Atheism's Army Of The Smug

National Post ^ | 2006-12-23 | Robert Fulford

[antiRepublicrat]

It supports itself...

I can't see that it's even any form of syllogism. It's simply a statement, and an incorrect one at that unless you very vaguely define "higher power."

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

I can't see that it's even any form of syllogism. It's simply a statement, and an incorrect one at that unless you very vaguely define "higher power."

The very concept of rights is also founded in religion.

Since the enlightened person is freed from any superstitions about some "God," they are free from having to worry about "rights." Only raw power counts and humans are just meat puppets for the powerful...

Morality is an esoteric ideal, no more real than those hobgoblins that seem to appear before us in a dream.

Returning to Plato's Euthyphro, Socrates advanced the argument that piety to the gods is impossible if the gods all want different things...

Morality is impossible, because all humans have different morals... Claims of morality is sophistry without some higher power defining what it is.

Morality and all of its associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.

[NCLaw441]

You said (in response to a post asking if anyone else has had the influence that Christ has):
Well, Mohammed, and to a lesser extent Buddha. And that Princip fellow who shot Archduke Ferdinand is pretty much singularly responsible for the current geo-political situation...
***

The world, not part of it, but all of it, says that we are living in the year 2006.... A.D. The influence of Christ's life is so pervasive that every day testament is given to it simply by writing down the year in which we are living. In the year of Our Lord. Older dates are referred to as B.C. (forgetting for a moment those PC efforts at calling this the "Common Era" and prior to Christ as BCE (before the common era)-- even those terms center, without saying so, around Christ as the center of time itself).

I readily, and happily, concede that what I believe, I believe by faith. Nevertheless, there is a lot of historical evidence for the life and influence of Jesus Christ. To mention Joseph Smith or Jim Jones in the same paragraph is to elevate them beyond their worth.

I respect the right of those who live without faith to do so, and I also respect their integrity in not simply saying that they believe when they do not. That said, I do hope that those who do not believe in God can looking outside of themselves as well as within themselves to see and feel that there is more than our observable existence to this world.

[antiRepublicrat]

Claims of morality is sophistry without some higher power defining what it is.

I posit to you that morals were invented by societies as they started banning those things that were found to detrimental to the society, and promoting things that were found to be beneficial. They later ascribed these rules to their god for enforcement.

And even if a higher power defines morality and rights, they are always subject to interpretation by humans, and therefore a completely fluid concepts. Whatever the book says, society will interpret it to their current mores, just as it conceived of those morals in the first place. For example, the Catholic Church used to freely endorse the death penalty based on scripture, but society has changed, so the Church no longer endorses it.

[antiRepublicrat]

And you still haven't shown how that is a bullet proof syllogism that works in truth tables. Or is that just some apologetics you read without verifying it for yourself?

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

And you still haven't shown how that is a bullet proof syllogism that works in truth tables.

Do it yourself... it is very easy... of course, that would require you to know what you are talking about... it only takes one side of a sheet of paper...

GET AN EDUCATION, then come back...

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Might makes right... anything else is religion...

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Oh, here try this syllogism...

So long as someone is willing to pay, there will always be someone willing to collect...

[antiRepublicrat]

So long as someone is willing to pay, there will always be someone willing to collect...

Also not a syllogism. A truism maybe, but not a syllogism.

[antiRepublicrat]

Do it yourself... it is very easy... of course, that would require you to know what you are talking about... it only takes one side of a sheet of paper...

Going very basic here, a syllogism has three parts. Yours didn't even have that.

[Junior]

The world, not part of it, but all of it, says that we are living in the year 2006.... A.D.

Oh ye of little education (and probably a government school education at that). Much of the world uses different calendars:

• Jewish Year: 5767
• Moslem Year: 1426
• Buddhist Year: 2550

Just because you don't know about these other calendars does not mean they do not exist and are not followed by significant portions of the world's population.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

Going very basic here, a syllogism has three parts.

You are learning... keep trying...

[antiRepublicrat]

You are learning... keep trying...

I don't have to learn. Your statement was simply not a syllogism.

[A.J.Armitage]

But even it is is true that they did die in the way reported it's still a bad argument, people have died all throughout history for things that were not true and/or lies.

On the contrary, your counterargument is so stupid it's surprising to see it presented seriously. You should have given a moment's thought to your examples; you didn't, because you haven't even considered the original argument. Here's a clue: it's not simply "they died for it, so it's true". For what it is, you could try reading. Or just go on making a fool of yourself; your choice, really.

Joseph Smith never recanted even when faced with death by an angry mob.

He went to his death shooting and shouting the Masonic distress call, and the crowd never offered the chance to recant anyway.

Why did Jim Jones kill himself, when he knew that all he had been preaching was false?

And how do you know he did? More relevantly, if every single follower had known he was preaching falsehood, how do you suppose it would have went?

The Waco Branch Davidians died believing David Koresh to be the next Messiah

And?

What about the early Muslims who volunteered to die in Muhammad's cause (i.e. The Battle of the Trench), according to your logic they wouldn't have if they knew that Muhammad had not been visited by Gabriel

Now explain how they would have known.

No, don't. Just throw up some more non sequiturs.

[dread78645]

They never seem to think about the good, like the fact that abolition was led my Christians, for example.

Your Christians?

• 1800: The Roman Catholic church placed anti-slavery tracts on their Index of Forbidden Books in order to prevent the public from reading them.
  
