"The Atheist Delusion" - Phillip Adams, Australia's most celebrated atheist, warns atheists of Hubris at their Global Convention(sic)

[fasgnadh]

"The atheist delusion"
Phillip Adams

"When I was a child I was the only person who didn't believe in God that
I knew. Everyone else had either been born into one of the major brands
of Christianity, or at very least they'd accepted, by a process of
social osmosis, the idea of God, even if they remained, for all
practical purposes, indifferent.

And that's the good thing about the recent ascendancy of our belief, or
rather our disbelief. For atheism does not presuppose, let alone impose,
a set of views. All it does is unite us in religious scepticism about
the existence of gods. Gods plural because, of course, even within one
of the religious brands quite a few variations on God are made available.

So today is important because it tells people that atheism is all right.
I didn't know it was all right. This greatly intensified my loneliness
as a child. When I tried to tell my grandmother my doubts - I was raised
by grandparents on a tiny farm -she boxed my ears. Ah, the solitary
dissidents, the lonely thinkers, the people who may be the only
disbeliever in a family or community. To that extent we need to borrow
from our enemies and have some missionary zeal. Whilst we should avoid
messiahs we need disciples to go out and spread the word and seek
converts. But as I'll be arguing this morning we must also have to use
our intellectual convictions to calm down the frenzies of faith.

I see some parallels here between atheism and homosexuality.'The love
that dare not speak its name' as Oscar Wilde pronounced it. Leading to
millions living their life in the closet. Atheism was, and to a large
extent remains, the view that dare not speak its name. And it's only
recently that I've observed atheists coming out. Finally confident
enough to be, to borrow a gay slogan, loud and proud (Incidentally,
spare a thought for gay atheists).

But in becoming prouder and louder I want to argue that we should not be
too loud. And that we should not overestimate our importance as the
tectonic plates of religion move slowly, rubbing against each other to
cause mental and social earthquakes. By all means let us congratulate
each other - but let us not fall prey to hubris.

The disintegration of many a previously monolithic faith cannot be
attributed or credited to us. Roman Catholicism founders because
conservative prelates have tried to undo the progress of Vatican II. The
faithful refuse to comply with anachronistic instructions on the pill
and the condom.

They're embarrassed by their Church's archaic stance on women and
appalled by the ongoing attempts to cover up paedophilia scandals.
Others bitterly resent the undermining of liberation theology - those
valiant social justice campaigns. Or the stacking of the pulpits of
Western Europe with arch conservative priests from Poland.

The woes of the Catholic Church are self inflicted. We've barely laid a
glove on them. Ditto for the Anglican Church which is increasingly
stacked to the rafters with agnostics while Australian Anglicanism and
US Episcopalians self destruct over the issues of women priests and
continuing ecclesiastic homophobia.

But even the foundering of major faiths doesn't necessarily swell our
numbers. There's evidence that the major faiths have atomised,
Balkanised into the ongoing nonsense of cults, the New Age and pseudo
science. Religious energy, like energy itself, cannot be destroyed. It
tends to morph into new forms.

Twenty years ago Dick Smith and I aided and abetted the creation of the
Australian Sceptics, the local branch of CSICOP - the Committee for the
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP deals with
displaced religiosity. Much of the loss of the market share for big
brand religious beliefs was split up between the Pentecostalists with
their shopping mall religions or the fast faith franchises, largely
generated in California, right alongside the dream factory of Hollywood.
Two worlds that overlap to an extraordinary extent.

Far from winning, the Sceptics and CSICOP have lost ground to
Millenarian and Shirley Macleanish madness. Turn on cable or free to air
telly and you'll see an ever increasing number of programs based on
paranormal detectives while John Edwards and his fellow frauds talk to
the dead. And the amount of space in newspapers given to astrology has
by no means decreased. We live in a parallel universe to these people.
The beliefs and behaviours that came from the Baptismal font in
mainstream faiths have simply deformed and reformed.

Yes, atheism is on the march in the US, according to statistics. But
we're starting from a very, very low base. And we should look across the
census figures at the equally dramatic growth of Islam in the US. It's
not coming from immigration but from conversion. Conversion within the
prison system! Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali certainly started something.

So beware of triumphalism. Over the last half century I've learnt that
my euphoria about atheism's progress, inevitable to us, about the
advance of science leading to the retreat of God, was wildly optimistic.
Yet the triumph of science, even in the scientifically triumphant US,
has failed to convince the vast majority of Americans that evolution is
a fact rather than a blasphemy.

Members of religions see atheists as their mortal enemies. Not immortal,
of course, because atheists don't linger on through all eternity. We
simply return to the nothingness that preceded our birth. Religions'
immortal enemy is religion. We might shake our puny fists at the
Vatican, at Islamic fundamentalism, at the religious right who
turbo-charge the US Republican party - but it is the ancient and modern
squabbles, the murderous contests between faiths and within them, that
dwarf our dissent.

Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest of us are, at best, at worst, the most
minor of irritants. The ancient and recent Christian crusades against
Islam, the titanic struggle of the Protestant heretics against Mother
Church, the recent internecine horrors in the Balkans, the genocidal
hatred of the Jews incited by Martin Luther that evolved into Holocaust
- these are the big stories. Savanarola was burnt at the stake by fellow
Catholics - as was Joan of Arc. Atheists neither gathered the faggots
nor fanned the flames. When religions are not at war with each other
they tear themselves apart.

We cannot take the credit for the dramatic decline in religious
observation in most Western nations. At last count, 90 per cent of
Australian Catholics were not attending Mass. But that's not because of
our arguments. It's because of their arguments with their priests,
bishops and the more recent Popes, particularly those from Poland and
Germany. Take us out of the equation and that rapid erosion will
continue, perhaps accelerate.

It's even observable in the United States amongst the Pentacostalists.
Just as the hippies were a reaction against stultifying and emotionally
stunted parents, a great many children of US fundamentalists are
shrugging off the dogmas of Mum and Dad. At very least they're moving at
least fractionally towards the left. And American religious excess has
certainly helped dim the flames of faith as far away as Western Europe.
But it is important for us to realise - and let me borrow a couple of
metaphors from the realms of cutlery - that it's self inflicted wounds
that have done the most damage - particularly the Christian variants -
than the cut and thrust of the atheists' arguments. We are, perhaps, the
beneficiaries of this process but we cannot claim the credit.

Nor have we laid a glove on Islam or Hinduism. They are indifferent to
us and our arguments. No, indifferent isn't the word, as in some Muslim
countries our lives might well be at risk. You could argue, perhaps,
that secular atheistic Jews are in constant conflict with the orthodox
and ultra orthodox in Israel. Not that they seem to have won too many
rounds (After all, Israel began its life as a secular state and, over
the generations, has had to abandon territory to the religious right.
They mightn't yield territory to the Palestinians but the religiously
xenophobic don't seem to have lost much influence).

So perhaps we should reconsider our role, our allotted tasks, as people
who believe in none of this nonsense we might see ourselves as honest
brokers. Negotiate in their all consuming conflicts. Given our
anthropological detachment from Messianic and Milleranian madness, from
the boiling hatreds between Sunni and Shiia, we might share the role of
the Norwegians. They're not particularly powerful or numerous but fight
above their weight in hosing down dangerous situations. Confronted by
rabid religiosity people who don't believe could try to ameliorate the
hatreds of those who do. Mind you, you could mount an argument that
that's exactly what the likes of us have been doing for the past few
centuries. As to trying to convert the believer to disbelief - I tried
that for the last half century and found it not only a fruitless but
thankless task.

A confession I must admit to is being swept up in a religion as a
teenager. I became, during the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its
coldest and McCarthyism at its height, a member of the Australian
Communist Party. I was 15 when I signed up and 18 when I was kicked out.
And one of the reasons I lost my faith in atheistic communism was
because it revealed itself as a parody of the Catholic Church.
Catholicism had Rome, Communists had Moscow. Catholics had God the
Father and his son Jesus. Communists had Karl Marx as God and Lenin as
the saviour. They had the Bible, we had Das Kapital. They'd had Martin
Luther and we'd had Trotsky. Both of us had forms of dogma, the show
trial, confession, heresy, expulsion. Both published an Index of books
not to read.

I remember noticing the eerie parallels between cheap Catholic tracts
sold by the Catholic's Evidence Guild and cheap Marxist tracts sold at
the international book shop perhaps a mile from where we are today. One
tract would warn against heresy. The other against revisionism. One
would have the upturned bearded face of Christ on the cover, the other
the upturned bearded face of Lenin. Towards the end of my involvement in
the party I used to swap them over, putting communist tracts into the
racks surrounding a Gothic column in St Patrick's Cathedral - and
smuggling the Catholic counterparts into the small Marxist bookshop. God
knows, Marx knows, what happened as a consequence. How many Catholics
were converted to communism, how many Commos accepted Christ as their
own personal saviour.

I mention these parallels to dramatise that the atheist can be as
susceptible to authority and dogma as the Catholic. And that's one of
the reasons I differ in emphasis from Christopher and Richard. Just as I
differed totally from Christopher on the war in Iraq. I've been an
atheist for 66 years. I became atheist at the age of five, a decade
before I knew what an atheist was. Before I'd even heard the word. But
as a little boy, the son of a Christian minister, I realised I couldn't
believe, that the notion of God was totally redundant. The great
argument for God was that there had to be a Creation, a beginning. Some
sort of cosmic orgasm that got things going. But my objection was
simple. If God was the beginning who began God?

When I was discovering why I was not a communist I read Bertrand
Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. In it he explained that he was 18 or
19 when he asked himself that all important question. If God was the
beginning who began God? And it was at that moment that he lost the last
vestiges of faith.

But I understand the yearning for belief. The poignancy, the wanting to
believe. It is driven, principally, by the fear of death. Christians
postulate a lopsided creation in which personal existence goes on and on
and on for billions of years in Heaven. Yet that creation had a sudden,
magical beginning with God.

I realised, at the age of five, that I'd already been dead forever.
Because what happened before birth - all those billions of years of
non-existence was identical to what happened after death.

Now, although I share much of the anger, indignation and rage that
Hitchens and Dawkins express I am well aware of that vastation of terror
that greets anyone who considers their mortality.

