd idea.

If we were to live in a godless society, and I was on a small island with just one other person there with me, and this other person were to declare he just met a man that had magic powers... but couldn't prove it.... I would call him a crazy person. This wouldn't make me 'agnostic'... this would simply make me a person who doesn't believe ridiculous ideas that people tell me.

Your belief in the absence of a deity without proof is faith. Whether you mask that faith with an adjective such as "absurd" is of no objective relevance to the fact that what you display is faith.

 

[TheTexan]

Your belief in the absence of a deity without proof is faith. Whether you mask that faith with an adjective such as "absurd" is of no objective relevance to the fact that what you display is faith.

Rev9 has faith that no mime with fuzzy rabbit slippers broke into my apartment.

Does that count as a belief system?

 

[kuckfeynes]

Couple question for any believers. Not so much concerning the existence of a creator, but rather every other specific claim put forth by religion beyond that.

Given our comparative insignificance in the universe by unfathomable orders of magnitude, what makes one certain that this creator is particularly human-centric?

Could there be (or have been) other worlds of life as advanced as ours, as it would seem by all odds, and if so, does one creator endow each with this belief that THEY are the chosen species to be saved? Does every planet get a visit from this creator's offspring in their own image and likeness?

Or is our place, with at least millions or billions of similar places in the universe, at any point in the construct we perceive as "time," really THE place?

 

[RiseAgainst]

Couple question for any believers. Not so much concerning the existence of a creator, but rather every other specific claim put forth by religion beyond that.

Okay.

Given our comparative insignificance in the universe by unfathomable orders of magnitude, what makes one certain that this creator is particularly human-centric?

There is no certainty (by certainty I assume you mean something approaching scientific certainty), however there are good reasons to believe that he is, namely that we were created in his image. I don't rule out, however, that he (or she, as I also have no certainty with regard to gender) isn't.

Could there be (or have been) other worlds of life as advanced as ours,

Yes, there could. I believe there are, but that is a personal belief.

as it would seem by all odds,

This sounds strangely like a statement of faith, rather than science...

and if so, does one creator endow each with this belief that THEY are the chosen species to be saved?

Supposing such another species did exist, I would imagine you would have to ask them, not me.

Does every planet get a visit from this creator's offspring in their own image and likeness?

Again, I believe this question would likely better be answered by the inhabitants of the other planets.

Or is our place, with at least millions or billions of similar places in the universe, at any point in the construct we perceive as "time," really THE place?

It could be. If you are looking for scientific facts, you won't find them. That is why it is called faith. If God were scientifically verifiable, and displayed himself to each and every human each and every day, what sort of faith would it take to believe in him? Would believing in him at that point demonstrate any sort of love at all?

 

[TER]

Oh, and bxm042--who cares if Jesus of Nazareth performed miracles? If so, it was two thousand years ago, right? A better question is, was Jesus wise? And here is a place where you can decide for yourself:

http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html

You should tread carefully with the Gospel of Thomas, and remember it is not canonical and has never been considered as such. This of course does not mean there is no value in it, but just a word of caution that some of this writing contains doctrinal innovation started by certain sects which were not in communion with the Church and not according to the faith once for all handed down to the saints.

As for wavelengths and experiential anomalies, their beauty points toward the divine, for all beauty is divine. And the data and evidence and hypotheses and ultimately theories formulated by men have as their concording endpoint to be Truth.

The Apostles did not know calculus, but knew Christ, and as such, had no need for calculus. For by knowing Christ, anything that calculus could ever possibly acheive is unto Christ. For anything that the cosmos were ever made of, or thought of, or reasoned for, finds it fulfillment in the Source, Creator, and Sustainer of creation, in God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, Who alone rules over all. He Who hung the universe over dark matter and Who was Himself hung on a tree in order to save it. Just as every moment since the day of Adam to birth of Christ led to that moment in time, and now for us, every moment leads to the end of it when He shall stand as Judge over all of creation.

Lord have mercy on us sinners! Give heed to the cries of Your children on that day and have mercy upon us sinners!

 

[lilymc]

Here are a couple questions for the atheists. Do you believe absolute truth exists? Do you believe that there are indeed some things that are absolute, yet completely immaterial?

 

[Revolution9]

That video is quite apropos coming from you. You generally have a difficult time following conversations, too caught up in your own internal narrative.

