Atheist QOTD

8 Responses to “6th June 2008”

1. Roland Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 1:26

   That sounds fun, I think I will start using this.

2. John Sutton Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 10:37

   This is very true in the case of UK education system. Morality and ethics is often taught solely from a religious point of view – with almost all staffing in this area having some faith bias.

   In the over thirty per cent of schools staff recruitment is heavily biased towards people of a particular faith so that overall, schools are infested with religious believers out of proportion to their numbers in the population.

3. Terence Meaden Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 11:47

   Distressingly so many institutions are faith-based—built on foundations shaky with myth, and faith-biased towards one crazy religion or another.

   Saddest are schools where bias can be total, the young indoctrinated, brains enslaved for ever.

   The marvel of human evolution should have led to something better than this.

4. Pontus Judas Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 15:10

   I’m a product of a thorough catholic schooling: I tend to lean toward the atheist side of the agnostic spectrum. I’ll admit–I can’t disprove God’s existence…but that doesn’t mean I can’t prove the unlikelyhood of it.

   Besides, a big man in the sky and a man with horns int he ground playing with my fate…that scares the hell out of me more than being alone with fellow man.

   I like to define, not be defined.

5. Terence Meaden Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 17:38

   No-one can prove the non-existence of gods. We can no better disprove the claimed existence of Thor, Aphrodite, the sun-goddess Amaterasu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster than we can disprove the existence of the christian’s god. I can dream up a new god right now, shout it around the world, and add it to the pantheon of gods invented by previous storytellers.

   But what we can do is show that one does not need to invent some god to account for the universe and life when advanced science does that perfectly well anyway.

   So what you are choosing between is whether you are on the side of the elite scientists and astute ordinary people who have unimpaired common sense,
   or whether you side with the fictions and myths of illiterate Bronze Age desert travellers and their latter-day substitutes: the prostrating preachers and wailing priests, the mullahs and magicians, the wizards and witches.

6. Chris Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 19:18

   It’s high time the phrase “faith based” acquired the pejorative baggage that the two words together can’t help but concede. When one makes a “faith based” argument one is necessary surrendering the higher ground of “reality based” reasoning. A faith based initiative may ultimately deliver a valuable service but it does so out of fear of punishment or in a storing nuts for winter kind of way that is dishonest in it’s strident denial of self-interest. And how can anything based on faith not be sneering and superior and cajoling and disapproving of people of different or worse, no faith?

7. Hypatia Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 20:08

   I’ll admiit–I can’t disprove God’s existence…but that doesn’t mean I can’t prove the unlikelyhood of it.

   I think you’ll find most atheists agree with you – it’s impossible to prove that gods don’t exist.

   However, you could go one step further and consider that the concept of a “god” is fundamentally flawed. If god is the creator then from whence came god?

8. Terence Meaden Says:
   June 6th, 2008 at 21:41

   And as Bertrand Russell said, neither is it possible to prove or disprove that a huge china teapot is orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter.