Dangerous ground there Woz - some people believe it was The Devil who planted them fossils in order to distract man from worshipping God. I, however, know the truth: all those fossils them sciencers keep finding are the remnants of the last meal eaten by The Great Squid before he vomited them all over the planet, went to sleep a billion years ago and dreamed us all up. If we're bad and don't worship him he'll get all narky, wake up and that'll be the end of everything!
It's hardly surprising - this is a place where a burglar can sue you for cutting himself on the glass from the window he broke in order to steal from you. It's where the record industry spends million suing college kids for sharing mp3s. Hell, it's the place where some halfwit spilled McD's coffee on herself and sued because she got burned. And she won, because McD's apparently should have had the foresight to warn her that the coffee may have been hot. It's a legal system that seems to reward idiocy & ruthlessness disproportionately.
I'm sodding well moving there if I ever fall off my horse.
I'm not making that assertion, I was merely pointing out a comparison in order to dispel a myth that societies decay in proportion to how non-religious they are. Lizardfolk mentioned a supposed correlation between societal decay and secularism. It's a correlation which doesn't appear to exist.
For all I know it's a mere coincidence that the more secular countries - those without state religions, religiously-derived laws or a ruling body of priests such as the ayatollahs in Iran - have higher per capita income & better government-run social programs compared to the more religious ones. Perhaps improved wages and living standards are causes of people leaving religion and embracing secular, inclusive policies, rather than effects. Maybe they're unrelated.
Scandinavian countries have been declining religiously for years and they've long been reputed to have some of the highest living standards and lowest crime rates in the world. Australia, the UK, Canada, Germany, Japan and others are pretty much secular nations (i.e. no state-imposed religion) and are all doing okay in terms of living standards and crime. Of course no place is perfect when populated bby humans, but compare them to the US (a million people in jail, high teenage birth rates in the most religious states, an evangelist in charge, wars left & right, a tanking economy, polls suggesting 60% of the people are creationists), Saudi Arabi (where rape victims are punished for being out unsupervised, people are beheaded publicly and blasphemers are imprisoned & beaten), Taliban-ruled Afghanistan (where women were treated as slaves or property, often worse than livestock), or many third-world African countries where Catholic bishops, trying to enforce their doctrine of no premarital sex and no contraception, aren't even told off by Pope Ratzinger for spreading the murderous lie that condom use spreads HIV rather than prevents it.
I agree with point one.
The second point is also true, but it doesn't necessarily follow that it was their unbelief which propelled them to mass murder. As I said, there were many other factors driving their decisions.
The third point is only true for some people. Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh was a Christian. So is George Bush and he's as far from being a pacifist as I am from being a jihadist muslim. Their faiths didn't and haven't prevented them from spilling the blood of many innocent people for no good reason (as if such a reason could exist anyway!).
Ugh! A grosser, more simplistic and ignorant characterisation of atheists I've never seen. This teacher of yours seems more like a preacher than an educator. Atheist doesn't mean amoral. Some might argue that a moral code derived simply from how your actions affect other people is purer and more honest than one foisted upon you by a supreme being - one which you have to obey on pain of eternal torment.
We had morals before we invented religion. How could our species have survived & thrived otherwise? We had "love they neighbour" and "do unto others" long before we had Jesus. We had "thou shalt not kill" long before we had Moses. Even members of ape groups don't go around hurting each other and stealing because they're not religious. Social animals that live in communities have to cooperate and share and consider each others' needs or the group (and therefore the individuals in it) won't last long.
I object strongly to this concept that religion is the sole source of morality in the world. The whole reason people accept & reject different bits of the bible is because they're weighing its words against their own morality. If they followed biblical morality they'd still stone people who worked on weekends instead of praying.
Yeah I know...much easier to malign her as a whore and temptress and suppress her words than let mum & dad peasant decide for themselves what to think.
I'm not sure myself either. What I do know is that in the 4th Century AD, the Council at Nicaea chaired by Emperor Constantine I was convened to resolve disputes between the already varying, conflicting sects of Christianity and decide once & for all on its core doctrines. I'm not sure if the selection of the various gospels happened here or later, but the end result is that the majority of existing texts were rejected in favour of the gospels we all know of. I'm just wondering how it is that you can sit around picking & choosing & rejecting bits of what's regarded as the true word of god as it suits you. Is that not blasphemy?