• 1829: Congregationalists, Quakers, Mennonites, Methodists and Unitarians (You know, those 'not a Christian') organized the "underground railway" to help slaves escape northward towards Canada and southward into Spanish held territories.
  
• 1841 to 1844: The American Baptist Foreign Mission Board took neither a pro nor anti-slavery position. An American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 brought the issue into the open. Southern delegates to the 1841 Triennial Convention of the Board "protested the abolitionist agitation and argued that, while slavery was a calamity and a great evil, it was not a sin according to the Bible."
  In a test case, the Georgia Baptist nominated a slave owner as a missionary and asked asked the Home Missions Society to approve their choice. No decision was made. Finally, a Baptist Free Mission Society was formed; "it refused 'tainted' Southern money." The Southern members withdrew and formed the Southern Baptist Convention, which eventually grew to become the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.
  "
• 1843: 1,200 Methodist ministers owned 1,500 slaves, and 25,000 members owned 208,000 slaves...the Methodist Church as a whole remained silent and neutral on the issue of slavery."
  
• 1844: The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church split into two conferences because of tensions over slavery and the power of bishops in the denomination. The two General Conferences, the Methodist Episcopal Church (North) and Methodist Episcopal church, South remained separate until a merger in 1939 created the Methodist Church. The latter became the present United Methodist Church.
  
• 1860: Ministers and laity of the Methodist Episcopal Church's Genesee Conference in western New York state were expelled from the church for insubordination. They left to form the Free Methodist Church of North America. They split over a variety of factors, including theological disagreements, the perceived worldliness of the original church, and slavery. Their leader "...Roberts and most of his followers were radical abolitionists in the years immediately prior to the Civil War, at a time when many within the Methodist Episcopal church were hesitant in their condemnation of the practice of slavery."
  
• 1861: The Presbyterians were able to remain united in spite of tensions created by the slavery issue. Shortly after the Civil War began, the Southern presbyteries of the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America withdrew and organized the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States (later renamed the Presbyterian Church in the United States). The split was healed in 1983 with the merger of these two bodies and the creation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
  
• 1866: The Holy Office of the Vatican issued a statement in support of slavery. The document stated that "Slavery itself...is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law...The purchaser [of the slave] should carefully examine whether the slave who is put up for sale has been justly or unjustly deprived of his liberty, and that the vendor should do nothing which might endanger the life, virtue, or Catholic faith of the slave."
  
• 1873: Pope Pius IX was concerned about the "wreched Ethopians in Central Africa." He prayed that "Almighty God may at length remove the curse of Cham [Ham] from their hearts." God's curse on Ham was that the Canaanite people would be forever enslaved.
  
• 1917: The Roman Catholic church's Canon Law was expanded to declare a that "selling a human being into slavery or for any other evil purpose" is a crime.

Gotta love them solid 'anti-slavery' Christians ...

... caused by atheists like Hitler, Mao and Stalin, ...

Hitler was a Catholic.

[dread78645]

I used to say "Merry Christmas" until Bill O'Reilly annoyed me enough to switch to "Happy Holidays".

He does that to some people ...

[NCLaw441]

I do know of those calendars, and I receive mail from a fair number of Jewish folks (I confess my mail from Islamists and Buddhists has been light of late) and they use the same dats as well. I know those calendars exist, but they are not used with great frequency. I wonder what dates newspapers in Israel use, for example? If those calendars are used to a great extent, they are yet further examples of the influence of religion (and thus God, of one sort or another) in the daily lives of most people. I apologize if I came across as xenophobic.

[SoCal Pubbie]

Wow, you really felt the need to expend a lot of energy there, didn't you? Lots of writing, none of which addresses that fact that Atheists regimes have slaughtered more people than all others combined.

[dread78645]

Wow, you really felt the need to expend a lot of energy there, didn't you?

Not really. Just addressing your (faux) point 'that abolition was led my Christians'.
The Christians were deeply divided over slavery and only a subset (Congregationalists, Quakers, Mennonites, Free Methodists , Unitarians, etc) were actively involved in freeing slaves and getting them to safety.

... Lots of writing, none of which addresses that fact that Atheists regimes have slaughtered more people than all others combined.

One of Communism's hallmarks in the Soviet Union and China was its aggressive and violent suppression of other religions. Communism was "anti-religious" only in the sense that it forcibly suppressed all religions other than itself.

> atheists like Hitler, Mao and Stalin, than all religionists combined, they'd rush to outlaw atheism instead.

So you'd like to 'outlaw atheism'?
Hmm ...

[SoCal Pubbie]

Again, my point was not that religionists were perfect, but the emphasis on focusing on the negative without recognizing the positive, as it seems you do. The mention of abolitionists was not a "faux" point, it was factual. It is not mutually exclusive that Christians were leaders on both sides of the slavery issue. Your arguments are vivid examples of the dichotomy of human nature, something anti religionists refuse to acknowledge. They wish to throw out the baby with the bath water, so to speak.

I'm not sure what to make of your second point. Religion is generally agreed to mean a system of worship of a deity, and as Communist outlawed such belief systems it was by definition atheist.

Finally, your last comment shows you completely missed the point of my initial post. It was an atheist I know who commented about the need to outlaw religion based on fanatics like those who flew planes into the World Trade Center towers on 911. Now, based on HIS logic, HE should be trying to fight atheism, since they have a lot more notches on their belt.