I’m an athiest debate me

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You're right!

Thanks again for clueing me in to user generated streams. Next up is exploring tags in greater detail.

I understand some people might not know about heaven/ hell.... BUT WHY WOULD YOU KNOWINGLY CHOOSE HELL!!! You claim to be intelligent but at this point I doubt it!

This is interesting. Jesus preached forgiveness, not being judgemental. That's supposed to be God's job, isn't it? And if you won't respect other people's beliefs, surely you accept that others won't respect yours. Or perhaps holier than thou infighting is the cornerstone of religion as is practiced. If humans aren't qualified to define right from wrong, how can they be trusted to accurately interpret the word of God? If every of the dozens of Christian denominations each claiming sole stewardship of the one and only truth, all others be damned, then what possible conclusion can be drawn than NONE of them are right?

There's an old quote to the effect of "I assert that we are both atheists, I simply beleive in one fewer gods than you. When you understsnd your reason for rejecting everyone else's gods, you will understand my reason for rejecting yours."

"respect your beliefs"? What are your beliefs? "I'll hang 10 in hell" if you acknowledge hell existing than why would you choose it? I'm assuming you already know everything I've said, so that means you know the truth and chose to reject it.

And really? You think people should choose right from wrong. Ever heard of WW2, the Germans decided what they did was right, people used to think slave trading was right, people think murder is right, people think rape is right, people think little kids changing gender is right, people think abortion is right! So if you think people should choose right from wrong then you need to change your world views.

You're not obliged to agree with anyone. I don't know anyone who isn't biased towards their own beliefs. But simply acknowledging that people are entitled to their own views is necessary for differing beliefs to co-exist. Otherwise it's Highlander until only one remains.

To you I am a poor lost soul doomed to eternal damnation. To me you are a well intentioned but misguided fellow oblivious to your religion's overreach into other people's lives.

I submit for your consideration two thought experiments:

First, there are far more stringent faiths than the one you have elected to follow. To your list of proscriptions they add using electricity, performing work on the sabbath, copulating without the intent to procreate, eating meat on friday, not wearing magic underwear, not eating a piece of their god, ad nausem. They are every bit as certain as you that adherence to their list is the one and only path to salvation. What makes you any more correct than them? Why? You cannot KNOW you're right because it's by definition a matter of personal faith.

Second, a person wakes up with amnesia. They can speak and understand language but remember nothing, and soon find themselves surrounded by representatives of baptist, jehovas witness, mormon, methodist, seventh day adventist, pentacostal, calvinist, lutheran, episcopal and menonnite congregations. (The amish, being limited to horseback, couldn't get there in time to throw their giant, magestic hats into the ring.) Each of the 10 represented faiths--all Christian denominations--assert that they alone hold the keys to salvation, with the others being varying degrees of blasphemous. Each holds the sincere belief that they (and they alone) are correct. How can amnesia dude know who is the true holyman and who are the peddlers of false faith?

I'd add the other Abrahamic religions and even other non-Abrahamic religions into the mix, but baby steps.

I don't believe in Hell, you do. I'm indulging you for the sake of argument because you are categorically incapable of comprehending the existence of any worldview outside of your own. I'm trying to point to what's outside the tiny box your mind is entombed inside and you can't even see my finger past the covers of the bible.

The absolute bare mininum any decent human of any stripe could do is honor the same right to freedom of belief in others that they themself enjoy. I know moral relativism is beyond your grasp. It's not a judgement, just a fact. And it's why all the disparate denomonations of Christianty can't agree on the tenents of their own faith, much less connect the dots that Christianity, Judaism and Islam all worship the same God. *shrugs*

Christianity, Judaism and Islam worship the same God!?!? Are you saying that there's such a thing as God? I thought you didn't believe in Gods.

And I'm not "categorically incapable" of doing anything, I know the truth, I'm trying to tell others of the truth.

And for the record this ain't no debate, you either agreed or disagreed with everything I said with no follow up on anything.