I started writing about that terror in columns almost half a century
ago. It was, I believe, the first time these issues were raised in an
Australian newspaper. As I took advantage of the fact that they were
evolving from newspapers to viewspapers. Unable to compete with the
urgency and immediacy of electronic media newspapers were opening their
pages to interpretation of last night's news and could be encouraged to
give space to philosophical meanderings. So I used that window of
opportunity to start discussing, in newspapers like The Age, The
Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the notion of living in a
meaningless universe, without author or purpose - its only destiny to go
cold and dark in obedience to the second law of thermo dynamics.

The notions of personal mortality, our denial of death or its burial in
euphemism - are central to most religious belief.

For a while the attacks in response were deafening and strident but,
little by little, I got a sort of a dialogue going with people of faith
- which I still find valid. Because on a vast variety of the social
issues - the social justice issues that I care about - people whose
beliefs I find ridiculous can become my colleagues.

A decade ago Australia went through the most appalling wave of bigotry
in the way it addressed the so-called problems of a few refugees.
Building on the paranoia of white Australia, the Pauline Hansons and
John Howards - and sadly some on my side of politics - prove that under
the veneer of tolerance Australians remained deeply racist. On that
issue amongst the first people to sign up for justice for refugees were
Jesuit intellectuals and Josephite nuns. Just as Jews played a major
role in the civil rights movement in the US - yes, largely secular Jews
but nonetheless operating within a Jewish religious tradition - just as
Jews joined with black leaders like Luther King to overthrow America's
apartheid, members of Australian religious organisations (by no means
enough of them, in very small numbers) manned the barricades.

As they did on Aboriginal rights. As they do on a wide variety of
issues. While it's true that atheists have to put up with bullshit from
the religious that deny us any claim to ethics or morality we must not
make the same mistake. There are atheists who refuse to accept the
possibility that Christians, for example, can be taken seriously as
social reformers. They argue that they do it for the religious
counterpart to frequent flyer points. In its crudest form, they argue
that only the atheist can be truly ethical. Well, tell that to the
Reverend Martin Luther King or the many black and white Christians who
played a leading part in overthrowing the repulsive race laws that had
been established by the Dutch Reform Church and justified by their
distorted theology. We saw much the same thing with slavery. Christians,
even Quakers, could justify the slave trade. Nonetheless, Christians
following Wilberforce worked mightily to destroy it.

Atheists, finally, don't believe. But that doesn't make us better or
nobler or finer people. At least, not necessarily. Many of the great
crimes of the 20th century can be laid as much at our door as at the
doors of the churches. Atheists, like Christians, can be the best or
worst of people. We do not have a monopoly on intelligence, on ethics or
decency. Yes, their beliefs - whether New Age nonsense or full blown
Catholicism - range from the ludicrous to the loathsome. Yes, the
Catholic Church's sickening attitude to human sexuality leads to
paedophilia on a monstrous scale.

Its nonsense about virgin births and immaculate conceptions and the
superiority of celibacy so distorts the human psyche that, decades ago,
when making a film on prostitution and the sex industry, I discovered an
overwhelming majority of prostitutes had had convent educations. And
when I pointed this out in a series of newspaper columns, linking it to
similar findings in the UK, which found that a remarkably high
percentage of men and women in the sex trades were Roman Catholics, led
to me being the target of a Catholic fatwah. On one particular Sunday an
edict was read out from every Catholic pulpit in this country saying
that it was a sin to read any newspaper that printed me or to listen to
any radio station that broadcast me. And I hadn't even mentioned the
paedophilia problem because, at the time, I didn't know it existed.

But when I look at these phenomena I am not moved to hate Roman
Catholics so much as I am to pity them. And I want atheists to view
these people, dragooned into belief since childhood, or coming upon them
later in life as a consequence of the most profound of fears, the fear
of death, with a degree of understanding and compassion.

It's true that such tolerance has never been extended to us and remains
singularly absent in most major religions. The atheist remains an
ultimate outsider, someone to be demonised, feared and detested. But
that's their problem, not ours.

The current frenzy for faith, and fundamentalism, may be as I've
occasionally speculated, the storm before the lull. The last gasp of
religion as it yields to the mighty analysis and discoveries of science.
That might be the case. But the confidence that I had in my teens - that
religion would be dead by the end of the 20th century - that the
synagogues, cathedrals and mosques would be museums - was foolhardy in
the extreme. Indeed, while the religious monoliths did seem to be
crumbling, the spontaneous combustion of ever more foolish faiths in the
supernatural smorgasbord of cults, largely created in California, and in
the tenacity of superstition to remain alive and well even in its
trickle-down form of those astrological features in daily newspapers,
remains awesome.

Furthermore I'm assailed by people who argue that while God didn't
exist, doesn't exist, he she or it is coming into existence through the
new technologies. That the internet is the harbinger of a vast new form
of consciousness that will fill the galaxies and will, in some strange
way, neutralise the second law of thermo-dynamics. Now I think this is
twaddle. But it shows that even amongst people who claim to be totally
secular, who would see themselves as being atheists of some degree,
there's always a danger of creating a new ism or ology that, like
communism at its worst, may have a disastrous impact.

Yes, we must rage against religious extremism. But we must also be
intelligent enough to understand its origins, in the individual and in
society. We are not strong enough, we don't have sufficient numbers to
change the balance of power. The fact that religious belief may have
evaporated in western Europe, that it really ceased to exist in Japan,
that does not mean that we've won. It simply means that in many areas
religion has lost. But giving up on religious belief is not the same as
becoming a thoughtful, highly rational atheist. There may be 2,500 of us
here today but we are still a tiny minority.

Most people who've abandoned religion have not embraced the thoughts and
values we might try and articulate. They've taken up shopping. They are
dulling the pain of existence in the mall, by buying things they don't
need with the credit cards they can't afford. Or they're dulling the
pain in alcohol or narcosis. Or they're just sitting in front of the
telly or the computer screen bathing themselves in violent drama or
hyper violent games. In pornography or the pornographies of violence.

Don't be fooled into thinking that we're at the edge of victory. That
would be a delusion. It concerns me that by becoming too arrogant, too
strident, too aggressive we will stultify rather than intensify debate.
I've known Christopher Hitchens for decades and know how he operates. In
any area, on no matter what he's tackling, he has two positions. On or
off. And when he's on he can be absolutely exhilarating.

I remember chortling with delight at his attacks on Mother Theresa -
when he called for Henry Kissinger to be tried as a war criminal. But I
was horrified when he threw his lot in with the Bush administration and
the neo cons. Mind you, many of the neo cons started their intellectual
life as Christopher did, as Trotskyites. In other words whenever
Christopher is writing something he cannot help but pound the keyboard
like a pianist playing one of the noisier works of Rachmaninoff. His
response to what he correctly sees as Islamist fascism brooks no
argument and takes no prisoners. It goes straight to shock and awe, to
the botched invasion of Iraq and ends up with up to a million dead (Not
that we'll ever know the figure because a body count has always been
studiously avoided) and Abu Ghraib. And Christopher remains
unapologetic. Because that's the way he thinks and that's the way he
writes. And nobody does that sort of thing better. Much of what Richard
writes and says and broadcasts has the same... energy.

I propose, if you like, a third way while recognising how devalued that
notion has become in politics. But a willingness to sit down and talk to
these people who are not necessarily our enemies and who may, on a raft
of issues, be our friends. Sometimes their efforts to be our friends are
grotesque and ludicrous. I think of the Templeton prizewinners, the long
list of scientists, almost all of whom I have either known or
interviewed at length, cop a million dollars for building bridges of
understanding - usually misunderstandings between science and Christian
beliefs. But when it comes to human suffering, whilst I can see that
much of it has been exacerbated by religion, we must accept the reality
that we need 'em on our side if we are to effect social change.

There was a time when, for example, the Christian world seemed wholly
unsympathetic to the climate change crisis. But there is now a strong
movement, within Christianity, to see the destruction of the planet as a
form of blasphemy.

People of religious faith are, in my view, more to be pitied than
blamed. They are, I believe, victims of the faiths they profess. But
there are countless millions of them who are decent human beings. As
decent as the 2,500 gathered here today. And I return to that notion of
the atheist as honest broker. Of the atheist as go-between. Of the
atheist who can sit down with Protestant, Catholic, Sunni and Shiia,
Muslim and Hindu and try to talk some sense into them.

And I've done it. I've conducted little experiments along these lines by
getting myself invited to some very strange places. For example,
Australia's leading Pentecostal ministers - running vast churches - had
me along to talk to them about atheism. I described myself as a mangy
old lion in a den of Christians and got a very good hearing. And by the
end of the discussion I like to think that they would not be so quick to
condemn, demonise of vilify atheists in the future.

In running this line at this conference I realise that it will not be
popular, that it's much more fun to shake the fist and pound the table.
But in a world where the religious have done so much of that for
millennia, and continue to do it in the 21st century, somebody's got to
be sane. And sanity is, or should be, a characteristic of atheism.

And may the blessings of Bertrand Russell rain down upon you.

Footnote

While I do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ I'm here to
tell you that other apparent corpses have a remarkable ability to
resurrect themselves. Only moments ago Obama's victory signalled the end
of the Republican Party. Now, a little over a year after his
inauguration day, the Republicans are reviving. Not by compromising, not
by changing the packaging, but by becoming even madder than ever. The
Rush Limbaughs, Sarah Palins, Tea Parties, Fox News and its loony
luminaries, are looking forward to the mid-terms where there will be a
bounce back. The pundits, as ever, were totally unreliable. Ditto for
the death of religion. It rises like Lazarus, like the phoenix from the
ashes. In some cases it does some repackaging. So that Creationism is
slightly redefined as intelligent design. But much of it goes in the
opposite direction, becoming even more reckless and Fundamentalist, more
mediaeval. Faith, blind faith in all its forms, in all its weird and
wacky variations, behaves like a virus. Just when you think you've got
it on the run it mutates into something even more infectious, even
deadlier. And the immune system of human societies isn't getting
significantly stronger.

In the last century 150 million people died in wars and genocides. We
would argue that religion played a major role in those statistics.
There's little evidence of it ameliorated fanaticism and much that
exacerbated it.

How will we fare in the 21st century? It certainly not off to an
encouraging start. Truly world wars may be fading but the
intensification of local, nationalist, civil and other forms of conflict
are on the increase. And we have yet to see what will happen when,
inevitably, terrorist groups, motivated by religion, get their hands on
biological or nuclear weapons. When one or more of scores of would-be
Saddam Husseins really do get weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, there are pockets of progress. But they're offset by black holes of
brutal beliefs. It's a fight that's been going on for centuries,
millennia. And it's not over yet.

