Are you an atheist?

Are you an atheist?


  • Total voters
    351
Ah, but that is what I asked. If we put aside the question of whether the supernatural exists or not, what tangible benefits do people obtain from their belief in the supernatural?

But those that do believe are already a type of person.

My ideas do carry some big weight. I am the one who designs the products. I am the one who builds them.

But limited to your company.

As to not needing everything to be proven before moving ahead, that one made me laugh out loud. You are clearly not a developer, because if you were, you would know that nothing, absolutely nothing, is known or proven or defined until AFTER the product has already been built and distributed.

Never claimed to be an Access devoper. But I have sold dbs to insurance companies. But they are not buying how I made it. They want the ideas etc.
 
Ah, but that is what I asked. If we put aside the question of whether the supernatural exists or not, what tangible benefits do people obtain from their belief in the supernatural?

But those that do believe are already a type of person.
I agree. But you still have not answered my question. If the existence of god, or the supernatural, cannot be proven, for whatever reason, then in order to be a believer you must choose (or be indoctrinated) to believe that there is a god. My question is, what is the tangible benefit of such a choice? I have already laid out in detail what I percieve to be negative affects of that choice. What are the positive affects? Your answer so far has been that salespeople that "believe" are more successful, i.e., sell more, make more, whatever. And I have responded that even should I accept your argument as true (which I don't), that is a pretty piddling benefit that I will happily pass by without thinking twice.
 
Alisa,

I have already said to you it is not just salesmen who have that as a job title.

It is not just about money...it is about getting a lot more of what you want.

Atheists in general need everything to be proved before they jump, thus they don't jump very often. Big achievments come by trying to impliment concepts.
 
Alisa,

I have already said to you it is not just salesmen who have that as a job title.

It is not just about money...it is about getting a lot more of what you want.

Atheists in general need everything to be proved before they jump, thus they don't jump very often. Big achievments come by trying to impliment concepts.

I think you would jump all over me if I said something about what "christians in general need." That comment aside, it sounds like you are trying to make some sort of argument that believers "get more of what they want" in life or achieve more in general. That is complete hogwash. "Beleivers" are severely underpresented among nobel prize winners. Are you trying to say that those who have won the nobel prize haven't made "big achievments"? Your words, not mine.
 
That is pretty harsh. I don't think that was warranted at all.

Just a thought, you have struggled with a wider meaning of faith, i and j and now sales.

Of course you useage isn't incorrect - its just very precise, but you don't seem to be making any effort to grasp what the other person means. Ok Brian disgrees with how Mike is using isales, but he acknowledges his intended meaning.

It wasn't supposed to be harsh, I was told to see a doctor earlier in the thread.
 
I must tell the wife, she thinks that she is just teaching 3 year olds to hold pencils, and recognise colours , plus few words and numbers.

Brian

Can I book a few lessons, I've been having a few senior moments myself - :p
 
I think you would jump all over me if I said something about what "christians in general need."

Can you find one post I have made thaty would indicate I am a Christian.

By the way it is a C and G when referring to the Christian/Islam/Judaism god.

god is as in...a god....


That comment aside, it sounds like you are trying to make some sort of argument that believers "get more of what they want" in life or achieve more in general.

Yes but mainly because of the type of person they are.

That is complete hogwash. "Beleivers" are severely underpresented among nobel prize winners. Are you trying to say that those who have won the nobel prize haven't made "big achievments"? Your words, not mine.

Alisa, you appear to have difficulty reading. Firstly, you seem to think I am Christian in belief. Also, there is no post I have made that said success is requires belief in a supernatural. Yasser Arafat was a winner:D
 
Just a thought, you have struggled with a wider meaning of faith, i and j and now sales.

Of course you useage isn't incorrect - its just very precise, but you don't seem to be making any effort to grasp what the other person means. Ok Brian disgrees with how Mike is using isales, but he acknowledges his intended meaning.

It wasn't supposed to be harsh, I was told to see a doctor earlier in the thread.
Paul, you are the one who doesn't understand what an imaginary number is, but did I take a personal crack at you? No I didn't, I just declined to argue the point. And since when is suggesting that someone has a mental illness not an insult?
 
Can you find one post I have made thaty would indicate I am a Christian.
I wasn't implying that you were personally a christian.


god is as in...a god....
or god as in . . . belief in the supernatural in general


That comment aside, it sounds like you are trying to make some sort of argument that believers "get more of what they want" in life or achieve more in general.

Yes but mainly because of the type of person they are.

In which case, belief has nothing to do with it, which is what you originally claimed.
 
Alisa,

From your thread starting post

and have always found it incomprehensible that other people can bring themselves to believe there is some supernatural being in the sky responsible for our existence, despite an overwhelming lack of evidence to support that belief.

Taking evolution in the strict sense as opposed to the general image, what is your explanation as to how life started? The flavour of your post would indicate that you have the answer or a close to the answer....
 
Taking evolution in the strict sense as opposed to the general image, what is your explanation as to how life started? The flavour of your post would indicate that you have the answer or a close to the answer....

I have already stated at least a dozen times in this thread that we do not have the answer to that question.
 
I think there is no shame in having a mental illness, much like there is no shame in having a cold or a broken leg. So its not an insult.

Anyway it was just used to refer to your use of language, its just something for you and your doctor to consider shoud you wish.
You did liken me to a schizophrenic in an earlier post? I questioned myself at that point, and we both dismissed it.

What gives you the impression I do not know what an imaginary number is? You are jumping to conclusions with no/little evidence.
 
I have already stated at least a dozen times in this thread that we do not have the answer to that question.

