I actually think that that is likely to change not so long from now.

About 30% of Americans under 30 don't subscribe to any particular religion, most of them not believing in any sort of god.

Florida's population is old and getting older. Once the older demographic dies off, they'll be replaced by those atheist under 30 year olds and things can change fast.

There is a discernible trend that associates higher education with atheism. The younger generations are more educated than the older generations were at their age. It is natural then to determine that within the not so distant future, Atheism in America will rise with the increasing percentage of population attending post-secondary education.

Typical apologist straw man.

They come from a hard 4,000,000 plus years of evolutionary experience with humans living with each other and learning the hard way that certain kinds of actions are harmful to the community.

Bad things (theft, rape, murder, etc.) are bad for a community and cause hard feelings between the victims and the perpetrators. Bad feelings result in wars, family feuds, more murder, and usually escalating violence. Humans are, at least sometimes, smart people, and those with real smarts have figured out that these things are not good.

This has resulted in communities, ever since Hammurabi, setting down those rules where everybody can see them and understand that they are not approved activities by that community. Murder, rape, theft, and other forms of violence have been proscribed actions since long before christianity or judaism ever made the scene. "god" didn't invent morality. Neither did the jews, they just came up with their own rules, just like lots of other human communities have since the beginning of human existence. The change the jews made is that they gave credit to their god so those rules could be elevated to where they couldn't be questioned!

Actually, a brilliant move. The christians have taken that one and made a science out of it!

Unfortunately, the jewish morality largely involved rules having to do with their religion and keeping the faith. The first half of the Ten Commandments have nothing to do with human values, but are proscriptions intended to keep the jews loyal to their god. Given all the trouble he had keeping them in line, it was probably a smart idea...

But also, those first commandments have nothing to do with Western civilization's laws, especially the religious ones the US dumped when we wrote the Constitution!

i could boil it all down to a simple rule i go by: treat others how you want to be treated. i don't want my stuff stolen; i don't steal. i don't want to be murdered; i don't kill anyone. i want to be treated with kindness; i treat others with kindness. i can't always expect others to do the same, but i do my best to adhere to this simple concept anyway. you don't need religion to live by such a rule, and you don't need to be without religion to break it, either. :)

Atheists don't have the loopholes that religions usually have built in, so we usually stick by our code of ethics because we have to live with ourselves. We don't get a day of atonement or confession or any other magical sin cleanser. Most atheists that I have come in contact with are good people just because we put some thought into our actions and don't have a deity to blame or appease.

EJP;

Yes, I agree completely! I hadn't thought of it that way...

I have tremendous faith, I am a pillar of faith and I don't believe that anything is SINFUL.

Sin is a man made concept.

That isn't really true. Atheists don't know and neither do any religions. Anyone that says they know for sure that there is a god or isn't a god is deluded. No one knows and NO ONE has the right to say that they do and force it down the throats of others.

You apparently did not read or understand my last post unclecharlie... If atheists said "absolutely not!" as you claim we do, then I wouldn't have brought up all the questions about "What if God did exist?" in my previous post. As I believe in what science can prove by evidence, I cannot 100% declare there is no God. However, given all the evidence, I have come to the conclusion that there most likely, 99.99% chance, is no God.

And as for your statement inferring that religious people are more tolerant to "What if?" than atheists; when was the last time a religious group received a death threat from an atheist over a billboard supporting God? Never.

given all the scientific evidence, and with the proof of my own personal experiences, I come to the conclusion that it is 100% certain that God exists. Some things are true whether you choose to believe them or not. if there was no God, all would be chaos, no order. And God has shown he is there, in a very personal way.

Oh? Pray tell, please link to all that "scientific evidence" of god's existence!

Curious minds await!

On the contrary, atheists start from the position that there is no god, not because we can prove it, but because YOU can't! Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

If nobody had ever told me that "there is a god", I would not have any clue as to that entity's existence. The only "proof" i've ever seen was the *claim* on some human's part that he does. A claim is not proof.

Don't point to the bible, it is merely very old, unsubstantiated and dubious third, forth and fifth-generation claims of the same sort. You have no way to prove the authorship or the provenience of any of the documents in that compendium, and cannot show what the original documents may have said, it has been altered so many times.