As is any illiterate, uneducated population - hence the Dark Ages.
Albieg, I've met so many more ex-Catholics than current Catholics I'm surprised there are any left in modern countries at all The Vatican seems to have a lock on the Third World though...
I've always had trouble reconciling the concept of "Christian charity, pacifism, tolerance and inclusiveness" with stuff like this:
All the charity, love and forgiveness you want but if you believe wrongly, down you go - at the hand of the all-loving god. Or is it at the hand of the all-loathing devil? Without a name in that verse it's hard to tell who we're talking about.
And people think the Old Testament is the nasty one, what with all the raping and destruction - at least if you died in the OT you were gone & free of any further torment. This New Testament god wants to torture your immortal soul for eternity if you step out of line!
I think the only way to view Christianity entirely as a religion of cheek-turning pacifism & eternal forgiveness is if you ignore the many verses of madness such as the above and pick out whatever nicer bits slot into your own morality. There's so much of this awful stuff in the Bible it makes me wonder exactly what percentage of the entire book has been discarded over the centuries in favour of the softer, more compassionate ideas.
I meant rational, reasonable, normal everyday non-believers who have jobs and families and cars and bicycles and dogs and just want to live their lives, not the kind of psychopath atheist dictators that were being discussed at the time. I really should've made that clearer in retrospect. My implication was that, religious or not, blind faith in unsupported ideas, especially in people who are unbalanced to begin with, leads very easily to catastrophe.
We're agreed there. I said exactly the same thing and always have - did you not read my lengthy and boring posts? Religion has started some wars and some of history's worst bastards have been religious, killed or oppressed in the name of their religion and/or used religion to motivate their cause. Some, not all, possibly not even the majority. I maintain that any kind of belief without reason, any kind of dogma or faith, whether it's religious or not, invariably makes human conflict worse. All kinds of people oppose abortion, but it's the Christian fundamentalists who bomb clinics and murder doctors, not the atheist anti-abortionists.
We're agreed there too. My contention is merely that if you add "absolute faith" in anything, be it gods, a thousand-year Reich or a socialist utopia with you at its head, to that list of negative attributes, you add highly potent fuel to the flames.
You simply can't have religion without faith. A religion based on reason & evidence & logic isn't a religion, it's an oxymoron. But you can have faith without religion, such as the faith in the political ideas I've already described. Hitler's unshakeable faith in his eventual victory needlessly destroyed many thousands of lives, long after his war was lost. Lenin's faith in a Marxist dream brought an age of despotism to Russia. Kim Il Sung's own faith in pseudo-Marxism (and possibly in his own semi-divine greatness) brought an age of oppression that continues to this day in North Korea. My definition of "faith" echoes that of most dictionaries: it's a belief in a proposition that isn't supported by evidence.
Atheists, arrogant or otherwise, don't indulge in faith. Whatever they believe about anything needs evidence, which negates the need for faith.
Myth busted? Not exactly. Religions don't start all wars (would be dishonest to assert that) but religions certainly make them worse. Faith is the common denominator here (and a seriously unbalanced psyche).
Simply: the problem with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot etc wasn't their religion or lack of it. It was their absolute faith in their own twsited ideology combined with a ruthless thirst for power that drove them, not any apparent lack of religious belief. Why kill millions based on unbelief in god? Their dogmatism and unshakeable beliefs that they, above all, held the absolute truth and were deserving of ultimate power were the very antithesis of reason and logic (which where atheism springs from). It wasn't their alleged atheism that drove them to oppression & mass murder & genocide, it was their faith in their own ideology and their enormous greed. Faith - unreasonable belief - was the thing these men had in common. Whether it's unreasonable belief, either in gods or your own ideology or just your own greatness, faith can be as dangerous as an a-bomb.
