Cleopatra wrote:
If I remember well the color needs around 400.000 years to change.
Think you mean 40,000 years? Homo Sapien as a species is about 150,000 years old. Modern humans went from dark black, to medium brown, to very pale under wildly varying conditions.
Has the science of psychology determined how psychological phaenomena behave in terms of time. I mean in how many centuries Christians and Jedi Knights will get over their illusions?
As long as the meme exists. No real way to predict how long a group of people will believe a certain thing.
To be fair, Jews don't really have "illusions" of persecutions. They HAVE been systematically persecuted for millenia.
Atheists do not even get into the trouble of discussing bio-ethics. If you don't believe me read the threads in this forum. Name hamburger eating as ethics and you will see a chorus of atheists bashing eating hamburgers on principle.
Not sure what you mean by this. I've never seen a chorus of atheists really say much of anything, and I'm not sure if you meant to use "hamburger eating" as an esoteric example or an actual example.
Atheists can't really debate ethics as a whole, because atheists aren't a "something," so much as it's a description of a single facet of a person. I feel exactly 0 kinship with other atheists in terms of our atheism. It is as immaterial to me, and most I would think, as people who like asparagus as much as me, or like cats.
In this forum I have read that eating the corpse of dead people is ok, eating your dead dog is ok, necrophilia is not bad if you exclude the problem of hygene and of course incest is an old fashioned religious concept of social structure.
Some of us subscribe to a higher, more enlightened form of ethics and morality. For instance, I don't think something is wrong simply because I find it distasteful. Unless you can present to me a harm that it is doing to an unwilling person, why is it wrong? Who says so? Why do they get to say?
Reflexively branding something as "bad" doesn't work in the vacuum of an absence of a belief structure. It is silly to me that people wish to use their standards of morality as a basis for the way others live their lives. It's as if many people wished that they were the single arbitor of life, the universe, and everything. This arrogant soap-box preaching is what makes religions so often distasteful, and what makes many atheists in particular bitter about the whole thing. Try living a perfectly normal, healthy life, yet every day being told you are commiting some horrible blasphemy. It's so alien to my worldview, so stupid, that I can't help but laugh at it.
So, who is really progressed. The atheists who claim that there is no such a thing as incest or the Pope that has accepted evolution and he still gives hope to million of people.
How can atheists as a whole progress? This example is as ridiculous as asking "who has progressed more, the pope or people that like cats and asparagus?"
This is a single description of a single, non unified absence of belief. Some atheists have the same wrongheaded, illogical morals and ethics and wish themselves to be the arbitors of everything. Some don't. The same can be said of Christians, and Muslims, and just about anyone. Living ones life according to ones principles is an admirable thing, demonizing a person for not having those same principles is arrogant.
So does the President of USA.
This is ridiculous, not to mention incredibly ignorant.
I am the last person that's going to defend Bush on personal or political grounds. I think he's a blubbering idiot that has done immense harm to our nation. However, he is pious, but he holds no illusions of BEING god.
He and the citizens of his country behave as if they are God.
Excuse me? We hold the greatest political clout. The United States, for all the evil it could do, has done far better than
any other super power in the history of the world. How many countries have we annexed and enslaved? How many times could we have done that?
Answer to the first is 0.
Answer to the second is ANYONE WE WANTED TOO.
Despite having shady motivations, the United States has been damned benevolent, and you should be grateful we are so nice about things. We could turn this world into a dark place indeed, as has happened under so many other empires.
But whoops, we're not an empire, nor do we wish to be at all imperialistic. Unless you count Hawaii. But we like vacationing there.
How can we talk about secular states when the concept of the nation is worshipped like a God?
What does this even mean? If you were to apply this concept to China, or perhaps the former USSR, you would be right. Applying this to the USA is ridiculous. We have our patriotism, but the state is not some magical entity of all knowing benevolent goodness that we get on our hands and pray too every day. The state is something that WE OWN, it reflects, in theory, the will of us all. When you see the government of my country, you see the manifestation our ideals. You see our collective will, as divided as that often is, coalesced. It is an extention of us all, and we are damned proud that we've managed to build what we have without destroying other cultures in the process.
How can you talk about secular states when flag burning in many modern secular states is a crime?
Uh, it is not illegal to burn the flag in any state in the USA. You are free to do whatever you wish with your own property, without regards to what that property looks like at the time.
Not to say that today's USA President is the son of a previous President. Has anybody said anything about Pharaohs?
He won the presidency. I think his being the son of former president Bush was enough clout for him to win an otherwise unstable victory, but that is another story. Our system is not capricious.
What? Do you know how many people, how many nations survived in history because they believed in God?
I'd wager none.
Do you know how many people manage to survive illness,to cope with losses and difficulties just by believing and this is an option that religion has given to people.
Alcohol and marijuana can do the same thing. A big snuggly teddy bear too. The benefits of religion, mainly that sense of community, are fringe to the core of the belief system. They would be there no matter what they belief system was. Why not base a system of ethics around TRUTH, instead of lies?
Which is atheism's contribution in comforting people, in helping them overcoming difficulties in giving them hope just to continue living.
I'm sure if you want to start a thread on what atheism has done for me, or others, you would get a lot of heartfelt responses. The fact that atheists have been a historical minority is the reason you see so little of it. Until the last century or so, being an atheist would have been just as untenable as being a theist. Our knowledge of the unverse was so vastly limited in terms of scope and depth, believing in anything at all would be silly! But today, I can easily look at any given god concept and see how it fails on every conceivable level. I see god receding as science advances. I see truth replacing fiction. I see knowledge replacing ignorance. More to the point, I see us becoming better.
To turn this around on you:
How many wars would have been avoided if we had no ideaological differences? How many murders would have been stopped? If nobody had a religion to staunchly defend, what would this world be like right now? No imagined difference, only real ones. You avoid a whole mess of problems right there.
When finally given the choice, I chose the truth. I chose to take each concept, expose it's base, and judge it on it's merits alone. When it came to religion, I found a fundamental lack at every single level. One blind untruth topped on another, and another and another. A tangled mess of dogma and ritual that are meant to replace the tangible things in our lives, meant to replace learning, meant to replace genuine human relationship. I can't accept that.