Remember, link to "scientific" evidence, so we may be educated. That means published in peer reviewed, scientific journals. And you said evidence for "god's" existence, and not the existence of the worship of him, which is not the same.

Yes, please do provide the proof. I have been waiting for it since I was seven. I am at the edge of my seat and depending upon you to show me the undeniable proof of the existence of god. Please don't let me down, unclecharlie.

Seriously. I want to review your facts, because atheists are always open to the presentation of information.

Well, I'm sayin' it. There absolutely, 100% is no God. Not the "God" you goof-balls are thinking about.

And how could there be? You haven't got the brains to compete with God - and that is the range of understanding it takes to have any idea what-so-ever.
Since you have no possibility of having enough intellectual juice to comprehend God, ALL of your thoughts, beliefs and ideas - are wrong.

Your thoughts, the level of your thoughts - don't compete.

That's it. The God you think/hope/wish for - does not exist.

Or it wouldn't be God...

Hmm, over week. Either there's no evidence, or unclecharlie is just having trouble compiling it all. I wonder which it is...

Faith that defies logic is a form of mental illness.

Uh, doesn't that typically happen without religious faith behind it?

If you help little old ladies cross the street, help out at the homeless shelter, and do other good things regardless of whether or not you have a religious doctrine, don't good things tend to happen to you in return? That doesn't seem to be the result of faith or religion, it seems to be the result of of our social structure.

And I'll bet you think that "one true god" is the one you believe in. That proves why other countries hate us, people like you are selfish and egotistical. God didn't make man, man made god. God is whatever delusion you want him/her/it to be in your own head just as it is for everyone else on this planet.

There is no God, not in the way you are trying to promote it.

Monotheism is what fucked our planet up in the first place.

You only live once - you're right to try and throw off bad stuff.

The key, I believe, is essentially not re-enforcing old thought or fears by constantly re-thinking them - or giving any time to it.

When your brain thinks, it makes that thought, you. You become the thoughts and feelings that you engage in. Those thoughts become strong, the thoughts you do not think, become weak.

Put the past into the past - and it will plague you no more.

The good thing is that, often, most of the stuff we have thought, really was just a bunch of crap that a youth wrestled with themself over. And that as you have grown and grown up, it truly is gone.

Give it no weight, and it will disappear; - away on the constantly flowing river of time.

maybe read kris franklin's story. they were evangelical missionaries to guatemala. They lost their faith in evangelical protestantism, and found their faith authentically in the universality of the catholic church. the cayholic church is not divided by denominationalism- it truly is universal......

Oh, bull pucky.

If the RCC really WAS universal, there would be no other christian denominations, but you see, there ARE. Martin Luther, bless his pea-pickin little anti-semitic heart, took care of THAT one.

So much for universality, as there are also other complete, different religions, altogether!

There will never be a universal church, as people are too fractious, too different, too willing to disagree with one another.

If there really WERE a god, and he had the real powers of an omniscient, all powerful universe creator, he would surely have the power to see that there wouldn't be any cheap, false competitors. If, that is, he had the fatal, *human* flaw of needing any kind of acknowledgement from the likes of US regarding that power.

Which I really doubt.

That was one of the best paragraphs I have read in a long time. Short. Succinct. Major props.

Yet there are a lot of people in religion who not only make it about ME ME ME, but they do it rather successfully.

Besides, if religion is about God God God, that seems to me like God is saying, "ME ME ME!" which is a very petty thing for a higher being to do.

Your post assumes that they were trying to convert theists.

Nothing is further from the truth.

They are simply trying to let those that do not believe know that they are not alone. If you think that there are no atheists in a majority christian county, then you have another think coming.

Places where there are large, strong majorities of christians are places where this word needs to get out to first, to comfort and reach those that are "in the closet". They don't have to DO anything, just be comforted that they are not alone.

Believe me, that IS a comfort!

I'm not sure where you got the idea that I thought that they were trying to convert theists, but what I was trying to say was that they would have been more successful in reaching and comforting "in the closet" atheists in a more populated/less right-wing city.