Look at Hitler's last days or weeks in power in 1945. Berlin was being ravaged, his armies were depleted, starving, cut off, freezing or encircled and he was hearing constant reports of this. He refused to listen to the truth his generals were telling him, instead maintaining his absolute belief that the German people would prevail and drive the Russians out. His unshakeable belief in his own greatness and his ideology simply wouldn't allow him to see the truth of what was happening. When he did finally admit that all was lost, he blamed everyone but himself and took his own life.
Both religion and extremist political ideas have faith that they're absolutely true as a common factor. Both forms of dogma tend to attract megalomaniacal, greedy psychopaths to their upper echelons who will be ruthless about upholding their ideals. Extremism of any form is dangerous, but combine extreme politics with religion and nothing good can come of it.
What I meant by "personal & private" was that religious people shouldn't arrogantly assume theirs is The One and that it needs to be foisted onto other people in schools, legislature and in their own homes. I've had various brands shoved in my face at various times in my life (and it still happens, but not often) and it was never welcome even when I was a believer. I don't evangelise about my nonbelief or try to de-convert the faithful (though I have been known to crap on a lot, especially if SamH is pushing my buttons and I've got a glass of shiraz next to me - ah, the 'net, blessed haven for drunken egomaniacs), I merely expect the same in return.
Racer Y:Whosies are freaks, no doubt. But it's the Battlestar Galacticans you really gotta be wary of. Last time one of those guys came to my house he vanquished my frickin toaster and then accused me of being one! Took a lot to convince him I was 100% meat.
I can dig the feeling that all we can see may not be all there is. Once I ditched my own Jeebus-belief I gradually moved through a few different types of half-arsed spirituality & woo-woo concepts until I just gave up on it all. I realised I was expending way too much effort on what might come later and what might be behind the curtain. As Yoda would say: "Never his mind on where he was! What he was doing!"
Y'know, if all this crap is all there is, I'm fine with it. From the tiniest molecular machine to the most mind-boggling supermassive black hole to the simple, nice feeling I get when the light in my backyard turns a particular muted yellowish-green on cloudy afternoons after it's been raining, this universe of ours is pretty damn cool. If there's more than that I don't really need it, but I'll gladly welcome the surprise I mean, what if we are just figments of some giant squid's imagination as he floats around in a VR daze kilometres below the surface of the ocean? So what? Doesn't make our experiences any less real, at least as far as our puny non-squid brains can comprehend. We may as well make the most of it before ol' squiddy wakes up to go and wrestle a sperm whale, consigning us all to oblivion as if the program supporting us were never booted up. Life's simply too short to worship leprechauns, pray to fairies and try to avoid being sent to some infernal, eternal punishment which could only have been dreamed up by a bona fide psychopath.
All hail our squid overlords.
xaotik: for the record I would never define myself by what I don't believe and I would resent anyone else doing it on my behalf. I wouldn't base my life on the fact that I don't believe in honest TV evangelists That goes double for gods.
Back from the pub. Bloodied knuckles. Those sodding Scientariologarian UFO cultists had it coming - oh, hi chaps. Didn't see you there.
Well, I'm glad you saw my point Sambo (and were able to relate it to our Mazz, bless him ). Yeah, I think some atheists get a little gobby and rant somewhat too much and step into the anti-theist camp. I'm certainly not out to convert people. People can do & think & believe & kneel before what they like until it starts affecting others' freedom to do the same. That's where lots of religions overstep the mark imho, like Christian fundies in the states trying to get Genesis-inspired creationism into science classes; some muslims pushing for sharia law in the UK; Jehovahs coming to my house uninvited on the assumption I'm going to hell and lots of other things (the doctrine of hell is the main reason my mum removed my brothers & I from sunday school - telling a child they'll roast forever is a pretty horrific thing for a young mind. Kudos, mum). Even when I was briefly religious, I still resented the local church coming into the school to preach at us through so-called "religious education seminars". The only true part of that phrase is the first word - the other two they should have replaced with "sermon" and cut the crap. If they were about "religious education" seminars why did we never hear from the buddhist monks down the road, the muslims from further down the road, the hippies from up the road or even from a different brand of Christian? A high school library is for reading Asterix or books about cars, playing D&D, avoiding large boys who want to kill you and occasionally homework. I didn't roll dice or read or think in or steal books from their church, the least they could've done was kept their sermons and beige pants and very neat hair out of my damn library.
