Why no blog?

louis Says on May 25, 2009 at 7:42:

Hey atheist! Why do so many of your commenters and thread-starters have no blogs of their own?

Help! I’m all alone in my enlightened bubble!

Enlightened writes on May 21, 2009 at 4:03 am:

I was raised knowing that I am Jewish, but had a very sparse religious education. That changed when I moved to Israel (long story) and met my future husband who came from a very traditional family. Somehow, despite my very rational and logical approach to just about everything, I became a full believer. Mind you, I NEVER practiced or admired orthodoxy, but I did believe in a supreme deity- or at least convinced myself that I did. Then, after a tragic wake-up call, I evolved! I was enlightened! In some ways it has been invigorating and–well, enlightening! Although most often it is a very sad and bitter realization. I feel angry that I wasted so much time, that I allowed myself to be oppressed-THAT I WAS PART OF MY OWN OPPRESSION! But the worst part is that I fed this stupid god/Santa Claus BS to my children. My husband still fears god (he’d do better to fear me a little!) and we even keep Kosher. I have no room in my life and absolutely no patience for religion- especially Judaism. (Somehow, I only pity the followers of other religions-but I have a growing animosity towards Judaism.) Most of my friends are believers as well. They just smile and change the subject when I start to rant (I am a good person and a good friend so they stick around). Those of my friends who are not believers just can’t understand what I am so worked up about. They sing holiday songs, enjoy holiday feasts and could care less about god, and all the ugly facets of religion that lie heavy on my heart.
So here I am on one hand relieved and excited. (I want to wake everyone up! “Hello! Guess what?! There is no god you idiots! There never was! Ok, let’s get to work! It is time to move on! There is a MUCH higher level of morality than religion. Let’s get busy and fix this world!)
On the other hand, I am depressed. I have god and religion all around me, all of the time. I married my heart’s choice 20 years ago and I feel that I can’t just change the rules on him. I began raising my children Jewish and feel that they are too young to turn around and say “oops, I didn’t really mean that.” The innocent part of celebrating Holidays is gone for me, and I just can’t bring myself to celebrate anything but birthdays. I am a real pain during the holidays!!
I admit that I have been prone to ranting and raving lately, but I just wish I could wake up tomorrow and find that the world has caught up to me. People think that I just hate god, because of the losses I have suffered. What they don’t understand is that I hate what the belief in god has done to humanity, what it has done to me, my parents, and my sweet peace-loving sister who was blown up beyond recognition while sleeping on the beach. I don’t hate god. THERE IS NO GOD! I hate bigotry, oppression, discrimination and ignorance- A.k.a. Religion!
So- besides anti-depressants, therapy, tolerance, patience and time, does anyone have some suggestions for the ‘woman in the bubble’?

Fallacious Arguments from Silence

JMartyr asks:

——————————
Hi, I have a question.

What would an atheist’s reply be 2 the Christian who argues that most of atheism’s arguments for Jesus’ non-existence rely on fallacious arguments from silence? I know they say that we would’ve found something by now, but didn’t it indeed take centuries, even millenia, for most if not all historians/archaeologists to make many of their discoveries?

Thanks,
JMartyr
——————————

Thanks for the question, JMartyr!

Atheists can Hate God

psychosavant Says:

I’ve heard it before, I’ve read it on this blog. Contrary to what many would say, even atheists, we can and some of us do, hate God. Anyone who says it is impossible for an atheist to hate God because they don’t believe he exists is not looking at things from the right perspective.

I’m an atheist, and I hate God. How is this possible you ask? Am I thus acknowledging the existence of God? The answer to this latter question is a resounding “No!”.

I hate God in much the same way I hate the Teletubbies, the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, and DragonBallZ. I do not have to believe something is real to hate it. God to me, is as fictional a character as the rest of these, but I hate him the most.

However, this is not to say all atheists hate God. To each his (or her for the ladies) own. But it is not particularly impossible for anyone to have an emotional response, or to love or hate something, simply because they do not believe in it.

Amino Acids: Attacking Atheism (again)

Xela777 Says:

So, you guys had your experiment, (http://bcs.whfreeman.com/thelifewire/content/chp03/0302001.html) where “you” used methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water to mimic the early earth’s atmosphere, and viola you guys made amino acids! No one disputes that. Although, I am curios as to how these amino acids eventually linked up to make a functional cell, or how they linked at all. These amino acids needed to be in a very specific order, and although T’s will link to C’s, is it? I don’t see how the groups of T-C and A-U (in the case of RNA, which is thought to be before DNA) will join together to make any intelligible (as in, will work) organism.
I will also point out that after the 1950’s, the prehistoric meteorologists rethought their hypothesis of early atmosphere, and changed it to nitrogen, I think oxygen, iron too? The point is, they changed it because the supposed hydrogen would’ve escaped off, and the experiment never showed the amino results in the “new” atmosphere.
But how did aminos link?

Atheists can’t explain origin of life

Xela777 Says:

I’m a high schooler, so I haven’t really met the hierarchy of evolutionists, but every atheist (not that their necessarily the same) I’ve met, including my dad, hasn’t been able to even make an explanation of how the “first reproductive cells” started asexual reproduction and then evolved into sexual reproduction. It would require two voluntary cells, one to somehow know how to play the female role, the other the male, and get that complex reaction to work.
So, anyone?