This is an edited version of a speech Phillip Adams gave last weekend at
the 2010 Global Atheist Convention."


http://2010.atheistconvention.org.au/phillip-adams/


Adams is not the only atheist intellectual to join me in warning
militant atheists against misplaced arrogance and hubris:

---------



The foremost atheist Philosopher of our age recently
launched his new book "Religion for Atheists" and
no atheists are interested in talking about it,
including all the ones who eagerly embraced Dawkin's
even more enthusiastic endorsement of atheist Gods he claims
'came into being'(sic)

From his book Launch:

"A few years ago it struck me that there is a resource
that is a provider of Wisdom, and consolation,
and an ethical framework, and it's rather fascinating and
has dominated the mental landscape of human beings for thousands of years
I'm thinking, of course, of religion.

And the problem is, I'm an atheist."

Yes, that's certainly a problem for any atheist! B^D

or for anyone living in any of the atheist regimes they ran! B^[

"Not just a bit of an atheist, I really am an atheist."

You make it sound like you expect people not to believe atheists!

B^D

"So, this doesn't, in a way, make me an ideal cantidate to write
about religion, but at some point it did strike me that religions
cannot be, in the words of Christopher Hitchins, "the source of
the poison of everything", it's implausible, they've been around
for thousands of years, they reflect the collaborative intelligences
and sensitivities of millions of people and the idea that everything
to do with them is false and wicked just didn't start to stand up to
the scrutiny I applied to it, as I thought more about the subject.

So, that's really the fruit of my thinking"


That religion is really the source of so so many good and useful
contributions to civilisation that Hitchin's malicious lies just
don't stand up.. 8^o and as atheism is devoid of anything
worthwhile itself, it needs to STEAL some of the many great ideas
religion has to offer:


" my new book,Religion for Atheists is a deliberate attempt
to look at a number of areas where I believe that religions
have things to offer for non-believers"

Sure, Truth, Love, Compassion, Justice, Sincerity, Charity,
Mercy, Courage, Integrity..
all the virtues atheism lacks, and doesn't even understand, all
the spiritual values that atheists reject completely...


# From: Budikka666 <budi...@netscape.net>
# Newsgroups:
alt.atheism,alt.religion,alt.religion.christian,alt.agnosticism
# Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2009 03:38:16 -0800 (PST)
# Message-ID:
<bfcf3a9d-9711-449a...@m3g2000yqf.googlegroups.com>
#
# You can keep your spiritual values.
# I'll piss on them and pass on them.
#
# Budikka



" ..and perhaps believers know about these things already,
but for non-believers I wanted to look at that."

"It strikes me that at the moment the world is really divided into
believers and non-believers and the debate has become at times very
fierce, there are people, some of whom live in North Oxford who
have suggested not only that religion is unbelievable but also
that it's ridiculous, and that people who believe in anything are
simpletons, maniacs .. people who must be lectured at, to remove
the folly of their intellectual errors."


We all know the "person from North Oxford" he's criticising for
being such an arrogant, rabid demagogue with extreme views, is
Richard Dawkins B^]

"That's not really my approach, I think such an approach is sterile,
I don't think one makes progress"

True, Dawkins extreme militancy and all the money spent on Bus
ad lies to proselytise for new atheist converts never worked!

"It doesn't strike me that this is really a productive way
to go forward."

Mate, I have been telling the dimwitted Dawkinite Drones that
for YEARS now! But they are completely blind to reason! B^D

" How do you live a good life outside of a religious structure?

Well that's silly, when the good life you want to emulate
exists WITHIN that moral framework and claims that the SPIRITUAL
values are what brings life to the attempts at self-transformation!

It's like you want the Light from a lightbulb, using only
the physical MATTER, not invisible, electromagnetic ENERGY! B^D

It's been tried in EVERY atheist state and failed! B^]

How can these atheist 'thinkers' be so dumb?

"This is THE question facing modern society, and we haven't
necessarily answered it that well."

You atheists have NEVER answered it, B^D but the majority
religious societies that you want to emulate clearly have! B^]

"I think it's a legitimate question and my book is an
attempt to answer that question."

Sure, the hilarious part is that you think atheism needs
to copy religion ...because it HAS the answer already!!!!

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAHA!!

Just what Dawkins, Bukakke, Vurgil and all the other
ex-atheist believers are trying to do! ;-)

Except, THEY are copying the BELIEFs in Supernatural Beings,
i.e. they are FABRICATING GODS to WORSHIP! (Just
like every atheist tyranny tried to do with political cultism ;-)

Whereas De Botton wants to steal the PRAXIS of religion: B^D

"My starting point is to say that we should learn to STEAL from
religions."

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAA!

Priceless! The starting point for Atheist 'philosophy' is
that having no ideas of their own the unoriginal atheists
need to pinch the ideas of the, more successful, religious!

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAA




"you know some people have accused me of advocating a
'pick and mix'approach to religions, and I say you know what?
you're absolutely right, that's completely what I'm doing,
a pick and mix approach.

Some people have said 'religion's are not a buffet, from which
you can go round choosing the best bits', and my answer is yes they are.
And that's precidsely what I'm doing. So i've taken my plate,
and I've gone round the different faiths, and I've done precisely that."

- Alain de Botton, Lanching his new Book, Religion for Atheists
The Wheeler Centre, Melbourne 19/3/2012


http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2012/03/19/3455152.htm

---------

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http://altatheismfaq.blogspot.com/


http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.atheism/msg/7c0978c14fd4ed37?hl=en&dmode=source



"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism."
-Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

"We must combat religion"
-Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

“Down with religion and long live atheism;
the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!”
- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)

"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism."
- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)



http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:8290?context=latest

http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:8295?context=latest

http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:6348?context=latest

http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:17478?context=latest


"How can you make a revolution without firing squads?"
- Lenin

http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:17475?context=latest

http://www.c96trading.com/Nagant_NKVD_300h.jpg


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01001/Tsar-family_1001874c.jpg

[Uirgil]

In article <4BLdr.5219$%E2....@viwinnwfe01.internal.bigpond.com>,

`

[dolf]

And the problem is according to Phillip Adams, Australia's most
celebrated atheist. Who in “The Atheist Delusion”, warns militant
atheists against misplaced arrogance and hubris.

I’ve heard recently that Sydney radio shock jock, Karl Sandilands is
suffering from shrinking testicles. You ain't seen nothing until
you've had some fat queen sado-masochistic faggot actor as a gym
junkie from Sydney going troppo at being called a plump frump.

Does your dictionary make haughty a lawful alternative to skanking
whore, or self conceit a synonym for your shit?

Brad (brad...@gmail.com): “W[hat] T[he] F[uck] are you talking
about?”

atec77 (ate...@hotmail.com): “No one know[s] or cares. It is after all
just dork talk!”

dolf: “Karl you’re a chook.”

Ish (m...@g.net): “I thought so. What’s the matter? Afraid of women?”

Denis / Ish (denis...@yahoo.de / ish....@yahoo.de): “Is exactly
what I am”

Ish (x...@c.net): “You can’t consider a faggot like you a ‘woman’.

Is it really beyond you to believe a woman can like baseball and not
necessarily want to read about your obsessions in a baseball group?
Chauvinist!”.

denis (mrwils...@yahoo.de): “You can't consider a faggot tranny
like you a ‘woman’.”

dolf: “There’s only one queen and that’s Madonna bitch.”

Ishtar (isht...@gmail.com): “Fucking frog. Awful funny you show up
when the trolls do.”

dolf: “Qu'est-ce? Aren’t you just the trolley dolly from the women's
hospital.” [B-Day Song (feature M.I.A) Madonna MDNA ℗ 2012 Boy Toy
Inc.]

What is a Nation? (Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?) is a 1882 essay by French
historian Ernst Renan (1823–1892), known for the statements that a
nation is "a daily referendum", and that nations are based as much on
what the people jointly forget, as what they remember. It is
frequently quoted or anthologized in works of history or political
science pertaining to nationalism. [Wikipedia 2012: Qu’est-ce?]

M (st...@c.net): “What is this doing in a baseball group? Nobody here
gives a damn for your opinions, even that Rosecomm idiot plonked you.
Too bad...he might have said ‘Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame
playing with homosexual-sex-obsessed dee-nis's pecker.’ Now THAT would
be an appropriate job for him.”

Sir Gregory Hall, Esq. (greghall@home.fåke): “Dick-sucking: Thank you,
I Bought Databasix!”

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “[snicker] Thank y[o]u, Gary […] for
letting me suck your dick in public: "Not true. Gay is PERFORMING a
gay act like fellatio. Being on the receiving end of fellatio is not
performing. It's sort of like being in an audience and enjoying a
performance. Does it make somebody in an audience an actor when he
watches an actor? No." - Nellie Greg Hall Warren attempts to
rationalize his homosexual desires.

“Gay is gay, gweg, whether yer pitching or catching." Neon explains
the hows and whys of sexuality to clueless Nellie Gweg Hall.”

