As a European atheist, This is how I feel looking at the main page of Reddit...

MrDurka · 3 days

Then...nice to meet you, immovable object.

Edit: Also, I thought your Futurama post was spot on. We're deserting Christians trapped in the Christian home base. The attitude in the comments kinda just rubbed me the wrong way.

MrDurka · 3 days

Are we having the same conversation? You told me to "grow up". As if the criticism of religion is somehow naive or immature, or lacking in any validity. The context I presented, namely, of the murder and brutality visited upon children and women (that I was unlucky enough to witness working overseas), was intended to make you think before judging either myself or the entirely valid and much needed criticisms of faith (which is taboo in the U.S.) as worthy of the terms "whinge" or "grow up" as you so succinctly put it.

MrDurka · 4 days

Nice way to dodge the subject [the very real harm religion does, and why arguing about it is a fight worth winning] and assert your own moral superiority.

Relevant XKCD

You are part of the problem.

MrDurka · 4 days

You're supposed to be the paragon of maturity? Please.

Spend a couple years living in the Middle East and Africa and India and see the real brutality of religion first hand and then you can tell me to grow up.

You've never seen a girl's face burned by acid, first-hand, because she talked to someone outside her faith. You've never seen piles of dead children on the side of road, never given help because they are part of the Untouchables. You've never met someone whose disappeared and was never seen again because they were a woman talking to a foreign man in the Middle East.

Save your self-righteous accommodationist bullshit for the rest of your friends that have the luxury of living in a society free of religion and the prejudices it protects.

"Let me just tell you something: for hundreds and thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been in most places impossible to have, or Sam and I would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiling-face, ingratiating way, because it’s had to give so much ground, and because we know so much more. But you’ve no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side."

-Christopher Hitchens

MrDurka · 4 days

If atheists on reddit give it they should be able to take it aswell.

Uh, take your own advice then. I think it's pretty clear atheists in the US get enough shit without people that agree with them giving them shit for just speaking out.

Relevant biblical quote: "Don't judge lest ye be judged yourself."

MrDurka · 4 days

Hopefully this insight helped you understand why you shouldn't be so quick to judge.

MrDurka · 4 days

Sam Harris argues that what you see in r/atheism is not merely "mockery", but "social pressure". This social pressure is necessary to make people that have been socially insulated by other believers their entire lives, begin to question their previously unquestioned and untested beliefs. It's a gradual transformation of society's perception of value towards these beliefs, which are rather harmful to be honest.

blakhlsn07 · 5 days

DM;HS

dudeabides87 · 6 days

Van Halen is coming to Miami!?!?! SIGN ME UP!!! Seriously, I am so down.

liquidzing · 10 days

I think equality and fairness should be part of country's flag...every country has a history of some group wanting equality and fairness, why else would they have raised a flag in the first place? I think we can definitely learn a great deal from other countries in this regard, and that we should look to our common human heritage, not just nationalistic all-too-often historically revised accounts of our country's past and all it's limitations.

Why not open ourselves to all the potential the world, and even universe, has to offer?

kemloten · 20 days

It is you that is missing the point, my friend. You are overlooking quite a bit.

"Let me just tell you something: for hundreds and thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been in most places impossible to have, or Sam and I would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this smiling-face, ingratiating way, because it’s had to give so much ground, and because we know so much more. But you’ve no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong, and when it really did believe that it had God on its side."
- Christopher Hitchens

Sam Harris will briefly explain the typical accommodationist/agnostic blind spot in this regard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsqTysSMQpk&feature=player_embedded

gonzoblair · 20 days

To be honest, it's not really taken out of context. There really is a wrathful, vengeful Jesus to be found in the Gospels, and in the Jesus of Revelation. The Crusaders and the men that prosecuted the Spanish Inquisition were intimately familiar with the Sermon on the Mount and the concept of Grace and yet they still oversaw the arguably most gruesome and terrible portion of human history, torture, and executions.

Jesus clearly expected us to own slaves and never once decried or spoke out against the institution of slavery, the Southern states in the US definitively had the Biblical justification, and used it wholesale, to justify the continued enslavement of generations of African slaves. It's just that Christianity has had to constantly re-invent itself and revise it's own ideas just to stay relevant to new generations. Which is exactly what is happening with gays right now. Religion everywhere is becoming increasingly irrelevant and much of the violence and vitriol you see espoused by religious people is something of a reactionary response to modernity and their increasing irrelevance in modern societies.

gonzoblair · 20 days

Actually that's not clear at all. We are in the least violent and least warring period of history for our species. That trend is very likely to continue. These people do the "crazy" things they do for very explicit reasons. Theo+logical reasons, to be exact. Without religion, and with a liberalizing and a promotional approach towards critical thinking this behavior could be severely reduced and at the least marginalized to such a degree that even the most rural and poorly educated of people would see that religious people are dangerously and unhealthily insane.

CzaBzaGza · 24 days

how long did it stand before they demolished it? does anyone know why?

whichhole · 25 days

One of my friends just posted this video, here is my reply:

I appreciate the creativity and prose, and the production, camera work and editing are well done and compelling. But this is just the Emperor's New Clothes. Religion has a really bad wrap nowadays and Christianity is just trying to distance itself from the label of "religion" and re-label Jesus as something separate.

He is not.

Jesus IS religion, he is the central figure and deity of a RELIGIOUS TEXT that has caused and continues to cause unimaginable pain and suffering. Do you think the men that prosecuted the Spanish Inquisition were unfamiliar with the teachings of Jesus??? These holy men were explicitly familiar with the concept of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the concept of Grace.

Anyone who has read the New Testament in it's entirety might remember that Jesus said,

Matthew 5:17-20 "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.”

Matthew 10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Luke 12:51 Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

This is just the same re-packaging and revisionist historical crap the Christianity has to do once or twice every 100 years. They had to do it after slavery was repealed, they had to do it after women were granted suffrage, they had to do it after the civil rights movement, and they are having to do with gays and an increasingly liberal and google-armed youth population.

C'mon, dude. Just think about it. If there was any merit to Jesus or his teachings there would not be this much confusion. There isn't this much confusion and violence between Buddhists, their sects and the general population. There are many other religions with better teachings, a better message, and less contradictions and bullshit than Christianity and Jesus.

This is just another attempt to make Christianity fashionable and palatable for the new generation.

jonra · 1 month

dude, STFU this is AWESOME. I love it!!!

Johndoe9990 · 2 months

youthful appearance

Sariel007 · 2 months

[Insert gratuitous Secret of NIMH reference]

kortochgott · 2 months

So the water is in the warmer air during the day it's just invisible? And it becomes visible and forms as dew etc. once the air cools?

Fergi · 2 months

Christianity and fiction/fantasy

Bear_Masta · 2 months

I think it's telling that someone might call what the LEO's have been employing lately as "expertise". A bunch of dangerous, buffoonish fools, the lot of them.

ricbah · 2 months

Gasps Downvotes are persecution!

malfunktionv2 · 3 months

Ubisoft has already invested heavily in Assassin's Creed, your analogy is terrible.

doug3465 · 3 months

2nd lowest IQ in the NFL

got a source for that? genuinely curious

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