I've seen it all pal. I juts glaze right over things as unworthy of comment and focus on that which serves the purpose of my commentary. I don't play down dead end alleys with low level philotrollers either. You offended I didn't engage you or somethin'? Anything need clarifying... Be glad to oblige as best I can

Rev9

 

[Revolution9]

You should tread carefully with the Gospel of Thomas, and remember it is not canonical and has never been considered as such. This of course does not mean there is no value in it, but just a word of caution that some of this writing contains doctrinal innovation started by certain sects which were not in communion with the Church and not according to the faith once for all handed down to the saints.

As for wavelengths and experiential anomalies, their beauty points toward the divine, for all beauty is divine. And the data and evidence and hypotheses and ultimately theories formulated by men have as their concording endpoint to be Truth.

The Apostles did not know calculus, but knew Christ, and as such, had no need for calculus. For by knowing Christ, anything that calculus could ever possibly acheive is unto Christ. For anything that the cosmos were ever made of, or thought of, or reasoned for, finds it fulfillment in the Source, Creator, and Sustainer of creation, in God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, the Logos of God, Who alone rules over all. He Who hung the universe over dark matter and Who was Himself hung on a tree in order to save it. Just as every moment since the day of Adam to birth of Christ led to that moment in time, and now for us, every moment leads to the end of it when He shall stand as Judge over all of creation.

Lord have mercy on us sinners! Give heed to the cries of Your children on that day and have mercy upon us sinners!

Canon is man's interpretation of God's word. The Nag Hammadi contains works that were written at the time of Christ, prior and shortly thereafter. Much of the text considerations were common knowledge till the burning of The Library of Alexandria. I am non-denominational but I can certainly smell the smoke of satan or the incense of Christ and differentiate the two in any scripture I read. I also contend that as the kingdom is within me that I am responsible for interpreting according to my relationship and my cultural and experiential symbols. Your mileage may vary


Rev9

 

[ryanmkeisling]

Here are a couple questions for the atheists. Do you believe absolute truth exists? Do you believe that there are indeed some things that are absolute, yet completely immaterial?

They don't know what they believe, they want so bad to believe nothing, yet that isn't possible. Spirit is everywhere, science has now proven this, it is at the heart of every single one of the 73 trillion cells in our bodies. There are some really fascinating new studies in DNA, that it has memory and morphic resonance. We are closer to a creator than ever before, as ancient knowledge and mysticism meets quantum physics, the world is changing. It is incredible, but if you have no devotion or reverence it is lost.

 

[Wayreth]

Here are a couple questions for the atheists. Do you believe absolute truth exists? Do you believe that there are indeed some things that are absolute, yet completely immaterial?

Does absolute truth exist, no. Truth is a human construct, it is simply an unreachable end goal that we strive for to better understand the world around us through our perceptions. We can employ the use of the scientific method to increase clarity of our understanding by running repeatable and falsifiable experiments; however, even if a hypothesis ever achieves the status of theory, it can always alter overtime through the self-correcting nature of the scientific method. We can determine fragments of truth under certain conditions, which does not allow them to be applied to areas outside of their confines that absolute truth would allow.

And since immaterial things are all supernatural I wouldn't believe that absolute immaterial things exist. Sorry but it's a bit ridiculous as the question presupposes that I'd believe in something immaterial. If it was immaterial we could not observe it and therefor we could never know it exists. And being supernatural means it is not of this natural world. Again something unobservable. Whatever exists in this world is natural and has material form. And don't jump and say that is an absolute truth, as with anything i could never state i know something absolutely does not exist, it all relies under the constraints of our perceptions. But it is also laughable to claim something exists in absence of material form when it cannot be observed.

We are only able to make sense of this world because it is observable. Anything else is incomprehensible and if it is put into words it must become material. Any argument that insists on the immaterial simply is projecting the natural world onto the concept. Ever wonder why the gods of religions across the world exhibit human or animal appearances and human traits such as expressing emotion and goals? If they were truly separate from the natural material world why then do they exhibit what is observable?

Perception is also not an absolute truth, it is simply what we have to work with.

 

[WilliamC]

Yer all nuts, mathematics is the only way to know the mind of god.

Everything else is just feel-good emotionalism.

God is Math.

God in man is the ability to comprehend mathematics.

So forget yer holy texts and such and get to thinking about reality, about number, about math.

Is there a smaller natural number than one? If not then any subset of natural numbers containing one as the smallest member and satisfying the requirement that, whenever n is a member of the subset then so to is n*, it's immediate successor, then that subset is the field of natural numbers itself.