M (st...@c.net): “Blibber moofle whine……”

Blibber moofle whine

.jackNote@zen: 1, row: 1, col: 5, nous: 81 [Date: 2012.3.31, Super:
#473 / #81 - Propounding the Essential; I-Ching: H11 - Peace; Tetra:
15 - Reach, Ego: #446 / #81 - Propounding the Essential; I-Ching: H11
- Peace; Tetra: 15 - Reach]

Nous: #81
Time: 00:40 hrs
Date: 2012.3.31
Torah: #1 #10 #70 %81 = #0
Dao: Propounding the Essential
Tetra: #15 - Reach
I-Ching: H11 - Peace

Latin: Matutinus {God, delight of the children of men} Alt: Vaolyah
{Attached to Nothingness in God} {
1. HELPS & CONSOLES IN ADVERSITY & TO OBTAIN WISDOM
2. CHANGE, PRESERVATION OF MONUMENTS & LONGEVITY
3.THE OCCULT SCIENCES, REVEALS TRUTH
4. Abiou
}
#671 CE

- http://www.grapple369.com/grapple.html?zen:1,row:1,col:5

@memeBrain [Telos: #913, Super: #13 - Status, Loathing Shame; I-Ching:
H5 - Delay; Tetra: 17 - Holding Back, Ego: #22 - Point to Reversal?,
Humility's Increase; I-Ching: H8 - Seeking Unity; Tetra: 34 - Kinship]

Male Idea: #13 has 10 Categories: #1, #5, #6, #1 = 'Ahava' (H163): 1)
town or area in Babylonia; #1, #7, #4, #1 = 'azad (Aramaic) (H230): 1)
(P'al) to be gone; #2, #3, #6, #2 = Gob (H1359): 1) a place which was
the scene of two encounters between David's warriors and the
Philistines (also 'Gezer'); #3, #2, #8 = gibbeach (H1371): 1) to be
high, bald (in the forehead), having a bald forehead; #3, #4, #6 =
gedad (Aramaic) (H1414): 1) to cut down, hew down; #3, #5, #5 = gehah
(H1456): 1) a cure, a healing; #6, #5, #2 = Vaheb (H2052): 1) a place
in Moab, site unknown; #7, #2, #4 = zebed (H2065): 1) endowment, gift;
#7, #6 = zuw (H2098): 1) this, such rel pron; 2) (of) which, (of)
whom; #5, #3, #5 = yagah (H3014): 1) (Hiphil) to repel, thrust away,
push away;

Female Idea: #22 has 6 Categories: #5, #1, #3, #3, #10 = 'Agagiy
(H91): 1) said of Haman, Haman the Agagite; #6, #1, #5, #6, #4 =
'Ehuwd (H164): 1) Benjamite judge of Israel, deliverer of Israel from
Moab; 2) another Benjamite, son of Bilhan [1Ch. 8:6]; #1, #6, #10, #5
= 'owyah (H190): 1) woe!; #6, #1, #7, #6, #2 = 'ezowb (H231): 1)
hyssop, a plant used for medicinal and religious purposes; #6, #4, #5,
#2, #5 = dehab (Aramaic) (H1722): 1) gold; #2, #8, #2, #10 = chob
(H2243): 1) bosom;

Barry OGrady (ath...@hotmail.com.au): “You don't understand yourself
at all. You think it clever not to punctuate. What are trying to
prove?

You probably think its cool to wear a baseball cap on backwards. You
conform to what you think is non conforming.”

dolf: “That Catholic bitch apologist Kristina Keneally is dismissing
the fact that religious unbelief and disbelief which are your matters
of conscience as indulgence and belief is also someone else's human
rights claim which you are diminishing--Keep silent you skanking whore
because I am speaking in judgement against your soul.

Your fucked up Catholic Religious belief gives you, as an American
refugee, the right to Australian Citizenship and political party
privilege--But not Me!”

Ish (m...@g.net): “What part of "I'm a straight female baseball fan"
didn't you understand? Can you read or is your life all cut and
paste?”

dolf: “I accuse you of indifference. Stop buying your meat pies from
Tony Abbott, you are no longer welcome.”

This pastry became a staple dish in medieval times, and was eventually
called "pyes" or "pies". The origin of this name comes from the type
of meat commonly used as filling. Beef, lamb, and duck were employed,
but a majority of the time it was the magpie pigeon that was the main
ingredient. Magpies in medieval England were originally named pie.
Some historians think that the popular usage of 'pie' birds led to the
pastry dish being named pie as well, while etymologists suggest that
pies were named after these birds "from a supposed resemblance between
the miscellaneous contents of pies and the assortment of objects
collected by thieving magpies." The first use of the word "pie" as
food is referenced in 1303 by the Oxford English Dictionary; also
stating that the term became popular and widely utilized by 1362.
[Wikipedia 2012: Meat Pies]

Thom Madura (Tomm...@optonline.net): “WE do not need religion to be
kind and generous with others - Dolf”

dolf: “How is your pedophile porno collection going--still doing it
for you?”

Thom Madura (Tomm...@optonline.net): “YOU are mixing me up with YOU
- Dolf

IF you are mentioning it - it can only be to compare it to yours.

REST assured that I have no time for that nonsense - so YOU are still
the leader in that area?”

dolf: “You haven't answered the question about your pedophile porno
collection...”

Thom Madura (Tomm...@optonline.net): “Yes - I did - as I noted YOUR
record collection in that area - is unmatched by me - I am not a
participant in that.”

dolf: “Porn isn't my thing.

So what are you now saying about "YOUR record collection in that
area?"

That you don't star in any of them.”

% (per...@gmail.com): “Stupid replies get stupid replies.”

Barry OGrady (ath...@hotmail.com.au): “Dolt is a poof of God!”

dolf: “Forget the punctuation, learn to spell.”

% (per...@gmail.com): “Gin what?”

dolf: “Fuck wit!”

M (st...@c.net): “Cool. But it ain't baseball [in newsgroup:
comp.sys.mac.apps]”

Fidem Turbare (the non-existent atheist goddess): “The subject is
UNIX, not eunuchs.”

dolf: “Why do Americans always find that funny--Are you Mormon?”

Fidem Turbare (the non-existent atheist goddess): “No. Did you get
that impression about me (and if so, how?)?”

dolf: “I had a mormon friend once, who was into Unix and typically
drove a BMW: a Big Mormon Wagon.

I once called Eric Anderson from a phone box in Oxford Street,
Darlinghurst Sydney outside the court house and near where the Mardi
Gras Parade goes by.

Joked with him about his vasectomy--apparently that’s a slip of the
Mormon rules who to this today believe Jesus has stood on their soil.”

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “Izzit you, Qolon?”

dolf: “In tights? No! But in my RM Williams Brookstead Jean: Yes!”

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “Kook Hall of Fame vote recorded,
Qolon”

dolf: “It's a true story.

Hence factual.

Sorry kooks...”

Solon (Greek: Σόλων, c. 638 BCE – 558 BCE) was an Athenian statesman,
lawmaker, and poet. He is remembered particularly for his efforts to
legislate against political, economic and moral decline in archaic
Athens. His reforms failed in the short term, yet he is often credited
with having laid the foundations for Athenian democracy. [Wikipedia
2012: Solon]

- http://www.grapple369.com/memeBrain_files/nedkellygame.gif

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “Sure, but what about Ned Kelly?”

dolf: “At least with my story you can listen to Madonna's newly
released MDNA album...”

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “No thank you. DataBasix -
Continuing to kick USENet ass.

Science flew man to the moon. Religion flew man into buildings…”

Fidem Turbare (the non-existent atheist goddess): "It is the fable of
Jesus Christ, as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary
doctrine raised thereon, against which I contend. The story, taking it
as it is told, is blasphemously obscene-- Thomas Paine”

Sbalneav (sbal...@alburg.net): “BWAHAHA. [heads off to server room]”

Fidem Turbare (the non-existent atheist goddess): “Ha ha! I look
forward to an update -- please let us know how this works out.”

"Human behaviour flows from three main sources: Desire, Emotion, and
Knowledge." -- Plato of Athens

Bonnie Bitch (b...@owns.maf&dog): “Your primary goal is bashing
heterosexual men we know that for sure.”

Fidem Turbare (the non-existent atheist goddess): “That
unsubstantiated claim is entirely wrong. In fact, I find most men
interesting, entertaining, and sometimes even challenging at a variety
of levels (and other women often are too), but that's an anecdote that
may be a reflection of my own bias reflective of my circle of
friends.”

dolf: “Still Time To Vote: Usenet Kook Hall Of Fame!”

Gary L Burnore (gbur...@databasix.com): “I’ve [SLAP] no brain.

[plonk]”

dolf: “You databasix.com guys are nothing but piss-heads.

Are you the dick Fred Hall mouths off about?

Sorry mate, no cunts allowed. Only those blokes with testicles can vote.”

Friendly Neighborhood Vote Wrangler (fn...@databasix.com): “Yes, boys and
girls, men and women, Dolf Boek has made his triumphal return to
alt.usenet.kooks, dropping 500 line screedbombs across the virtual
landscape. The same Dolf 'Qolon' Boek who is the proud owner of these
AUK awards:

72 Raisins Crackpot Religion Award January 2006
Unabomber Surprise March 2006
Tony Sidaway Memorial Drama Queen Award April 2006
Goofy Azzed Babboon December 2007

Welcome back, Dolf! Perhaps the Grand Wizard will add you to his stable
of fine kooks!”

% (per...@gmail.com): “Looks like newbies to me.”

sgt.preston (sgt.p...@gmail.co): “Naaaahh.............just Fred's
"dirty Socks" !!”

dolf: “Are you attempting to unlawfully represent yourself as a member
of the Police Service or Armed Forces?”

Barry OGrady (ath...@hotmail.com.au): “

http://www.ratbags.com/loon/mailbox/dolf.htm

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/vic/VCAT/2002/92.html”

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “Ah, yes, the Boek k00ksuit. Too funny.”

dolf: “I will not make any submission to the present Parliamentary
Senate enquiry, because I am going to sue Peter Bowditch, the Sceptics
Society and the State of Victoria et al.

And I will visit the same recompense upon all and each of you here now.”

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “Glad we don't have that problem in
New Zealand.”

Sir Gregory Hall, Esq. (greghall@home.fåke): “Learn how to trim, you
freaking, rude jerk!”

Fidem Turbare (the non-existent atheist goddess): “Teaching children to
question things is the best defen[c]e teachers can give them against the
dark arts that is religion. Just as they should question evolution so
they should question religion--Les Hellawell”

dolf: “When I was a child I was the only person who didn't believe in

God that I knew. Everyone else had either been born into one of the
major brands of Christianity, or at very least they'd accepted, by a
process of social osmosis, the idea of God, even if they remained, for
all practical purposes, indifferent.

And that's the good thing about the recent ascendancy of our belief,
or rather our disbelief. For atheism does not presuppose, let alone
impose, a set of views. All it does is unite us in religious
scepticism about the existence of gods. Gods plural because, of
course, even within one of the religious brands quite a few variations
on God are made available.

So today is important because it tells people that atheism is all
right. I didn't know it was all right. This greatly intensified my
loneliness as a child. When I tried to tell my grandmother my doubts -

I was raised by grandparents on a tiny farm--she boxed my ears. Ah,

Others bitterly resent the undermining of liberation theology--those

Australia's leading Pentecostal ministers--running vast churches--had

millennia. And it's not over yet.” [© 2010 Phillip Adams, edited version
of a speech given at the Global Atheist Convention]

Fred Hall (fkh...@databasix.com): “Did you enjoy your stay in the hospital?

