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Topic: American Atheists should Come Out of the Closet ! (Topic Closed Topic Closed) Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Ed Aycock
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 7:23am | IP Logged | 1  

It's funny, because if any of you frequent Facebook, there has been a really annoying, offensive trend of the whole "Like if you love Jesus, just ignore and scroll down for Satan" bullsh*t going on. I usually post something angry in the comments but I get ignored.

Imagine though if anybody did something about atheism. It wouldn't be one post like mine, it would be probably a lot of angry posts about how atheists are bad. If fact, on Twitter (oh my god, I need to ease up on the social media), somebody posted that 99.9% of atheists he'd met are angry and unhappy people to which an atheist replied "and 84.6% of statistics are made up on the spot."

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Aaron Smith
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 7:56am | IP Logged | 2  

It's funny, because if any of you frequent Facebook, there has been a really annoying, offensive trend of the whole "Like if you love Jesus, just ignore and scroll down for Satan" bullsh*t going on. I usually post something angry in the comments but I get ignored.

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I actually un-friended my mother on Facebook because I couldn't stand her constant religious posts. A decade ago, she said some horrible, judgmental things to me because she disagreed with something I was doing in my life (something which didn't hurt anybody and made me happy) and attacked me using her religion as ammunition. I've never been able to forget what that felt like. I can deal with being around her for a few hours every few months on holidays and such occasions, but being confronted with her face and her religious propaganda every time I turned on my computer was something I didn't want to have to see.  
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John Byrne
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 8:12am | IP Logged | 3  

I'd call myself an angry and unhappy atheist, yes. And what makes me so, is surveying the world around me and finding it mostly populated with people who have abdicated great portions of their intellectual responsibilities in favor of worshipping various invisible men in the sky -- their faith in which is largely based on only superficial "reading" of the "holy books" which are supposed to serve as their user manuals.

I look at the Middle East, for instance, and see hundreds, thousands of people fighting, killing, dying, all because they basically disagree over which side their imaginary deity parts his hair.

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Aaron Smith
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 9:01am | IP Logged | 4  

-- their faith in which is largely based on only superficial "reading" of the "holy books" which are supposed to serve as their user manuals.

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That's one of the most disturbing things about it. I've met many, many Christians with whom I've entered discussions/ debates about religion only to find that they've never read the entire Bible! People claim to believe that this one book is the irrefutable, absolute word of god....but it's not important enough to them to take the time it takes to read the whole thing? Yet they feel entitled to tell others to base their lives on what it says! 


Edited by Aaron Smith on 01 February 2013 at 9:01am
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John Byrne
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 9:24am | IP Logged | 5  

That's one of the most disturbing things about it. I've met many, many Christians with whom I've entered discussions/ debates about religion only to find that they've never read the entire Bible! People claim to believe that this one book is the irrefutable, absolute word of god....but it's not important enough to them to take the time it takes to read the whole thing? Yet they feel entitled to tell others to base their lives on what it says!

••

Ask an average Christian to tell you "The Christmas Story", and you will most often hear some variant on what Biblical scholars sometimes call "the Fifth Gospel". It's a confabulation of the most memorable parts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and tells a story which is not really to be found in its entirety in any of them!

Sometimes the lack of knowledge becomes downright pathetic, tho. All those people who have spent thousands, millions of dollars crawling all over Mount Ararat, looking for traces of Noah's Ark, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Bible actually makes no reference to any such mountain, and that the mountain which bears the name was selected and named quite arbitrarily, several thousand years after the supposed time of the Flood.

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Bill Conway
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 10:54am | IP Logged | 6  

Speaking of a "Christmas Story", we never see Ralphie and his family go to church on Christmas morning. I always wondered if that was some kind of atheist sub-text...
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John Byrne
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 11:21am | IP Logged | 7  

Speaking of a "Christmas Story", we never see Ralphie and his family go to church on Christmas morning. I always wondered if that was some kind of atheist sub-text...

••

Might have more to do with the original short story which forms the spine of the movie having been set at Thanksgiving!

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Bob Simko
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 11:28am | IP Logged | 8  

Speaking of a "Christmas Story", we never see Ralphie and his family go to church on Christmas morning. I always wondered if that was some kind of atheist sub-text...
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That would be just plain boring.
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Bill Conway
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 11:44am | IP Logged | 9  

Might have more to do with the original short story which forms the spine of the movie having been set at Thanksgiving!

That would be "In God we trust, all others pay cash" by Jean Shepherd.

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Peter Hicks
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 11:57am | IP Logged | 10  

"The whole POINT of the Messiah, in fact, is that he would drive that authority out of the occupied lands, his victory to be complete and total."

When I read the entire bible, I found a huge change in tone between the Old Testament's brutal and ruthless theme of justice, versus the New Testament's theme of love, compassion, and forgiveness.  My point of view is that Jesus came because God's followers of Old Testament times had misconstrued things so badly.  So of course they expected the Messiah would lead them in great military victories, and help them rule the world.  Thus, the prophecies they would publish would never dream that the Messiah would be rejected by those He came to save. 

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John Byrne
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | 11  

My point of view is that Jesus came because God's followers of Old Testament times had misconstrued things so badly.

••

The Old Testament draws its authority from being the transcribed Word of God. How can that be "misconstrued"?

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Bob Simko
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Posted: 01 February 2013 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | 12  

The Old Testament draws its authority from being the transcribed Word of God. How can that be "misconstrued"?
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He was misquoted..?
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