Atheists on belief threads. Why?

[DioneTheDiabolist]

While there are sometimes interesting threads where atheists and believers discuss and debate religion, it seems to me that increasingly atheists only come onto threads here to poopoo or disrespect the beliefs of others.

Am I right about this and if not then what is the reasoning behind the posts where atheists call the beliefs of others rubbish etc?

Does anyone here genuinely believe that without Christianity we wouldn't have hospitals, education and state benefits? That's the stupidest thing I've read all day.

Next thing will be someone trying to claim that God invented morality which would explain why before Moses jogged up a mountain and chiselled some rocks all the humans were just running around coveting things, killing each other and worshipping false idols all over the place..... Thank God THAT all got sorted out!

Niminy: your brand of superstition is no more or less ridiculous than the people who believe in aliens, fairies or astrology. It's the power the organisation awards itself or is allowed to wield that's the problem. My contempt for Catholicism is to do with its power over the lives of women and children and the harm it does them. Same as my contempt for Islam is about the harm done to women and children, I don't give a toss about the finer points of its mythologies.

Well...just straight believing in a deity is somewhat different to elves at the bottom of the garden, et al.

I'm not one of them (I'm a Christian, to the disgust of many :o), but there are people who believe in a god without any detail.

A dwarf in a teapot is a very specific thing. Zeus is a very specific thing. A creative sentient force isn't.

"A creative sentient force isn't."

I'd argue that it is, just because you can't attribute a physical thing to it.

Besides, the point of the teapot argument is that you can't prove it any more than you can prove a god, thus there's no more reason to think that it exists.

The purpose is to demonstrate how stupid the whole concept sounds.

Why is believing in a creative, sentient but invisible and undetectable force different from believing in an invisible, undetectable but creative and sentient pink unicorn in my garage?

"Why is believing in a creative, sentient but invisible and undetectable force different from believing in an invisible, undetectable but creative and sentient pink unicorn in my garage?"

I don't have a garage, so I'll have to keep my Unicorn in the garden, do you think it will be ok there?

Cheerfulyank: you just believe in a single imaginary friend rather than a race of them. Can't see the difference myself.

The Welfare State: has its origins in the Christian practice of charity

the last word should read tax - not charity

Yes, I believe in a specific god. I meant people who don't. But I can't explain what I mean any more clearly right now because I have pregnancy brain and no coffee.

The whole "people used to believe in Zeus" thing has never really held much weight with me. I used to work with a kid who, when asked about his day, would say things like "I couldn't sleep, and then I got up and ate toast, and then I went to the circus and they let me ride an elephant, and it almost stepped on a baby but I saved it..." The only true thing being that he had toast for breakfast. It was still true, though. Many lies or misconceptions about a thing do not mean that there is no truth to any of it. (And I've just come over all nostalgic now...I sure miss that kid. :))

There have been millions of failed hypotheses in science, many things people believed to be facts that weren't. It doesn't make science itself untrue. For me, lots of misconceptions about religion don't disprove God.

The difference, I suppose, is that "science" isn't one single thing which people can assign as true or untrue - it's always been developing and growing. The theory which fits the facts as they were known at the time is the accepted one, until new evidence comes to light. That's a good thing, and it is the way science is supposed to work. Religion, though, sticks to the same old ideas despite evidence being offered to the contrary.

Of course religion develops and grows and involves new ideas. If it didn't we'd all still be worshipping the sun.

But believers in "god" still stick to believing in it, despite the balance of evidence being totally the other way... But yes, of course people have believed in different things in different eras. People used to worship the sun. Quite. We think that's a bit silly now. In the year 4000, people are quite likely to be saying, "they used to worship this thing called 'god' which they thought answered all their prayers." Precisely the point I was making many posts above.

Nah, it'll just be some other form then. :)

Some other form of religion, probably, yes. But unlikely to resemble the Christian god. People will probably always need something supernatural to believe in - I can accept that. But there won't be any more evidence for it than there is fr the current crop.

(Sorry not to have been back sooner, it's been a busy day.)

