The way you describe atheism is the way I perceive agnosticism. What is an agnostic to you, then?
The semantics are very important, because I'm referring to the difference between the following two stances..
The lack of belief in god/undecided
The belief in the absence of a god/that there is no god
Those two positions are not the same. If you find yourself at 1., then I think you are essentially an agnostic. However, if you gravitate to 2., then you are definitively an atheist, IMO.
I spend quite a lot of time on YouTube, and it has a very strong and active atheist community. In fact, most of my subscribers are atheists. We spend a bit of time bantering over the semantics of the different terms.. being an agnostic, I did go ape at someone the other week that decided that I wasn't agnostic, I was "ignostic". An urban dictionary word which doesn't feature in any "real" dictionaries. Nobody wants to be redefined
The reason I refer to atheists as an organized religion is mostly down to my YouTube experience, where the atheist community seems very much in conference, setting out their stall and hammering out their agenda/manifesto. They fall out with each other quite a bit, and all but call dissenting atheists "splitters". They're actively trying to get a group together called the ASU (Atheist Scum United), which seems to be inspiring quite some interest among their ranks.. and they're now nearing the point where I really do consider them an organized religion, with a specific list of things you must believe in order to be a "true atheist".
Although it's atheism, and thus you could possibly regard it as a political movement as much as a religious movement, it does refer to life philosophy and religious standpoints.. and it's now, IMO, as organized as any individual Baptist church, and as organized as that Christian denomination (no congress, independent churches/communities). The only difference is that of core belief. Still, if it looks like a fish and swims like a fish...
MOST importantly, I DO see the active atheists (as opposed to passive atheists) firmly pursuant to the conversion of people from other religions. Active atheists are equally fervent propagators of their perspective as any Jehovas Witness. I'm perpetually inundated by theological questions from atheists - theology is definitely their preoccupation - trying to convince me to become atheist, and getting very agitated at my (and other agnostics) unwillingness to take up the theological debate.
Atheists are also, in the US, trying very hard to achieve religious rights to equal Islamic/Judaic/Christian protection etc. These are not the activities of an irreligious group. Agnostics aren't petitioning en masse for these rights.
If your position and/or motivation is different from the atheist movement on YouTube, then perhaps you're from a different atheist sect. I can only go on my own experiences of atheists and their activities.
Hank. look at how you've responded to things... I don't see how you can put that (your obvious belief in a non entity) in the ways in which you have and
NOT read that as a religious point of view. You have a bona fide belief in non belief. So what if it's an oxymoron? So's the Down Escalator, yet it's there.
Anyways just to get off topic and get "back on topic" here's a face to a suspect
Could robbery have been a motive? What about an insurance scam?
He could have been a born again nutcase while incarcerated I guess,
but most anti abortionist terrorist types tend to have criminal records only as a result of their cause. Blowing things up and shooting people? Yeah sure.
Just usually not armed robbery and whatever else that dude was doing he didn't get busted for. Those possibilities pretty much make this thread a moot point lol.
As far as religious views goes, I'm a Christian - just a not very good one.
Even though I also firmly believe in evolution, I just don't see all this progression from sea scum to dinosaurs to cave men to yuppie scum as simply the result of "dumb luck".
And for this nonsense about Catholics not being Christians???? Quit watching all that goofy 60 minute cable TV conspiracy crap - OK?
In the Bible, it simply states, "Whosover believeth in Me shall have everlasting life". OK well Catholics Christen their babies, Which really doesn't help Salvation wise IMHO, but they do something else as well. When they become old enough, they have something called a confirmation.
That is they confirm their belief in Jesus Christ.
I dunno I'm a mixed breed Southern Baptist/Pentecostal that got saved in a Quaker Church so you'd have to get a catholic to explain it better.
And just how in the F***!!!! did a turkey baster get put into this thread????
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God. But as long as there is free speech (something you don't seem to like) no one here is going to burn you or torture you for that.
