No. But it gives me an obligation to follow the rules of the forum as I understood them. And I think you know that. You're just casting my actions in the worst possible light. It's called an ad hominem attack, and it will not work against me.
I'm casting your actions in the light of trying to understand them because so far some of them haven't made much sense and the ones that did have been the usual derogatory stuff I hear often from people who see atheists as immoral and having beliefs that I would say are more akin to magic than science.
I may be a Harry Potter fan, but I know I can't wave a wand and say a spell that creates water or doubles the amount of food available, as Molly Weasley does when she has a few more people to feed in the Burrow or at Grimmauld Place. Seems to me I read that somewhere else, though... oh, right. The New Testament... something about feeding the multitudes on a few loaves and fishes?
Ignorance of that magnitude says far more about you than it does about me.
Given that it was the middle of the night, you will have to forgive me that I was thinking that a glass of milk and a snack would be nice, rather than delving into a research project about stuff I would have learned decades ago and didn't bother to keep fresh in my memory since it wasn't something I felt necessary.
I know what it is. I would wonder, however, if you truly understand what the greater implications of it are. To truly believe that no Supreme Being exists or has ever existed, you have to look at life, the universe, and everything... and declare that it just randomly "came into existence". So YES, I regard that as a fantastical belief. And there is NOTHING you can say or do to change my opinion.
I worked out the implications of this for myself over 40 years ago, thankyouverymuch, and don't need to have it 'splained to me as if I don't know what my own thoughts are.
Re the part of your post I bolded: now you're delving into Hitchhiker's Guide realms of belief. While the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42... it took 6 episodes of the TV series for Arthur Dent to figure out the Question, which turns out to be "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" And if you're going to bring Douglas Adams into this, you need to remember that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy contains a great deal of satire and isn't meant to be taken literally.
Seriously, there is evidence for the Big Bang. The cosmologists and astrophysicists are still working on it. It's a very complicated thing to try to understand, and the beauty of the scientific method is that if they realize they got something wrong, they set it aside, try to figure out how and why they got it wrong, and work from there to get it right.
That's how science works, from everything from studying the Big Bang to developing safe covid vaccines.
Further, Darwin's theory of evolution (only it's not a theory, it's a fact) runs on one principle: evolution is fueled by death
"Survival of the fittest" is an unfortunate turn of phrase for modern times, since it conjures images of death and destruction as the only necessary things.
What is necessary for evolution is for an organism to survive long enough to reproduce. What is also necessary is that when mutations happen that they allow the organism to adapt successfully to the conditions in which it exists.
We're in an extinction-level event now, due to so many species not being able to produce viable offspring, or if they do, the offspring can't adapt to the polluted hellhole that human activity/climate change has made of their natural habitats.
And life is very, very complex, even in its simplest form. Saying that it can form on it's own, at random, is like saying that the Great Wall of China built itself.
All I can say to this is that not one of the multiple deities ever worshiped on this planet throughout the millennia has been any better at engineering the human body than nature itself. You'd think that maybe one of them would have improved things so that people wouldn't die from diseases or medical conditions that the medical profession has worked diligently to cure for thousands of years... but nope. Not one of them bothered.
My sympathies, but neither of us can change the past. You should instead be working harder to deal with the future Minister Whozits is trying to bring about.
What makes you think I haven't been working to deal with this elsewhere? Adriana LaGrange is my MLA (representative in the provincial Legislature) and she is not amenable to being told she's wrong. The next election is still two years away. It's possible someone would mount a Charter challenge, pointing out that proselytizing in public schools is a Charter violation and the Supreme Court would agree. I sincerely hope they do.
The reason I mentioned any of this in the first place is because when you get a government that is determined to violate everyone's constitutional right of freedom of/from religion, it's appalling just how far they're prepared to go to do it.
I wil give the "Land of The Free" speech whenever I please to whomever I please because it's more true for the United States than any other country on Earth, including yours, as you keep proving with your posts.
