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At 2/6/09 04:06 PM, Victory wrote:

At 2/6/09 03:34 PM, dySWN wrote:

At 2/6/09 12:51 PM, Victory wrote: Religion would convince no-one, without childhood indoctrination there to mould their minds into shape before they have developed sufficiently.

How do you explain conversions, then?

My point in that statement was that religious indoctrination in children instils a manner of thinking that continues on throughout their entire life - acknowledging unprovable, unsupported-by-evidence claims as fact, or at least that said claims have more legitimacy than any other claim solely because they are religious.

As opposed to accepting such ideas from the media and 'authority' figures? Because one could argue that that's no different from the effects of letting kids watch T.V. or not forcing teachers to instruct from a rigorously neutral perspective on issues like politics.

I'm willing to bet that the large majority of people who convert from one religion to another were indoctrinated originally as children in one religion. I think you have to have your mind pushed open as a child in order to take any religion's claims seriously.

As I believe it has been mentioned earlier in this thread, recent studies seem to indicate otherwise.

At 2/6/09 12:51 PM, Victory wrote: Religion would convince no-one, without childhood indoctrination there to mould their minds into shape before they have developed sufficiently.

How do you explain conversions, then?

At 2/5/09 11:34 PM, thedo12 wrote:

At 2/5/09 11:20 PM, dySWN wrote:

Loaded vocabulary, etc. I don't see kids being led in at gunpoint, or coming out of sunday schools as raving jihadist lunatics.

many kids are held at a scocial gunpoint. like your parents disowning you if , you arent a christian.(let alone not beliving in god)

Meh. Kids rebel, too.

Given that many atheists were formerly Christian, it seems to follow that being taken to church at a young age is offset by outside sources of philosophical inspiration.

deconversion rates are actualy preety low , somewhere between 10 - 20 percent.

That's significant, considering that 10-20% comes out of billions.

Again, education is supposed to fix that.

whats wrong with preventative measures.

For one, such 'measures' going against the idea that the government should butt out of personal philosophical affairs; if yo want church and state separate, then it should work both ways and government should stay out of religion as much as religion should stay out of government. Let alone the fact that such measures are only supported by a tiny minority of the population in an otherwise democratic republic.

also, if school is suppose to fix all this then were parents shouldnt be allowed to give notes to get there kid out of certain classes.

what about home schooling?

I never really liked the idea of home schooling precisely because it denies the child external experience.

At 2/5/09 08:36 PM, thedo12 wrote:

At 2/5/09 08:31 PM, RubberTrucky wrote: It's like parents taking their kids out to a fancy restaurant.

id say forcing your children to belive in the invisable sky daddy is more harmfull then any restuarent.

Loaded vocabulary, etc. I don't see kids being led in at gunpoint, or coming out of sunday schools as raving jihadist lunatics.

Given that many atheists were formerly Christian, it seems to follow that being taken to church at a young age is offset by outside sources of philosophical inspiration.

I wouldnt have a problem with adults taking children to churches but at that age children belive ANYTHING there told from authority figures.

Again, education is supposed to fix that.

At 2/5/09 07:09 PM, thedo12 wrote: I think it should be illegal to take your kids to church unless there older then like 14 or soemthin like that.

As I've always said, the problem with this is in the details. How precisely would you enforce that? Doesn't that violate people's rights to gather peaceably as outlined in the First Amendment, let alone the right to religious expression?

kids have the right to make up there own minds god dammit.

This is what the education system is for. Or, at least, what it should be for.

Bush started this precedent, and Obama is continuing it.

BwahaBWAHAHAHAHAHA! WHERE IS YOUR CHANGE NOW?

At 2/4/09 12:12 AM, LordSenax wrote: I'm hoping they take a different approach, such as free modification, or production of some sort of "virus-like" tool to spread it to mass amounts of people easily.

This is unlikely. There's too much money to be made, and if you accept a lower job based on genetic differences then you'd be dooming yourself to be evolved out of the gene pool (after all, chicks dig moneymakers). As for the virus thing, many would argue that the risk of such air/waterborne viruses evolving themselves into infectious diseases outweighs their benefits.