I certainly don't believe in the Christian god. I'm merely acknowledging that other people do. That's what I meant when I said "I'm indulging you for the sake of argument."

You're not categorically incapable of anything? Huh. I'd ask how timetravel, telekinesis or basic flight are going for you, but a more basic example of the falseness of your statement is your failure to sway my view of religion. Indeed, thus far you have only succeeded in reinforcing it.

"categorically incapable of comprehending the existence of any worldview outside of my own" genius.

And why do you know so much about religion? If you're"agnostic" then you believe that the existence of God can't be proved or disproved, then why have you applied yourself to learn about religions?

Ever heard of knowledge for its own sake? Or is intellectual curiosity beyond the scope of your worldview as well?

I studied that shit in college because young me wanted insight into how so many humans could be so emphatically devoted to so many mutually exclusive religions. Plus lacking an informed opinion of things makes ones opinion about them absoutely worthless.

"No man should perish unknowingly", you know the truth and will be held accountable whether you like it or not.

YOUR truth does not equal THE truth, you know? That's my whole point. It's rooted in faith which is merely a matter of opinion. That you believe your opinion to supercede mine is irrelevant. We're equally entitled to our respective worldviews, which leaves us at a stalemate. Unless you can invoke something more compelling than shinking the universe to the size of your own beliefs and then using them to bludgeon everyone else into accordance, neither of us will ever be swayed.

Incorrect statements are rendered no less correct through force of repetition, so repeating to me what you believe I know accomplishes nothing. Look, either everyone's views are valid, no one's views are valid, or one lucky party will end up having somehow been right and the legions of others equally vehement about the righteousness of their position will be damned. The only of those posibilities in which I go to hell and you don't is if you happen to follow the One and Only True Faith. Even if god exists as you imagine, I very much doubt you're that lucky. If I'm wrong and we end up in the places you predict we will after we die, you can say "I told you so".

It might be fun to have a royal rumble to sort it out on Earth, where the existence we objectively experience occurs. At least then there would be fewer empty voices crowing their supremacy over all the others.

I believe we live in a computer simulation.

Word

Alright, what do you want to debate about?

How bout the merits of defensive VS offensive posturing? I'm content to say "come at me bro" while xtians tend towards the more aggressive "turn or burn" approach.

Atheists don't bother trying to change the minds of the religious because they know it's already a lost cause. It's the religious who seem so insecure in their faith that everyone who doesn't believe the same thing they do is a threat to be swayed or exterminated.

Christians are supposed to bring people to the Lord, I don't see atheists as a threat, I see them (you I'm assuming) as a person that if you don't change your mind, you'll burn in hell for eternity. And that's a fate I don't want on anyone, so if you wouldn't mind I'd like to ask. How did life start?

I'm what I like to call an anti-theist agnostic. Meaning I don't know what God is, but I'm quite confident nobody else does either, least of all anyone who claims to. I don't know how life started either, but I sincerely doubt it involved a talking snake in a tree. I'd invoke scientific progress along the lines of the origins or this or that but part of religious devotion involves a severe allergy to facts.

As for your concerns over the fate you believe befalls non-believers, I suppose I'm touched, but your beliefs have nothing to do with me. I believe you're squandering the only thing that makes Homo Sapiens special, namely the capacity for logical, rational, critical thinking, but by the same token my beliefs have nothing to do with you.

As to what God is, God is the creator, Any "scientific progress" would lead to a creator. Nothing can't explode into something, a rock can't evolve into a human, sure things can adapt to it's environment but nothing can turn into something else entirely.

Imagine a rock turning into a human, half way it's going to get stuck as a half rock unable to support life, and then it would die and then we wouldn't be here.

Everything has to be created. There is no way this came by chance. Why are we not like animals, why are animals not like us? Because we are different creations! And did not come from the same element.

Atheists have been scratching their heads trying to explain creation but not one has come up with any sound idea. But God explains creation in his word (the bible)

I agree that something can't come from nothingness. This fact combined with the fact that there is something, means that nothingness was never a possibility. Where we differ in interpretation is that I take this to signify the universe as being eternal, a conclusion which obviates the need to explain where it came from. This could be construed as the universe being God.