Uh-huh. Proselytizing of a different sort, then. I could ask a series of questions comparing our respective countries, but that would be off-topic for this thread. So I will leave it in case you ever want to have a conversation in which you're willing to discuss things quietly, rather than in anger.
And I offered you options for dealing with your gung-ho religious zealots. The fact that you'd rather complain about them in response to my posts is a "you" problem.
'Splaining rarely solves anything.
Go ahead and be an atheist. I don't care!
I never figured you did care. Obviously others in this thread and in my own personal experience care.
Which to most people is like saying "I like you fine. It's the fact that you're breathing that I can't stand. If it weren't for your pesky lungs i wouldn't be bothering you." Stop It! You know damned well people's beliefs are part of who they are as people, so trying to say you only have a problem with the beliefs is bullshit.
You're making a lot of assumptions about me. Back in the '80s, I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism (google it; it's a long story to explain it, but the relevant part here is that it's a religion-neutral educational organization that studies the Middle Ages through Tudor era).
When introduced to a new person, the first words out of her mouth were not "Hi" but rather "what church do you go to?" I told her I don't go to any church, and she immediately became terribly confused. She mulled it over and then said, "Well, that's okay... I guess."
At which point I had to stop myself from getting angry and informing her that I don't need anyone's permission to be atheist... because both of us were guests in another person's house, and I do have some company manners (more than she did, since I have never in my life asked anyone what their religion was, considering it to be none of my business unless they bring it up first).
Fast-forward a decade... we'd become good friends. Friends to the point that I was "Auntie ____" to her grandchildren and we had many interests in common including medieval history, strategy games, D&D, computer games (she taught me how to play Civilization), and Star Trek.
But the one thing she could never wrap her mind around was my being atheist. After about 11 years, I finally brought it up, since she'd accepted the not going to church, but I hadn't told her the reason why.
So I said, "I'm atheist" and her immediate reaction was "No. You're PAGAN."
She could not handle the idea that I don't believe in
any deities, spirits, supernatural, paranormal, etc. entities. I guess it did confuse her that someone who could play a cleric character in D&D could be atheist in RL. She would rather believe that I engage in Wiccan rites than nothing at all (nothing against Wiccans here; it's just that it falls into the same category of Stuff I Don't Believe In).
I can always take an extra pill. What I won't do is find somebody talking about The Walking Dead and use their posts to rail about my hypertention.
I have no idea what this even means. You seem to be taking a lot of this very personally and have assumed that I've been yelling at you when I actually haven't been.
I was hoping that there would be no need for me to say anything here, but this is starting to veer too much into the personal side.
Also, I was OK with the topic straying a little to atheism and religion in schools, since those are still related to the thread topic of religion, and it seemed like a natural outgrowth of the discussion. But, this:
"Who's freer, Canada or the U.S." is wildly off-topic. If the two of you wish to continue debating levels of freedom in various democracies, please feel free to start a new thread, but it's out of place here. Same for coming up with ways to have Adriana LaGrange removed from her post. Thank you.
Sorry, was trying not to get personal, and I do believe I can usually divorce the person from the belief (unless they get personal about it).
I have no interest whatsoever in debating which country is "freer". It's off-topic here and I've already had so many discussions about it over the years anyway.
I have been debating with myself about starting a thread about school curricula, because I've honestly been curious as to if and how much other jurisdictions in North America have had to put up with the sort of bullshit that's happening now in Alberta. It could (likely would) get contentious, so if you think it would work here, I'll think about it. If not... there's always other places.
Ah, two arguments I've often seen bandied about by atheists trying to "evangelize" me.
Nobody is trying to "evangelize" you. Atheism is not a religion.
It would be nice if you would accept the validity of the scientific method, though, since that's what has led to this cushy modern lifestyle we have where we don't have to start from scratch every time we want to know something.
It took 2.5 billion years just for prokaryotes to evolve into eukaryotes. Statistically, the odds of even prokaryotes (complete with DNA and systems for survival, ingestion of food, and reproduction) just "happening" out of a random swirl of molecules are effectively zero. As in, not gonna happen. Not in a billion years, not in a trillion, not in a quadrillion.