[trim, for ClosetBoi]”

Cujo DeSockpuppet (cu...@petitmorte.net): “So howz the
marsupial-molesting working out for you, freak?”

Cujo: The Official Overseer of Kooks and Trolls in dfw.*,
alt.paranormal, alt.astrology and alt.astrology.metapsych. Supreme Holy
Overlord of alt.fucknozzles. Winner of the 8/2000, 2/2003 & 4/2007 HL&S
award. July 2005 Hammer of Thor. Winning Trainer - Barbara Woodhouse
Memorial Dog Whistle - 12/2005 & 4/2008. COOSN-266-06-01895.

"Ad hominem, when it comes to psychology I am a genius. This can be seen
by the wriggling all spinics such as you do--and snipping of logical
definitions that trap you instead of you logically answering
them.”--Edmond 'taking his ego for a ride' Wollmann

Gary L Burnore (gbur...@databasix.com): “Already boring, ALready
killfiled. When the cancelbots start in, I shall laugh.”

Rick Sabian / Checkmate (RickS...@gmail.com /
Lunati...@The.Edge): “He's already in my stable of fine plonked
kooks.” [Checkmate: KotAGoR XXXIV, Hammer of Thor February 2012,
Copyright © 2012 all rights reserved]

“[I]ts usually the lesser intelligent person , that comments on the more
intelligent person's , lack of intelligents”--Dave Keating, AKA
"Squiggles" the assworm, AKA %, explaining intelligence

“[W]e all think what we do has major significants"--Squiggles explains
why he spends so much time on Usenet... and why he can't play Scrabble

dolf: “Don't over act Rick Sabian alias Checkmate, I've got enough
quotes for my book thanks.

And I reserve my rights as well.

That you are engaged in criminal activity towards me, as deliberate
character assassination of me by abusive, offensive conduct as
indictable crime worthy of attention and action being power of arrest by
your relative police jurisdictions.”

% (per...@gmail.com): "[I]'m saying [I]'m everything."

dolf: "0% proof! God is a spirit."

% (per...@gmail.com): “It sounds like you're not having a happy day.”

dolf: “Don't you think that if Zimmerman's story was contradicted by the
physical evidence the police would have charged him?”

Old Jinglebollocks (old.jingl...@gmail.com): “Doesn't matter any more.

Can't be bothered even to read what you bums are writing on Usenet.

Fuck ye, the whole damned lot o' ye.”

I thought Jamie Rowe was discriminatory in the manner by which he
undertook his seeking of housemates in Liverpool Street with Gay Share-
space was indulgently disrespectful of the person's dignity as
autonomic right. That collectively these radio personalities are by
their fascist dog commentary, not mindful of duty to State. I also
called the Chief Commissioner office with that same calmness of mind--
it is therefore dishonest to convey it as otherwise.

Flag NOT Fag Wa[i]ver (leo...@aohell.org): “Many targets, one bomb.

B O O M !”

dolf: “...and I want to call in an airstrike...is that wrong?”

Defence Minister Stephen Swan in addressing the media on 7 March 2012,
over ADF shenanigans does raise some matters of parallelism and I do
note as advice in which I agree.

On 13 March 2012 I followed my community health nurse and confidant’s
recent example of determined conduct as a statement of dissatisfaction
made in resignation and contempt over the unlawful character and the
frenzied, brutalising, hate filled manner by which the New South Wales
Police Service and Saint Vincent’s Acute Care Team have conducted
themselves in my affairs.

Following their advice that these persons were seeking to make a
submission to a Magistrate’s Court in order to forcibly gain entry
into my apartment and access me as to the nature, condition and
circumstances of my psychological health--they again resorted to
unlawful, threatening and unbridled aggression in their conduct
outside my premises and a week later they murdered a Brazilian youth
(certainly not a Brazil Holland hero) by tasering him in a
circumstance of mistaken identity over an alleged theft of biscuits (a
wafer perhaps?).

- http://www.manhunt.net/profile/BRAZIL_HOLLAND

Manhunt (Brazil_Holland): Age: 34, Position: Top, Height: 6’0”, Build:
Twink, Ethnicity: Mixed, Hair: Buzzed, Eyes: Brown, Cock: 9" (Uncut)

This was now the 3rd occasion where this intrusion against me had
occurred and which I viewed as an unwanted, unreasoned and aggressive
conduct against my autonomy and rights under the State as a person of
intellect, integrity and dignity who is generally of a calm and happy
disposition. This conduct by them has unnecessarily tainted,
prejudiced and rendered toxic my living environment--goodness knows
what monstrosity the neighbours think of me.

These grievous incursions by State Authorities who have no desire to
give any accountability for their actions and neither do they wish to
grant me a modicum of credence with respects to my religious belief as
being a substantial reality. Accordingly, I have left both Sydney and
the State of New South Wales with no intention of ever returning to
their culture of disrespect, which lacks civility in its inhumanity. I
have therefore terminated my lease and left 3rd parties to pack and
convey my goods and chattels interstate at a cost of over $4,000.
Given this my book has now reached a level of completeness. I believe
that such actions by me as public defiance of the State’s conduct
which I have taken with due consideration as a calculated exercise of
voluntary will accompanying determined action against them, will
invariably manifest a disturbing effect and consequence upon their
enjoyment as participation in any further ANZAC celebrations.

As I crossed the State border into Victoria as a safer haven from
their persecutions and traumatising conduct, I advised those parties
of my intention to leave the State.

This departure gave me an opportunity to meet a female friend of
Private Jake Kovco who had some life experiences which augmented mine.
There was no disagreement about the plausibility of any aspect about
my belief that Kovco’s conduct was deliberate and being passed off as
accidental. His making of a video record of his service was in itself
an unusual act. I formed the view from the sloppy and casual manner by
which he portrayed himself that it seemed different to how other
soldiers are normally portrayed in the media.

The casualness as his routine conduct was at odds with his disruption
of determined policy events. That the uncharacteristic behaviour about
his making of the video record seems to support the notion as a view
he held, that the Australian soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were
forgotten by the general populace, who went about their lives as
though they weren’t there and what they were doing wasn’t important.
He was in fact undertaking a course of action which required complex
processes that were not normal for him. That his intention to have his
body return on ANZAC day was a dishonourable and opportunistic conduct
as an attempt to impose himself upon the State in a most undignified
manner.

That I was right to protest as I had done and what a waste of time and
money the Military Tribunals into his death were.

Also conveyed to me was an equivalent experience to my own, about
private sexual acts being recorded by others and unbeknownst to
ourselves, were then publicised amongst a group in an attempt to
dishonour a person’s dignity and privacy--That this was technically a
rape because the sexual act accompanied a video recording which was
made against a person’s will.

Have you met my kangaroo Jingoist bitch prostitute: Shane Dowling?

"We know what you mean by Faceless Men, Krudd, you anti-termite,
errrrhm semite.....Coz Mark Arsebib, is just an ass-licker.” [7 March
2012, Shane Dowling alias Kangaroo Court Australia @
illusio...@gmail.com]

The dolt defamation on the Internet is going to come to an end!

“[With opposition] 101 [asks “Does the Zionist Lobby have blood on its
hands in Australia?”] [7 March 2012, Shane Dowling alias Kangaroo
Court Australia @ illusio...@gmail.com]

Semantics!

- dolf
- www.grapple369/memeBrain.html

[fasgnadh]

dolf speaks for all the atheists with small testicles:

> On 1/04/2012 8:31 AM, fasgnadh wrote:
>>
>> "The atheist delusion"
>> Phillip Adams
>>

>> "When I was a child I was the only person who didn't believe in God that
>> I knew. Everyone else had either been born into one of the major brands
>> of Christianity, or at very least they'd accepted, by a process of
>> social osmosis, the idea of God, even if they remained, for all
>> practical purposes, indifferent.
>>
>> And that's the good thing about the recent ascendancy of our belief, or
>> rather our disbelief. For atheism does not presuppose, let alone impose,
>> a set of views. All it does is unite us in religious scepticism about
>> the existence of gods. Gods plural because, of course, even within one
>> of the religious brands quite a few variations on God are made available.
>>
>> So today is important because it tells people that atheism is all right.
>> I didn't know it was all right. This greatly intensified my loneliness
>> as a child. When I tried to tell my grandmother my doubts - I was raised

>> by grandparents on a tiny farm -she boxed my ears. Ah, the solitary

>> Others bitterly resent the undermining of liberation theology - those

>> Australia's leading Pentecostal ministers - running vast churches - had

>> This is an edited version of a speech Phillip Adams gave last weekend at
>> the 2010 Global Atheist Convention."
>>
>>
>> http://2010.atheistconvention.org.au/phillip-adams/
>>
>

> And the problem is according to Phillip Adams, Australia's most
> celebrated atheist.

Gee Dolt, you don't seem to have finished that thought, have
you been practising making atheist word-salad again?

> Karl Sandilands is suffering from shrinking testicles.

Perhaps it's the cooling effect as your saliva evaporates..

> You ain't seen nothing

Oh I have no intention of watching, I'll leave you and
Findem Turdbar to it...

> had some fat queen sado-masochistic faggot actor

I hope you will both be happy together.

> dolf: “When I was a child I was the only person who didn't believe in
> God that I knew. Everyone else had

a brain.

> atec77 (ate...@hotmail.com): “No one know[s] or cares. It is after all
> just dork talk!”

true, lets leave him to his boyfriends, the Kook-suckers:

>
> Fidem Turbare (the non-existent atheist goddess): “That
> unsubstantiated claim is entirely wrong. In fact, I find most men

> interesting.”

>
> Welcome back, Dolf! Perhaps the Grand Wizard will add
> you to his stable

I think the other jealous Kook-suckers might say neigh to that.

Leaving the Lunatic fringe aside for the moment, and returning
to the ONE ISSUE you can guarantee atheists AND Kook Suckers
will always run away from, discussing ATHEISM:

[Uirgil]

In article <IlTdr.5246$%E2....@viwinnwfe01.internal.bigpond.com>,
fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com> wrote:

fasgnadh speaks for all theists with small testicles,

and for no one else!