But you must surely have ideas on how life started. I would be staggered to think someone who was an evolutionist could park the first building block out of sight.

You said there is an overwhelming lack of evidence to support a supernatural so I assume you must have something for an idea/theory?
 
You did liken me to a schizophrenic in an earlier post? I questioned myself at that point, and we both dismissed it.

Paul,

I read this and cracked up laughing. This is very funny and quite clever.:D
 
With reference to sales.

An idea is useless without being put into practice. For that to happen it must be conveyed to others in a way that can be understood.

Unless of course you wish to keep your genius entirely to yourself. :p
 
With reference to sales.

An idea is useless without being put into practice. For that to happen it must be conveyed to others in a way that can be understood.

Unless of course you wish to keep your genius entirely to yourself.

You'll have to explain that for me.
 
Alisa, first, let me thank you for clarifying that you are not heading down the road of wanting to force your worldview on other people. I reacted strongly to that prospect because history shows when such arguments have been made in the past without forceful repudiations then sometimes people act on them with horrifying results. There's a cliche that, for evil to triumph, good (wo)men need only do nothing. I think there's truth to that.

Alisa said:
I will not respond directly to that except to say that the correlation between religion of the parent and religion of the child is close to 100%.

Alisa said:
I am saying that the empirical evidence shows us that the overwhelming majority of people do NOT choose against the faith of their parents.

Ok. Let's look at these claims and ideas directly.

First up. What is your source for this 'close to 100%' statistic?

Regardless of where you got it from, for this to be a scientifically defensible statistic it needs to be testable and repeatable by other observers.

I am an observer and I know a bunch of people in New Zealand and in the USA. At a rough guess I'd say I'm either well acquainted with now, or in the past, well over a hundred people or more. If I had to put a number on the relationship between the worldview of parents and children, I'd guess in my small sample that it would be somewhere around 60%, maybe 70% maximum. I personally know christians with atheist parents, christians with christian parents, atheists with christian parents, atheists with atheist parents, and a few other examples of differing worldviews (vitalist, buddhists etc).

Now obviously this isn't a scientific poll, but I can count, and the observations I've made in my lifetime just do not jive with your statistic. So I'm fairly sceptical of it. Either I've lived in a bubble of exceptional people my whole life, or the statistic just isn't universally true.

Alisa said:
Because if I had been born to practicing christian parents, I have no doubt that I would be agreeing with you rather than arguing with you today.

Don't sell yourself short. I personally know many kids raised by Christian parents who turned out to be athesists. Given the corelation between higher education and atheism that you mentioned earlier, I have no doubt that if you had higher education then you'd have had multiple opportunities to be subtly re-educated, or not, to the satisfaction of your own intellect and depending also on your ability to discern and evaluate the underlying philosophy being taught to you there.

Alisa said:
This tells us that our "choice" of faith is not really a choice, it is just chance.

No it doesn't. It just means that some choices are 'harder' to make than others, depending on your environment. I think that's true about many decisions we make in our lives. But the capacity to choose is still there if you care enough about the issue to examine the basis for your beliefs.

Alisa said:
When I consider it is only by twist of fate that I do or don't believe in (insert the name of any god here), it is clear to me that none of them can be "true" or "real".

Or that their are as many conceptions of what God is as there are believers and none of us have probably got it completely right. That doesn't mean there is no actual true God, or that faith in such is wrong, just that we should all recognize that our perceptions are strongly influenced by our culture, religious influences, and our own unique experiences. That is why taking a dogmatic approach to enforcing one's belief system on others is just plain arrogant and wrong in my opinion.

I'm not saying you're interpretation is wrong, just that there are other ways of viewing the same data. You opinion here is a reasonable interpetation, but it is not the only possible logical interpretation of that set of observations.

Alisa said:
My question is, what is the tangible benefit of such a choice?

You and my father would get along great! He likes to blame religion for all the world's ills too. ;)

I actually thought I had laid out a fairly substantial list of benefits in response to that question. If you want more than that, then think of the number of religious charitites that exist, past and present, to help the poor and ill who are either ignored or reviled by wider society. And although the crusades were generally evil, they did bring back to western europe treatises on medicine, science, and philosophy that had either been lost after the fall of Rome, or had since developed in the Arab world, which later formed much of the basis for the renaissance. Likewise, monasteries kept the written word and literacy alive in the dark ages when few kings could even read and write (Charlemaigne was a notable exception).

I could go on, but I don't really see the need. There is good in religion and faith. Anyone involved in religion would agree with that, and I'd be willing to bet that quite a few atheists would concede it without raising a sweat also. That there is also the potential for bad to occur when religion is subverted by people is not the point.

I could ask you the same thing. What are the tangible benfits of atheism over a religious worldview like mine? The very things that you likely would promote as 'strengths' of your worldview are probably the very things I think of as the weaknesses of it. I'm sorry you keep blaming religion for the world's ills primarily because I think you are taking aim at the wrong target: which, to my mind, ought to be humanity's hubris and and intolerance for people with differing views, and the mindless folly of the masses who follow people with strong views and bad attitudes.

Personally, I think the atheist worldview lends itself better to such leaders simply because they don't think they're answerable to a supreme being, and you folks don't even have to fake the appearance of it. But that's just an opinion.
 
I think Mike is correct. We are all in sales. Not necessarily selling products but in everyday life we have to sell our ideas, ourselves to our employers at least initially to get a job.
 
I think Mike is correct. We are all in sales. Not necessarily selling products but in everyday life we have to sell our ideas, ourselves to our employers at least initially to get a job.

Of course he's correct, but most of us would never be able to live on the commision we'd earn - :p

(That post by Craig was the longest since Kraj left...:p)
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top Bottom