World Religions - Atheism Discussion Thread

[ronchamblin]

Makes good sense JayBird.

There seems to be a weighing or balancing process of the good and bad consequences of believing, as man does indeed have spiritual needs.  And humans sometimes need help during trying times.... help which can often be found in belief in various religions. 

I find myself wanting to occasionally remind people of some of the bad consequences of belief, so that they don't get too deeply lost in the imagined or real good of it.

And I agree that in any conflict such as that in Egypt there are "several" dynamics causing havoc, only one being religious.

[If_I_Loved_you]

I will never give up on God. He has never given up on me. I truly feel sorry for the non-believers. Because right before my death I will be at peace with myself, and my soul heading to heaven. And to the Non-Believers you too can be saved by just saying this prayer "Lord Jesus in heaven, I recognize that I am a sinner. I need You in my life. Thank you for dying on the cross for me. Forgive me. I accept you as my savior and Lord. Guide me, lead me, inspire me to be the person you want me to be. Show me how to follow in Your steps. Through Jesus' name I pray. Amen."

[ronchamblin]

I will never give up on God. He has never given up on me. I truly feel sorry for the non-believers. Because right before my death I will be at peace with myself, and my soul heading to heaven. And to the Non-Believers you too can be saved by just saying this prayer "Lord Jesus in heaven, I recognize that I am a sinner. I need You in my life. Thank you for dying on the cross for me. Forgive me. I accept you as my savior and Lord. Guide me, lead me, inspire me to be the person you want me to be. Show me how to follow in Your steps. Through Jesus' name I pray. Amen."

I understand where you are coming from IILY.  I can't go there.  Keep on truckin.  In the end, in some fashion, part of you and me will meet, after returning to the mother earth from which we came, after mixing with matter formerly used by others.  Part of us will meet as rearranged and recycled matter somewhere in the universe, to be mixed and perhaps borrowed again for a spell by other living creatures.  We are all made up of recycled matter, borrowed for an average of 80 years or so from the universe.   

[If_I_Loved_you]

I will never give up on God. He has never given up on me. I truly feel sorry for the non-believers. Because right before my death I will be at peace with myself, and my soul heading to heaven. And to the Non-Believers you too can be saved by just saying this prayer "Lord Jesus in heaven, I recognize that I am a sinner. I need You in my life. Thank you for dying on the cross for me. Forgive me. I accept you as my savior and Lord. Guide me, lead me, inspire me to be the person you want me to be. Show me how to follow in Your steps. Through Jesus' name I pray. Amen."

I understand where you are coming from IILY.  I can't go there.  Keep on truckin.  In the end, in some fashion, part of you and me will meet, after returning to the mother earth from which we came, after mixing with matter formerly used by others.  Part of us will meet as rearranged and recycled matter somewhere in the universe, to be mixed and perhaps borrowed again for a spell by other living creatures.  We are all made up of recycled matter, borrowed for an average of 80 years or so from the universe.

You're right my body will blend back into the earth. But my soul will be in heaven with Jesus. 

[ronchamblin]

Found this article on Slate.com... via Huffington Post.  The issue has been brought up on this forum occasionally. I'll have to think more about the idea of taxing churches before I arrive at opinion.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/22/churches_should_be_taxed_then_everyone_can_speak.html

We Should Be Taxing Churches by Matthew Yglesias

Amelia Thomson-Deveaux has a great piece about religious groups that are trying to remove restrictions on church-based electioneering. She suggests that rather than gutting the rules, there's a simple fix, "Religious leaders who want the liberty to endorse candidates can give up their churches' tax deduction."

I would go one further. Let's tax churches! All of them, in a non-discriminatory way that doesn't consider faith or creed or level of political engagement. There's simply no good reason to be giving large tax subsidies to the Church of Scientology or the Diocese of San Diego or Temple Rodef Shalom in Virginia or the John Wesley African Methodist Episcopal Zion church around the corner from me. Whichever faith you think is the one true faith, it's undeniable that the majority of this church-spending is going to support false doctrines. Under the circumstances, tax subsidies for religion are highly inefficient.

What's more, even insofar as tax subsidies do target the true faith they're still a pretty bad idea. The basic problem with subsidized religion is that there's no reason to believe that religion-related expenditures enhance productivity. When a factory spends more money on plant and equipment then it can produce more goods per worker. But soul-saving doesn't really work this way. Upgrading a church's physical plant doesn't enhance the soul-saving capacity of its clergy. You just get a nicer building or a grander Christmas pageant. There's nothing wrong with that. When I was young I always enjoyed the Grace Church Christmas pageant. But this is just a kind of private entertainment (comparable to spending money on snacks for your book club—and indeed what are Bible study groups but the original book clubs?) that doesn't need an implicit subsidiy.

