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Atheism

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  • Moderators Posts: 51,726 ✭✭✭✭Delirium


    Turtwig wrote: »
    Earth is a giant computer run by lab mice.

    they finally did it?? :eek:



    :pac:

    If you can read this, you're too close!



  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,232 ✭✭✭Brian Shanahan


    MayoSalmon wrote: »
    Not everything needs to be substantiated or analyzed.

    So you've no evidence and these "spirits" are either something you've dreamed up, or someone else has dreamed up and you've accepted without evidence.

    Nice to see we've that sorted out then.


  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    Barr125 wrote: »
    Atoms aren't energy (unless you're talking about atomic energy specifically) and he has already pointed out the fact the "energy" he was referring to is not a literal energy.

    I believe in an invisible pink unicorn that lives at the end of my garden.

    Of course, it's not a literal unicorn.

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,401 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    [...] it's not a literal unicorn.
    Does your unicorn depend on context?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 237 ✭✭The Adversary


    Yes OP, There is in fact a spirit world! Two actually.

    The first one is called heaven, thats where good people go. There's an endless supply of ice cold beer and strippers.

    The second is called hell, this is where bad people go. It's similar to heaven but the beer is stale and the strippers have STD'S.


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  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    robindch wrote: »
    Does your unicorn depend on context?

    Everything depends on CONTEXT!!!1!!1!

    Stop dissing my unicorn beliefs, or I'll have you up before the blasphemy police.

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    And you failed to ask the obvious question.

    If it's invisible... how do I know it is pink?

    The answer shall be revealed.

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Registered Users Posts: 9,439 ✭✭✭TheChizler


    And you failed to ask the obvious question.

    If it's invisible... how do I know it is pink?

    The answer shall be revealed.
    Faith, I believe.


  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    Sorry son, you're not of the pink unicorn god's chosen people. Hellfire and damnation await you, in an ironic it-doesn't-matter-how-you-live-your-life fashion.

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Registered Users Posts: 26,578 ✭✭✭✭Turtwig


    Everything depends on CONTEXT!!!1!!1!

    Stop dissing my unicorn beliefs, or I'll have you up before the blasphemy police.

    Calm the fck down before we get our ban hammer out and play whack a mole with your head! Respect the atheist religion or suffer extremely sadistic torture!

    Fck context! Fck everything. There is but only one interpretation and that is the interpretation of Mod.

    Burn the heathens. Burn them!


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  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    Turtwig wrote: »
    Calm the fck down before we get our ban hammer out and play whack a mole with your head! Respect the atheist religion or suffer extremely sadistic torture!

    How very dare you. I have the right to have a baby, as you have to have a man.

    tumblr_static_blank_title_white_transparent.png

    Behold the pink unicorn, lay down to F**k in front of him and/or her. Or else me daddy will lay retribution down upon yiz.

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Registered Users Posts: 9,439 ✭✭✭TheChizler


    Sorry son, you're not of the pink unicorn god's chosen people. Hellfire and damnation await you, in an ironic it-doesn't-matter-how-you-live-your-life fashion.
    Any worse than Sithrak, the god who hates you unconditionally?

    (That comic's SFW, the rest of the website VERY much isn't)


  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    Turtwig, it shall be written in the first three or four books of the make-it-up-testament how you were an evil daemon who frustrated the prophet and reduced his profits.

    Lettuce prey.

    Ay, men.

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Registered Users Posts: 9,338 ✭✭✭nozzferrahhtoo


    MayoSalmon wrote: »
    Not everything needs to be substantiated or analyzed.

    Nice cop out sentence for not backing up a single thing you say or intend to ever say.
    MayoSalmon wrote: »
    I am talking about the energy you see in animals, nature and people. You might call it there soul but I see it more as there spirit.

    Which energy exactly? All the energy in these creatures comes from food. It is released from there by processes we already greatly understand. We know what this energy is and I see no reason to call it "spirit" or "soul".

    I asked you to define the word "spirit" and clarify what it is you are even talking about. You appear unable to do even that. No surprise as others have failed before you. Look at the debate between Kyle Butt and Dan Barker for example where Barker asked Butt to define his idea of soul too. What Butt listed were a list of attributes of what "soul" is NOT. He could not, even when pressed, identify a single thing it actually IS.
    MayoSalmon wrote: »
    I am not talking literally

    Then what ARE you talking? Nonsense? Contrived Nonsense? Or just woo nonsense?

    I am struggling to add an option to that list that does not use the word nonsense but that might actually apply.
    MayoSalmon wrote: »
    That's a great summary, and it doesn't I would suggest it moves into a new state, no evidence etc of this of course. I guess I am a believer in the theory of reincarnation of some sort.

    We have another one around here who likes the idea of reincarnation and we pressed him to support the idea. He failed in a way that was as spectacular as it was comical. Quite literally the best he could come up with was to point at a single woman who appeared to be able to speak a language (though not very well at all it turns out) that no one knew how she learned.

    That was _quite literally_ the sum total of the evidence he could find supporting reincarnation.

    I think reincarnation is the wrong word. Everything that makes you: you... will be "recycled". Reused. There is, for example, a not insignificant chance that one atom in the water you drank today at one point passed through the bowels of Abraham Lincoln.

    But none of the break down and re-use of your self that naturally occurs on death in any way conforms to any definition of "reincarnation" I have ever read. Perhaps you are merely operating under a definition I have not yet been made aware of?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,232 ✭✭✭Brian Shanahan


    If it's invisible... how do I know it is pink?

    It is permanently stuck in the physical and mental state known as "being an eight year old girl".