Pointing to a lack of scientific explanation reduces your God to the "God of the gaps". Greater minds than mine have pointed out that by that logic God is nothing more than an ever-shrinking pocket of scientific ignorance. If God exists as you envision, I imagine he would be pretty insulted. Almost as insulted as people pointing to a tome translated, edited, retranslated, censored, modified, retranslated again and branded with a human's name as "His word".

I agree that the bible has been tampered with over the centuries. And as to being translated and retranslated, the full bible has been translated into 700+ languages, and the new testament (the portion of the bible pertaining to Jesus Christ) over 1500+ languages! and that's not by accident.

The bible says that no man should perish unknowingly (paraphrase don't quote me). I'd say being translated into over 1500 languages is a pretty good attempt at giving everyone on earth the opportunity to get saved.

And "greater minds" have acknowledged that the only reason they deny there is a God is that they don't like his rules, they don't like being told that sin is bad.

And as to God being insulted, I'm sure he is, but he loves everybody on this planet so much that he sent his only son to die for ALL of OUR sins.

And if what you believe is true, then is there a right and wrong? And if there is then who decides it?

And if God is a "scientific ignorance"? it's taken centuries to for scientists to figure out some stuff in the bible, like long before we knew that pork has worms that can't be killed, God said don't eat pork, he also said don't eat skin fish, which we now know that the "mudvain" in catfish contains mercury, who would've known?

Firstly, I want to acknowledge your piety. For whatever it's worth, I respect that. And I want to make it clear that I have a lot of baggage when it comes to bagging on religion. It probably sounds ridiculous but nothing I say I mean against you as a person. It's your worldview that raises my hackles. Sort of an analog of the whole "hate the sin and not the sinner" ideal.

Speaking of sin, a self-described Christian once justified her shabby bahavior to me by saying that "Jesus died so we could sin." One of my many grievances with Christianity in particular is that it expects people to be shitty, and whether they started out decent and religion corrupted them or religion just inherently attracts weak, rotten people to begin with, I find so many people of poor moral fiber to be Christians. But what else would one expect from a belief system that teaches people "You're flawed, you're gonna f**k up, just own it and say you're sorry" (paraphrasing).

I love the trope of Christians trotting out that without religion people would murder each other, marry cantaloupes and just otherwise devolve into depraved behavior. (There's the assumption that people are inherently driven to depravity again.) Religion has no more dominion over morality than the secular world has over logic. People don't murder each other just in spite of religion--often they murder each other BECAUSE of religion...

They also don't marry sheep or corpses or what have you--not because religion is there to provide bumpers to prevent the morally feeble from acting on their base, evil inclinations, but because by and large people have no such inherent drives. Taking myself as an example, before I even finished puberty I stopped eating meat out of compassion for animals. I am intensely empathetic and am uncomfortable around suffering. I take injustice personally even when it doesn't involve me personally. With the exception of a single short-lived relationship initiated by a girl I met in college, I was functionally celibate until I met my current wife in my 30s. I was extremely driven to pair off before then but my desperate fear of overstepping personal boundaries kept my to myself. Am I aberrantly upright, or is the thesis that people are invariably prone to acting like monsters until they're redeemed just bullshit?

This just addresses the first half of your last message. Who decides what's right or wrong? I follow my own moral compass. Others seem to need threats to be kept in line. Religion is nothing if not an exquisitely effective tool of control. I think religion gives itself too much credit for the modicum of civility humans collectively exhibit. But I also think the pervasiveness of the reasons man created God guarantee that a certain number of people will always breathe life into his (or hers, or theirs, or its) mythos. I just struggle to understand why so many of us are unable to put on the big boy pants and wrestle down the fact that there is a lot we don't know, might never know, and in some cases CAN'T know.