Please don't read "right-wing" as "christian-majoritied." They're not the same thing. Most counties in the United States have a christian majority, but many are not right-wing. I live nearby in more populated and slightly more progressive Tampa and I haven't successfully "came out" to my family. I haven't had reason to mention it to my until-recently-absent father. With our recent reconciliation, it hasn't really come up. And despite my best efforts, my mother has not accepted my beliefs.

I would have appreciated the opportunity to talk about my beliefs if I had heard about it, but apparently the news didn't even make it a few miles down the road. This was the first I'd heard of it. I'm not saying that the sign was a bad idea, just the location could have been better thought out. Just because those of us who live in more populated areas aren't surrounded by right wingers, doesn't mean we live an easy and accepted existance.

Believe me, I understand, I grew up in Texas. It is easier now that I live in Md, but I haven't talked to the family in Tx for years about this, and am not about to start now.

But my point is the same, that if I did still live there, I would feel much better hearing the message in that billboard. Again, it's not like anybody seriously expects large organizational gains in those areas, but the billboard serves to do two things. It lets those in that area that are in the closet know they are not alone, and it shakes up the fundies. Both are good, in my book.

I mean, look at the publicity they've gotten - that's almost like money in the bank, it IS like the major media has paid for a major publicity campaign!

You cannot buy that kind of publicity otherwise. Not without a few million dollars.

I agree with this. If religion didn't exist, people would just find something else to fight about.

However, I still find it offensive when Western Christians (especially American ones) complain about how supposedly oppressed they are when Christians in other parts of the world face actual persecution every day.

Actually, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington are widely believed -- through their actions and their recorded speeches -- to have been atheists or at best non-religious theists.

Additionally, the Constitution of the United States is based upon a secular foundation, not theist principals -- much less Christians ones.

darinK, are you aware of the irony of your statement?
From one perspective, christianity and atheism can be compared on common grounds as belief systems One of The Constitution's primary goals - That of freedom of faith - is first touched on in the first amendment. If, as you suggest, our founders were writing from a christian perspective, then without their version of the constitution, atheists wouldn't be allowed to practice(or, not practice, as it were..). And you suggest that atheists would strike down those laws that allowed it's existence.

Kinda funny!

Furthermore, you'll note that in this article, there was no imposition by atheists upon others. Rather, they put up a rather benign and nonthreatening sign (comparable to billboards from a church) and the Christians came out with the pitchforks and torches.

You aren't making terribly much sense here, darinK.

Here are quotes from some of the most important fathers of the US constitution:

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
-Thomas Jefferson

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson,

"The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma."
- Abraham Lincoln

“The government of the United States is in no sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

- George Washington

So in fact, the Constitution was written by Atheists.

George Washington put it best:

There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. [George Washington, address to Congress, 8 January, 1790]

....and President Thomas Jefferson was ahead of his time when he said:

Priests...dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subversions of the duperies on which they live.

-Thomas Jefferson

I actually support the right to put up that billboard. Atheism to me is a religion of non belief or the belief in no higher power. Any group with the same belief is a religous group if the belief has to do with higher powers. Free speech to all. I have seen the attack on christianity in public especially around Christmas. Only atheists have attacked such a religous occassion. Even terrorists restrain from those events. Your attacks have greater consequences that you'll regret rather than enjoy.

darinK,

Atheism is not a "belief about a higher power". It is a LACK of such belief.

I do not live my life telling myself "There is no god", but simply live my life according to values I have learned to make my life easier and richer - do no harm, help others, be kind to animals, etc.

Sorry, but there will be nothing to regret, as I have not been giving my money to a non-existant god's adherents to spread their poison, but have used it to improve the lives of my family and those charities I have chosen to give to.

I am not religious, and do not have such a belief.

darinK, if you could perhaps post a link to one or some of these 'attacks' as you call them, perhaps that would support your stance. I would be keen on knowing more if this is a frequently occurring. By highlighting this issue you suggest that, proportionate to the atheist population, more 'attacks' of this sort are perpetrated by atheists than by Christians. I doubt the facts are on your side here, but if they are, I'd like to know.