Its not so much that atheism is a religion, but that both religion and atheism can become ideologies in the sense that adherents claim their beliefs as universally true moralities. Any idea can become ideology (even science), but religion is more prone to this since to admit that your 'origin myth' is an expedient truth goes against the grain.
What should distinguish atheism from religion is precisely the recognition that when we create a model of the world, its form is transient at best. To this end, I have always considered the semantic differences between atheism and agnosticism to be trivial. Semantically speaking the 'a' in atheism comes from greek. The 'privative a' expresses a negation of a concept, so essentially atheism means to deny the existence of gods.
I don't find this helpful however, since it suggests a binary coupling between belief and non-belief; one cannot deny something without accepting its existence in the first place! So I tend to interpret the 'a' as meaning 'without' (in the sense of 'outside of') - an atheist is then someone whose life is lived outside of the concept of gods. Their existence or non-existence is irrelevant.
Agnosticism carries the notion of being undecided, so I prefer to be known as atheist, but I recognise that there is an ideological atheism that tends towards a belief system. I hope I've been clear enough to demonstrate that there needn't be an inevitable polarity of position.
Semantically the greek suffix 'a' defines absence, not negation; as in moral, amoral, immoral. Therefore atheism resolves in a system of thought devoid of the presence of God, not in its derivative negation (with or without implied acceptance of the existence of a system with subsequent opposition). That's called antitheism. Anyway the formulation of an antithesis doesn't exist as a formal acceptance of the validity of a thesis, but rather as a formal acceptance of the existence of a thesis whose validity isn't accepted.
LOL I guess that makes me ArFactor....
I haven't been drinking, so i don't wish to type about religion right now
I wanna talk about: Abortion
For one thing, I'd like to see some sort of data on what the majorities of the reasons for them being performed were. Something tells me that in the US, people throwing newborns into trash dumpsters outnumber first trimester abortions. But I think that patient/ doctor privilege plays a factor in that and I don't really see any reliable information being available - at least not in the US
Also, here it seems that the people with the most extreme views for abortion rights are totally against capital punishment. and it's the other way around for the anti abortionists. go figure...
But exactly when does a fetus get a "soul" during development? When does it get to the point it realizes it's existence? One thing I learned from that snuff flick I saw at the clinic was that some abortions performed were like a couple a weeks from the time of birth. If that fetus was capable of registering some sort of thought, wouldn't that abortion be some sort of homicide? If not, then why not not have post natal abortions?
And if an abortion of a self cognant (?) being is acceptable and done so
because the pregnancy was determined to be an "inconvenience",
then why the hell can't I shoot the dumbass that cut me off on the freeway???
Don't get me wrong, I'm not for or against abortion. But if they are allowed to occur under those circumstances, something is totally out of whack.
I'm only half kidding here. The number of abortions seems to have a negative correlation with the availability of contraceptives. The countries where condoms are hard to get, and where sex education is frowned upon tend to have high numbers of abortions (be it legal or illegal).
I'm an atheist, so I'd say "never". Hardcore pro-lifers will say that it's at conception. But then there'd be lots of lost souls, because only one third of all conceptions lead to pregnancy.
I'd be surprised if it was. In the Netherlands, abortions after 25 weeks of pregnancy are illegal. The limit is at 25 weeks because from that moment on the fetus has a chance to survive, if it would be born.
At the age of about 2 years, IIRC.
If you want to base the distinction (legal or illegal) on some sort of measure of "being sentient", then you're in dangerous waters! By all biological standards, an adult chimp is much more sentient than a fetus, or even a baby or toddler. So if it would be forbidden to abort a fetus past a certain stage of development, then it should also be illegal to kill apes, monkeys, and possibly even pigs and cattle.
