don't be sheep

everyone thinks up their own demons, thanks to religions GOOD PEOPLE NATURALLY DO GOOD. BAD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS. ONLY IN THE NAME OF A RELIGION DO GOOD PEOPLE DO VERY BAD THINGS! there is no devine being, just ur fears. check my profile and view george carlin's video and "GOD," the view his "who controls america, ie the NAZI right wing religious fanatics. actually the ones how use this none thinkers for their greedy controlling purposes. they are really as religious as i am, but they are smart enough to use it to control americans with all their fear and hate mongering. and we've went for it all these years, and it's peeking with bushy. read up on how the NASIS started and it is a text book case of the reagan/bush eras. use ur critical thinking and not the propagada u were raised with as were the muslims and jews and hindus, etc. the reagan mindless and bushys have made america look like fools. remember father bushy said the atheist should not be citizens


Posted by hologram
religion

 This article is quite interesting because it juxtaposes the battle that is going on in many factions of America, not just the Atheist one. contrasts the speeches given by Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, and author Sam Harris: In his speech, Dawkins portrayed a black-and-white intellectual battle between atheism and religion. He denounced the “preposterous nonsense of religious customs” and compared religion to racism. He also gave no quarter to moderate or liberal believers, asserting that “so-called moderate Christianity is simply an evasion.” “If you’ve been taught to believe it by moderates, what’s to stop you from taking the next step and blowing yourself up?” he said. By contrast, Harris’s speech was a more tempered critique of the atheist movement itself. While Harris said he believed science must ultimately destroy religion, he also discussed spirituality and mysticism and called for a greater understanding of allegedly spiritual phenomena. He also cautioned the audience against lumping all religions together. “The refrain that all religions have their extremists is bull-t,” Harris said. “All religions do not have their extremists. Some religions have never had their extremists.” Specifically, he noted that radical Islam was far more threatening than any radical Christian sect, adding that Christians had a right to be outraged when the media treated the two religions similarly. Harris also criticized movement atheism and questioned the use of the word “atheist.” “Atheism is not a philosophy, just as non-racism is not,” he said. “It is not a worldview, though it is frequently portrayed as one. “Rather than declare ourselves atheists, I think we should emphasize reason,” Harris added. While the audience gave Dawkins a standing ovation, Harris received only polite applause. One questioner later declared herself “very disappointed” in Harris’s talk. This need for the extreme end of the spectrum, fascinates me. I perceive that Harris is attempting to find the middle and define the movement away from “militant atheism”, yet they were having none of it. Perhaps this is what one would find in any group that would gather itself because the people who are taking the time to get together are the ones who are more energized and possess more zeal for their cause. They are on fire wanting to share their partisan devotion and revolutionary ideals, in the U.S., they are a minority and want to soak in the fraternal love of their brothers and sisters, so perhaps it is not surprising that they didn’t clap for the more moderate tone of Sam Harris. Not that, “science must ultimately destroy religion” is in anyway a moderate idea. To be clear, here is a gem from Richard Dawkins for your consideration. Logical Path from Religious Beliefs to Evil Deeds by Richard Dawkins Reposted from: Washingtonpost/Newsweek On Faith Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on. It would be absurd to suggest such a thing: just as absurd as to generalize about all atheists. I am not even concerned with statistical generalizations about the majority of religious people (or atheists). My concern here is over whether there is any general reason why religion might be more or less likely to bias individuals towards all those unpleasant things in Christopher Hitchens’s list: to make them more likely to exhibit them than they would have been without religion. I think the answer is yes.Religion changes, for people, the definition of good. Atheists and humanists tend to define good and bad deeds in terms of the welfare and suffering of others. Murder, torture, and cruelty are bad because they cause people to suffer. Most religious people think them bad, too, but some religions (for example the religion of the Taliban) sanction all of them under some circumstances. For non-religious people, the behavior of consenting adults in a private bedroom is the business of nobody else, and is not bad unless it causes suffering – for example by breaking up a happy family. But many religions arrogate to themselves the right to decide that certain kinds of sexual behavior, even if they do no harm to anyone, are wrong.The actions of the Taliban, their vile bullying of women, their sanctimonious hatred of all that might lead to enjoyment, their violence, their ignorant bigotry, their hatred of education, their cruelty, seem to me to be as close to pure evil as anything I can imagine. Yet, by the lights of their own religion they are supremely righteous – really good people.The nineteen men of 9/11, having washed, perfumed themselves and shaved their whole bodies in preparation for the martyr’s paradise, believed they were performing the highest religious duty. By the lights of their religion they were as good as it is possible to be. They were not poor, downtrodden, oppressed or psychotic; they were well educated, sane and well balanced, and, as they thought, supremely good. But they were religious, and that provided all the justification they needed to murder and destroy. Their madrassas and their mullahs had given them good reason to think they were on a fast track to paradise.Polls suggest that 13% of British Muslims regard the 7/7 London bombers as blessed martyrs. Neighbors and friends expressed bewilderment that such nice, gentle, kind, youth-clubbing, cricket-loving young men could do such terrible things. But once you understand what they truly and sincerely believed – that it was Allah’s will that they blow up buses and subways – it becomes all too easy to understand.It is easy for religious faith, even if it is irrational in itself, to lead a sane and decent person, by rational, logical steps, to do terrible things. There is a logical path from religious faith to evil deeds. There is no logical path from atheism to evil deeds. Of course, many evil deeds are done by individuals who happen to be atheists. But it can never be rational to say that, because of my nonbelief in religion, it would be good to be cruel, to murder, to oppress women, or to perpetrate any of the evils on the Hitchens list.The following quotation from the Nobel prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg has become well known, but it is so devastatingly true that it is worth quoting again and again: “With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” Ahh, the catchy little quote. People who are good can be lead astray by any ideology, as evidenced by the death and destruction perpetrated by the true believers among the Nazis, the Soviets and among those living in North Korea and China, who will imprison and torture and kill for their states. State ideology is just as powerful. Whenever one group of people looks at another group of people and labels them, for whatever reason, they have objectified that group and have made it easier to justify their aims. Something to “free” think about…

Posted by hologram