—–

From me: Thanks for the new thread, Xela777!

Jesus’ subservience to the Father

Before the domination of the early Christian sect commonly referred to as the “proto-orthodoxy” (which later became known as the orthodoxy), there were other Christian sects who were also vying for supremacy. Like the proto-orthodoxy, these other sects held an opinion about the nature of Jesus. For example, some sects held that Jesus was a god who only appeared as a man. Others insisted that he was a god but one that was subservient to the God (a.k.a. the Father). Much of what the Church Fathers wrote was intended as a defense of their own particular christology, and as a condemnation of the views held by the competing sects. The proto-orthodoxy view was not merely that Jesus was a god equal to the Father, but that Jesus and the Father are one and the same god.

Yet this seems at odds with various verses in the Bible, such as ones we find in John 5, which make a clear distinction between Jesus and the Father. John 5 quotes Jesus as saying:

(19) …the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.
(20) For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, to your amazement he will show him even greater things than these.
(22) …the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son,
(26) For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself.
(27) And he has given him authority to judge because he is the Son of Man.
(30) By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.

How do you suppose the Church Fathers reconciles statements like these and others with their belief the Jesus and the Father are one and the same?

What is the evolutionary explanation for having two sexes?

Andy asks: “What is the evolutionary explanation for having two sexes (man and woman)?” Thanks for the question, Andy!

Sexual reproduction began with simple single-cell organisms (eukaryotes). Since sexual reproduction provides much more genetic variation in a population than asexual reproduction does, it follows that species which could reproduce sexually were able to more quickly evolve in response to environmental changes than species that reproduce only asexually. It was therefore the asexual reproducers who were better able to develop into higher plant and animal forms.

Did God created the universe for us?

If you believe that God created the Universe, why do you suppose he did it? Was it for the benefit of us humans, or was there another purpose? Did he create the stars simply for our viewing pleasure? If so, it seems a bit over the top considering the size of a single star compared to our Earth (more about that shortly), the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and the hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe (each being made up of hundreds of billions of stars) – nearly all of which we can’t even see. It would have made more sense to put small bright orbs in the heavens – which is what the ancients believed the stars to be.

If our Sun represents less than one billianth of one billianth of the total number of stars in the universe – virtually a single grain of sand on a long beach – then how big is our Earth relative to the Sun? If you think of the Sun as a basketball, the Earth would be about the size of the head of a pin. With a little imagination, you can get a feel for just how miniscule our corner of the universe really is.

What fraction of time has this unimaginably small spec we call Earth been home to humans? The universe itself is about 14 billion years old. The earth is about 4.5 billion years old – about a third of the time the universe has been around. But how long has the Earth been home to us humans? Oxygen first appeared in the Earth’s atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago. Bacteria appeared only about 600 million years ago. Land plants appeared only 400 million years ago, followed by the first land animals around 300 million years ago. The genus, Homo, appeared only 2.5 million years ago. If these are the humans of Genesis, then the Earth has been home to humans not 1% of the time that the Earth has been around, not 0.1% of the time, but about 0.05% of the time. To give you a perspective, 0.05% of a year is about an hour and a half.

However the first species of the genus Homo were nothing like us modern humans. They looked more like modern Gorillas than modern humans. Homosapiens, our species, have only been around for about 200,000 years. That’s only about a thousandth of the time that the genus Homo has been around. Once again, to give you perspective of what a small fraction of time homosapiens have existed: one thousandth of 0.05% of a year is about 5 seconds.

But it gets even worse. Most of Earth is hostile to human life. The ocean covers about 70% of the Earth and is uninhabitable. The land that makes up the remainder of the Earth’s surface is no paradise either. Tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic activity, droughts, extreme temperatures, hurricanes, and tornadoes are some of the geological dangers that constantly threaten human life. In addition to geological hazards, humans also face deadly non-biological hazards, like plagues which wipe out a significant part of the human population from time to time.

Not only is there no compelling reason to believe that the universe was designed in the first place, there is overwhelming evidence that the universe was not designed for us humans. There is only a tiny corner of the universe we can see. Nearly all of that tiny fraction of the universe is hostile to human life. And even the tiny spec of the tiny fraction that supports human life, has only been a hostile home to humans for a tiny fraction of time.

End note:

How big is a billion anyway? If you are reading this on a computer with a decent monitor (say 1280 x 768), then there are nearly a million pixels on your screen. On a good monitor, you won’t be able to see an individual pixel with your naked eye – try looking at a portion of the screen through a magnifying glass and you will see the pixels. To see a billion pixels, your monitor would have to be a thousand times larger (which means 32 times taller and 32 times wider – 32 x 32 = 1024)! You can measure the width and height of your monitor and multiply the width by 32 and the height by 32 to see how big a billion-pixel monitor would be. That’s one one billion pixels. Now imagine that this single pixel you are viewing through a magnifying glass were actually super-sized billion-pixel monitor (32 time wider and 32 times taller than your computer monitor) – all stuffed into the space of a single pixel of the original billion-pixel super-sized monitor. A single pixel on that monitor would be a billionth of a billionth the size of your original full-sized monitor.

Bible Contradictions

Sabregod Says:

Why Does Atheist Doesn’t Believe in Bible And Religion. Bible And Science Doesn’t Contradict if You Gave Some Examples of Contradictions, I Will come up some counter-arguments against those contradictions.