I'm not sure thats strictly true. I'm no greek scholar, so I say this tentatively, but the Greek word 'atheos' is the direct root of 'atheism'. The prefix 'alpha' denotes not a passive lack, but an active denial of the gods, something we would indeed call antitheism (Christian opposition to the existence of gods other than God, meant they were often accused of atheism by Greek writers)
True, but to regard atheism as the logical antithesis of theism means you are locked in a binary struggle where one term is dependent for meaning on the other.
It is true. I'm no greek scholar either, but I've done my share of linguistics.
Antithesis is by definition derivative, but it's in no way logical in this case. It's purely theoretical. You cannot apply a certain logical value to sentences like "God exists" or "God doesn't exist". Logic - at least binary logic - wants certainty, either true or false, and this isn't exactly the case.
Awe inspiring is a pretty optimistic view for a nihilist It silly (IMO) because it takes more faith to think that all of matter spontaneously came from nothing (which we cannot define other than in terms of concept) billions of years ago, and the content and compostion of which just happened to eventually form a planet with precise conditions, a certain distance from a star, and some atoms came together (100 billion of them or so IIRC) to make a single celled organism which happened to just decide to evolve. You say you're against natural law, and therefore evolution for you by definition should be preposterous since without natural law, no "species" can decide that it (wants? needs? why?) to survive.
You're quite a philisohpical fellow aren't you? Interaction with/of existence outside of ourselves is in itself definitely not just a "religious" idea, and you appear totally against the notion. Famous psychologist Carl Jung was adamant about the "collective subconcious", and even a secular idea such as this means that our interpretation of the world isn't intrinsically (necessarily, completely) self borne. No matter what ideaology - be it "scientific" or "religious" - you will always be confronted with challenges, simply because no one is omniscient. That's not relevant to what's true and what isn't, unless your knowledge is perfect.
There's too many subtopics emerging, I could see spending hours on each of them. Evolutionism isn't even all that widely accepted amongst the secular, the scientific. It fails to explain how life began at all, since it assumes the pre-existence of dreadfully complex organisms to begin with - to even get the process going. Couple that with the gaping lack of discovering transitional species, and it doesn't make much sense to me. Certain things just "pop out of nowhere" when the theory is said to take ages to produce a new iteration of something (but, only sometimes!). Woodpeckers for example... just magically came along on their own, presumably like the primitive organisms that began the evolutionary process to begin with. I've attended conferences where Ph D biologists have torn evolution to pieces for hours on end, and I'm certainly no Ph D biologist. But the fact that many people who are that qualified think it's largely rubbish speaks volumes to me....The requirement humans have for love and affection does not serve any scientific / evolutionary purpose, and should therefore be eradicated from our genetic pool and eventually we should simply all become the Borg. Superior in every way to every being, yet utterly without purpose. Why would we develop into emotional beings when much of the time our emotions cause us to act irrationally and do stupid things (especially the one that we crave and need in order to be well adjusted and not go berserk)?
Not really true I don't think. By your definition, you can then not call evolution (in terms of explaining life on this planet) a science at all. You simply have an inquisitive mind, and enjoy science, and like to be able to explain things - so you call evolution a science, but there are too many facts missing to call it that. Maybe we should call it a religion?
How is it naive?
One of the greatest scientific minds who ever lived disagrees:
Albert Einstein : "I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
Albert Einstein: "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
"The brain is a machine that ghosts can operate."
There is far too much order and perfection and presicion in all of creation for that statement to be naive. What IS naive however is the notion that any feeble human mind can explain it all with some random bones. How much of "what can be known" do you really think science has discovered? Can you even quantify it? I know I can't. Not long ago we thought the world was flat. We can't even stop a tiny organism from killing us. Science has it's place, and I like science - I always have, it's interesting. It becomes a religion in itself when you start to worship the human mind as your deity - humanism. Everyone worships something whether they profess to or not - most of the time it's simply oneself.