Meanwhile, nobody thinks churches and other religious institutions should silence themselves on the important issues of the day. On the contrary, discussing moral action is at the heart of many religious enterprises. And much moral action plays itself out in the arena of politics. So trying to say that churches should get subsidy when they don't endorse candidates is de facto a kind of subsidy to religious doctrines whose views happen to lack strong partisan implications. So if your faith says "abortion should be illegal and spending on the poor should be increased and it's too bad neither candidate supports that" you're golden, but if your faith says "abortion should be legal and spending on the poor should be increased so good for Barack Obama" suddenly you're in trouble. That's perverse. Just make everyone pay taxes.

[Garden guy]

Ive been a proponent of taxing business...a church is a business like any other business..it a haven to hide money ...their bible tells them a rich man will not enter their heaven.

[Garden guy]

And think of all the good that could have been done if 90% of the money that came into churches actually went to help instead of paying for those lighthouses..building and salaries...now that would be something special...im an athiest but my grand father was a church of god minister for 60 years and never got paid

[If_I_Loved_you]

And think of all the good that could have been done if 90% of the money that came into churches actually went to help instead of paying for those lighthouses..building and salaries...now that would be something special...im an athiest but my grand father was a church of god minister for 60 years and never got paid

Your Grand Father did get paid he is in Heaven this was his reward.

[Cheshire Cat]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/09/08/220450752/science-v-religion-let-s-be-civil?utm_source=npr&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=nprfacebook  ( click link for full article)

A few years ago, over dinner, a friend and fellow academic "came out" to me as a theist.

The conversation later struck me as quite funny. Only in my exotic academic enclave, I thought to myself, would two Americans have a conversation in which the Christian theist "came out" to the atheist Jew. In most American communities, my beliefs would be the anomalies, to be revealed selectively and with caution.

A few weeks ago, writer Virginia Heffernan made a similar in a post at Yahoo! News:

    "At heart, I am a creationist. There, I said it. At least you, dear readers, won't now storm out of a restaurant like the last person I admitted that to. In New York City saying you're a creationist is like confessing you think Ahmadinejad has a couple of good points. Maybe I'm the only creationist I know."

The response was characterized in The New York Times as "." One blogger described Heffernan's post as a "." Among the on Yahoo! News were charges of being "intellectually vapid" and offering "the intellectual equivalent of a ditry [sic] bomb."

Of course, the vitriol goes both ways; it isn't just believers who sometimes face a hostile reception when they voice their beliefs. and face in various forms, some of it "."

Issues about science and religion have become so politicized and polarizing that it's hard to find public forums in which people with different commitments can meaningfully engage in discussion and debate. You know, respectful conversations, ones in which we interpret each other charitably and don't simply assume that those who disagree with us are foolish, immoral or just plain stupid.

I'm not arguing for a middle ground in which we all compromise. The best position isn't necessarily the one in the middle, or the one that wins by majority vote. But I do think we need a "charitable ground," if you will — some shared territory in which we recognize that other people's religious and scientific commitments can be as deeply felt and deeply reasoned as our own, and that there's value in understanding why others believe what they do

[ronchamblin]

AlterNet / By Amanda Marcotte 
Are Religious People More Depressed?
A new study finds a high correlation between religiosity and depression.

September 19, 2013     
While non-religious people tend to reject religion because they find the evidence for a supernatural deity unconvincing, a new study shows that rejecting religion can be good not just logically, but emotionally.

While previous studies had suggested some emotional and social value to being religious, a new study that examined a huge number of people from around the world discovered that being religious is a risk factor for depression.  As explained by the Huffington Post, over 8,000 people from different countries from the UK to Chile, had their levels of religiosity measured. The study covered various economic and social groups and looked at the relationship between religiosity and depression.

The researchers found that religious people were more prone to depression, with rates of developing depression in places like the United Kingdom being three times as high for believers than non-believers. Studies like this are merely measuring risk factors and not necessarily suggesting a causal relationship so much as suggesting to clinicians traits to look out for when determining a patient's chances of developing depression. However, the fact that the finding was both cross- and intra-cultural suggests that there may be more going on here than a simple correlation.