[raven1]

On Sun, 01 Apr 2012 08:31:51 +1000, fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

Thanks for posting this well-written and thoughtful article. A pity
you felt the need to follow it up with your own tedious and
thoughtless meanderings. I've snipped those so readers can enjoy the
original. HTH.

[fasgnadh]

On 1/04/2012 5:35 PM, Uirgil wrote:

> On 1/04/2012 5:21 PM, fasgnadh wrote:
>> dolf speaks for all the atheists with small testicles:
>>> On 1/04/2012 8:31 AM, fasgnadh wrote:
>>>>
>>>> "The atheist delusion"
>>>> Phillip Adams
>>>>

>>>> "atheism does not presuppose, let alone impose, a set of views.

Except in EVERY atheist regime in history! B^D

ATHEIST STATES


"North Korea's government exercises virtual total
control over society and imposes state sanctioned atheism"
- Hertzke, Allen. 2006.
Freeing God's Children. Rowman & Littlefield

---------

"Although the North Korean constitution states that freedom of religion
is permitted, free religious activities no longer exist in North Korea
as the government sponsors religious groups only to create an illusion
of religious freedom"
- Essential Background: Overview of human rights issues in
Human Rights in North Korea
(DPRK: The Democratic People's Republic of Korea)
(Human Rights Watch, 8-7-2004)

---------

"All publications are subject to supervision and censorship by the state.
There is no freedom of religion.
Independent worship is not allowed"

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/english/docs/2004/07/08/nkorea9040.htm

---------

"North Korea is officially an atheist state"
- World and Its Peoples: Eastern and Southern Asia

---------

"Atheism continues to be the official position of the
governments of China, North Korea and Cuba."
- The State of Religion Atlas. Simon & Schuster.



"autonomous religious activities now almost nonexistent;
government-sponsored religious groups exist to provide illusion of
religious freedom"

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kn.html

>>>> Ah, the solitary dissidents, the lonely thinkers, the people who
>>>> may be the only disbeliever in a family or community.

Yup, things have sure gone downhill for atheism since the atheist
regimes failed catastrophically in the 20th century!

In the same 7 years that atheist numbers in the USA crept up by a
pathetic 719,000 to reach a feeble 0.7% of the US population, the
number of believers in China exploded by 300,000,000 new believers!

China's explosive growth in religious faith, after decades of
persecution and oppression of religious freedom under Mao, is
accompanied by incredible prosperity and progress, while America's
economy falters, as atheism creeps upward.

Now atheists are looking to COPY religion, in a doomed attempt to become
more respectable and more attractive:

>>>> To that extent we need to borrow
>>>> from our enemies and have some missionary zeal.

Mao's Red Guards had that, it failed.

>>>> Whilst we should avoid messiahs,

Sure, previous attempts to deify Lenin, Mao, Stalin, all failed,
Only Kim Wrong Un in Nth Korea remains, leading an atheist shithole
that can't even FEED it's people!

>>>> we need disciples to go out and spread the word and seek
>>>> converts.

Why, you have nothing to sell! Atheism offers mankind NOTHING!

Even with the entire propaganda power of the atheist state, it's
coercive secret police, and totalitarian tyranny, you couldn't
convince people that atheism has anything to offer them! B^D

>>>> I see some parallels here between atheism and homosexuality.

Both like putting thinks in their arses? with atheists it's their heads:

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Head-Up_Ass.png

>>>> Atheism was, and to a large
>>>> extent remains, the view that dare not speak its name.

This is another atheist myth, the ARIS data, showing atheism
at INSIGNIFICANT levels, was an anonymous survey, no 'reprisals'
were possible.. .. the reason atheist numbers are low is not
because they were afraid to identify as atheists, but because the
number of atheists is VERY LOW!

Get over it!

Even at the Atheist "World Convention" at which Adams was presenting
this talk, there were only 2500 attendees, that's LESS than the
congregation at ONE Sydney church on any weekend!

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA

>>>> But in becoming prouder and louder I want to argue that we should not be
>>>> too loud. And that we should not overestimate our importance as the
>>>> tectonic plates of religion move slowly, rubbing against each other to
>>>> cause mental and social earthquakes. By all means let us congratulate
>>>> each other - but let us not fall prey to hubris.

Too late, clearly!

>>>> The disintegration of many a previously monolithic faith cannot be
>>>> attributed or credited to us.

Neither can any civilisation, or even a decent secular democracy.. no
atheist regime ever managed it! And you can't claim responsibility for
evolution, scientific progress in general...

>>>> Roman Catholicism founders because
>>>> conservative prelates have tried to undo the progress of Vatican II. The
>>>> faithful refuse to comply with anachronistic instructions on the pill
>>>> and the condom.
>>>>
>>>> They're embarrassed by their Church's archaic stance on women and
>>>> appalled by the ongoing attempts to cover up paedophilia scandals.
>>>> Others bitterly resent the undermining of liberation theology - those
>>>> valiant social justice campaigns. Or the stacking of the pulpits of
>>>> Western Europe with arch conservative priests from Poland.
>>>>
>>>> The woes of the Catholic Church are self inflicted. We've barely laid a
>>>> glove on them. Ditto for the Anglican Church which is increasingly
>>>> stacked to the rafters with agnostics while Australian Anglicanism and
>>>> US Episcopalians self destruct over the issues of women priests and
>>>> continuing ecclesiastic homophobia.

Adam's is correct that atheism plays no significant role in any of the
reforms or changes from the Reformation on.. it is the evolution of
understandings WITHIN the churches which has radically transformed them!

>>>> But even the foundering of major faiths doesn't necessarily swell our
>>>> numbers. There's evidence that the major faiths have atomised,
>>>> Balkanised into the ongoing nonsense of cults, the New Age and pseudo
>>>> science. Religious energy, like energy itself, cannot be destroyed. It
>>>> tends to morph into new forms.

Correct, Religious ORGANISATIONS in the west may be old and tired,
but FAITH in countries recently released from Atheist oppression are
going gangbusters.. and in China this growth is DESPITE the OFFICIAL
Church, sanctioned by the State.. the growth and the ENERGY is in
massive House Church movements.

The only role atheism played in these movements is making those new
religious aware of how much Atheism was NOT a viable option! B^]

>>>> Twenty years ago Dick Smith and I aided and abetted the creation of the
>>>> Australian Sceptics, the local branch of CSICOP - the Committee for the
>>>> Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
>>>>

>>>> Far from winning, the Sceptics and CSICOP have lost ground to
>>>> Millenarian and Shirley Macleanish madness. Turn on cable or free to air
>>>> telly and you'll see an ever increasing number of programs based on
>>>> paranormal detectives while John Edwards and his fellow frauds talk to
>>>> the dead. And the amount of space in newspapers given to astrology has
>>>> by no means decreased. We live in a parallel universe to these people.

Like atheism, the New Age, (and it's revival of obscurantism, astrology,
paganism) does not perform the traditional community building, nor the
creation of schools and hospitals, which traditional religion performed.

>>>> Yes, atheism is on the march in the US, according to statistics. But
>>>> we're starting from a very, very low base.

And, as most atheists are disenchanted Westerners, they consistently
ignore the GROWTH IN RELIGION across the GLOBE, which makes the tiny
advance in American atheism look even more pathetic.. part of the
overall decline in America.


# "At the dawn of the 20th Century approximately one half
# of the world's population identified itself as either Muslim,
# Catholic, Protestant, Hindu or Buddhist, and 100 years of
# secularism, and technological advancement, and scientific
# progress later and that number is now two thirds.

Contrary to the atheist DELUSION, religion GROWS with Rationality
and education! 8^o

# So, for those of you who enjoy beginning coffee shop
# conversations with "The Death of God" .. it's time to change
# the subject! It's time to talk about something else , because
# it's not happening at all.
#
# People are becoming more religious, not less religious,
# and religion itself is also evolving"
#
# - Dr Reza Aslan
#
# http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2010/2929354.htm

It is that last point which even intelligent atheists such as
de Botton and Adams fail to grasp.

>>>> And we should look across the
>>>> census figures at the equally dramatic growth of Islam in the US. It's
>>>> not coming from immigration but from conversion. Conversion within the
>>>> prison system! Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali certainly started something.

Ding! B^] Sound of penny dropping.

>>>> So beware of triumphalism. Over the last half century I've learnt that
>>>> my euphoria about atheism's progress, inevitable to us, about the
>>>> advance of science leading to the retreat of God, was wildly optimistic.

It was, in fact, delusion.

Like most atheists, Adams was an adolescent UTOPIAN, and he became
an idealistic young communist. His disillusion with atheistic communism
faded after the Invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, but the
atheism, inexplicably, remained. He can't seem to see that it failed,
just as communism did. In fact China, without the atheist persecution of
the Maoist era since it reformed it's constitution in 1982 to allow
greater religious freedom, has seen other freedoms slowly expand as
well, and has prospered, even though it remains a one party communist
state. The evidence of history is that state atheism is more deadly to
human progress than state communism! In fact the control of the
commanding heights combined with market forces at the lower levels is
proving to be a more effective hybrid capitalism than the corrupted
corporatist model which is failing in the US! 8^o

The Communist government of China is economically outperforming the USA,
since they abandoned Maoist persecution of religion and allowed the most
fundamental freedom.. that of thought and belief! 8^o

>>>> Yet the triumph of science, even in the scientifically triumphant US,
>>>> has failed to convince the vast majority of Americans that evolution is
>>>> a fact rather than a blasphemy.

Science has nothing to do with atheism. The evolution denying ignorance
of fundies is a particular American phenomena.

>>>> Members of religions see atheists as their mortal enemies.

Rubbish. You are just a minor irritant. The broader forces of
materialism and greed, which are destroying the planet we all depend on
for survival, are the threat.. everything else is small beer.

Even after warning atheists against hubris, Adams can't help but IMAGINE
his precious atheism is more important than it is in reality! B^]

>>>> Not immortal,
>>>> of course, because atheists don't linger on through all eternity. We
>>>> simply return to the nothingness that preceded our birth. Religions'
>>>> immortal enemy is religion. We might shake our puny fists at the
>>>> Vatican, at Islamic fundamentalism, at the religious right who
>>>> turbo-charge the US Republican party - but it is the ancient and modern
>>>> squabbles, the murderous contests between faiths and within them, that
>>>> dwarf our dissent.

A bitch fight in the apartment upstairs dwarfs atheist dissent.