My suspicion is that people feel hyper-sensitive about their holidays being questioned, and create much sensationalism around something that seems to undermine them. It's a natural human reaction. An 'us or them' mentality gets created, and the snowball topic rolls and rolls downhill.....
When in reality it was never a big deal to start with.

But I could be wrong. Ahh, atheism, gifting me with comfort despite unknowns and uncertainties.

MOK Some of the attacks I was refering to are well known. Many companies changed policies to not say or display Christmas during Christmas time. Most companies did this under pressure from the aclu. Christians and many others celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Why is that harmful to any atheist. It's one of the few global holidays and will be forever so you better learn to live with it.

You see, that's the problem with many christians.

A company changing their policy regarding customer relations, intended to adjust to the realities of the modern world, where not everybody is christian, is NOT AN ATTACK ON CHRISTIANITY!!

Geez, get over it, not everybody believes the same religious crap you do. Some have their own, different crap to believe in that does NOT include something called christ or christ's mass. Others do not believe in religion at all, and someone else adjusting their attitudes to that new reality is not an attack on someone else.

Believe me, when atheists really begin attacking religion, you'll know it. While a lot of us are live or let live types, others are now beginning to think that going into attack mode is better than keeping quiet. Your attitude in calling atheists' attempts to merely protect our legal rights "attacks" is a large part of the reason why this attitude is beginning to gain traction.

Keep your religion where it should be - in your church, paid for by donations to that church. Keep it out of government, and stop trying to advance your faith through the power of government, using government funds, and we'll be happy to let you worship as you please. Just have the courtesy to give us the same rights, and stop pushing your faith into the public sphere.

Mass for Christ was pulled out from under a rug only because they knew no one would ever give up on Saturnalia - the oldest and most loved winter holiday that was always celebrated on Dec 25th. It was the Xmas magic feeling but also a bit of New Years too. When everybody loosened up and had fun.

Jesus wasn't born anywhere near Dec - if there ever really was a Jesus in the first place.

I get what your saying, but the problem with that notion is Jesus didnt just say hippie, non violent things. If you think the wickedness was only in the old testament, Jesus said, "It is easier for Heaven and Earth to pass away than for the smallest part of the letter of the law to become invalid." (Luke 16:17 NAB) , it doesnt matter, because Jesus wants you to apply the Old Testament way of living to your life. Even worse in one instance, Jesus is more cruel than Big Guns up stairs, the OT says adultery is punishable by death, Jesus said even lusting/thinking about adultery is punishable by death...So the point Im trying to make is that when you say "authentic", what you really mean is people who cherrypick the good quotes and follow them, "love your neighbor etc", but ignore the truly wicked ones..they then become "hypochristian" also dont they?

@IronLionZion, about the quotes from Luke....Have you ever heard about hyperbole or irony? I interpret those quotes from Jesus as using one or both of these devices to drive a point home. I don't believe Jesus wanted people to follow the OT way of life, especially after he condemned the Pharisees for being the Children of Satan for being such strict adherents to the law, demonstrating to them that following the Law would never lead to everlasting life. Jesus came to save the world, not enslave the world to a system of laws created by Moses and plagiarized from the Egyptians. The history of the Israelites is rife with them adopting the customs of other gods into their dogma and rituals.

The way I understand Jesus is not typical of Christianity today. And when you say "Cherry Picking" that is exactly what you must do with the Bible, because it is a sociopolitical hybrid based on age old Astrological foundations. The "loving father" that Jesus came to reveal to humanity, is not the same "Father God" of Abraham and cited author of the Law of the Torah. The loving Father of Jesus is not a personality in the sense that you and I are personalities. Jesus Father is an active force in the universe, that creates and exists in natural laws on the level of Earthly Nature, Cosmological Nature, Microbiological Nature, and Quantum, String, and Chaos levels of Nature; not in the imaginations, pretensions, myths, fears, and oppressive legal structures created by mortal men. We must Cherry pick because the Mother of the Bible, the Catholic Church perverted the original writings adding scriptures to support their authority and strengthen their interpretations of dogma or deleted scriptures that contradicted their authority and exposed their dogma as false teachings. Anti-Christs have existed from the very beginning and were at work to establish an Official Christianity that Jesus would never have sanctioned in the first place.