Trichinosis, which doesn't only affect pork, can be killed by properly cooking meat before consuming it. Carp (catfish, goldfish, koi) are bottomfeeders. The highest concentrations of heavy metals are found in predatory fish as they are higher up the food chain, and all the toxic junk in fish is the result of human activity since the industrial revolution, basically the last 2 centuries. Even if God predicted it, it was irrelvant for almost the entirety of the Bible's existence.

I'll never be able to reconcile the mindf**k that God made us flawed, punishes us with eternal torment for failing to follow his rules, and that he loves us.

Okay, as to the "self described Christian" they were wrong, and MANY christians are not really christians and have a compromising pacifistic take on life. Jesus didn't die so we could sin, he died so we could be free from sin.

And the correct belief system says "you f--ked up but you can be a new creation in Christ". And without religion people are pretty low, couples living together for years if they ever marry, they hurt people, lie abuse substances and are greedy, (I'm not saying that a lot of Christians don't do those things) but the farther the country goes away from the faith the worse things get, I could list everything but I'm sure you know the state of the world.

As for you I'm not surprised you're "anti-theist agnostic" cause college is one of the biggest faith killers of all time, and are you aberrantly upright, I'd say you don't have as much sin weighing on you than a lot of people do, I'll assume you were raised in a decent setting.

So if you choose what's right and wrong, and I choose right and wrong then is there even a right and wrong? Why are some things "wrong" if it's right to someone else?

Too much religion is a bad thing, look at catholicism, God is not honored there, man is honored there.

And I know we disagree here but man didn't create God, he created us, and there is scientific evidence of creation for anyone who wants it, and is willing to find the truth.

And you're right, there is a lot we don't, and can't know. That's why we are called to have faith in God even though we can't see him.

And God didn't make us flawed, we became flawed through sin in the garden with the "talking snake".

Sin does not go unpunished, if we don't accept Jesus who bore our sin on the cross, who paid the price for all sin, was brutally killed on the cross and went to hell to pay for our mistakes so we don't have to, then we must bare the punishment for sin which is eternity in hell.

And he does love us. It would have been way easier to wipe humanity off of the face of the earth, but he sent Jesus to come to die for us because he loves everyone, that's why no man has EVER went to hell without having a opportunity to get saved at some point.

And I know it sounds almost random but I tried to address everything in order

I can see I'm not getting anywhere with this, so all I can say is I tried, I still hope you get saved someday, but I can only hope someone else gets saved with this thread (assuming you don't delete it). If you want to go to hell knowingly that's your business and I can't stop you.

I'm trying to reply but we seem to have reached the reply limit for this thread. It's about the journey, not the destination. As long as you're getting something out of our banter, I'm game to continue.

To be fair, calling this a "debate" was a stretch. I don't fault you for using this as a forum to try to convert me, if that was indeed all you sought to get out of it, though I am puzzled as to why you thought pointing to the good book in response to my assertions would sway my thinking, as if no one had tried that before.

We were never going to change each other's minds, but that was never the point. I'm here for the intellectual stimulation of feeling out other people's sensibilities, as I find that enjoyable for its own sake. I apologize if your agenda beyond that failed to pan out the way you'd hoped, and hope you take something more away from our exchange than just another damned soul. It would make you more interesting game for your next prospect.

We ran out of replies again.

I may not be on THE right way but I'm not far from it, you see I've found results from my beliefs because I tried them out.

You're a college made atheist who looks in college books for truth and found nothing.

And why do such "low" people come to Christianity? Because that's who needs a savior! If you love this world the love of the father is not in you. You studied various faiths with the preconceived notion that there is no God, So you found no God.

The bible says "seek and ye shall find" not "study and ye shall learn".

So do you think I was a college-made atheist, or came to college already beleiving there was no god? Or can you not see the contradiction you made in the span of 5 sentences?

You didn't have to tell me you're a absurdist, I already found out your absurdity.

And I know 90+ percent of people come out of college a atheist (or whatever pronoun you prefer)

And I think you didn't believe before or after college, just college set it in stone.

