This poster shows nothing but the staggering quantity of ignorance radiating from its creator(s). Which is not to say that it holds no bearing - I have to agree that the Big Bang Theory is not the greatest scientific theory ever created. Point being it is not the only possible atheistic belief. Claiming that all atheists believe that nothing exploded to create everything is like saying that every single person on this planet who believes in god is catholic. Does that claim come off as really fucking stupid to anyone other than me?
Any person who believes in one or more gods is lumped into this one gigantic category called Theism, and anyone who does not believe in a god is lumped into another category called Atheism. Just like Theism, Atheism has many different beliefs and theories, and is just as broad as Theism.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with people believing in one or more deities, however, I do have a problem with people trying to claim that I'm going to go to hell for not believing in a god, or more specifically, their god. If all religions claim that anyone who has a different religion than them is going to hell, then every single fucking person on this planet is going to hell.
Where you will be able to listen to Black Sabbath for all of eternity.P.S.
Entropy is fake.
8 comments:
Toward the end there, you're doing the same thing you complain that others do. You're lumping all religions together, although at least you've saved the wiggle room of saying "If all religions claim …" But they don't all claim that. So calm down.
I know that some fundamentalist Christians believe that unless you explicitly believe in Jesus, you go to hell, but the Church I'm most familiar wit, the Catholic Church most definitely does not believe that, and I think the same is true for most Christians. The crazies and the extremists always get the most press coverage, and sometimes the subtleties of theology are lost on reporters who aren't theologians and mainstream theology gets misreported, but the bottom line is that most Christians today would not say that you're going to hell if you honestly don't believe in God.
P.S. I hope things have been okay between you and your dad since you wrote the letter.
Thanks for clarifying. I have had very negative experiences with hardcore Christians personally. It just bothers me that people are so... pessimistic about the world.
I made this post because I had an argument about the topic.
Live and let live. :-) What about agnosticism? The "bi" in the battle against the two, lol.
@aek
I believe atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal concepts. Ones absence in belief in a god (atheism) is unrelated to ones ability to _know_ if there is a god.
Ergo I claim to be a weakly agnostic atheist which literally means that I have no belief in a god (ergo atheist) and i dont believe that I can know whether or not a god exists. Similarly you can be an agnostic theist -- you have a belief in a god but do not believe that you can _know_ that such a god exists.
In any case atheism does not prescribe something to come from nothing. The concept of nothing is meaningless when you talk about the big bang. Its _NOT_ the case that "nothing" was just there hanging out and then "something" came into this space -- its _literally_ that the space was the nothing (i.e. the singularity).
The point is that using intuitive arguments about what "reality" is like (i.e. physics) is _EXTREMELY NAIVE_. Our human intuition about "somthing" and "nothing" is completely constrained to our anatomy and sense of time -- both of which give us very little insight into what reality is really like. Go to the quantum level -- nothing behaves like it does at our level. Go to higher dimensions (if string or m theory is "reality") -- we can mathematically describe consistent systems with more spatial dimensions than our eyes can perceive.
Yet despite all of the challenges and problems that we are faced in reality just trying to reconcile our observation with reason and logic -- we "dumb humans" have to go off and create gods to satisfy our ape needs. We have plenty of "real" problems to deal with in describing reality before we can even get to speculating about nonsense space gods.
*le sigh*
Steve
I am very aware that our understanding of the universe is limited, I am a nuclear physicist, and I have studied string theory. It isn't really related to why I was upset, however, I do appreciate your comment.
I just think that I'd rather believe in what is visible, and that is science. I did accept agnosticism for a while but if a king allowed his people to suffer the way the supposed "god(s)" do, they would be overthrown, not worshiped. Why the difference?
"I just think that I'd rather believe in what is visible"
- what's so special about light?
I know you don't mean 'visible' as in reflects light, but you mean, I assume, what you can sense with your oh so flawless senses?
The thing that's so special without light is that it's visible. Without it, we would not have the sense of sight.
Of course the human senses are flawed, however, blind faith is fare more flawed than our senses.
Post a Comment