Is there an expression of infinity that is larger than the infinity of natural numbers? Since for any n there is always a successor n* given by n*= n + 1, then there are an infinite number of natural numbers. Thus the natural numbers constitute a set with an infinite number of members (an infinite set, call it omega), and since there is no number larger than infinity then there is no set that has a cardinality larger than omega (cardinality is the number of members in the set). So that's it, right? No, consider the power set of omega (all the possible subsets that can be created from the elements of set). The power set is by definition always of a larger cardinality than the given set (consider the finite set {1,2} with a cardinality of 2, the power set is {{}, {1}, {2}, {1,2}}, which has a cardinality of 4.) same principal applies for infinite sets, including omega. So the power set of omega, (let's call it alpha) has a higher cardinality than omega itself. So alpha is somehow more infinite than omega.

But wait, god is the alpha and omega, so he must be even more infinite than both! How can this be?

Do the math.....

 

[lilymc]

Does absolute truth exist, no.

Thank you for replying to my questions. I have to say, however, that I think maybe some atheists haven't really thought this through. The belief that absolute truth does not exist is self-defeating. If your assertion, "Absolute truth does not exist" is actually true, it would itself be an absolute truth. And obviously if it's an absolute truth, then it is self-contradictory and false. Think about it.

Truth is a human construct, it is simply an unreachable end goal that we strive for to better understand the world around us through our perceptions.

Wow, I don't know how you can say that. I've heard many atheists say that they believe morality is a human construct, but even hard-core atheists I've encountered don't believe that truth itself is a human construct. The universe exists, it's not a human construct, are you going to claim that the universe around us is a figment of our imaginations and doesn't really exist? You yourself exist, that is a truth. You didn't make that truth up. So, unless I've misunderstood your point, what you said is nonsensical.

We can employ the use of the scientific method to increase clarity of our understanding by running repeatable and falsifiable experiments; however, even if a hypothesis ever achieves the status of theory, it can always alter overtime through the self-correcting nature of the scientific method. We can determine fragments of truth under certain conditions, which does not allow them to be applied to areas outside of their confines that absolute truth would allow.

You can't even begin the scientific process without certain truths being in place, that science itself cannot prove. I'm talking about A Priori truths, which are self-evident. The scientific method is only one way of determining truth. The big mistake that I see atheists make is to think that science is the ONLY way to know truth. And what I think it funny is that atheists love to proudly proclaim science as the be-all end-all determiner of truth, and anything that science can't prove doesn't exist (Ok, maybe not all atheists are like that, but many are) and what they don't even realize is that science itself is rooted in certain philosophical truths that are outside the realm of science. They come first. So you atheists have faith without even realizing it.

And since immaterial things are all supernatural I wouldn't believe that absolute immaterial things exist. Sorry but it's a bit ridiculous as the question presupposes that I'd believe in something immaterial. If it was immaterial we could not observe it and therefor we could never know it exists. And being supernatural means it is not of this natural world. Again something unobservable. Whatever exists in this world is natural and has material form. And don't jump and say that is an absolute truth, as with anything i could never state i know something absolutely does not exist, it all relies under the constraints of our perceptions. But it is also laughable to claim something exists in absence of material form when it cannot be observed.

There are lots of things that are immaterial. I could list a whole bunch of things, but I want to talk about something in particular, that I think most atheists believe in. At least the ones who always say that "atheism is logical" and that belief in God is "illogical."

Do you believe that logic exists? (Other atheists here can answer this too, of course) Are you going to maintain your previous point that no absolutes exist, by stating that logic is not absolute? And where would you say that logic comes from?

We are only able to make sense of this world because it is observable. Anything else is incomprehensible and if it is put into words it must become material. Any argument that insists on the immaterial simply is projecting the natural world onto the concept. Ever wonder why the gods of religions across the world exhibit human or animal appearances and human traits such as expressing emotion and goals? If they were truly separate from the natural material world why then do they exhibit what is observable?

I already covered this. See above.

Perception is also not an absolute truth, it is simply what we have to work with.

Of course perception and truth are not the same thing. But we can know that truth exists, and to claim that it does not, or that we cannot know is self-defeating and illogical.

 

[Austrian Econ Disciple]

Does absolute truth exist, no. Truth is a human construct, it is simply an unreachable end goal that we strive for to better understand the world around us through our perceptions. We can employ the use of the scientific method to increase clarity of our understanding by running repeatable and falsifiable experiments; however, even if a hypothesis ever achieves the status of theory, it can always alter overtime through the self-correcting nature of the scientific method. We can determine fragments of truth under certain conditions, which does not allow them to be applied to areas outside of their confines that absolute truth would allow.

