How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

I do not consider myself superior to others. I do consider religion to be deserving of ridicule. You assert that "no one knows..." yet the whole point of religion is that it claims to KNOW in the most absurd detail. People used to kill each other over the question I posed in the title of this thread. And I once saw two devout and otherwise peaceful Christians (one Catholic and one Evangelical) come to blows over an argument whether salvation was by works or by faith. This deserves ridicule, and is easy to ridicule. (FWIW, the Catholic in this case threw the first blow, but the Evangelical did not turn the other cheek.)

You've caught the Berman disease: accusing everyone you disagree with of hating you. I do not hate your non-existent god because it doesn't exist. And I don't hate people who hold ridiculous beliefs, though I do and I will ridicule those beliefs. And I do not consider myself better than the next person. Even when they hold ridiculous beliefs.

And this, Kow and others, is the crux of the matter: You people use your ridiculous religious dogmas to try to force other people to live your life style. You try (often successfully!) to deny basic human and civil rights to people based on your own narrow and ridiculous dogmas about what your god wants and cares about. You have thrust your ridiculous beliefs into the arena of public policy, and therefore made yourselves fair game for ridicule.

And now you cannot take that ridicule so you accuse us of hatred (hatred being the hallmark of religious bigotry) and you try to create a public ethos whereby ideas held in the total absense of any evidence or reason are by that very fact protected from criticism.

If I said there was a pink unicorn in my garden, and appeared to actually believe it, you'd heap ridicule on my head and have me locked up in a looney bin. Well, my friend, your god in the sky is just as lunatic a notion as a pink unicorn in the garden and ridiculing that lunatic idea is no longer taboo. Get used to it.

BTW, Muslims world-wide are trying to pass laws against ridiculing their lunatic religion. You are making common cause with them when you oppose ridicule of religion. And they would kill you for your beliefs if they got a chance. All I want to do is make fun of your beliefs so that future generations will leave religion in the trash bin of history and stop killing each other over their various answers to my question in this thread!

 

There's something to be said for funny hats.

If you are Jewish, you've violated the Kosher dietary restrictions. Most if not all Jews probably believe that those laws apply only to them since they are part of a covenant between them and the god who demanded that they worship only him. (And lots of Jews don't follow the Kosher laws anyway.) Christians reject all the Old Testament dietary laws, so a Christian would say you've done nothing wrong. Muslims follow the OT dietary restrictions, but do not analyze them as finely as the Jews do. They do not eat pork. But they would not care if a non-Muslim eats pork because the non-Muslim is going to hell anyway, so eating pork becomes moot.

So the consensus would probably be that you are not going to hell for eating pork, though I wouldn't brag about it at a PETA meeting.

 

The funny hats are the only good thing about religion, and sadly, many religions don't even have those.

Dogfriend beat me to it!

Faulty logic. You are confusing a process with the concept of a divine or supernatural creator. An atheist is not a person who denies that there are processes. Theism is the belief in gods or a god. Atheism is the absence of such a belief.

I am an atheist. For me, this means that I believe that there is no god. I do believe that the big bang probably occurred (there is a lot of evidence for it) and that evolution occurred and continues (there is overwhelming and indisputable evidence for it).

Therefore, your version of atheism (as denying processes) is a straw man. The belief you have disproved is one that nobody holds. You are merely playing with words, perhaps to be annoying. Of course, you have a right to be annoying. I delight in annoying people who hold ridiculous beliefs, and you have a right to ridicule my beliefs. But you have misrepresented what it is that I believe in.

You could prove that there is a god by defining the word "god" to mean the doorknob on your bathroom door. That's not much different than "proving" that "atheism" is wrong by defining atheism to mean something silly, as you have done.

 

Read his post again. Tom says that mocking serves a purpose because "People who take themselves too seriously are a danger to themselves and the rest of us."

FWIW I agree with him. So, yes, mockery and ridicule are very useful, especially when directed at ridiculous beliefs.

I believe that Tom exists. I cannot prove that he exists, though I suspect that he could prove that he exists. But based on the evidence of his posts, I believe he exists.

I'm an agnostic on the question of whether Berman exists. I neither accept nor dispute his existence. I think it's possible, but I have not yet seen sufficient evidence to convince me.

 

BTW Kow, you don't think people should make fun of religious beliefs. Do you think people should make fun of Nazism or racism or denial of the holocaust? These are all beliefs held by narrow-minded people, and those people are offended when their beliefs are made fun of. I say that anybody who believes all Jews should be killed, or all black folks should be slaves, needs to be ridiculed mercilessly. Yet these are "beliefs." If you exempt "beliefs" from ridicule you deny decent people a powerful weapon against intolerance. And I say that anyone who invokes religion (or any other stupidity, though it's invariably religion) to deny basic civil rights to gay couples or individuals also deserves to be ridiculed mercilessly.

If you take attacks upon your beliefs as personal, that's your problem. But freedom of speech gives us the right to dispute ideas any way we like.

 

You are correct. I made a mistake when I defined atheism as the lack of a belief. I should more properly have defined "atheism" as a belief system that does not include a god.

The waters are muddied a bit by the fact that actual belief systems range from very hard to very hard theism, with a very hazy boundary between soft atheism and agnosticism, to the point where some actual atheists consider themselves to be agnostics:

My definitions follow:

atheist: I believe there is no god.
soft atheist: I think there is no god, but I don't have a strong opinion on the subject.
agnostic: I hold no opinion on whether there is a god or not.
theist: I believe there is (are) a god (or gods).
soft theist: I think there's "something" out there, but I don't have an opinion about what it is.

Any person who substitutes the word "know" for the word "believe" is a nut job who does not comprehend the difference between beliefs and knowledge. Most fundamentalists fall into this category. They are absolutely certain that their religion is the One True Religion(TM) and they will not entertain the possibility that they might be mistaken.

But some people, understanding that we cannot know anything about such matters with absolute certainly, make a similar mistake as above and call themselves agnostics when they are actually atheists. They believe there is no god, but since they understand that they cannot know, they call themselves agnostics. The true agnostic is one who takes no position on the question of whether there is (are) a god (gods) or not.

My grandfather was raised Jewish in Russia and exposed to Christianity when his illiterate neighbor asked him to read the Bible to him. My grandfather's family were the only literate people in the village. He made up his mind that there was no god. When I asked him whether he believed in god, he answered "No" without hesitation. Yet he called himself an agnostic, because, as an educated man, he understood that nobody could know. But by that definition, everybody would be an agnostic and the word would serve no purpose.