Is there anything about religion that might make people more prone to depression? Or is it that people who are prone to depression are more likely to be religious?

The latter is certainly an intriguing possibility. It would make a lot of sense if people who are prone to depression find themselves drawn to religion, precisely because it offers the kind of hope depressed people often find difficult to muster by themselves. This is particularly true when one considers how religion imagines hope as a thing external to the believer. All the believer is required to do is believe and follow a set of rules, religions like Christianity promise, and they will go to heaven.

Depression is described as a state where the sufferer experiences "feelings of helplessness, hopelessness and worthlessness and of being out of control." Depressed people have a hard time looking on the bright side of life, and muscling up that optimism that allows non-depressed people to feel confident in their ability to go out and conquer the world. It's not a coincidence that religion offers exactly what is missing in a depressed person's life.

Take Christianity, for instance. It promises that God loves you, that he has a unique plan for you, that you can exert control over your life through prayer and good works, and that even if things are bleak now, there is a promise of another life beyond where things are perfect. If you can work yourself into believing it, that might sound very much like a cure, especially if you're not aware the feelings you're suffering are clinical depression—which is a common dilemma for people suffering it.

Certainly there's some reason to believe that if society protects people against some of the worst causes of depression, such as the fear of falling into poverty, that society will have more atheists in it.  Stable, egalitarian societies repeatedly prove to be places where the atheist message takes off really well. We know that on a national level, if people feel like they have control over their lives and there's hope in the here and now, those nations tend to have more atheists. So why wouldn't that be true on an individual level?

Most atheists, including myself, like to believe we came to the conclusion that religion is not true and that there are no gods simply through rigor and logic. What this study may suggest, however, is that we're underestimating the role our emotional states play in making us at least willing to hear atheist arguments. When you feel good about yourself, you're less likely to need to hear there's a God who does the loving of you for you. If you feel hope about tomorrow, the promise of heaven isn't quite as tempting—or you're less likely to be perturbed at the idea of death being forever if the life you're living today is pretty good. If you feel you have some control over your life, you're not going to see any need to beg a supernatural being to intercede on your behalf.


Interesting little article on depression as related to religion.  Cheer up everyone.   

[If_I_Loved_you]

And the rest of the story left out why?

For those of us who want to both help people leave religion and improve the public image of atheists, this understanding of why religion so often appeals to people is critical. Instead of being angry with religious people for believing, it's useful to consider that the hope that religion offers might seem like a lifeline to people who are hurting badly, and ask if there's anything atheists can do to offer similar kinds of hope.

Indeed, one major advantage atheists have on their side is that there's no reason to believe that religion alone is actually helping people. After all, religious people have higher rates of depression, suggesting that while they may hope religion will make them feel better, it's often not working.

Luckily, more atheists are beginning to take seriously the idea that atheist activists need to be talking more about mental health, and reaching out to people who have mental health issues and getting them the evidence-based help they need. Some atheists, like Greta Christina and JT Eberhard have opened up about their own struggles with mental illness. Instead of offering prayer and heaven as answers, they point their audiences to more proven methods for getting help, such as therapy and the use of medication under a doctor's supervision. Indeed, atheists are uniquely able to speak to the issue of getting help for depression, because they can speak directly about the environmental and biological causes without getting bogged down in talking about spirituality.

http://www.salon.com/2013/09/20/are_religious_people_more_depressed_partner/singleton/

[If_I_Loved_you]

Are atheists mentally ill?

By Sean Thomas Religion Last updated: August 14th, 2013

Thanks to a couple of surveys, it's being put about in certain circles that atheists have higher IQs than believers. That may or may not be the case, but one problem with this argument is that, if you accept "average group differences in IQ", you get into all sorts of sinister debates which bien pensant atheist Lefties might find less to their liking.

So let's not go down that unhappy road. Let's dispense with the crude metric of IQ and look at the actual lives led by atheists, and believers, and see how they measure up. In other words: let's see who is living more intelligently.

And guess what: it's the believers. A vast body of research, amassed over recent decades, shows that religious belief is physically and psychologically beneficial – to a remarkable degree.

In 2004, scholars at UCLA revealed that college students involved in religious activities are likely to have better mental health. In 2006, population researchers at the University of Texas discovered that the more often you go to church, the longer you live. In the same year researchers at Duke University in America discovered that religious people have stronger immune systems than the irreligious. They also established that churchgoers have lower blood pressure.