Although people may believe that hospitals, universities, schools and individual rights have nothing to do with Christianity, they are in fact wrong, and displaying their lack of historical knowledge. Hospitals were a Christian invention. The early church was notorious for caring for the sick and poor -- and not just Christians, but also pagans. Whatever their merits, the societies of the ancient world set little value on ordinary lives and on caring for the poor or sick. It is possible that hospitals would have happened anyway, but it would have needed a radically different set of values from the ones commonly held in the ancient world to give people the idea of starting them. In practice, that radical set of ideas was Christianity.

The same is true of universities, which were an outgrowth of medieval Christianity's reverence for learning.

Individual rights are valued in the societies that once constituted Christendom, and were thought of there, because Judaism, and after it Christianity, alone of all major systems of thought, believed that each human being was uniquely beloved and valued by God. From that insight, the Western idea of the individual developed, and from that the idea of individual rights.

Charity was a central principle of Christianity: as believers sought to live out the Gospel, they developed the Jewish principle of aiding the poor and the stranger into the Christian virtue of 'caritas', or love between oneself and one's neighbour. The laws which led to the formation of the welfare state (the Elizabethan poor laws, and then the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and finally the establishment of the welfare state in 1945) were a direct development of medieval practices of charity, in which the poor and disabled were aided by the rest of society.

I don't know. The Christian God (as in, Abraham's god) has been worshipped for nearly that long already, hasn't It?

I chuckled when I read that the early Christians were notorious for helping the sick and poor. What other heinous crimes were they guilty of?

The (pagan) emperor Julian wrote to a pagan priest 'It is a disgrace that these impious Galileans [ie Christians] care not only for their own poor but for ours as well.'

niminy - would you care to quote your sources?

Even Wikipedia gives info on institutions dedicated to the care of the sick in Ancient Greece, Egypt and the Roman Empire. India and Sri Lanka both have documented examples that pre-date Christianity by nearly half a millennia.

According to this site the three earliest universities in the modern form were in Morocco, Egypt and what is now Iran, and were connected to the teaching of Islam. That is to ignore the centres of learning so popular with the ancient Greeks.

It is possible to create a connection between the welfare state and the concept of charity in Christianity, documents in my family that were written by one of the people responsible for the formation of the Welfare State commented at the time that the best way to promote it would be to promote the philosophy of reincarnation- ie help out the poor because you never know if you might come back poor yourself in another life.

How do you explain hospitals and schools in non-Christian countries? Did the Christians pop in, set them up and run away again?

The first public hospital dedicated to the care of the sick was opened by a Roman Christian woman in the third century (away from the book but will look it up and give a reference later). While it's true that Islam established centres of learning based around mosques, the university in the form that we know it was a Christian invention. That might be an interesting document, but the fact remains that charity and welfare are essentially Christian ideas.

Niminy- I'm sorry, but, honestly, that's not true. You really can't say that there hve only been hospitals, universities, charity and a sense of self for the past 2000 years!

Sorry, Seeker, but it is.

I've had a look at the wiki article now. The Greek asklepion was not a hospital in the sense that we understand it at all, and certainly would not have treated slaves and non-citizens. The Sri Lankan example is fascinating, and I would certainly like to know more about that. The example from India dates from 400 CE, which is after Christianity reached India. The article casts some doubt on to what extent the Roman building remains that have previously been identified as valetudinaria can be considered so, and what precisely their function was. The examples of early hospitals in the Islamic world were set up by or with assistance from Christians. The article notes that it was Christianity that drove the expansion of medical care and the widespread esablishment of hospitals.

From the Wikipedia page:

The Romans constructed buildings called valetudinaria for the care of sick slaves, gladiators, and soldiers around 100 B.C.

Sure, these institutions were promoted and furthered by the spread of Christianity, but it is simply wrong to say they didn't exist in any form before Christianity came along.

Of course, there are some institutions that were Christian concepts, such as the institutions of the Evangelical Rescue Movement which led to the Magdalene Laundries.

Dad Where is the evidence that God does not exist? Surely, no one can prove it either way?