And I already said God loves everyone, but Jesus Christ said the ONLY way to the father is by ME (Jesus) so if you don't accept Jesus, there is something to fear. Whether or not you choose to believe it.

And you don't believe in Gods but you believe goddesses?

I apologize for slinging mud and for periodically jumping between sincerity and sarcasm. I also don't mean ignorant in a pejorative way. It's a right that I am obliged to respect. I even admire the devotion required to maintain it.

If I could synthesize my takeaway from our entire exchange, it's simply that I still struggle to honor the rights of a religion whose beliefs involve dishonoring my own.

I don't doubt that 90% of college students end up atheist but oof, that hits me right in the feels. I saw nothing during my 5 years to suggest college has an agenda to turn people away from their faith, but I do remember how genuinely distraught a mormon girl was in the first "religious studies" class (a clinical overview of different religions, their denominations and the beliefs that define them). Objective analysis of her faith alongside others was quite understandably something she had never experienced. I can only imagine how that turned her worldview on its ear. Don't know what ended up happening to her, but I do rememeber realizing that beyond proper science and religious dogma being fundamentally incompatible, they approach knowledge from opposite positions as well.

To science, knowledge is a friend, ally and foundation of understanding. The pursuit of knowledge is a noble goal and typically cheered on. Science needs knowledge to continue and progress.

To religion, knowledge is threatening, corruptive, and dangerous. The pursuit of knowledge is suspicious and actively discouraged. Religion must shun knowledge to continue. (As evidenced by how poorly it fares in an environment where knowledge is encouraged.) No wonder knowledge is anathema to religion: knowledge obliterates the soil out of which religion grows: ignorance!

To religion, igorance is a friend, ally and foundation of understanding. The protection of ignorance is a noble goal and typically cheered on. Religion needs ignorance to continue and progress.

I weep at this, but I accept it. And outside of forums like online chats with people who visit my memes, I respect people's right to their ignorance because I know how crucial it is to their chosen worldview as well as how fragile and irretrievable it is once lost. I have no more right to inform those who wish to protect their ignorance than they have to inform me. If anything, those of faith more vulnerable because when I'm presented with an opposing viewpoint, at worst I get annoyed. To a person of faith, it could destroy their faith completely. I...I mean...I don't agree with religion as practiced but I have no right to impose that view on the people who follow those religions. I just wish they could find it in themselves to grant me the same courtesy.

Who said knowledge is dangerous for religion? And what knowledge?

Do I really need to point to the first book of your own bible to give you your own god's views on the danger of knowledge? Or was getting booted out of eden not enough to convince you? 🤦

And science and Christianity go hand in hand, to those smart enough to see.

No, self-contradiction goes hand in hand with christianity, as evidenced by how many people it excommunicated and/or murdered throughout history because their "radical" scientific views conflicted with church dogma, only to backpedal years (sometimes centuries) later.

If you're unaware of this, you're doing an excellent job of illustrating my point that christians often lack an understanding even of their own stinking religion.

Absurd is to absurdism as ignore is to ignorance. I'd draw you a map but you lack the faculties necessary to follow it. In simple terms, they share common roots but the meanings don't equivalate.

I believe in the CONCEPT. As in IDEA, of EVERYTHING. Including gods, goddesses, vampires, chupacabras, aliens, thoughtful christians, compassionate conservatives, intelligent anti-intellectuals, blind justice, and a whole HOST of things I have zero evidence to support the existence of. Even if I DIDN'T believe in a concept (or even understand what it was), I could still envoke it with words. Fuxk, religious people do that every time they speak about damn near anything, sometimes including their own go***mned religion.

Have you tried testing something to prove whether or not it's real?... Oh wait, I forgot, your "agnostic" so you don't think it can be proved or disproved.

How could you even have a debate if your point is that you have no provable point?

