The Ranting Room

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 stonebeard wrote:

I was considering making a separate thread for this, but I don't
imagine it would be the sort of thing to stay alive for too long
without being euthanized. Good old Ranting Room. 

Now,
since I have been mostly away for however long I have been mostly away,
I have been reading quite a lot. Guess what I'm reading? Atheist books.

Religion, atheism, philosophy, all of this fascinates me. What
fascinates me more is how religion cannot be talked about critically
and seriously. My years at PA should have made this eye-poppingly
obvious, but in any case, now I know.

I believe, thoroughly, that taking things on faith is horrific and dangerous. (However, some minor things have
to be taken on faith. I cannot spend all of the day investigating
whether everything everyone tells me is true or not. This is not the
dangerous kind of faith, though.) Is there anything scarier to a
rational mind than someone who cannot be guided by reason and who
believes in paradise after death? I believe religion is incompatible
with science an rationality. Some say that Christianity now is moderate
and is compatible with scientific and rational thinking. These people
delude themselves. If you do not follow your religion strictly, you do
not follow it. You cannot pick and choose which verses to believe,
ignoring the horrific ones. Moderates in religion have split
personalities, guiding themselves mostly by reason (maybe augmented
with some faulty ethics from a book) for most of the week, then for an
hour or two on Sunday, listen to a reiteration of their faulty ethics
from an authority they should not trust.

All who want to tip-toe
around religion, never discuss it for fear of offending someone, annoy
me greatly. This is surely one of the reasons I get so frequently angry
at Prog Archives. You're all intelligent people, and I like you, so
it's the perfect setting for discussion. But alas, prog is the order of
the day and issues that really matter are given the hard shoulder.

I
am scared for rationality and for this world. I think I will plan on
discussing my athistic agnosticism with my parents after the New Year,
and continuing discussing ethics and philosophy with my friends. Do I
necessarily want to convert everyone to my position? Yes an no. I want
everyone to think rationally and accept facts. Whether that leads them
to a different specific place than me doesn't matter. 

Yeah Stoney, cos you know, it's pretty surprising prog is the order of
the day on PA and political/economic/philsophical discussions are
secondary, gee, it's hard to believe that *rolls eyes*

Yeah, we are (for the most part) a bunch of intelligent people, but I
don't come here as my primary to get my fix on
political/economic/philosophical/religious discussion.

It's not because I can't/dont want to talk about that, but honestly
there are other forum boards I go to where I feel more comfortable
discussing it, and the general level of discussion is of a higher
quality (no offense intended to anyone here btw, just my opinion) and
things that seem to be censored for almost no reason here (IMO) you can
at least freely discuss elsewhere without getting intro trouble and
well, learn something new in the process.

This going onto another topic itself though, but it's something I tend to think about a lot.

Some of the most well moderated and most respected forum boards on the
internet allow coarse language, allow offensive/violent (by the
standards of PA anyway) image posting in threads if it can be used to
substantiate a point in a mature way and if members of the board who
have earned a great deal of respect and have been around a long time
feel a newbie is being an idiot/not using the search function for
topics done to death, they come down on hard on them 
And you know what?

Instead of the same crap being rehashed, we actually get new
undiscussed topics on a more regular basis and as a result, actually
learn more and makes members feel more likely to want to engage in
discussion, because they know they will come out of it knowing
something they didn't before.

Oh yeah, that was another one of my somewhat off at a tangent inspired rants again.

But yeah, I kinda agree with ya Stoney with some of your post, me being an atheist and all too:P

Except well, to say "Prog doesn't matter" really bothers me.
On the surface, yeah, might not mean too much, but dude, it's a cultural institution.
The arts culture is so much more important than many people realize. 
It's changed so many lives, for better or worse, it affects our society directly in some ways, it helps define many of us as human beings, it gives many people employment, it gives people a chance to express themselves, it gives people a chance to do something in their time that could otherwise be spent doing something negative.
You don't think that's important?
You're most likely in the fairly severe minority, on this website at least, if you don't think it matters all that much.

Edited by HughesJB4 - December 22 2008 at 00:27