I understood my lack of sanity when I entered this thread, and I thank everyone for keeping their cool in a topic that often gets out of hand. Kudos to everyone. There are brilliant minds sprinkled on this forum. I still however realize that this is a futile topic, even though I've enjoyed it. You cannot easily marry the stone mind with the warm heart... Articulation of personal, emotional, experiencial, relational views is not simply translatable into the logical argument.
You see, we can discuss politics and different beleifs all day long but at the end of the day my opinion stems from the fact that God changed my life in a real, personal, and individual way and I am 110% certain of that beyond the shadow of any doubt. Completely regardless of anyone's denial, I do 100% know this for fact. Too many things have happened, too many dreadfully obvious answers to prayer, too much supernatural working of the word of God in my life etc. I understand that these things will sounds/seem foolish, but honestly that's fine with me. I also understand just how foolish many Christians appear to be, and I wish I could slap them but I can't. I wish crooked idiots didn't demand your money on TV (although, if you're dumb enough to think that paying dude on TV money is going to help you spiritually, then you deserve to lose your money), I wish that many Chrisitians weren't intolerant legalistic dogmatic puppets that misrepresent my Lord, I wish that a number of "healings" were not proven false - perptrated by money loving scoundrels (I have witness authentic healings myself, and even *I* find myself skeptical!). I wasn't born as a Christian. I used to be the most scientific minded person you could meet, and I much more actively mocked and persecuted Christianity than you guys can imagine. Noone was a bigger skeptic than I was, but that all changed in an instant and for me to try and communicate in text with people I don't know how that happened is beyond my abilities.
The fundamental message of the Gospel is not "repent or burn", the fundamental message is one of love. Which is exactly what's missing, and dying on our planet. Lack of love for each other, and even ourselves in a more convoluted way, is exactly why we are in the condition we are in. Kids kill eachother all the time, and kill themselves more than ever. Hopelessness pervades in broken familes translating into a broken society that has no reason at all to go on, other than to run the rat race, and contemplate why they are running the rat race to get a bigger TV, better car, and every material thing achievable. Science cannot, will not ever cure that. Science's answer for that is antidepressant drugs, ritalin, and the pseudoscience of therapy.
Maybe I'm assuming too much... It does go against what I have read before about the Greek use of the word atheos, but I'll have to accept your point, since it makes sense in relation to words like asexual, or atypical (and I'm sure you know that 'a-' is a prefix, not a suffix ). It also makes sense when looking at other privative prefixes, since 'in-' is used more often in English to suggest an opposite.
@BBT... LOL, I wouldn't call myself a nihilist... my adopted name came from... well, some other time
Laws are made to be broken... Or at least tested and reinterpreted. Nature doesn't decide to do anything, but people decide whether to abide by laws, people define laws.
I see a number of misrepresentations here:
- The matter didn't "come from nothing". The Big Bang hypothesis only talks about the rapid expansion after the bang. There's no telling what there was prior to that, because the current physics theories are not valid for those circumstances.
- If you consider the gigantic number of stars and planets in the universe, then it's not surprising that there is a planet with "precise conditions". (See also: anthropic principle.)
- Evolution theory doesn't assume that "100 billion atoms came together" to form the first cell. That's preposterous. Before the first organisms, there must have been chemical compounds capable of simple self-replication. (Unfortunately, they didn't fossilise.)
- The first organisms did not "happen to just decide to evolve". Evolution is the inevitable consequence of a few properties: variation, self-replication and environmental pressures.
That's plain wrong. Even simple simulations show that cooperation between individuals is in many cases advantageous and evolutionary stable. In the human mind, the tendency for cooperative behaviour is experienced as love, compassion and parental care.
If you call that humanism, then you'd better read up on the subject. To worship means that you value yourself as having less worth than some other entity, individual, or deity. That's something that is completely alien to humanism. And worshiping yourself is a contradiction in itself. (Unless you're referring to egoism, which is also contrary to humanism.)
Human love has to do with affection, not "cooperative behaviour". You can't redefine an abstract principle with a concrete definition like "cooperative behaviour". Sorry, this makes no sense at all. Cooperation would benefit evolution obviously, requiring affection (in the form of emotional attachment, and relational bonding) would not.
