Metal Reviews

What difference does that make?
Behavior is still a choice, ergo, fair game.

I'm going to side with Frig and say that I make no positive pronouncements about the universe etc.

I don't dislike Islam insofar as it can be an emancipatory group. However when people submit to it ignoring human rights it's a little disheartening. Hinduism and Judaism really don't bother me. The Nation of Islam, i.e., Malcolm X not really Farrakahn, was pretty awesome. They were willing to say what MLK said but was ignored for. MLK became very anti-statist yet that's whitewashed out of history nowadays. MLK's dream wasn't about being tolerated it was about living in a country which he had a stake in.

Selective hate, then. Just as I thought.
Next. the NoI is a racist organization, but according to typical liberal thinking, racism is just fine when it is directed towards Whites... self-loathing must really suck.
Funny how the only ones expected to be "colorblind" are those of European heritage.

BTW, a lot of things about MLK are "whitwashed" out of history nowadays.

So, the "human rights" abuses, like stoning rape victims, is " a littel disheartening", eh?

hahaha.

Religion doesn't really claim "knowledge" either, though. We believe that a supernatural power (God) exists. We don't really "know" that it exists. The same general principle applies to whatever religious doctrine you follow.

It makes a dogmatic statement about ethics, metaphysical structures, etc. The atheist merely refutes the religious claims due to lack of evidence. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan

Where is the evidence that god doesn't exist?
Saying god does NOT exist is just as an extraordinary claim as saying one DOES exist.

No, because the theist is the one who makes the highly improbable claim that god exists and is bound by the burden of proof to provide evidence for his claim. There is a difference between making an un-provable claim and refuting one.

I think "challenge" is a better word than "refute" in such a case. Because to "refute" a claim means to prove it false. The atheist, by demanding evidence (or, more accurately, evidence that he feels necessarily leads to the conclusion being drawn), isn't really proving the claim to be false. He's just questioning its validity.

I don't think Carl Sagan was saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to be true." He was (rightly) implying that, unless strong enough evidence is presented for an extraordinary claim, it's completely reasonable to question its validity. Sagan was a true skeptic in every sense of the word.

Surely atheists (should) submit to scientific rationality, which means you assume that God doesn't exist until evidence emerges to show he does.

Logically, you can't "prove" he doesn't exist, because you can't prove a negative. I can't prove that mice don't have wee little parties in my fridge whenever the door is shut, although it seems improbable because the bulb in my fridge has gone. Why would mice want to party in the dark?

I believe that god does not exist, and the burden of proof isn't on me, frankly. Arguing for the absence of an enormous man in the sky who has a book of rules to follow is more logical than arguing for his existence, plus all the punishments that are doubtless due me for not following El Bible. I can't prove he's not there, but I highly doubt it.

Not that I want to get dragged into Metal Reviews Religion War 72, but this argument really annoys me every time I hear it. If you say something exists, then it's up to you to prove that it does, not another person to prove that it doesn't. If I said that there are magical invisible purple unicorns living in New York City, somehow I doubt that when a dissenter asked me to provide proof, everyone and their mother would start saying "it's up to you to proof that the magical purple unicorns don't exist." So no, saying that a deity that noone has seen or heard and who is just one among tens of thousands of deities that people have believed in over the millennia exists is not as extraordinary a claim as saying that this deity does not exist. And it is more extraordinary because it's a statement based on faith, which is the whole point of modern religion, so I don't know where this whole "evidence" thing is coming from.

Wellllllllllllllll, that's not exactly what we believe in. But let's not get into that right now.

Which is another big difference between "Atheist fundamentalists" (hate that term) and religious ones. Were evidence for God's existence to emerge, we would accept it and change our minds. No matter how much evidence we find for a world view different than that in the Bible, the Christian fundie will never change his mind.

Again, the atheist claims that there is no god, or does the American Heritage dictionary have it all wrong?
That is as big a claim as the belief that god exists... so the burden is just as much on the atheist to back up those claims.
BTW, the atheist refutes, the religious believe...
using the same soft language, why should Christians have to prove something that they believe, whilst atheists do not have that same burden?

can you explain the universe, or how it originated and where it starts and ends, outside of pure theory?
Why not? It exists, doesn't it?

I rather like some types of radical christianity, e.g. early Quakerism and the Diggers. All that stuff about the Spirit Within, and God = Reason is awesome, and completely contrary to the "subservient" tendencies that I often think of religion as having.

Seriously, read this (by my all-time political hero, Gerrard Winstanley), and tell me that God cannot be awesome.

http://www.rogerlovejoy.co.uk/philosoph ... ggers2.htm



(which is pretty forward thinking for the mid-17th century)

For the record, I am playing devil's advocate here. I am not even the slightest bit religious; I just think that it is hypocritical to claim one side has the burden of proof while the other can get away withmaking huge claims without that same burden.

that and how Christianity = bad, while Islam, etc. is "emancipating"...

I would argue that both sides have the burden of "justification." Not really the burden of proof. You can't prove a negative, so the burden is pretty well lifted from the atheist. But you can't prove God's existence either (if you could, He'd need to be bounded by human reason, at which He wouldn't be God!). So, really, neither side has the "burden of proof" IMO. But both sides have the "burden of justification." Specifically, the theist needs to justify the validity of his belief. While the skeptic needs to justify the validity of his skepticism.

I think any religion can be either oppressive or emancipatory depending on the context.

I saw this really interesting presentation at some academic conference. The guy had taken the assumption than Christian Evangelism was inherently a conservative force, and proved quite the opposite: That in poorer areas, being an Evangelical was statistically more likely to make you vote liberal, which seems very counter intuitive.

It just goes to show that in different contexts religions take on very different meanings.

The basic essence of any religion is the spiritual. The nature of our own existence and why we exist. Regarding what Frigid was suggesting about the "Biblical worldview", I think that issue only really applies to discussions about topics like Creationism vs. Evolution or whether the Great Flood was actually a worldly flood. But, as agno-atheist (and leading skeptic) Michael Shermer points out, science can't contradict religion. The two search for completely different truths (Science? Naturalistic truth. Religion? Metaphysical/spiritual truth). And, thus, they shouldn't be "mixed and matched."