Meanwhile in 2009 a team of Harvard psychologists discovered that believers who checked into hospital with broken hips reported less depression, had shorter hospital stays, and could hobble further when they left hospital – as compared to their similarly crippled but heathen fellow-sufferers.

The list goes on. In the last few years scientists have revealed that believers, compared to non-believers, have better outcomes from breast cancer, coronary disease, mental illness, Aids, and rheumatoid arthritis. Believers even get better results from IVF. Likewise, believers also report greater levels of happiness, are less likely to commit suicide, and cope with stressful events much better. Believers also have more kids.

What's more, these benefits are visible even if you adjust for the fact that believers are less likely to smoke, drink or take drugs. And let's not forget that religious people are nicer. They certainly give more money to charity than atheists, who are, according to the very latest survey, the meanest of all.

So which is the smart party, here? Is it the atheists, who live short, selfish, stunted little lives – often childless – before they approach hopeless death in despair, and their worthless corpses are chucked in a trench (or, if they are wrong, they go to Hell)? Or is it the believers, who live longer, happier, healthier, more generous lives, and who have more kids, and who go to their quietus with ritual dignity, expecting to be greeted by a smiling and benevolent God?

Obviously, it's the believers who are smarter. Anyone who thinks otherwise is mentally ill.

And I mean that literally: the evidence today implies that atheism is a form of mental illness. And this is because science is showing that the human mind is hard-wired for faith: we have, as a species, evolved to believe, which is one crucial reason why believers are happier – religious people have all their faculties intact, they are fully functioning humans.

Therefore, being an atheist – lacking the vital faculty of faith – should be seen as an affliction, and a tragic deficiency: something akin to blindness. Which makes Richard Dawkins the intellectual equivalent of an amputee, furiously waving his stumps in the air, boasting that he has no hands.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100231060/are-atheists-mentally-ill/

[ronchamblin]

IILY ... I offered the post 185 because I thought it interesting.  As for your last offering via Sean Thomas ....Thank you for your interest and attention to it. I would like to respond but don't have the time at present, and doubt if I ever will... considering the extremes in thought labor to which I would have to go in order to make an impact upon a mind obviously cultivated and shaped for decades by a religious system which, by its very nature, is protected from any intrusions of truth.   

[If_I_Loved_you]

IILY ... I offered the post 185 because I thought it interesting.  As for your last offering via Sean Thomas ....Thank you for your interest and attention to it. I would like to respond but don't have the time at present, and doubt if I ever will... considering the extremes in thought labor to which I would have to go in order to make an impact upon a mind obviously cultivated and shaped for decades by a religious system which, by its very nature, is protected from any intrusions of truth.   

RC you made me smile and laugh when you talked about "intrusions of truth?" I believe in God and you will never be-able to change my "mind obviously cultivated and shaped for decades by a religious system." Amen 

[ronchamblin]

IILY ... I offered the post 185 because I thought it interesting.  As for your last offering via Sean Thomas ....Thank you for your interest and attention to it. I would like to respond but don't have the time at present, and doubt if I ever will... considering the extremes in thought labor to which I would have to go in order to make an impact upon a mind obviously cultivated and shaped for decades by a religious system which, by its very nature, is protected from any intrusions of truth.   

RC you made me smile and laugh when you talked about "intrusions of truth?" I believe in God and you will never be-able to change my "mind obviously cultivated and shaped for decades by a religious system." Amen 

Absolutely.  I agree that there is not enough time remaining in your life to change your thinking from Christianity, as you've been taught apparently from birth, beginning perhaps with your first babysitter, the myths and stories of the 2,000 year old revealed religious system.  Within your mind, embedded throughout the deep molecular and neuronal structures of memory, along with the first children's stories conveyed by caring adults, are the symbols, stories, hopes, and myths of Christianity.  The latter, because of the comfort and mental stability given to you, has over decades grown stronger within, and therefore has become less vulnerable to the onslaughts of any truths offered by science, or any truths of nature or common sense. 

In some measure, I envy your happiness, as you are set for life, apparently satisfied to end your days within the world of Christianity.  I wish you increasing comfort and mental stability as you progress through life .... a stability buttressed by your ignorance of many truths around you.  But.... not to worry.... as mankind is fortunate that you and most of your fellow believers in the myths of Christianity, are not like some Muslims who are able, in their passion to believe, to interpret scripture so as to find cause to inflict suffering or death upon those who do not believe as they do.