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Bradski
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Whether one can class something as ridiculous would depend on the evidence presented. PA’s is a hypothetical so no evidence.is available. But we both know the evidence provided for Zeitoun, so we can class it as such.
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Aloysium
Guest
I had never heard of Zeitoun Egypt.
Apparently:
100,000’s describe seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Some simply saw lights.
There are all sorts of explanations:
I don’t have the time and motivation to go beyond the first pages of Google, probably because I have prejudicially determined that I will come to no answer. But, the phenomenon seems really interesting. The explanations range from the religious, to the psychological, sociological, and the physical. Tectonic lights? All you get are the weird (UFO, angel, skeptic, etc) sites on searches.
Too ridiculous to investigate? Hardly.
Apparently:
100,000’s describe seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Some simply saw lights.
There are all sorts of explanations:
I don’t have the time and motivation to go beyond the first pages of Google, probably because I have prejudicially determined that I will come to no answer. But, the phenomenon seems really interesting. The explanations range from the religious, to the psychological, sociological, and the physical. Tectonic lights? All you get are the weird (UFO, angel, skeptic, etc) sites on searches.
Too ridiculous to investigate? Hardly.
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Pallas_Athene
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And don’t forget, he was about to get married. Hardly a normal state of mind.
Once he gets back to normal, he will realize that dead people do not reach out of the grave and do not turn on appliances.Many people don’t like hypotheticals because those expose the irrationality of their beliefs. There is only one restriction on hypotheticals, namely that they should not be logically impossible.
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tonyrey
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“a more **cheerful **note” sums up the atheist’s morbid view of life! It hardly reflects “a basically hopeful and cheerful disposition”… Camus was far more perceptive in his view that death is “the supreme abuse” (for those who reject the possibility of an afterlife).
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PRmerger
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Are you a professional skeptic whose raison d’etre is to investigate phenomena for supernatural causes?
No?
Then…
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PRmerger
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I don’t know what this means, Bradski.
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PRmerger
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There’s that closed-mindedness again.And don’t forget, he was about to get married. Hardly a normal state of mind.
You can’t be a scientific investigator, and claim to have a goal of improving our understanding of the true nature of things, yet dismiss one possible way to understand our world.
That would be like Fleming refusing to consider food as a possible source for antibacterial properties because “food does not stop bacteria from multiplying.”
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Charlemagne_III
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Camus and Sartre both in their fiction and philosophical writings focused on the experience of nausea as an emotional state appropriate to atheism. Camus likewise focused on suicide as the ultimate issue every atheist has to explain away. That being so, the honest atheist does not suppose that his life will be full of fun and good cheer. It is significant that Camus’s atheism seemed to be softening before his tragic car crash, and that Sartre as he approached death suddenly took a great interest in religion. Meaning in life cannot be assigned to life by us. It has to be assigned to life by God. Anyone who rejects this idea is assuming the function of a god. Talk about lack of humility.
But the assumption that we can always assign our own meaning is always absurd, because we did not create ourselves and assign ourselves our own meaning.
When the atheist talks about being cheerful, he is exactly like the man whistling his way down a dark and sinister alley. It is all pretense that there is nothing to fear in life, nor at the end of life. :
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tonyrey
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A delightful image, Charlie, which captures the absurdity of belief in absurdity! :tiphat:
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tonyrey
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Charlemagne_III
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Exactly. Where does philosophical relativism get off being so cocksure of itself?Dogmatism is a form of mental rheumatism!
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Pallas_Athene
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Why do you think that two atheists represent the views of ALL the millions of atheists? Let me assure you, they do not. Just like Torquemada did not represent ALL the Catholics.
But you guys keep on bringing up Camus and Stalin and Mao and the Khmer Rouge as examples of the horrors of atheism. The quintessential “straw man” argument. This is why you will get no respect. There are many very respectable believers, and there are many despicable, dumb and intellectually dishonest Christians.
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tonyrey
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The post has nothing to do with atheists have or have not** done** but with the ultimate issue every atheist has to face:
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Charlemagne_III
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I’m quite sure they don’t since there are only several doctrines that unite almost all atheists:
No God.
No soul
No afterlife
How can you live a cheerful life under the assumption there is no God. I maintain that at least Sartre and Camus were honest enough to admit that an absurd existence produces not fun, but ultimately nausea.
The stats are in. People in religious countries are far less suicidal than in countries dominated by unmitigated secularism. How does that prove the cheerfulness of atheism?
Whistling in the dark is a well known form of rationalizing our worst fears.
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icamhif
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Again, where is your source for this statistic?
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Bradski
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Hey, look. I found some stats too.
The murder rate in the U.S. is off the scale and America is the most Christian of countries. So that says…well, what exactly?
There are nearly one million abortions in the U.S. every year and 83% of the population is Christian. So that says…well, what exactly.
Nearly 40% of prison inmates are Catholic and only 0.2% atheists. So that says…well, what, exactly?
Do you really want to play the statistics game, Charles?
The murder rate in the U.S. is off the scale and America is the most Christian of countries. So that says…well, what exactly?
There are nearly one million abortions in the U.S. every year and 83% of the population is Christian. So that says…well, what exactly.
Nearly 40% of prison inmates are Catholic and only 0.2% atheists. So that says…well, what, exactly?
Do you really want to play the statistics game, Charles?
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Charlemagne_III
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Charlemagne_III
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This is a meaningless non-sequitur.
Is it your contention that in America mostly Christians commit murder?
I assure you, being in the prison ministry, that very few prisoners avail themselves of that ministry.
Moreover, prisoners who are not religious will claim to be, since they will naturally assume it’s in their interest to lie to the parole board than tell the truth.
Most killing in America is gang related. Are you saying the gangs are religious.
Do you really want to go there, Brad?
Just doesn’t ring true, does it?
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Pallas_Athene
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First, these are not “doctrines” - atheism has no “doctrines”. Second, that is what atheism is all about: “the lack of belief in anything called supernatural”. But that is all. Being an atheist has no predictive value on one’s general disposition, on being kind or cruel, on being helpful or selfish on being cheerful or depressed, smart or stupid. No predictive value whatsoever!
No problem there. The God you describe is not someone we consider “loving and caring” but someone who is indifferent - at best; if not outright malevolent and cruel.
Whatever you “maintain” has absolutely no significance.
You commit the old fallacy: “post hoc ergo propter hoc”. Even if it were true that atheists are generally “depressed”, which is simply incorrect, you would still confuse “correlation” with “causation”.
There is no fear of “afterlife” for atheists. For believers it might be a fearsome prospect to be thrown into the “eternal fire”. As the scripture says: “it is fearful to fall into the hands of the (kind and loving) living God (who loves you more than you will ever know)”. You are the ones who go periodically to confession, because you are scared of hell, of eternal damnation. One little unconfessed and unrepented mortal sin, and off to hell you go. Such a belief would lead logically to chronic depression, if it were “real”. But it is not. You all believe that you (personally) will get to heaven. Hell is for others. Now that is what I call “whistling in the dark”.
And I would like to point you to the moral theology forum, where you see the fear, the depression, the guilt of those poor people (mostly teenagers) who give in to the natural desire of alleviating their red-hot libido breathing down on their neck and perform a not just neutral but beneficial act of a little masturbation. They are the ones who are depressed and it is not a correlation but direct causation of their “theism”.
You see Charlie, it would do you a world of good if you actually studied the subject which you wish to argue. There is another old saying: “it is bad enough to be thought to be a fool, but it is infinitely worse to open your mouth and confirm it”. And I say this with benevolence, and being helpful toward you. (Of course there are some nincompoops who will consider it an “ad hominem”)
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