Fastest growing religion in the USA

[SixPackBack]

[youtube]MeSSwKffj9o[/youtube]

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[peasea]

[youtube]MeSSwKffj9o[/youtube]

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Ya know?

Sometimes I think you're a fucking genius just for posting links that make us laugh. Never mind the factual stuff.

On ya dude.

[SixPackBack]

This one made me laugh.

[youtube]bkII6Mr9LTg[/youtube]

[bogan]

http://brainz.org/50-most-brilliant-atheists-all-time/

pfft aethiest hardouts, let me know when one of them can turn water into wine, then ill be impressed

[dipshit]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=10605956

"At a special service during the church's annual conference in Auckland at the weekend, about 700 male members of the church swore a "covenant oath" of loyalty and obedience to Mr Tamaki and were given a "covenant ring" to wear on their right hands."


But i thought christianity was opposed to homosexual marriages..???

[Mikkel]

"At a special service during the church's annual conference in Auckland at the weekend, about 700 male members of the church swore a "covenant oath" of loyalty and obedience to Mr Tamaki and were given a "covenant ring" to wear on their right hands."


But i thought christianity was opposed to homosexual marriages..???

Homosexuality is ok, as long as at least one of the involved is a church official. ...can't get married though, but nothing prevents them from making an oath and getting a ring.

[Indiana_Jones]

You miss the main point, and that is people are turning away from religion.

You make it sound like it's something new and hasn't been going on since the start of mankind?

-Indy

[bikemike]

No, You miss the main point. People are only switching religion.

What is religious in Atheism? I think there is an imbalance of understanding across the theist divide, even if the disagreement is equally felt.

Atheism is evidently not religious, and to me the absence of any kind of worship seals it.

I like this which is from God is not great; Christopher Hitchins:

"Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and professor Richard Dawkins, concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we will resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication…..We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, “I am so made that I cannot believe.” In the village of Montaillou, during one of the great medieval persecutions, a woman was asked by the Inquisitors to tell them from whom she had acquired her heretical doubts about hell and resurrection. She must have known that she stood in terrible danger of a lingering death administered by the pious, but she responded that she took them from nobody and had evolved them all by herself. (Often, you hear the believers praise the simplicity of their flock, but not in the case of this unforced and conscientious sanity and lucidity, which has been stamped out and burned out in the cases of more humans than we shall ever be able to name.)

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of a man’s most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be “holier” than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. "

[R-Soul]

What if he could not be arsed because we are just not worth his time...? Then he is lazy...

[R-Soul]

Agnostics acknowledge to potential for a "higher being" to exist.

I on the other believe in nothing other than the mammoth capacity for humanity to behave as badly as possible at the least appropriate moment.

As they say: the one thing man learns from history is that man does not learn from history...

[avgas]

but asking for religious advice from the 1 place on earth where people don't think anything exists outside the city walls.....

Isn't that like doing periphery test on a race horse and claiming it has cataracts.
Doing a English test in china and claiming all Chinese are stupid.
Doing a land survey in Ruakaka and claiming New Zealand has no tall buildings.....

[Marmoot]

What is religious in Atheism? I think there is an imbalance of understanding across the theist divide, even if the disagreement is equally felt.

Atheism is evidently not religious, and to me the absence of any kind of worship seals it.

If you bother to read the thread topic.....

[slofox]

let me know when one of them can turn water into wine, then ill be impressed

Turning water into wine is piss easy. You just pour the water onto a grape vine. The vine turns the water into fruit. I can turn the fruit into wine. There ya go. Magic!

Doesn't mean I'm not an irreligious bastard though....

[R-Soul]

The thing about religion and priests is, to paraphrase a famous quote, that those qualities that would make a person want to be a "holy man" are exactly those qualities that make them inherently unsuitable for the job (much like politicians really).

Qualities like:

- wanting to influence a community
- wanting their opinion to be regarded as the truth
- an absolutely unshakeable faith that their way is right,
- an intolerance of others viewpoints of such a strength that they actively go out to convert them
- their inability/lack of imagination to see things from others viewpoints
- their gullibility in having been completely convinced of their viewpoint to start off with


Any person that believes that their religious viewpoint is fact and not faith, is mistaken. All religion is merely an opinion.
NOBODY has a red telephone hot line to God or The Truth. The pope wakes up in the morning, has a turd. He sees and hears all that we see, nothing more, nothing less. He just has a lot of money to spend on more people to give him alternative viewpoints on faith (which he ignores completely). And he has access to the opinionate ramblings of ther supposed "holy men" from centuries ago who ALSO did not have a hotline with God.

[R-Soul]

but asking for religious advice from the 1 place on earth where people don't think anything exists outside the city walls.....

Isn't that like doing periphery test on a race horse and claiming it has cataracts.
Doing a English test in china and claiming all Chinese are stupid.
Doing a land survey in Ruakaka and claiming New Zealand has no tall buildings.....

New Zealand has tall buildings?