I was thinking of worship as "The reverent love and devotion accorded a deity, an idol, or a sacred object." Self-worship is entirely possible from my point of view; it does not have to be directed outward. "Being your own idol" is not an oxymoron at all. Semantics are mean sometimes, and I fail to see how humanism is out of context in what I wrote, at least not in a broad sense. Thanks for the link though.
Please correct me if I'm wrong as I may be reading more into your post than you really meant, but you seem to be looking at evolution and the big bang theory from the wrong angle. If you start with the fact that "there is life on earth" and try to calculate the odds of that happening by chance as a consequence of (ultimately) the big bang, you will of course end up with some truly unbelievable odds. (How lucky are we?) That does not mean that the theories themselves are unlikely.
Think of a physics simulation for instance (Sorry. I've been working on my physics engine lately, but bare with me. ). You have a collection of bodies (say a few boxes), and a set of rules that decide how these bodies relate to each other (Newton's laws among others.). Now, if you jump into this simulation at any given point, without knowing what the rules of the system are, and look at one box going "now what are the chances of that ending up right there?", that too will seem extremely unlikely, even though the result of the simulation is entirely deterministic given the rules and input. There is no such thing as an unlikely result within this system. You just don't know the what the rules are.
Same thing with the universe. Life spawning at the earth not unlikely at all. It's the only possible result of the system given it's rules. Do we know what these rules are? Not at all, but we have theories that fit for a few of the (from our perspective) big ones. Evolution and The Big Bang. They may indeed be wrong, but for now they seem to stand up to the tests we have put them through. They're "good enough" until something better comes along. What was before The Big Bang? What is the "system"? Why are there rules? We don't know yet, but we're looking into it.
Given this point of view not even a god controlling it all is entirely out of the question, but if there is one it would just be another rule of the system, and we should be able to prove it's existence, or at the very least define the rules that make up God.
That of course is where science flies in the face of religion.
Not the Einstein mis-quote! Next you'll be mentioning Pascals' Wager *sigh* or Darwin's alleged deathbed confession. Here is Einstein's famous essay on science and religion, which makes interesting reading. His personal concepts of religion and god seem at odds with the one you seem to think (hope) he holds. Still, even if he was devout, he wouldn't have been the first. Galileo himself (condemned by the Inquisition for his own scientific heresy in 1633 and pardoned by the Vatican in 1992) was a devout Catholic who even sent two of his daughters to a convent.
As for our "feeble" human mind, it has explained much more about the universe (using a lot more than just "random bones" I might add) in the last 200 years than any religion has managed to, starting from the beginnings of Christianity. The fact that anyone endeavouring to explain how things were used to have to tread very carefully lest they be charged by Rome with heresy speaks volumes about that. The people you mention who used to consider the world flat, for instance, were the very same pious individuals who hung onto that particular piece of ignorance and punished thinkers for speaking the opposite, until it was proven that the world is indeed round.
Of course I can't, and neither can anyone, quantify how much of what can be known has been discovered up to this point. It's the precise driving force behind all scientific endeavour - the desire to know what can be known. What I do know is this: all of that which is currently known about our planet & universe has been discovered by science and not by religion. I think the very nature of religion is not to ask itself any hard questions: every other intellectual endeavour goes through a veritable crossfire of checking, argument, counter-argument, testing, hypothesis, peer review, all of which filters erroneous information and ensures verifiable information and consensus. From mathematics to natural sciences to history to archaeology to languages to philosophy and just about everything else, outdated or unsupported (and unsupportable) ideas are weeded out and left behind by artificial selection.