Religion should be a personal, private thing. Make a public song & dance and demand special treatment; extra entitlements to respect; the right not to be offended by stupid cartoons; tax-free real estate or try and convert people door-to-door like you're selling broadband and you bring it out of the personal arena and into the public domain. Once you're out and bollocking on like you're the one person in the universe with The Truth and everyone else is going to hell or deserves death at your hands, you're fair game as far as I'm concerned.
Worst case scenario, right here: if you cost your own child her life because you'd rather chant to your deity than get her to a ****ing hospital, you should ****ing well burn in hell. Failing that, life in prison. Grr!
Not really. Atheists don't positively maintain that there isn't a god, no do they absolutely discount the possibility of one - they simply don't believe there is one because no evidence exists to support the claim. That may seem a tiny semantic difference but in this area of discourse it's a vital one. People who actively believe there isn't a god are anti-theists.
Atheism a passive disbelief, an absence of belief, not an active disbelief and not a dearly-held truth. It's simply based on a lack of evidence. It's certainly not a statement of absolute truth. Noone can know if gods actually exist, regardless of their beliefs or lack of them. I can't prove gods don't exist. I don't wish to and it shouldn't be expected of me or anyone else - you can't prove the nonexistence of something. He who makes the positive claim, that gods do exist, has the responsibility to provide evidence. Same as in a court of law. You claim I killed someone, show the jury the evidence. If I didn't kill anyone, the lack of evidence clears my name. Unless you frame me.
I won't say "there isn't a god" because you're right, I can't know that for sure, but I will say "there isn't any evidence of a god". That doesn't mean I'm agnostic so please, for the love of [something], don't be throwing me in a box. The one thing that craps in my mouth is people telling me what I do or don't believe and in which category that places me. I'm a-theist. Without a god. That doesn't mean I deny the possibility of one existing. What it does mean is that I no more believe gods exist than leprechauns, unicorns, Vulcans or honest TV evangelists. I live my life as if leprechauns don't exist - not because I know they don't, but because I don't believe they do. Noone's ever asked me to disprove the existence of leprechauns. It's not a belief, it's the absence of one. Calling disbelief a leap of faith (how can it be a leap of faith to not believe in something for which there's no evidence? More like common ****ing sense imho ), or calling atheism a religion is like calling "not collecting stamps" a hobby. It's a complete misunderstanding of atheism that's leapt upon and used as an argument ad nauseam by the religious and unreligious alike. And it shits me. So I'm goin' down the pub.
I respect original ideas that would add to the racing and improve the quality of the driving experience, not arcade-style ideas that have already been posted and re-posted this forum about a dozen times already in the past five years.
Having real companies like HKS, BBS, Koni etc would cost the devs money to begin with because those companies would want license fees - that same reason keeps real-life cars (except the two BMWs, the MRT and the Raceabout) & tracks out of LFS. Also, I doubt many LFS players would want to spend their real money to make their virtual cars faster. If they did, the racers with the most money would of course end up with the best parts, putting the racers with less spare money at a gross disadvantage. For some people in the world, an S2 license just by itself is a major purchase. Start adding to the costs by forcing people to spend money to be competitive and watch people go and play something else very quickly. The thing people like about LFS is that you buy your license and then you compete on a level playing field, with driving skill being what decides a race result, not the money you've spent on parts.
This "tuning" debate has been brought up on this forum so many times, a quick search and five minutes of reading would have given you a great view of the arguments for and against it. If people seem a bit short-tempered it's because everybody who suggests tuning thinks they're the first to think of it, while a forum search for "tuning" (or even "tunning") would have revealed the opposite.
What, you can't prove that having no evidence for your beliefs makes no sense? Let's not start the "atheism is just like a religion" argument - I guarantee you'll be here all day reading my essays & thinly-veiled ridicule
Jar Jar effing Binks - sufficient reason to call a goddam fatwa on George Lucas. There's an apostate if ever there was one.
I've found the dull side can be just ar irritating - spray your tin hat with olive oil before application. Works well, but wash before you go to sleep unless you like your pets licking your forehead.