When I think of Authentic Christians I think of peace makers, of the kinds of souls that Jesus described in the Be-attitudes.

Also I must declare that the Daughters of the Mother Church, continue on the course of manipulation of dogmas and have employed brainwashing techniques for centuries, they capitalized on the inhumanity of the Inquisition to Protest and to establish a New World Order based on new dogmas developed by Luther and Wesley. The current Kings, the Evangelical/Pentecostals have carried on this tradition but have returned to legalism as their faith foundational cornerstone.

Merging the OT with the NT and with all the corruption of the Mother and Daughters has created a BI-POLAR BIBLE that has been practically rendered meaningless.

But again I assert that IMHO Authentic Christians should be peacemakers who do not judge anyone, who love unconditionally all of God's children, whether they be poverty stricken, sick, sexually deviant, thieves, liars, pagans, atheists, or any other category of stratification you can add to this list; everyone considered the "other". The job of an Authentic Christian is to ennoble the human spirit, to exalt the human condition, to bring social justice through acceptance of differences of lifestyles and ideologies.

Authentic Christians would be involved in conflict resolution, not be the arbiters of practically every conflict known to man.

jubal - this is one of the best things ever put forth in the christian debate. Very well done.

Thanks O2. I appreciate your taking the time to read it.

that was awesome, jubal. *recommend^infinity*

Bravo, Jubal!

whoa. i just read these responses. jubal did a great job. i gotta say, he does a much greater job at using facts; synthesizing, defining and explaining it all.

Yes, Jubal's post was good, but what I don't get, and he doesn't really explain, is: What are the criteria by which one chooses the verses to follow vs. the ones to trash and forget?

Because Jesus' teachings are split between more than one gospel, the outlook, and the particular quotes chosen by each writer, are different in tone and character. In one he says he is coming to begin things anew, and in another, he says that the law will never pass away and must be obeyed. He preaches peace and light in one place, and yet, lets go with the fire and brimstone in another. In each of the various gospels, his message is not only different, but often contradictory.

Yes, the fundies that want to follow the bible literally have those problems, but while the more liberal denominations throw out much of the contradictory stuff, they never do seem to come up with a satisfactory set of criteria for determining which to keep and which to trash.

Why toss out the stuff about diet, slavery, violence, etc., in the old testament (which the fundies do too), but keep in the prohibition against homosexuality? What excuse do they have for denying polygamy? All the old testament based Hebrew leaders had more than one wife, and the bible does not prohibit it, as the Mormons before Utah's statehood would have told you. (and some of them will still say so today) Yet, all of these "values", strict diet, human trafficking, violent real estate acquisition and so forth, also "just happen" to also be ignored or frowned upon by modern, post-enlightenment western societies, for reasons that have NOTHING to do with theocratic gymnastics.

Coincidence? I doubt it. Christianity in western society has had to adjust itself, and its theology, to the realities of secular law within the societies in which it operates, because IT NO LONGER CONTROLS THE LAW in those societies.

Western culture officially frowns upon slavery, and has since beginning in the 19th century - earlier in some European countries. The US fought a war to re-integrate itself after a split-up, over, among other things, human trafficking. Christian theology had nothing to do with this, as there were christians on both sides of that issue, both using biblical quotations to back themselves up.

The International community has, since the emergence of the UN, officially frowned upon violent acquisition of real estate, and most western industrialized countries now have outlawed capital punishment. Many States in the US have also. Again, the anti-death penalty crowd do not use christian theology in their arguments. Their arguments are most often decidedly humanist in nature.

Most European countries now have dropped any legal discriminations against gays, and the US is now in the midst of a culture "war" over that issue, in which the leading lights against gay "liberation" are fundamentalist christians and the RCC. To their credit, many liberal christian denominations now have joined the fight to stop legal discrimination against gays in this country.

I guess that invisible line of criteria have finally crossed the Rubicon to drop the last, great old testament rule into the rubbish bin of history.

But I'd still like to see some kind of admission by those liberal christians that secular values are truly at the bottom of those rule changes.

Rwahrens, I appreciate you calling me out and I will try, in my own understanding of things, tell you how I cherry pick. The key to Gnosis, first and foremost, is to know yourself. Know thy self. How does one go about knowing one's self.

