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You should perhaps consider that you're entirely wrong. There is not one shred of evidence for your feelings and had you been born in ancient greece your credulous butt would have just believed in the greek pantheon instead. It is all made up dude.
Do you really have the audacity and arrogance necessary to believe you are one of the few million out of 117 billion humans to have ever lived to see the light of the ONE TRUE GOD/RELIGION? Do you know how wild that sounds to someone not in the thrall of your particular sect?
Since we're on the topic of peer pressure against small rules violations
The only difference between these two sentence pairs is the insertion of scorn. Would it be so bad to tone this down please? If you're modded you might feel vindicated for proving The Motte is too soft for ingroup criticism, well done, but if so this will be the reason. While your instinct now is probably to go hunting for examples of scornful language elsewhere on the Motte, you're delivering scorn here in distilled juice concentrate.
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You're the one parroting the mainstream position here. I suspect we'd both be pantheon believers, but we'd also both be different people entirely without access to the scientific method etc. There is no me if I had been born in ancient Greece.
Other than that though, thanks, you've really given me a lot to chew on. I had never considered before that I might be wrong.
Atheism is not mainstream. Most people are religious adherents, 85% according to the most recent surveys. I'm the counterculture rebel here, not you. You would have been cheering on the death of socrates on charges of atheism and corrupting the youth.
First you say my position must be wrong because it's so rare, then you say I'm in the mainstream and following along with the rest of the sheep. Which is it?
¿Por Qué No Los Dos? You are both are lucky enough to belong to the ONE TRUE RELIGION and also to the "mainstream" that believes in some kind of magical force we just can't quite ever prove. At least yours has magic underpants!
Hey, you seem to have made a bunch of decent posts before this whole drama, but posts like this are just not interesting, and also are against the rules. This is heat, not light. I think you are correct that it is bad to believe in magic and omnipotent beings who judge humans on morality because it's part of a powerful cultural force because it isn't true. But these are just insults, and they're insults that i'd downvote on the 'other site' for not being funny enough.
I was attempting to add a little levity to the conversation without being overtly offensive. I agree. I strayed from the path here, Tenaz hasn't been any better, clearly looking up all my posts and replying to them now. Not that it is a worthy excuse.
The religiosity and the respect it is given is getting out of hand here though. Time to burn some witches before they run the town. I just read a "hitler did nothing wrong" post a minute ago.
Here is a more entertaining rejoinder to a different comment. "Opening with a forwards from grandma style meme that wouldn't look out of place in a kevin sorbo movie is not a good start to this ramble to nowhere."
I have actually deprogrammed at this point exactly 1 Jehovah's Witness (female friend) 1 church of latter-day saints adherent (male friend), and one Baptist (my wife). So maybe it is screaming into the void. But I have had some limited success with it.
It made me chuckle anyhow.
I didn't do that. You've responded in 3-4 different areas to my comments here. I responded here to a particularly egregious comment of yours, but nowhere else I think.
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And you're lucky enough to simultaneously belong to the brave, clear-thinking counterculture, and to the one group immune to any and all Outside View criticisms because the group's beliefs are called a philosophy rather than a religion. You get that most philosophies are also mutually exclusive, right?
It isn't even a philosophy, it is just seeing the world for what it is, without magic or gods or any of that make believe stuff. A lack of belief in the supernatural isn't a philosophy, it is viewing reality.
Way to miss the point. Whether you call it a philosophy or not, it's a specific belief about reality, mutually exclusive with any contradictory beliefs.
"Acktually it's a lack of belief" sure whatever but the mutual exclusivity issue still applies. You're the one who apparently thinks the outside view has validity.
So you really think Joseph Smith, the scam artist, is a good basis for a religious faith? All you have to do is read the wikipedia page to know the whole thing is a ridiculous scam. It is a farcical story, no one would believe the naivete of the adherents it if was made into a movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith
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