Discussion»Questions»Holidays» It is Monday the 2nd of October here in Australia, Last night on television I saw my first two ads for Christmas, is this insane?
Totally insane - but understandable, we don't do Halloween or Thanksgiving. It's called CORPORATE GREED.
This post was edited by Slartibartfast at December 30, 2017 7:52 AM MST
Here in the U.S. I will accept Christmas ads after Halloween. I do not want to see any Christmas stuff before that (and ideally I don't want it to start until after Thanksgiving).
The best atheist historians now agree that He definitely did exist, and that He probably said some of the things attributed to Him (embellished, like the monologues of Socrates who also never wrote anything himself) - they simply dispute the alleged miracles. "Antiquities of the Jews" by Flavius Josephus has been obviously and badly edited, but removing all references to the "Galilean healer" makes an unreadable mess of his account of the fourth decade.
Just curious if you were brought up in a very religious household, or were abused by a very religious person, or were exposed to something horrible related to religion. You seem to go out of your way to berate it and those who believe. No need for a history of all the awful things done in the name of religion. In all honesty, I don't know a whole lot about the subject. It just seems to strike a very personal chord with you.
I personally have not had any bad experiences through religion but I know of many who have and when you consider that people are willing to brainwash their children and even kill others all in the name of something that there is not one shred of evidence to support, in my opinion for two thousand years it has brought nothing but tears and the crosses to plant on the graves. At present I am living in Australia, the reason for this is that I have a 13 year old son who was born in Indonesia, the only real choice there for education is a state school, which spends a lot of time teaching Islam or you can go private to a Catholic/Christian school and I leave it to you to guess what they spend much of their time teaching. In actual fact it is illegal (yes you can be jailed) unless you have one of six Indonesian government approved religions, quite recently the Governor of Jakarta (the capital city) was imprisoned for blasphemy, of course it is only a coincident that he is of Chinese decent and is not Muslim, I give this as an example of how religion can be used to influence so much in our day to day life, even to removing a democratically elected official to whether or not I can buy a beer.
Certainly understandable how this would affect your point of view but do you totally discount any positive aspects of religion and, whether real or total fantasy, the value people feel it's had in their lives? I won't go into detail because it's very embarrassing, but during an extremely painful time in my life, something others would consider completely ridiculous brought me great comfort and literally helped me to survive. I never do understand the vitriol, the lack of respect in religious debate. Particularly since there are no definitive answers and minds are rarely, if ever changed. Sharing personal experience is fine, but I don't get the need to crap on other people's beliefs.
No I do not totally discount the positive sides of religion and I am glad that some people feel it has helped them be that help real or imaginary. My problem is when religion seeks to control lives, not by any god but by men who claim to be special, who claim to know what happens after death, who claim special knowledge as to what their particular sky fairy wants, it is with these people that the danger is to be found, these people and the ones stupid enough to believe what these other human beings say, or to put it another way, “Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” ― Steven Weinberg
I personally have no reason to suppose that a god, any god, past or present, has ever existed but given enough evidence (of which there is so far none) I could change my thinking but for me to believe that any man is in direct contact with such a god, well that would take a miracle.
If you have the time then I suggest you read Thomas Paine's (he was a believer in god) Age of Reason or you could listen to it here, I know it is a marathon listening session but you could try bit by bit.
Slartibartfast 