Thanks for visiting our little corner of the Web, angiebarna.

I'm sorry, but I disagree with you completely. This post is largely about religions. Of course there are some people, like yourself, who say they don't recognize themselves in a major religion. Okay, right, so this isn't about you then. If you're happy with your pipe dreams and delusional world view, go right ahead. If that's the way you want to live. We choose not to. This site tries to convince people the Christian world view is wrong, and presents viable alternatives. Likewise, you're welcome to convince us we're wrong. But I do have to say this attempt wasn't that convincing. Thanks for trying though.

We know about the fairytale of the separation between good and evil in the heavenly kingdom, but what does it tell us? I personally take sides with Lucifer in the story. He lead a revolution against an obviously oppressive regime. The regime kicked him out after a failed attempt to introduce freedom in the kingdom. Afterwards, God created humans in his own image. Right on top of Lucifer's home. Let's just ignore the contradiction that hell existed before the heavens and the earth. Apparently, the introduction of freedom by Lucifer was successful on the earth. According to the scriptures, we have Lucifer to thank for freedom of choice. Personally, I value freedom and justice (which depends on the existence of freedom) over some pipe dream of glory through self sacrificial altruism.

Oh my, this guy really doesn't know. The anthropic principle is useless. It violates the very scientific rules it uses to describe the constants. It's simply not falsifiable. He could just have said "God exists!" and he would have made exactly the same point.

Hmm, I still don't understand where you're coming from. Doesn't their holy scripture state that one should kill everybody who doesn't follow the rules, and love everybody else equally? I think "follow the rules of the fairytale or die" is pretty much geared towards individual, personal oppression. Those pesky Christians keep telling you about the love, because the alternative isn't that nice to tell potential church members about.

The emotion "love" and the social construct are two separate things. The emotion is a personal experience and cannot be questioned. Emotions aren't logical from the egocentric viewpoint, they just happen. So if Christians feel a genuine love for their god or neighbor, it's real love. Even if this love originates from delusional thinking.

I can't believe I'm actually defending Christians here. I guess I'm just spreading the love...

Well, point taken, thanks. Sometimes it's just hard to keep being reasonable when I'm confronted with the opposite. Not that these conversations are mine, but I do recognize myself in them. I think the unreasonable stance of many atheists can be partly excused by their habits, though. Even when conversing with reasonably reasonable Christians, these prejudices of intolerance and being unreasonable won't just go away.

I've written a reaction on my personal blog, here: http://www.jrrzz.net/2009/04/22/re-10-questions-f...

Eventually everything boils down to the group instinct. It's a matter of personality how much individuality a person can bolster. So you could say people who don't value individuality that much are more likely to fall into the status quo of their choosing. Religion offers such a status quo, and does so very well. The less individuality present amongst group members, the more control and hierarchical structures will develop. It's not so much masochism, it's willful instinct driven submission.

Besides, the very gathering of people sharing ideas like the ACP is, is somewhat the same. There aren't that many lone cowboys left in this digital age.

No, that's alright. I know where you're coming from. But help yourself if you think this site would miss out without it :)

The link between dualism and Christianity is quite obvious these days. Since the soul is purely subjective by nature, many Christians often use dualism to somehow prove the existence of the supernatural. That post attacked creationism by defeating the concept of having a soul, and thus dualism by proxy. Compared to the vast differences between scientific realism and creationism, the differences between the various dualistic philosophies in this context are minor enough to generalize in my opinion.

I must admit I've been using the English language a bit freely. Your assumptions about my attempt at wielding it are bang on. And yes, atheism is without question part of scientific realism at the moment. The two are closely linked but not dependant on each other. One can be both ignorant and atheist. If (not when) science finds proof in favor of a god's existence, the link between atheism and scientific realism ceases to exist.

Is it evident? That in itself is both self defeating and confirming, how funny. Anyhow, I'd argue against the divide. Not a single aspect of one's existence is atomic, if I may use this term in philosophy. A personal philosophy will always lean to one or the other, but it will never entirely be either one. I'm personally convinced this playing field isn't horizontal but vertical, with objectivity at the bottom. Subjectivity is based upon purely objective information. The border between the two appears at the point where objective events are not experienced as such, but abstracted into subjectivity. I wouldn't argue that there's no subjectivity at all. An external entity, say, a neurologist, can take all of a person's subjective experiences and translate them into objective data. This data won't have the same intrinsic value though, but can in theory be used to recreate the same subjective state. I see the human being as a complex Turing machine. See my post about Turing, Moore and dualism for more information.

But if you have to have to divide the people into groups, I'd say there are three. Those who deny objectivity, those who deny subjectivity and those who support both. So the only divide possible would be the "subjective/objective/both" version. The only people not falling in the latter will be the people who have thought about the subject in an abstract way. The vast majority of the people will be unaware about the entire situation and automatically end up in the "both" section.

Be careful with extending something as inextendable as atheism. The belief system you're referring to is called scientific realism, not western atheism.