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Post by shane on Sept 14, 2021 15:22:46 GMT
Meh, man is a tribal animal. As an adult it’s not so easy to make new friends, especially if you’re not in some sporting or political group. For many I think atheist groups are just adult social organisations with atheism as a pretext.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Sept 14, 2021 17:19:46 GMT
Meh, man is a tribal animal. As an adult it’s not so easy to make new friends, especially if you’re not in some sporting or political group. For many I think atheist groups are just adult social organisations with atheism as a pretext. Quite right, Shane, and welcome back.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Sept 15, 2021 8:41:21 GMT
The current PHOENIX, in its profile of Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland, gives an interesting description of the internal rows and shenanigans of the most prominent organisation seeking to represent atheists internationally. Mr Nugent, it seems, is establishing a rival body. Here's an interesting thought - how many of the members of these bodies have used at one time or other the trite debating-point that atheism is not a belief system but simply an absence of belief? If it's not a belief system, how can it have organised representative bodies (complete, it seems, with schisms and heresy hunts)? I read Michael Nugent's bio on Wikipedia Michael Nugent and I find it remarkable how detailed it is for someone who is essentially just a professional agitator. No doubt Mr Nugent has plenty of energy, but much more important figures have less information on Wikipedia.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 25, 2021 8:01:46 GMT
I suspect that Nugent or a fan writes his own entry. This is not supposed to happen but it is a fairly common occurrence (for example, Desmond Fennell's entry was clearly written by himself).
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Post by Irish8916 on Nov 6, 2021 0:02:51 GMT
Anyone here from Belfast, Northern Ireland?
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Post by assisi on Nov 7, 2021 17:54:08 GMT
Anyone here from Belfast, Northern Ireland? I don't think so. I think some may have lived in Belfast for a time. Any particular reason for asking?
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 19, 2021 20:59:51 GMT
The current Spectator magazine has a colloquium between Steven Pinker and Rory Sutherland in which Pinker describes Ireland as having become a majority-atheist country. This might be true as regards material atheism (living as if you were an atheist) but not, I suspect formal atheism (declaring yourself as an atheist); partly because we tend not to do principles in this country, just to go with the flow. Any thoughts?
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Post by benny on Dec 22, 2021 10:11:46 GMT
I always wonder about three things : 1) why atheists feel the desperate need to attack the Christian faith, religion, God when they claim to know none of it exists. 2) why they never attack the Muslim faith, although I can guess why not. 3) why they never attack the Jewish faith and again I can guess why not.
Anyway, I will not be replying to atheist comment as they have nothing to offer except their fear that maybe God does exist.
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Post by assisi on Dec 25, 2021 21:05:19 GMT
I always wonder about three things : 1) why atheists feel the desperate need to attack the Christian faith, religion, God when they claim to know none of it exists. 2) why they never attack the Muslim faith, although I can guess why not. 3) why they never attack the Jewish faith and again I can guess why not. Anyway, I will not be replying to atheist comment as they have nothing to offer except their fear that maybe God does exist. 1) Atheists feel this way because Christianity is a constant reminder to them of the sin of their often dark lifestyles. And also a reminder of the emptiness of their own spiritual being. 2) They rarely attack the Muslim faith in case they get killed. They also, in their PC world, vaguely associate Islam as an enemy of Christianity, and being mostly a non-Western phenomenon (i.e. non-white) must be accorded liberal vouchers. 3) Some do attack the Jewish faith, others the state of Israel. But one risks losing careers, being cancelled or being shunned.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 8, 2022 19:44:45 GMT
I think this is a bit oversimplified. Part of the reason some atheists attack Christianity is that they see themselves as having been sold a pup by their Christian upbringing and having been kept in ignorance and provincialism longer than they need have been. (b) There is quite a noticeable culture of ex-Muslim atheists who are driven at least partly by the reasons given in (a) above. Some non-Muslim atheists are also hostile to it because they see Muslims as still taking their religion seriously as Christians used to do. There is also the fact that in the US and Europe Muslims are predominantly fairly recent immigrants of non-European descent, so attacks on Islam can be seen as racist. (This is not altogether untrue - cf the way in which some far-right groups describe themselves as "infidels" and preach a version of cultural Christianity defined as being non-Muslim, just as a certain type of self-professed Protestant defines Protestantism as not being Catholic.) There is a tradition of secular Islamophobia which attacks Mohammed as a way of covertly attacking Jesus (cf Voltaire). (c) Secular Jews can be really scathing about religiously observant Jews and vice versa (they have been known to exchange accusations of anti-semitism, based on different definitions of what it is to be a Jew), and there is a long tradition of Jewish atheism. The fact that Judaism can be seen as a national (and hence potentially secular) identity as well as a religious one, and that it is not an universalistic religion like Christianity and Islam, complicates matters, as does the Holocaust and the long history of Jews being persecuted. There have been and probably still are atheist anti-semites who blame the Jews for the existence of Christianity and Islam - cf Christopher Hitchens' statement that his greatest historical regret was that the Hellenisers did not defeat the Maccabees.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jan 10, 2022 2:19:22 GMT
I always wonder about three things : 1) why atheists feel the desperate need to attack the Christian faith, religion, God when they claim to know none of it exists. 2) why they never attack the Muslim faith, although I can guess why not. 3) why they never attack the Jewish faith and again I can guess why not. Anyway, I will not be replying to atheist comment as they have nothing to offer except their fear that maybe God does exist. And some people call Catholics closed-minded.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 19, 2022 0:39:22 GMT
This post on the fall of the Roman Empire by a historian who is not particularly religious incidentally refutes cruder atheist claims that Christianity killed off Greco-Roman thought and blocked European civilisation for a millennium. Check out the amazingly dumb chart (which he reproduces) showing the supposed impact of the "Christian Dark Ages"! acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/#comments
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 25, 2022 0:26:46 GMT
Recently read Fr Brendan Purcell's FROM BIG BANG TO BIG MYSTERY. Impressed by his observation that debating Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett left him impressed by their passionate commitment to truth (even though I suspect this means they are convinced they have the truth already).
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 18, 2023 20:30:45 GMT
An interesting discussion of the different types of atheist and the problem of engaging them in rational argument. NB there was a time when "atheist" was used to describe those who believe in an impersonal or non-interventionist God, and the second or third types discussed in the article can exemplify this: www.ncregister.com/blog/three-kinds-of-atheists
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 14, 2023 22:45:39 GMT
Recently noted Richard Dawkins and a particularly aggressive atheist on Politics.ie who calls him/herself Lumpy Talbot commenting on the view that the loss of Christian faith undermines morality. What surprised me is how completely they miss the point: Dawkins asks why we can't just be good without positing the existence of God. Lumpy Talbot claims (in a brief paraphrase) that the claim is simply that people will only be good if they're afraid of hellfire. What neither of them gets is the point made by proponents of the view (including some agnostics like the historian Tom Holland, and for that matter Nietzsche who thought undermining "slave morality" was a good thing). This is that commonly accepted ideas of what it is to be good, such as the view that everyone possesses fundamental human rights, rest on Christian assumptions and if Christian belief is rejected these assumptions are undermined as well. Lumpy Talbot also suggests that religious societies are the most oppressive. I wonder what non-religious societies he has in mind, given that most societies have been religious in some sense? Enver Hoxha's Albania does not exactly present an appealing image: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism#Albania
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