As for "everyone worshipping something", well that's the most sparklingly naive thing I've ever heard. I don't worship anything: not my mind, not a god, not the dog next door, not Jimi Hendrix. I don't understand why it's so difficult for some people to comprehend why there are other people who simply don't hold religious beliefs! I certainly don't worship science! Science is the very antithesis of religion: it demands testable hypotheses, solid proof, repeatable experiments, logical thinking. It demands that whenever new information comes to light that contradicts old thinking, the old thinking must be discarded. Scientists are happy to leave old concepts behind as it means they've discovered something new, which is the whole reason people are scientists to begin with! I don't worship science but I think it's very, very useful.
Religion, however, requires - demands - faith in ancient, virtually unchanged scripture. There may be a couple of millennia of theology and divinity and study and philosophy built upon that scripture and many fine, learned people lending their names and intellects to such endeavours but, at the end of the day, you have scripture written by imperfect humans with feeble brains. Also, there's very little material written by other humans around the same time - humans without religious agendas, that is - which can confirm very much of it with any clarity.
My definition of an agnostic is basically what I find in the dictionary: someone who holds the view that the existence of a god cannot be known or proven. To me, this says they accept the possibility that a god could exist. By not discounting a possibility, an agnostic is open to
I, however, am a common or garden atheist. My position is this: I don't believe in the non-existence of god. I am convinced there isn't one. Belief has nothing to do with it. I believe my dog is the most beautiful. Doesn't mean it's true. However, I am convinced she's a Beagle. I believe Australia should become a republic and I believe it's inevitable, however all I have to go on are my instincts. I have no concrete reason to think that way and I have no idea when this transition will occur, it's just a belief I have formed based on my observations of the political climate here.
It may seem like a tiny little semantic difference but semantics are important when dealing with subject matter like this. We've all seen drift/race arguments get stupidly out of hand because people can't or won't agree on terminology. Once people get their terms straight the discourse can proceed in an orderly fashion and opposing arguments can expressed more clearly.
So, yes, anyway, I am an atheist. I was a Christian until my mid-teens and I know a religion and a sect when I see one, and I can tell you atheism is neither. Atheists are definitely starting to make some noise in the US (and on dear ol' YouTube - on that topic, you should watch this, it's Douglas Adams' thoughts on atheism and how he achieved it ) and wanting to make themselves heard, but as far as I know that's localised to the US. Religious pressure groups have an unholy amount of influence there and, now that their born-again man is in the Whitehouse, are exercising it like it's going out of style (at the end of 2008 it may well be). George W has been throwing cash at "faith-based initiatives" for years, flying directly in the face of the separation of church and state that's meant to be cast in stone in the US Constitution, as well as installing people who share his right-wing Christian views in various high-ranking positions. What US atheists want is the right to be recognised as such without being demonised or discriminated against. Hell, you're almost better off being a Satanist in the US right now - at least that's a religion.
However, if some atheists are "evangelising" and trying to convert (though "de-convert" seems to be a more appropriate term), then that's unfortunate and I really do wish they'd stop. OK, fine, some religious groups may deserve an eye for an eye (like the ones who knock on your door and the ones who raise their kids in their own religion without giving them a choice in the matter) but come on, atheists don't need to play that game and should avoid it. The whole point about atheism is giving people credit for their own intelligence and not forcing a point of view on them. Just don't take me for one of those types, whatever you do, and please don't start splitting us off into "sects". Sub-groups, cliques, whatever's fine, but avoiding the use of religious terminology would do everyone a favour by preventing unnecessary arguments. If anything, atheism in the US is resembling a grass-roots political upsurge more than a religious movement. They've got a long way to go before they can even approach the levels the Baptists and evangelicals have in the US.
I'm not sure what it's like in the UK (though I have a feeling it's similar to here) but the question of religious beliefs (or lack of them) hardly ever comes up in conversation in Australia (probably because basically none of my friends or family - except the oldies - are religious). That's why my post is so long - I never get to discuss this stuff so I was thinking about it all bloody day!