You have a strange fascination with the word "random".
And the whole "self-replicating system" argument is theoretical and involves one very specific chemical compound. It's funny how your ilk seems to expect me to have the atheist equivalent of a Billy Graham crusade "come to Jesus" moment when you present it.
I am trying to picture any atheist lecturer or presenter I know of, mounting a Billy Graham crusade-style event, imploring their atheist audience to contribute $$$$$$$ or Charles Darwin will "call him home."
... until life forms, evolution is not a factor.
Here's some reading material for you on
Stellar Evolution.
The article is a bit wordy, but in essence, there have been several generations of stars that have existed since the Big Bang. The earliest ones were pretty basic compared to stars like our own Sun. They didn't have all the goodies the Sun does, like oxygen, for instance. They only had hydrogen and helium.
The biggest stars - the supergiants - often end their lives as a supernova (I'm sure you've heard of those, even though Star Trek never depicts them accurately). In the final phases of a supergiant's life, before it goes BOOM! (silently, of course), it makes heavier elements in a desperate attempt to keep existing. It never works, though - something has to give, and so the star explodes, releasing its constituent atoms into the universe... and billions of years later, some of those atoms get recycled into new stars, possibly planets, and maybe life (thanks to those more-complex-than-helium atoms cooked up inside those older stars).
So next time you roast a hot dog over an open fire, thank an old, billions-of-years-dead star. It gave you the carbon, oxygen, and everything else necessary for the fire, your hot dog, the stick you use for roasting, and the ketchup, mustard, relish, or whatever else you might use as condiments, as well as your own self, who is eagerly anticipating biting into that hot dog.
Carl Sagan said it best: We are starstuff. We're made of recycled star matter from billions of years ago. So yeah, evolution was around long before there was any life to try to figure it out.
It IS marvelous. Too marvelous, IMO, to just be a mere accident.
Mutations happen. Some have beneficial results. Most don't. That virus going around right now has been mutating. I don't call that "marvelous."
But sometimes accidents to lead to something better. I've had cooking accidents that led to better recipes.
I am a firm believer in evolution. If humans can turn canis lupus into Chihuahuas, St. Bernard's, and everything in between, Mother Nature can certainly do the same. I just see evolution the way I see Lee Harvey Oswald... it didn't act alone.
You could have fooled me. You've just been waxing hysterically at the thought of nasty people in this thread trying to turn you into an atheist, when the actual reality is that we don't care what you believe as long as you please stop attributing things you don't understand to "magic" and try to understand the scientific method and that just because we don't have the knowledge RIGHT NOW, that doesn't prove that "goddidit."
You wanted science? I'm a student of cosmology, astronomy, biology, microbiology, mathematics, and statistics. The Goldilocks cosmos, the orderly universe, the principle on entropy, the complexity of life, they all tell me the same thing. I am sorry, but if you are an atheist, your house is built on some very soft sand, and while I respect your God given and constitutionally guaranteed right to live in that house, I have no wish whatsoever to share it with you. I formally refuse to adopt such a depressing, nihilistic, and scientifically unsound faith. And there is, quite honestly, nothing you can do about it.
And there you prove that you really have no clue at all what atheism is, and although some of us have been taking the time and effort to explain it to you, you haven't understood one syllable about it.
Nobody here is trying to "convert" you to being an atheist. There's nothing to "convert" to, as it's not a religion.
How a worldview that prefers the scientific method over "we don't understand it, therefore miracles" can be "scientifically unsound" makes no sense.
I guess this can be summed up as "projecting, much?" and since you have no idea how evolution actually works (your example with domestic dogs is artificial selection, not natural selection), I am at a loss to understand why you would
drop a "like" on a caption contest entry for an episode that partly deals with evolution.
Or maybe it's not so mysterious, after all. Whoever wrote "Threshold" didn't understand it, either.