Well first of all you must take an honest and thorough inventory of everything that makes up your consciousness, your beliefs, your convictions, your resentments, your anger, your fears, and the things you are proud of. The main factor here is that we especially want to identify the fears, because fear is the greatest mind killer their is. Almost every psychosis and psychological problem is tied to fear. This process is not something that is accomplished in a day, it may take months or even a few years to fully flush everything out. Once everything has been identified and tied to anger and fear, then it must be analyzed in order to take ownership of the good and the bad, the comfortable and the uncomfortable and in the process of doing so begin to remove the labels and remove the self from the light/dark, good/bad dichotomies. Everything simply exists without judgments or values placed on them and we take ownership of everything that is our being. Once we have achieved the ownership there will be a release of fear, anger and resentment and we will experience what many call love or grace. This is the process to Gnosis; self knowledge where we are elevated from the Doxa to the Logos.

Many of those who have achieved Gnosis realize that the mythos of Judeo/Christian/Islamic theism is man made; it was meant as advice and guidance, not laws to be enshrined as idols to be followed, worshiped and adored. More people put their faith in the idol of the written word than the word that is written within our hearts and our consciousness. Getting in touch with the inner self, emancipating it from the mythos brings the self into Gnosis.

If you haven't been through this process of enlightenment then you cannot cherry pick very well. Everything will seem confusing and contradictory. But with enlightenment, discernment comes into focus and becomes like a highlighter, causing the deeper meanings to jump out of the words to us and we find that they confirm what we already knew in our hearts and minds; we experience an Aha! moment. The written words confirm the internal reality that we already understand through Gnosis, rather than using the words we are reading to create the understanding.

In my experience, I came to the conclusion that Jehovah was not the father of Jesus. It wasn't until later that, after achieving Gnosis, was I able to re-read the bible and find that the scriptures confirm that internal reality, that I came to on my own, without anyone telling me to think or believe it. I stumbled upon it and at first it caused me great consternation, fear and worry that I was treading into blasphemy. But I persisted, calming my self. I realized that I had to open my mind to the possibility of things not being the way that I had always thought they were, the way that I was taught things were; that reality was something entirely different than faith and charity, or money, property and prestige.

This is the beginning...

There are other paths to Gnosis, but this is the one that worked for me.

Jubal,

That was very good, as good an explanation of how gnosis works I've ever heard.

But that theology is as far from modern christianity as you can get; it was pronounced heresy by the RCC 1500 years or more ago. As such, it does not represent an answer to my question.

Don't get me wrong. I believe in the spirituality of man, and gnosis is a lot closer to a personal spirituality than modern christian theology could ever get. If it works for you, that is great - for you. If it worked for more people, we'd have less of an issue with fundies wanting to restructure American history and government to suit their twisted ideas.

But again, it does not explain how or why modern christians can take verses from the christian bible and, using that bible, which is what christians have to explain and document their faith, decide what to follow and what to toss out as "outmoded" or merely "allegorical" instead of an actual, you know, command. (which is how many of these verses are structured.)

I'd still like more christians admit that their cherry picking depends more upon modern values expressed as a result of the enlightenment and secular philosophy than biblical passages.

Thanks for the post though.

I got you now, sorry for misunderstanding. I don't speak for Christianity so I couldn't be able to answer your question specifically for them. But I completely understand that ALL Christians cherry pick to their advantage. I agree that most are not honest about the fact that they are cherry picking and asserting that their interpretations are the only real and true ones. Perhaps that is why we have over 30000 Christian denominations registered as Non-Profits with the Internal Revenue Service.

This fact alone, being that there are so many with beliefs so diverse, that they had to register as a separate entity is very telling. It means that the bible as an ultimate source of law and truth has been rendered irrelevant.

Now THAT I can agree with completely!

OMG that is so true. Very well put! I am spiritual, and I'm am so saddened by the hate I see perpetuated in the name of institutionalized religion. Humanity can fuck most anything up.

agreed

"Hypochristians" is a great term!