To conclude I must say that it's refreshing to find a good solid debate on something interesting in this forum. You just don't find discourse like this in "Improvement Suggestions" (yes I know, this is first and foremost a game forum ). Much respect to the participants thus far, it's been a good read :up: Work tomorrow, don't expect much more than observation from me.
Just a minor point, because you've projected an acceptance of the possibility of the existence of a god, for agnostics, which is tentative. We're not accepting the possibility. To be accurate, you have to counterweigh that projection with the point that they also accept the possibility that a god could *not* exist.
The single agnostic identifier is that they acknowledge that it cannot be known or proven. Nothing more than that.
If someone could prove to me (as for something to be proven is the basis for me to become convinced of anything) that god doesn't exist, I'd happily become an atheist. I'm afraid that I remain convinced that atheists believe something that I don't, because I think they've made a leap of faith on a topic that I'm unwilling to do.
Since you're not an American atheist, I'll assume that you don't intend to prove anything, so it's not a challenge or anything I'm just setting out my agnostic stall
[edit] Important point.. I cannot be deconverted from agnosticism, by definition, so the atheists that are "calling" are definitely trying to convert me to atheism. They want me to believe what they believe, without offering proof. Moreover, most of the bases of argument they offer seem to be stances specifically in opposition to Christianity. "You should be an atheist because it's stupid what Christians believe" makes no headway in convincing an agnostic of anything, and yet they persist!
Damn Hank, Can't you put more than three posts in a thread with out having to bash bush?
I like how people that have no religion dictate what a religion is. This is kind of an old subject topic for me (yawn). Plus politics and religion are the hobbies of drunkards and fools and my dumbass ran out of beer yesterday.
About abortion. or well the anti-abortion terrorists to be more precise.
Notice how they all seem to be males? Do you think maybe that these males might have some deep rooted issue with not being able to have children themselves?
Maybe it's a subconscious reaction triggering this? Also, I've noticed that the females that are active in the anti-abortion movement have had abortions or have worked in the industry at some level.
And that alot of the people that are "pro-choice" never had an abortion or ever will. They seem to equate abortion rights as being the same thing as a woman having the right to vote.
Speaking of a "woman's right to choose", my wife is choosing to make me take her to the store.......
I didn't think Hank was bashing Bush in the slightest. He didn't state anything about Bush that isn't very common knowledge. The right-wing religious lobby groups in the US aren't a rumour at all. It's all very well documented stuff.
Methinks you're a bit sensitive about Bush, tbh. It's like, after Bush has done his stuff in Iraq, and is focusing on Iran (with his friend McCain singing "bomb bomb bomb Iran"), complaining when someone calls him a warmonger. Err...
I think there are two types of agnostics. The first says that he has seen as much proof that support the existence of a god as proof that support its non-existence. The second type says that it is impossible to prove either the existence or the non-existence. Where one is undecided on the matter, the other is sure that it's undecidable.
The atheist view (and mine) is that the matter is decidable. Theism makes a number of claims, and many of them have been falsified. Mankind and the universe are older than 6000 years; a worldwide flood is physically impossible; praying does not work; it's logically impossible for any being to be both omniscient and omnipotent. Etcetera. In effect, the claim of existence of god is handled as a scientific hypothesis, and this hypothesis has been refuted.
Well, then read The God delusion by Richard Dawkins. He makes a pretty good case.
While I'm happy science tries to deal with these matters in a scientific way, I'm quite convinced that an investigation about the existence of God cannot be performed with some sort of human measurement. Science as a whole can be taken as a system that is constantly adapted during centuries. Many theories have been proved to be false or incomplete and have been dissed and replaced, or corrected and completed. But this happens, always, only to the extent of our knowledge. That is: I am unwilling to put so much faith in human abilities. I'm, overall, an optimist, but that doesn't make me a blind believer in science.
EBAY!!!
Human love has to do with affection, not "cooperative behaviour". You can't redefine an abstract principle with a concrete definition like "cooperative behaviour". Sorry, this makes no sense at all. 