Personally, I think genetic engineering in human beings should be limited to disease prevention and/or somatic alterations only. This way, the big genetic problems that we face can be eliminated without the specter of a modification error manifesting itself generations down the road, and the only inequities we're left with on the matter are subsumed by the current ones we have in terms of medical care.

I think we should hang on to public nudity laws; while some might argue that nudity can be a form of self-expression, I see it as a public health issue. If a nudist has crabs and sits on a cloth-covered seat of some kind, wouldn't the next person who sits there risk catching them as well?

At 1/29/09 08:35 PM, thedo12 wrote: whats makes something god dose automaticly rightous?

right makes right isnt a valid argument.

Well, if God supposedly made everything, then by extension he would have invented morality as well.

At 1/29/09 01:33 AM, SomeCrappyUsername wrote: Don't worry Barack Obama will make it all better.

I LOL'd. Hard.

Social conservative, capitalist, and religious. I favor a government that infringes as little as possible on the lives of others, but I hold myself to particular standards.

The funniest part is that, if Bush had done this, there would have been widespread condemnation of the action as "warmongering."

At 1/22/09 01:39 PM, AKACCMIOF wrote:

At 1/22/09 12:58 PM, MattTheParanoidKat wrote: But, aside from the fact that I am obviously joking my ideologies are not narrow, and I truly think Rush Limbaugh needs to stop speaking because he's just bad.

More than that, he needs to stop breathing!

A little extreme, don't you think?

HURF DURF LET'S WISH DEATH ON PEOPLE FOR DISAGREEING HURF DURF

At 1/22/09 10:57 AM, MattTheParanoidKat wrote: RANT

As much as I love to hear 19 year olds constantly reverting to ad hominem and narrow ideology, I've got to tell you how much this thread sounds more and more like trolling.

At 1/22/09 10:43 AM, poxpower wrote: Some religiosity vs intelligence here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity _and_intelligence#cite_note-GSS-11 With some useless data sprinkled in.

You mean, data that doesn't fit the curve you're looking for? Because 5 points of IQ isn't much, and the last study in that article seemed to indicate the opposite of what you seem to be arguing.

At 1/22/09 01:08 AM, poxpower wrote: Yes, there really was a big resurgence of the Asgard pantheon in Denmark in the 90's...

Once a religion dies, it's done. It doesn't "cycle back".

I think you'd be surprised. In a report I did back in high school, my research into Norse mythology indicated that there were a small number of people fostering a minor resurgence of the belief system. Plus, wikipedia has an article on Germanic Neopaganism that sort of flies in the face of your arguments that religious beliefs stay permanently dead.

At 1/21/09 03:47 PM, Drakim wrote:

At 1/21/09 03:22 PM, Brick-top wrote: And what I'm arguing is Atheists can believe in the paranormal because it has nothing to do with Atheism and Atheists are not interently skeptical.

That's it.

Well, that applies for everything. Nothing prevents you from being Christian and thinking Jesus was gay. lol.

Well, there was that whole "love thy neighbor" bit... j/k

At 1/21/09 01:34 AM, VigilanteNighthawk wrote:

At 1/21/09 12:51 AM, dySWN wrote:

I did mention malpractice, didn't I?

You did, but it appeared to me that you were minimizing the violation committed here by focusing on the monetary damage.

No, I was expanding on the possible legal actions she could take. If you're really pissed about something, you might as well throw as much as you can at it.

At 1/20/09 11:49 PM, VigilanteNighthawk wrote: That is not the the biggest issue here. This patient's rights were knowingly and willfully violated by the nurse. This is a far bigger offense than the theft of the IUD itself. The nurse should be sued for malpractice and should lose her license to practice medicine.

I did mention malpractice, didn't I?

At 1/20/09 10:52 PM, freddorfman wrote: You know what screw suing her cut her hands off and chain that bitch to the capitol building , do things like they did in the 1500's she seems to be living there mentaly already

Probably a bit extreme.

Also, drunken grammar is funny.