I believe in provable things too, silly. Agnosticism doesn't mean a belief that nothing can be proved or disproved, just the existence of god. What you're describing is closer to the branch of philosophy known as Academic Skepticism. Even it acknowledges that people can be confident in things given enough evidence, which I suppose makes it a faith as well. I have confidence in science and the scientific method. Just as an example I believe in gravity, still an unproven theory. I have faith in it. But that faith is not immutable. If presented with sufficiently pursuasive evidence, my belief in the currently posited theory of gravity would be swayed. Or more accurately, refined, to account for the new evidence. My allegiance is to the most rational position given all available evidence, not to some arbitrary dogma.

I can see how one could claim the idea of science itself to be unprovable, in which case my belief in the validity of science itself would make me a man of faith. In that case, we're both religious in a sense. We just follow different faiths.

Can your science explain the grand canyon?

It's not "my" science. Science is a practice that can't belong to anyone. And yes, it can and has explained the grand canyon. That's old news. The more cutting edge stuff like quantum field theory is still very much a work in progress.

And I saw your recent memes and I gotta say your "moral compass" is bullshit

Coming from someone as backwards and closed-minded as you, that's a compliment.

Oh, THOSE memes. Heh, you get partial credit for the religion themed ones. Our conversation inspired them! 😂 Sorry you had to find out this way...I'll send you links as I come up with new ones from now on. Wouldn't want you feeling left out of the loop when you basically deserve co-authorship rights.

Let me guess, Colorado River over millions of years?

More accurately, the river tens of millions of years ago that ended up as what we now call the Colorado River today, but essentially yes. Although you don't "guess" at science, you postulate.

Did you know that the walls are higher at the bottom of the canyon than at the start?

That river would have had to flow uphill.

And shrinking my universe? You're living in a "safety bubble" where you refuse Gods existence because you don't want to be accountable to anything.

There you go conflating a lack of accountability to YOUR god with a lack of accountability to ANYTHING. Remember, I never said I was an atheist. I said I am an anti-theist agnostic. They are not the same thing. I posit that YOU have more in common with atheists than I, because you are both intractably certain that the unprovable views that you have freely chosen to embrace must override the beliefs anyone else might freely choose. You are using a freedom that you enjoy to deny others that same freedom. That is hypocritocal. I, as an Absurdist (the closest thing I would claim to a religion) impose no such restriction. I embrace that there is no meaning inherent in existence, but is created by for each individial for that individual, and perishes with that individual. I believe this because it is the only hard evidence based worldview I have come across, and I embrace that its relevance is limited to me and anyone else who happens to individually stumble upon it. (I certainly didn't come up with that branch of Existentialism myself.)

I am accountable to the believe that actions have consequences, the belief that failure to take responsibility for those consequences is a not something I am comfortable doing, and a belief that my current life is the only one I am certain to get. I furthermore believe it is best spent striving to make effective use of my intellectual potential (since as I have previously stated, I believe it is the only thing that makes homo sapiens special) while attempting to keep harm done to others and the planet in general to a minimim (a screwed pooch in America and most of the developed world, admittedly). I weep than people would choose to shirk any semblance of resonsibility to our mother (Gaia, a goddess actually worthy of devotion) with the irresponsibly dismissive assertion that the world will end only when god decides to end it...

...itself a further example of how your faith enables people to take no responsibility for the wholesale razing of our birthplace and only home we have.

I also believe the most sensibly rooted belief in the Judeo-Christian god that I have seen (as aspoused by numerous survivors of near-death experiences) holds that we (ALL of us, not just jesuits or bible thumpers or hari krishnas--EVERYONE) are loved unconditionally, there is nothing to fear, and we can do no wrong (not something I believe personally, but it does jibe with my absursist sensibilities). All the authoritarian trappings religion has aquired over the centuries are merely there for people to exert control over other people.

But not everyone learns to see through the bullshit they were spoonfed from infancy by the time they turn 8. Just the precocious, inquisitive and independent minded. You know, the types that end up in hell. The types I would look forward to sharing eternity with if I shared the beliefs you have elected to embrace.

As it stands, I continue to try to make the most of the life I know I have in a way that makes sense to me based on my knowledge and experience, and perpetually baffled by how much difficulty some people have accepting--not understanding--just accepting that choice.