And since immaterial things are all supernatural I wouldn't believe that absolute immaterial things exist. Sorry but it's a bit ridiculous as the question presupposes that I'd believe in something immaterial. If it was immaterial we could not observe it and therefor we could never know it exists. And being supernatural means it is not of this natural world. Again something unobservable. Whatever exists in this world is natural and has material form. And don't jump and say that is an absolute truth, as with anything i could never state i know something absolutely does not exist, it all relies under the constraints of our perceptions. But it is also laughable to claim something exists in absence of material form when it cannot be observed.

We are only able to make sense of this world because it is observable. Anything else is incomprehensible and if it is put into words it must become material. Any argument that insists on the immaterial simply is projecting the natural world onto the concept. Ever wonder why the gods of religions across the world exhibit human or animal appearances and human traits such as expressing emotion and goals? If they were truly separate from the natural material world why then do they exhibit what is observable?

Perception is also not an absolute truth, it is simply what we have to work with.

Absolute truth does exist -- it's called logic and reason. As Rene Descartes said: I exist, therefore I am. Such is an absolute truth. Sometimes I lament the lost rationalism in modernity. It gave rise to the toxic Statist world. Bring back the Enlightenment and Rationalism!

 

[acptulsa]

Similarly calling atheism a religion is also silly.

I have an absence of belief in absurd invisible mimes, and an absence of belief in absurd higher powers watching my every move. I am an atheist, and absence of belief does not a religion make:



Atheism = Not a religion.

Figured it out. You are definitely an atheist. You prosthelytize more than any Jesus Freak I ever saw. That could only mean you found religion.

You believe there is no God, deeply, and for some reason you think I should too. Sorry. But, hey. If prosthelytizing until you make a nuisance of yourself makes you happy...

 

[Revolution9]

Yer all nuts, mathematics is the only way to know the mind of god.

Everything else is just feel-good emotionalism.

God is Math.

God in man is the ability to comprehend mathematics.

So forget yer holy texts and such and get to thinking about reality, about number, about math.

You were going great till you admonished to forget scripture, for as you focus on math which is a correct measure you must understand that words are math based phonetics codified and organized and based on subatomic angular momentum, collision and deflection and built into our mouth and tongue as we are expression of the complexity of Universe which is atomic, subatomic and moving in nature/composed of vibratory phenomena....

Rev9

 

[TheTexan]

Figured it out. You are definitely an atheist. You prosthelytize more than any Jesus Freak I ever saw. That could only mean you found religion.

You believe there is no God, deeply, and for some reason you think I should too. Sorry. But, hey. If prosthelytizing until you make a nuisance of yourself makes you happy...

I'm glad you're not pretending to be logical about it anymore

And how is talking about atheism in an atheist thread prosthelytizing

and for some reason you think I should too

Negative ghostrider. Up to you, I don't care either way.

 

[WilliamC]

You were going great till you admonished to forget scripture, for as you focus on math which is a correct measure you must understand that words are math based phonetics codified and organized and based on subatomic angular momentum, collision and deflection and built into our mouth and tongue as we are expression of the complexity of Universe which is atomic, subatomic and moving in nature/composed of vibratory phenomena....

Rev9

Sorry, I don't use any type of vibratory phenomena where my mouth and tongue are concerned, I'm just funny that way

Some say god is infinity, but what about zero? Zero is actually the mathematical concept that is the most troubling, as division by zero is defined as meaningless, do not pass go, do not collect $200. But certainly god isn't meaningless, so maybe, just maybe zero is the anti-god, satan, the ultimate negative, and infinity is god, which is greater than anything else, but still can't help us with zero.

So I guess in the math religion you might have a split between the zero's and the infinities, yin and yang, good and evil, light and dark, binary and not binary, well, you get my point.

Or at least I hope you do, 'cause I sure don't.

But that's the fun thing with philosophy/religion/politics/poetry, you don't have to make any sense, you just have to sound interesting saying it.

Alas for me the entertainment value is fleeting, and I really am not out to make fun at others expense just 'cause they believe differently than me.

I'd much rather make fun at my own expense.

 

[Voluntary Man]

Figured it out. You are definitely an atheist. You prosthelytize more than any Jesus Freak I ever saw. That could only mean you found religion.

You believe there is no God, deeply, and for some reason you think I should too. Sorry. But, hey. If prosthelytizing until you make a nuisance of yourself makes you happy...

Atheism is NOT a religion!

.....it's a cult.

Get your facts straight.

 

[trey4sports]

But Rick Santorum says, we can't have a strong dollar without strong families, and a strong lord.