cleanhippie
cleanhippie's JournalDawkins Rebukes Cameron, Calling Bible 'An Appalling Moral Compass'
Richard Dawkins has challenged David Cameron’s assertion that the UK needs to return to Christian ideals, calling the Bible “an appalling moral compass”.
On Friday, in a speech to celebrate the 400th birthday of the King James Bible, the prime minister said the New Testament had helped give our country "a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today,” adding that we should "actively stand up and defend" these Christian values. However, speaking to Sky News, Dawkins, a renowned, scientist, author and atheist, said that Cameron is wrong to suggest the Christian Bible is going to “help us with our morals and our social wellbeing.”
“The Christian bible will help us with our literature,” said the author of The God Delusion. “It should therefore be taught in schools in literature classes, but it’s not going to help us with our morals, far from it.”
“The bible is a terrible moral compass, if you think about it. Of course, you can cherry pick the verses that you like, which means the verses that happen to coincide with our modern secular consensus, but then you need to have a rational for leaving out the ones that say stone people to death if they break the Sabbath, or if they commit adultery. It’s an appalling moral compass.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/17/richard-dawkins-david-cameron-bible-moral-compass_n_1155246.html
The Top Ten Misconceptions About Atheists
Let me correct some of the most egregious misconceptions believers have about us, in reverse order:
10) We don’t eat or molest babies. Nor do we agree with what allegedly atheist dictators did in the past century. Over-all we are good people. All you need to do is personally know one of us to see this. I have no doubt but that you probably already know an atheist. It’s just that you don’t give that person the freedom to tell you in this Christian dominated culture. I wish more atheists would “come out of the closet” because of this.
--snip--
3) We don’t claim to know with certainty that a god of some kind doesn’t exist. Not even Richard Dawkins or Victor Stenger thinks it’s impossible that a god of some kind exists (I heard them both say as much in debates). We do think the God hypothesis is unnecessary and irrelevant to life though.
2) We don’t have faith nor a religion. We base our conclusions on the available evidence. We do not take a leap of faith beyond those probabilities. And since to have a religion one must believe in supernatural beings and forces, we cannot be labeled as religious in any meaningful sense.
1) We are not a minority. We are the second largest denomination in America. Depending on how we define an atheist (if we include agnostics who are skeptics with regard to all “revealed” religions) we may even be upwards to 24% of the population. Worldwide we represent third place among the world religions, even though we’re not religious.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/loftus/2011/12/12/the-top-ten-misconceptions-about-atheists-2
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Now, I think this pretty much sums up the atheists/non-believers here on DU, so you can now stop posting the nonsense that directly contradicts this (you know who you are). To continue to make posts that contain this crap means that you are just trolling, are irrelevant to civil conversation, and should be ignored.
IOW, don't be douche.
A glimpse into the vague and blurry mind of a proud None
I don’t go to church on Sundays anymore, so it’s so kind of the New York Times to serve me up a bit of that familiar sanctimonious, self-congratulatory bullshit from a guy named Eric Weiner. Weiner is a smug member in good standing, he thinks, of that demographic called the Nones: people who don’t belong to a church, but maybe believe in a higher power. Or maybe not. It’s a broad catch-all category, so their beliefs are hard to categorize.
All I can say is that if Eric Weiner is at all representative, a lot of Nones are idiots: For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us? I can also quote myself: “squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.”
I must also point out that Weiner is making a common mischaracterization of atheists: we aren’t sitting around fuming at the world, and we’re not primarily angry. Most of us are pretty damned happy with the universe (or at least, aware of reality), and we mainly get angry at denialists and fools — people with whom we should be angry — and if you aren’t pissed off at people who set environmental policy by the backward whims of their bible, or who deny civil rights to people because they don’t like their private behavior, or who vote for political candidates on the basis of how loudly pious they are, then there is something wrong with you.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/12/11/a-glimpse-into-the-vague-and-blurry-mind-of-a-proud-none/
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You NEED to read the entire rant, at the link. Please.
New atheist billboard echoes the Treaty of Tripoli
Undeterred by an embarrassing misquote of Thomas Jefferson on a billboard in October, the Orange County California group, Backyard Skeptics, is still out there trumpeting the cause of reason and separation of church and state. They're on firmer ground with their latest effort, a billboard that paraphrases a key article from the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli. It was unveiled at 1526 Newport Blvd (at the northeast corner of Industrial Way) in Costa Mesa on December 9th. It reads:
AMERICA IS NOT, IN ANY SENSE, FOUNDED ON THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 - Signed Unanimously by Congress
--snip--
Undeterred by an embarrassing misquote of Thomas Jefferson on a billboard in October, the Orange County California group, Backyard Skeptics, is still out there trumpeting the cause of reason and separation of church and state. They're on firmer ground with their latest effort, a billboard that paraphrases a key article from the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli. It was unveiled at 1526 Newport Blvd (at the northeast corner of Industrial Way) in Costa Mesa on December 9th. It reads:
AMERICA IS NOT, IN ANY SENSE, FOUNDED ON THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 - Signed Unanimously by Congress
--snip--
The treaty was ratified unanimously by Congress and signed by then President John Adams.
The reason the billboard features the Treaty of Tripoli is that it demonstrates that the founding fathers understood and endorsed the governing principle of separation of church which, as Backyard Skeptics spokesman Bruce Gleason wrote in an email announcing the billboard, "is one of the fundamental concepts our constitutional authors had when penning the Constitution: 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.'" The treaty is, in fact, direct and compelling evidence that the United States was not "in any sense" founded as a Christian nation.
http://www.examiner.com/atheism-in-los-angeles/new-atheist-billboard-echoes-the-treaty-of-tripoli
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