As Adam's himself admits, the great reforms in religion are caused
INTERNALLY, eg the Reformation.. religion, despite what atheists
believe, EVOLVES and it's evolution has been critical to broader social
progress. It was Wilberforce a Christian, who fought against and
outlawed slavery, It was Islam which delivered Greek thought, Indian
mathematics, and their own contributions to Calculus and medicine,
el Oud and Astronomy, and the 'arab numerals' without which capitalism
and world trade would be impossible, into Europe and sparked it's
Renaissance and Enlightenment.. It is MAJORITY RELIGIOUS societies which
have evolved open, tolerant, rights-based SECULAR democracies..

MOT ATHEIST STATES, which have ALL been catastrophic failures! B^]

Atheism, Mr Adams, is a failed hypothesis,

rational folk would move on!

>>>> Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest of us are, at best, at worst, the most
>>>> minor of irritants.

Exactly.

I use you as teaching tools, to warn adolescents against folly. B^]

Just like we warn them of the danger of smoking, or unprotected sex.

>>>> The ancient and recent Christian crusades against Islam,

now they meet together, form World Parliaments of religion, acknowledge
they share the SAME GOD, and share ideas on world issues.

>>>> the titanic struggle of the Protestant heretics against Mother
>>>> Church,

transforming Christianity and the Mother Church itself..

A 2000 year old church has evolved more than any atheist state could
manage! They all failed and passed away in the twinkling of an eye!

Astonishing!

>>>> the recent internecine horrors in the Balkans, the genocidal
>>>> hatred of the Jews incited by Martin Luther that evolved into Holocaust
>>>> - these are the big stories. Savanarola was burnt at the stake by fellow
>>>> Catholics - as was Joan of Arc. Atheists neither gathered the faggots
>>>> nor fanned the flames. When religions are not at war with each other
>>>> they tear themselves apart.

Yes, Phillip.. that's what turned us all away from religion as youth.

But after witnessing the FAR Greater terror, torture and Mass Murder of
the the atheist states, the Union of Savage slaughter and Repression,
Mao's Great Leap Backwards and Cultural Devolution, Pol Pot's Year Zero
Genocide.. killing more than 80,000,000 people, more than ANY RELIGION,

well, 300,000,000 in China alone have turned to religion, as, at worst
the LESSER or two evils, and at best, the greatest inspiration for
progressive, evolving CIVILISATIONS that ENDURE, that the world has
ever seen.

Got it? Humans are not blind, as mosh atheists are to the RELATIVE
superiority of faith in building and sustaining effective communities,
even though, just like ANY organisation, the formal religious structure
can be corrupted.. there remains something capable of eternal RENEWAL
in the SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS of the founders.. which survives and grows.

>>>> We cannot take the credit for the dramatic decline in religious
>>>> observation in most Western nations.

You don't even UNDERSTAND IT.

Large, hierarchical Church Authorities, with priests and Imams
administrating, (and like all power elites, tending to do so in
THEIR OWN INTERESTS) are certainly passe. The Holy Roman Empire is
gone, and it ain't coming back, thank God.

Ever since Guttenberg, and mass literacy, the hierarchies based on
EXCLUSIVE control of knowledge, religious, political, scientific..
ARE OVER. Some the the very BIG and IMPORTANT ones, just take longer to
die.. hence the Vatican has outlived most European Monarchies.

But faith is alive and growing, globally. In China the official church,
sanctioned by the State, is moribund, the explosion of over 300,000,000
new believers is mostly in House churches, more like early Christianity
when it grew amidst fierce persecution.

Why do people expect Traditional religious worship on a Sunday to
continue when already traditional sport and family life doesn't
because, hey, it's just another Shopping day, so people have to work!

>>>> At last count, 90 per cent of
>>>> Australian Catholics were not attending Mass. But that's not because of
>>>> our arguments. It's because of their arguments with their priests,
>>>> bishops and the more recent Popes, particularly those from Poland and
>>>> Germany. Take us out of the equation and that rapid erosion will
>>>> continue, perhaps accelerate.

Ding! You are absolutely correct, the threat of atheistic communism in
post war America DROVE the evangelist revival and made Billy Graham a
national Icon!

But the decline in membership and attendance in traditional churches
is not the death of faith. (Just look at Dawkin's toying with the
fantasy of evolved Gods, and de Botton suggesting atheists steal the
best bits of religion, in an attempt to make atheism relevant and
successful! B^)

Adams own despair at the spread of New Age Crystal healers and revivals
of paganism simply affirms that "those who don't believe in something
are likely to believe in ANYTHING." B^)

Westerners, and in particular Americans are drawn to Buddhism, because
the practice can be done in private, it doesn't require a fixed
scheduled sabbath, in fact it doesn't demand much of a sacrifice at all!

How Western can you get!? B^D

But atheists are deluded by what they see LOCALLY, they don't get the
GLOBAL picture. 700,000 new atheists in the US in 7 years, 300,000,000
new believers in china in the same time period.

Discussion OVER, losers! B^D

You don't have a FUCKING CLUE what is going on, do you!?!!!!! B^D

>>>> It's even observable in the United States amongst the Pentacostalists.
>>>> Just as the hippies were a reaction against stultifying and emotionally
>>>> stunted parents, a great many children of US fundamentalists are
>>>> shrugging off the dogmas of Mum and Dad.

Of course. Religion evolves. Atheism didn't.

>>>> At very least they're moving at
>>>> least fractionally towards the left.

Aw.. keep dreamin, Phill! Didn't the last congress go Tea Party!?

Left wing? pffffffft!

And where do you think Europe will head as economic woes deepen?

We'll be lucky if it doesn't go Germany in the 30's!

The Chinese are so much SMARTER, they DUMPED state atheism
and became PRO-ACTIVE in religious freedom.. the FOUNDATION freedom,
the basis of community and prosperity;

"With the gradual liberalisation that developed with
Deng Xiaoping's open door reforms, religion was no
longer proscribed. In 1982, the constitution was
amended to allow Chinese people considerable freedom
of religion."

http://cbbc.org/china_guide/religion.html


"At the first world Buddhism forum in East China's Zhejiang
Province last year, the Chinese government acknowledged
the active role religion plays in building a harmonious society."

"For example, religious beliefs have helped cut down crime
to a large extent,"

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/content_802994.htm



"religion has been enjoying a resurgence in China over the
past 20 years, as Communist Party disapproval has eased"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6337627.stm


"Religious believers thrice the estimate
By Wu Jiao (China Daily)

"A survey has found that the number of religious believers
is three times bigger than the official estimate.

The poll of about 4,500 people, conducted by professors Tong
Shijun and Liu Zhongyu of Shanghai-based East China Normal
University from 2005 till recently, found that 31.4 percent
of Chinese aged 16 and above or about 300 million are religious."

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/07/content_802994.htm

Incredible! in just a few short years the new converts from
atheism In JUST ONE COUNTRY, far outnumber the slow increase
in tiny atheist numbers in the rest of the WORLD! B^D

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAAHAA

>>>> And American religious excess has
>>>> certainly helped dim the flames of faith as far away as Western Europe.

Sure.. why do you think I Leave Bukakke alone, tilting at fundie
windmills.. the atheists perform a valuable service by helping
to prune American religious beliefs.. getting rid of the deadwood
which was already INTELLECTUALLY demolished by Theist critics, (eg
Shelby Spong).

In my country Evolution is taught in every faith based school,
Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Bahai, Sikh, Buddhist.. they CHOOSE to do
so, it's not a problem for their faiths.

So if Bukakke becomes a religious scholar and scarifies the fundies,
that's a social service. It's NOT a threat to religion, (but don't tell
him that! ;-)

>>>> But it is important for us to realise - and let me borrow a couple of
>>>> metaphors from the realms of cutlery - that it's self inflicted wounds
>>>> that have done the most damage - particularly the Christian variants -
>>>> than the cut and thrust of the atheists' arguments. We are, perhaps, the
>>>> beneficiaries of this process but we cannot claim the credit.

No, you are NOT even the beneficiaries.. any reasonable assessment
of the data shows that atheism is not growing in any way approaching
the decline in Catholic attendance at Mass!

I have friends who teach in a Catholic school, they have been using
contraception for decades, they don't go to mass, they still believe in
Jesus, they are shamed by the Church's handling of paedophile priests,
they are still committed to traditional Catholic Social Justice,

ie they have KEPT the Spirit and abandoned the BODY (of the Church)

That, mate, is what BORN AGAIN really means.

They have been BURNED by the hierarchy, and their kids will grow
up free of it, unless and until it becomes RESPONSIVE, once again,
to the membership, the SIGN of that will probably be full membership
for women.

Meanwhile that same SPIRIT, enlivens millions in China, building
families communities and new, freer, national body.

>>>> Nor have we laid a glove on Islam or Hinduism. They are indifferent to
>>>> us and our arguments. No, indifferent isn't the word, as in some Muslim
>>>> countries our lives might well be at risk. You could argue, perhaps,
>>>> that secular atheistic Jews are in constant conflict with the orthodox
>>>> and ultra orthodox in Israel. Not that they seem to have won too many
>>>> rounds (After all, Israel began its life as a secular state and, over
>>>> the generations, has had to abandon territory to the religious right.
>>>> They mightn't yield territory to the Palestinians but the religiously
>>>> xenophobic don't seem to have lost much influence).

As Adams admits that atheism has made no headway, even in spots RIVEN
with religious conflicts, it must become apparent that the faiths are
CRITICAL to solving these problems.

The smartest thing Australia has done in the past couple of decades is
put Aid money into building Islamic colleges in Indonesia, Madrassas.

Now it goes right against the separation of Church and State, atheists
oppose this sort of thing.. but in Indonesia the poor cannot afford an
education, and Saudi money was funding Wahabist Madrassas, and Wahabism,
while a minority within Islam, was an influence on Bin Laden and
Islamofascist terror. So now we have moderate Madrassas, funded by OZ,
welcomed by Indonesia, teaching Science AND the Qur'an, the message of
peace, as part of Indonesia's sensible war on IGNORANCE, and hence on
terror!

Atheist opposition to state funding of religious schools would simply
PROMOTE ignorance and violence.

Get REAL!

>>>> So perhaps we should reconsider our role,our allotted tasks,

YES! YES!

ARM YOURSELVES!