At 1/20/09 07:48 PM, AntiangelicAngel wrote:

At 1/20/09 07:37 PM, RubberTrucky wrote: The nurse might as well have pulled it out by accident and not so much deliberately.

Right... well then she should have replaced it or helped her get it replaced. "Oh shit, I pulled out your pacemaker, but I don't believe in them. Good luck."

This is when a person in a capitalist society votes with their feet and gets another medical provider.

That, and sue; technically, if the patient is considered to have owned the piece of medical equipment in her body and it was taken from her with the intent to permanently deprive her of it, that's technically larceny combined with malpractice - and, given the cost of medical tech in these times, probably grand larceny.

At 1/20/09 05:48 PM, jakobhummelen wrote: Now, I am wondering as to what extend your country has this sort of legislation and I am curious about your opinion (for example, America has had an exceptional close relation between god and country (I won't get into why or why not this may be) so it would be interesting to hear from some Americans, their opinions on seperating god from state or at least get rid of all 'godly' laws.

To be fair, while culturally we tend to be a bit Judeo-Christian, our federal government tries its best to not get itself involved in religious affairs. Most of us believe that the state has no business dictating religious practice, and vice-versa.

At 1/20/09 05:00 PM, SolInvictus wrote: why not? most presidents are not exceptional in either good or bad ways, and nothing indicates that he is that much different. its just playing the odds.

Aw, why did you have to phrase it that way? You know that now, since I live in a town that gets most of it's revenue from gambling, I'm just going to have to set up that over/under bet on his final approval rating.

I call dibs on the under 50% slot, by the way. Performance aside, it'll be hard for him to meet his constituencies' ultra-high expectations.

At 1/20/09 04:00 PM, RubberTrucky wrote: In that way, atheists are entitled to their opinion. But it's arrogant to declare that anyone who does not share your opinion is a lowlife birdbrain.

Yep.

Won't stop people from doing it, though.

At 1/20/09 03:50 AM, VigilanteNighthawk wrote: He hasn't committed one official act, so you can't judge this yet. He could be the best president we've had in decades, or he could bungle things up in proportions even Bush couldn't imagine.

Reposted for truth. We need to wait and see what he will do before we judge him, and even then we probably won't have a clear perspective on his administration as a whole until after it's well over.

I never saw whiteface, or blackface for that matter, as racist. Recognizing that we hold certain incorrect views about race is the first step to correcting them to better fit reality. To me, building caricaturizations of commonly held racial stereotypes serves to help bring such stereotypes into the open in a fashion that points out their inherent stupidity - by poking fun at misconceptions, we bring them into the general public discourse and, thus, help to either take away their power to shock and offend or cause them to gradually become seen as laughably ignorant and fall out of common use.

But, then again, I laugh at everyone (including myself). So yeah.

At 1/19/09 08:09 PM, Patton3 wrote: electing a man who will improve this country, not the one you'd like to have a beer with.

He isn't in office until the 20th. I wouldn't be patting him on the back for improving the country just yet. How do we know that he won't get up on that podium tomorrow and just go "LOL you've all been PUNK'D! Looks like time to open up those sweatshops."?

At 1/19/09 09:07 PM, poxpower wrote:

Atheists are not smarter.

Yeah they are smarter. Atheists are located mainly in first-world countries and are mostly people with the highest degree of education. The more educated a person is, the more likely it is that they'll be atheist.

Remember kids, correlation does not equal causation.

This message brought to you by statistics and the letter "q."

At 1/19/09 04:06 PM, AntiangelicAngel wrote:

Atheists are not smarter nor less intelligent than their counterpart in other religions.

I'll be fair. If you took American atheists and American religious persons, the average atheist would be smarter. However, the correlation involves several confounding variables. Largely, the stupid are often poor, and the disadvantaged seek solace in religion. Their intelligence leads to their situation which leads to their religion. That general average doesn't mean that any given atheist is smart or any given religious person is stupid, though.

Don't forget to mention that many educational institutions tend to push a particular worldview through their curriculum, and that part of that world view is the portrayal of organized religion (especially Christianity) as the bad guy. Sure, there were some rough spots for religion in history, but such can be said for any philosophical or political system.