Article on Atheism as a Mental Illness

It's like throwing holy water on Satan. It's fun!
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Well I'm convinced. :rolleyes:

All things being what they seem to be, he makes a pretty good case that the Intelligent Designer is evil.
 
Fnord said:
Sorry ... that algorithm was produced by intelligent intent, which directed the design of those antennae.

Now, if those antennae had spontaneaously assembled themselves from nothing, then you could claim that they were produced without intelligent intent.
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You do know that genetic algorithsm do not contain any directions from what is evolved, except for a fitness function? And in this case the fitness function would only be how good reception the antenna gets? Do you really mean that if you randomly slap some
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Rule 10
together, test it, see how well it works as an antenna, randomly modify the structure, test again, repeat wash rince is intelligent directed design?
 
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asmodean said:
You do know that genetic algorithsm do not contain any directions from what is evolved, except for a fitness function? And in this case the fitness function would only be how good reception the antenna gets? Do you really mean that if you randomly slap some ◊◊◊◊ together, test it, see how well it works as an antenna, randomly modify the structure, test again, repeat wash rince is intelligent directed design?
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I think he refers to as the 'fitness function' being intelligently designed.

He probably wants to make the argument that if the antenae suddenly appeared and you would see them and say 'Hey! Maybe those are good antennae!' and you would use them and they then would prove to be the most excellent antennae ONLY THEN no intelligent design was involved.

You want to make the argument that 'life, to exist at all, has to conform to several fitness functions' and therefore can evolve whilst conforming to those, without having a predetermined building plan.

Neither arguments preclude the other or are even in direct contest with each other.

So, to augment argument 1: The evolution of those antennae did not use any predetermined plan, so they were not intelligently 'designed', although the fitness for their habitat was. But that is just the confines of the experiment.

Augmenting argument 2: Show me something that has no intelligently designed fitness functions that produced something like these antennae.

Hajime!
 
I seem to recall that before the collapse of the Soviet Union, this was the common tactic used against dissidents there.
It was not conceivable that a good, practicing Communist would be anything but happy and well-adjusted.
So, dissidents were de facto nuts......
 
Blaspehmy !!!!!!!!!!!!

God created us the way we are, including the Atheists. and now one of his other creations dears to critizie god's creation and call some of his creations mentally ill....

mmmhhh oh boy, you just can hope we atheists are right and God is indeed pure fantasy, else you end up in hell together with us mentally ill creations.
 
There should be a "good-sportsmanship" rule on this site. You should be allowed to say whatever you want - dump as much hate on atheists as you desire, for example - but you should then be required to stick around and take your lumps.
 
Gee, and here I thought it was the other way around...

Epilepsy has long been associated with holy (or unholy) status. In the book we describe how temporal lobe seizures often result in intense religious experiences, including feeling the presence of God, feeling that one is in heaven, and seeing emanations of light from the sky, from objects, and even from body parts.
http://www.welcometoyourbrain.com/2008/02/spirit-possession-and-religious.html
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Geschwind syndrome, also known as Waxman-Geschwind syndrome or "Gastaut-Geschwind" is a characteristic personality syndrome consisting of symptoms such as circumstantiality (excessive verbal output, stickiness, hypergraphia), altered sexuality (usually hyposexuality, meaning a decreased interest), and intensified mental life (deepened cognitive and emotional responses), hyper-religiosity and/or hyper-morality or moral ideas, that is present in some epilepsy patients. This syndrome is particularly associated with usually left-side temporal lobe epilepsy.
Geschwind_syndromeWP
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Vilayanur S. Ramachandran explored the neural basis of the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE using galvanic skin response, which correlates with emotional arousal, to determine whether the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE was due to an overall enhanced emotional response, or if the enhancement was specific to religious stimuli (Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998). By presenting subjects with neutral, sexually arousing and religious words while measuring GSR, Ramachandran was able to show that patients with TLE showed enhanced emotional responses to the religious words, diminished responses to the sexually charged words, and normal responses to the neutral words. These results suggest that the medial temporal lobe is specifically involved in generating some of the emotional reactions associated with religious words, images and symbols.
Temporal_lobe_epilepsyWP
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All highlighting mine.
 
ORDER REQUIRES INTELLIGENT DIRECTION.

Say that enough times, all in caps, and anyone who disagrees with your will automatically be mentally ill.

I might recommend an experiment to this twit (not that it would impress him in the least). Take a jar loosely packed with randomly mixed large white marbles and small black ones. Shake it in a random manner, only taking care to keep it generally upright. If ORDER REQUIRES INTELLIGENT DIRECTION, then the marbles should remain randomly mixed. However, this is NOT what will happen. After a while, the marbles will self-organize, with the smll black ones on the bottom and the large white ones on top.
 
If Atheism is a mental illness, then every single newborn baby, animal and plant is clinically insane

We're gonna need quite a large Ark to put all those wackos in, Jimbo
 
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So i was going to go through the article and make a point by point refutation, but suddenly i thought that the time anyone spent reading my post would be better spent doing anything else they could possibly think of. So i will try and keep this short.

This article was a redundant mess that whips up the authors internet chatter into an epic froth of personal growth, and battles between the forces of good and evil.

And on some level the constant use of the phrase " false idea" bothers me. Not in some offended by the idea way, but more so from a literary standpoint.

Misguided idea, evil idea, harmful idea, bad idea, deranged idea. All of these would have been very accurate in regards to the authors intent in describing atheism , and none of these would have bothered me. But there is something about the phrase false idea, that seems to imply that the very idea of there not being a god is not a possibility. ( which would beg me to differ in opinion.)

Or maybe i am reading too much into a short article that is only being read due to peoples need to discuss its strange nature.
 
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