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 9,438 ✭✭✭TwoShedsJackson


    If you see an animal, you are seeing a collection of atoms. Atoms = Energy.

    Clearly not the sort of 'energy' that MayoSalmon was referring to.


  • Registered Users Posts: 3,063 ✭✭✭Kiwi in IE


    smacl wrote: »
    nor is there a gentleman in Nigeria keen to transfer 7 million dollars in my bank account.

    Hahaha I got that email yesterday too.

    "Dear *Surname*
    I am the personal atorney for a Mr *same surname*"

    You'd think that an attorney might be able to spell their professional title correctly wouldn't you?

    Probably wouldn't send it to people if they knew they were atheist, far less likely to be gullible gob****es!


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 15 Iollan Leeden


    rosier79 wrote: »
    Do you think it is possible that there's a spirit world but not a god?
    No spirit world nor gods. But people have some cognitive biases to see the world as functional. It might explain - in part - why there are believers.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 15 Iollan Leeden


    Any one who has sufficent intelligence can see that atheism is as blind as christianity or islam, only agnosticism is the home of the openminded.we cannot know if a god existsor doesnt exist as athiests beleive, we cannot know the origins of the universe etc but we can be curious and ponder it or just accept that we wont ever know unless there is an afterlife(highly unlikely but no possible to say it doesnt exist) or a god reveals himself to us or provides evidence.anyone that follows a religon based on poor documentary evidence from unscientiic era's like the bible and koran are fools,but their blind faith could be true! nothing re faith can be completley discounted!
    from agnostic ronnie
    Not really. If you start by talking about our ignorance, you might as well talk about your next fart as the cause of the next earthquake. Would you stop farting (if you could)? In the same way, if a woman claims that she killed Napoleon, would you put her in prison?
    Being atheist doesn't mean we absolutely know that there are no gods but that doesn't mean we can't judge them as simple human stories. Agnosticism is by far invalid.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 15 Iollan Leeden


    O'Coonassa wrote: »
    I've had it cynically explained to me as the belief that there was nothing, and nothing acted upon that nothingness, and then for an unknown reason it exploded into everything; then for no good reason other than sheer random chance bits of everything rearranged themselves into bits that could make more of themselves and then they turned into apes who thought they knew about nearly everything.

    Is that fair?
    Problem is that we have cognitive biases to see the world as functional. So, when someone explains to you that there are no reasons, it might be difficult to accept (it's quite dangerous to believe in the brain...).


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  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 677 ✭✭✭Giacomo McGubbin


    O'Coonassa wrote: »
    I've had it cynically explained to me as the belief that there was nothing, and nothing acted upon that nothingness, and then for an unknown reason it exploded into everything; then for no good reason other than sheer random chance bits of everything rearranged themselves into bits that could make more of themselves and then they turned into apes who thought they knew about nearly everything.

    Is that fair?

    Actually, a pretty good summary


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 13,993 ✭✭✭✭recedite


    Behold the Zombie Thread.
    It died and resurrected itself, for your sins.


  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    Problem is that we have cognitive biases to see the world as functional. So, when someone explains to you that there are no reasons, it might be difficult to accept (it's quite dangerous to believe in the brain...).

    Why are you dragging up an old thread and dragging into it a random post from another even older thread?

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Closed Accounts Posts: 15 Iollan Leeden


    Problem is that we have cognitive biases to see the world as functional. So, when someone explains to you that there are no reasons, it might be difficult to accept (it's quite dangerous to believe in the brain...).

    Why are you dragging up an old thread and dragging into it a random post from another even older thread?
    A mistake.


  • Registered Users Posts: 34,245 ✭✭✭✭Hotblack Desiato


    A mistake.

    I agree.

    Fingal County Council are certainly not competent to be making decisions about the most important piece of infrastructure on the island. They need to stick to badly designed cycle lanes and deciding on whether Mrs Murphy can have her kitchen extension.



  • Closed Accounts Posts: 15 Iollan Leeden


    Thank you for your agreement :)


  • Registered Users Posts: 12,965 ✭✭✭✭bnt


    What would these spirits do, really? In my "consequentialist" view, existence alone doesn't mean anything. If spirits exist, but they don't do anything I could detect by any means, then they may as well not exist. (It's like those Christians who think that historical arguments for the existence of "Jesus" are persuasive: if you think he merely existed, you wouldn't be talking about him in the first place.)

    One of my favourite movies is Spirited Away, the Japanese animation by Studio Ghibli. In the movie, the main protagonist enters a Shinto-inspired world in which spirits are not only real, they come in all shapes and sizes (and smells), with inscrutable motivations. She has to negotiate with them, try to figure out what they want, and help them as best she can: they are not omnipotent, and sometimes rather stupid. It's not always pretty: it gets very violent at times. It's an example of fiction in which the spirits not only do things, at some times they are more human than the humans in the story. Do I believe it? No, it's just highly imaginative.

    From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch’.

    — Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 Astronaut



  • Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 15,729 Mod ✭✭✭✭smacl


    bnt wrote: »
    What would these spirits do, really? In my "consequentialist" view, existence alone doesn't mean anything. No, it's just highly imaginative.

    Great movie, and a big favourite with the whole family. Must watch it again soon.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,520 ✭✭✭learn_more


    rosier79 wrote: »
    Do you think it is possible that there's a spirit world but not a god?

    What's a spirit ?


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  • Registered Users Posts: 22,249 ✭✭✭✭endacl


    Actually, a pretty good summary

    Of an oversimplified misunderstanding?


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