The definition of authentic is : genuine, true. So by authentic do you mean the real christians in the sense of following every law in the bible as Jesus instructed and beleiving in the punishments prescribed in the bible for not following said laws (death)? Thats a scary notion Jubal..As much as I hate hypocritical christians who know nothing about the history of their texts, and whats even IN those texts..I'd much rather live amongst them rather than living in a nation full of fundamentalists.but what the hell do I know...

I am so glad you asked that question, IronLionZion (cool rhyming nickname btw) what I mean by my statement of "Authentic" is those that follow Jesus's actual teachings and not the Hypochristian Political Propaganda passing as Evangelical Pentecostal Moral Majority Christianity.

How many Christians in the media seizing headlines do you see practicing "turn the other cheek"? "Loving their enemies"? "Praying for their enemies"? "Walking the extra mile"? "Suffering for the sake of the least of Jesus brothers"?

Like Jesus said in the parable in Mathew 25:40 “The King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’

I think its pretty obvious to realize the distinction I am making here.

spanky,

We aren't trying to tell YOU how to live, we're trying to keep YOU from telling US how to live.

There IS a difference!

i asked myself those same two questions by the time i was... let's see... 9. i had no answers, but continued to believe because the thought of going to hell terrified me.

The problem with that paradigm is that one cannot MAKE oneself believe what one does not believe. One either believes what one sees or experiences or is told - or one does not. One can have a tentative belief, pending proof, but one cannot force belief on oneself.

You CAN fool yourself into thinking that you do. You CAN fool OTHERS into thinking that you do. But without doing some fancy psychological dancing around your internal mulberry bush, you cannot fool yourself, not really.

This is why religion breeds hypocrisy and teaches our young to lie.

We all have the desire to be like those around us - to BELONG. When a child is told by adults that they see/hear/talk to a deity, and they see and hear nothing, at first they will be confused, but will rapidly learn to play along, since they see that those that DO seem to see/hear that deity get approval from their elders.

But they still KNOW that they've seen or heard nothing. Hence, they learn that lying about their religion is ok, if not outright approved of and rewarded.

Religious training of the young is just plain child abuse.

Well you don't remember being born either, so that logic is stupid. There is as much evidence for an afterlife as there is a non-afterlife. It's not worth debating. You either find God or you don't. But neither side should worry about it.

What? Can't you read?

I was talking about children, who, as a matter of course, must be educated by their elders, and has nothing to do with your being able to remember anything.

Perhaps you should take a course in logic, it may expand your horizons!

It is the theists that are claiming something extraordinary, let them come up with the extraordinary proof. In the meantime, I'll just keep on living my life as if there's nothing there.

After all, I've never heard a god speak - when I do, I'll rethink the god thing...

What is "God's" plan ?
Please enlighten me, since you privy to this information...

God's plan is shit....and that is the plain truth. God is dead and the war's begun.

From all outward appearances, God's plan is whatever Christians think ought to happen.

Anything that you know or think you know has been told to you from when you were too young to know any better, just like how you were told that Santa Clause exists, and that the Tooth Fairy came at night to take away your tooth that fell out. You have NEVER been witness to a "plan" being carried out by anyone other than humans. Action and Re-Action are the only things that affect what goes on in our world, and let me tell you what you've probably noticed, no action is coming from any "God". Ever. Not when people made up the Bible stories, the Koran stories or mythical Greek stories and definitely not now. Action comes from US. Love and pain and evil and beauty... these are all things WE represent and created. Without humans there is no God. Without the IDEA of God there is no God. All I want from the religious population of the world is to stop killing each other in God's name. Whatever God you pick to help you find meaning in your life.

@spanky07

...well, I thought it was funny.

Yeah, funny as in roll on the floor laughing, cause it's so nuts!

You don't have to "sin" - just try growing up. You'll find you like yourself fine and can always be proud of yourself - because you genuinely act like you should and everybody who knows you, will know it.

No more faking your way through life.

It is so much better when you throw stupid away and become everything you should be in this life. You won't need no dumb-ass religion to keep your childish shit propped up.

I don't need faith. The things I believe in to govern my behavior are solid, well reasoned rules that have governed mankind for generations.

I have hope because I can see the good in people and am not told by a misogynistic, evil god that I am bad.

Amen :)