The Atheist Reform Movement needs to informally link with
the Parliament of World Religions to foster mutual co-operation
and understanding to SOLVE WORLD PROBLEMs, not bicker.

Just as I say to Muslims, be the best Muslim you can be, to Christians-
be teh best Christians you can be.. I say to atheists - be the best
atheist you can be, and I will be the best agnostic I can be.. and,
together, we can tackle and solve some problems.

Instead of telling each other to become MORE LIKE OURSELVES..

it's fruitless.

>>>> as people who believe in none of this nonsense

Oh, see, you have lost it already, because you have NO RESPECT.

>>>>we might see ourselves as honest brokers.

That's just silly. It's the Hubris you warned other atheists against,
Phillip.

>>>> Negotiate in their all consuming conflicts.

You have to be RESPECTED by both parties to do that.

Are atheists respected by anyone?


# Atheists Identified as America’s Most Distrusted Minority"
# - American Sociological Association, ASA NEWS
#
# "A survey by sociologists at the University of Minnesota
# found that atheists are “America’s most distrusted minority.”
#
# "From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households,
# university researchers found that Americans rate atheists
# below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and
# other minority groups in “sharing their vision of
# American society.”
#
# Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are
# least willing to allow their children to marry.
#
# Even though atheists are few in number, not formally
# organized and relatively hard to publicly identify,
# they are seen as a threat to the American way of life
# by a large portion of the American public.
#
# Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with
# an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal
# behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.
#
# Edgell believes a fear of moral decline and resulting
# social disorder is behind the findings.
# “Americans believe they share more than rules and
# procedures with their fellow citizens—they share an
# understanding of right and wrong,” she said. “Our
# findings seem to rest on a view of atheists as
# self-interested individuals who are not concerned
# with the common good.”

Phil is just preaching to the Choir, here:

>>>> Given our
>>>> anthropological detachment from Messianic and Milleranian madness, from
>>>> the boiling hatreds between Sunni and Shiia, we might share the role of
>>>> the Norwegians. They're not particularly powerful or numerous but fight
>>>> above their weight in hosing down dangerous situations. Confronted by
>>>> rabid religiosity people who don't believe could try to ameliorate the
>>>> hatreds of those who do. Mind you, you could mount an argument that
>>>> that's exactly what the likes of us have been doing for the past few
>>>> centuries.

In the Soviet union, destroying churches, temples, mosques, killing priests?

In Maost China? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIrUHVFkm9A

In Pol Pot's Cambodia?

# "The country's 40,000 to 60,000 Buddhist monks,
# regarded by the regime as social parasites,
# were defrocked and forced into labor brigades.
# Many monks were executed; temples and pagodas were
# destroyed or turned into storehouses or jails.
# Images of the Buddha were defaced and dumped into
# rivers and lakes. People who were discovered praying
# or expressing religious sentiments in other ways
# were often killed.
#
# The Christian and Muslim communities were among the most
# persecuted, as well. The Roman Catholic cathedral of
# Phnom Penh was completely razed.
#
# The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat pork, which they
# regard as an abomination. Many of those who refused were killed.
# Christian clergy and Muslim imams were executed."
# - http://countrystudies.us/cambodia/29.htm
#
# "Forty-eight percent of Cambodia's Christians were killed
# because of their religion."
#
http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk158/CANDEMIELDA/44camboyano.jpg


The atheist states killed over 80,000,000 people far more than any religion!

Honest Brokers? Atheists can't even be honest with themselves!

>>>> As to trying to convert the believer to disbelief - I tried
>>>> that for the last half century and found it not only a fruitless but
>>>> thankless task.

Masha'Allah.

>>>> A confession I must admit to is being swept up in a religion as a
>>>> teenager. I became, during the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its
>>>> coldest and McCarthyism at its height, a member of the Australian
>>>> Communist Party. I was 15 when I signed up and 18 when I was kicked out.
>>>> And one of the reasons I lost my faith in atheistic communism was
>>>> because it revealed itself as a parody of the Catholic Church.

And THAT is the problem with Alain de Bottons unoriginal suggestion
that atheists 'steal ideas from religion' they stole the FORM, but not
the SUBSTANCE: pffffffft!

>>>> Catholicism had Rome, Communists had Moscow. Catholics had God the
>>>> Father and his son Jesus. Communists had Karl Marx as God and Lenin as
>>>> the saviour. They had the Bible, we had Das Kapital. They'd had Martin
>>>> Luther and we'd had Trotsky. Both of us had forms of dogma, the show
>>>> trial, confession, heresy, expulsion. Both published an Index of books
>>>> not to read.

One lasted 2000 years and inspired a great, enduring and EVOLVING
civilisation, the other was an atheist tyranny, killed far more people
and failed, catastrophically, in just 7 decades of misery and despair.

Q.E.D.

>>>> I remember noticing the eerie parallels between cheap Catholic tracts
>>>> sold by the Catholic's Evidence Guild and cheap Marxist tracts sold at
>>>> the international book shop perhaps a mile from where we are today. One
>>>> tract would warn against heresy. The other against revisionism. One
>>>> would have the upturned bearded face of Christ on the cover, the other
>>>> the upturned bearded face of Lenin. Towards the end of my involvement in
>>>> the party I used to swap them over, putting communist tracts into the
>>>> racks surrounding a Gothic column in St Patrick's Cathedral - and
>>>> smuggling the Catholic counterparts into the small Marxist bookshop. God
>>>> knows, Marx knows, what happened as a consequence. How many Catholics
>>>> were converted to communism, how many Commos accepted Christ as their
>>>> own personal saviour.

Today there are 1,800,000,000 Catholics and almost enough atheistic
communists to fill a telephone booth.

Masha'Allah.

>>>> I mention these parallels to dramatise that the atheist can be as
>>>> susceptible to authority and dogma as the Catholic.

More so. The Christians built free open progressive prosperous
secular democracies, the atheists built dull, oppressive, tyrannies
riven with terror torture and murder.

So they copied the organisational forms, what was lacking?

just the Spirit, that which gives LIFE.

>>>> And that's one of
>>>> the reasons I differ in emphasis from Christopher and Richard.

And that is why agnostics and moderate atheists love you, Phil.

You are a decent bloke, you try and build bridges, you are a mensch.

>>>> Just as I
>>>> differed totally from Christopher on the war in Iraq.

Me too.

Hitchins demonstrated that atheists can copy the religious far right, as
well.

>>>> I've been an
>>>> atheist for 66 years. I became atheist at the age of five, a decade
>>>> before I knew what an atheist was. Before I'd even heard the word. But
>>>> as a little boy, the son of a Christian minister, I realised I couldn't
>>>> believe, that the notion of God was totally redundant. The great
>>>> argument for God was that there had to be a Creation, a beginning.

No, that's not right. You were sold a pup, Phil.

Like many atheists, perhaps those responsible for your 'religious
upbringing' poisoned the well.

The great argument for God is the EXISTING WORLD, especially
the success of civilisations inspired and sustained by spiritual
teachings.

Compare it to the atheist failures and you will see the point.

>>>> Some sort of cosmic orgasm that got things going.

Science agrees, and calls it the Big Bang, Lemaitre, a Catholic
professor and a priest, developed the theory.

>>>> But my objection was simple.
>>>> If God was the beginning who began God?

Most 5 year olds are too young for Russell's paradox,
in fact they can't grasp paradox at all.

It's time you grew up, Phil.

Metaphysics is what adults do when all the other important
jobs are done.

>>>> When I was discovering why I was not a communist

...on the rebound, eh?

>>>> I read Bertrand
>>>> Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. In it he explained that he was 18 or
>>>> 19 when he asked himself that all important question. If God was the
>>>> beginning who began God? And it was at that moment that he lost the last
>>>> vestiges of faith.

... and yours began.

>>>> But I understand the yearning for belief. The poignancy, the wanting to
>>>> believe.

We hear it in your radio interviews, Phil.

You have absorbed all the spiritual qualities Jesus taught were
important, except faith, ...like so many people, by ACTING
righteously they fullfil the commandments of God, sometimes more
completely than the believers themselves. Another paradox.
Somewhat like those believers who have no conception of God,
but follow the greatest Commandment.

>>>> It is driven, principally, by the fear of death.

Rubbish.

It is driven by the Joy of Life.

Go back and look at what you wrote about your daughters
conversion to Judaism. Is she living and believing in
the fear of death? 8^)

"I have come that they may have LIFE and have it in abundance" ;-)

It is common, however, to hear ATHEISTS who think that is the case...

so .. who really is obsessed with it? B^]

>>>> Christians
>>>> postulate a lopsided creation in which personal existence goes on and on
>>>> and on for billions of years in Heaven.

Dawkins now proposes the same, but as the result of EVOLUTION.

All you havfe now is a difference in TIMESCALE and starting point!

Atheists have conceded the EXISTENCE of God/s! BWAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAAA

>>>> Yet that creation had a sudden,
>>>> magical beginning with God.

Oh for goodness sake Phil, most Christians are NOT fundie creationists.

The UNIVESRSE of space and time 'magically' came into existence.. the
rest evolved.. the question of God remains OPEN.

Get over it, you only look silly when you try to demean believers by
pretending
they are all fundie creationists.

Humans have a myriad ways to create, physically, artistically,
economically, intellectually.. why are fundies AND fundie atheists
hung up on God's METHOD?

>>>> I realised, at the age of five, that I'd already been dead forever.
>>>> Because what happened before birth - all those billions of years of
>>>> non-existence was identical to what happened after death.

That's a reasonable BELIEF, but if multiverses exist, you may have
merely passed from one world to another...

pretty much what religions teach happens upon death, and quite
compatible with Buddhist rebirh...

All this stuff is mere speculation.. get on with LIFE! B^D

>>>> Now, although I share much of the anger, indignation and rage that
>>>> Hitchens and Dawkins express I am well aware of that vastation of terror
>>>> that greets anyone who considers their mortality.

We die. Get over it.

I love my life, but I don't regret sleep, even dreamless sleep
when I am not living my life for hours each night.

Where is the terror in a sleep from which we may never wake?

I had epilepsy in my youth, but I went skydiving.. never did relative
work or anything that could endanger others. Knew the risks, embraced
them. I survived. The Epilepsy went away.

I have seen death, kissed it's cold face, and felt no fear,
what I did feel is beyond words... acceptance, gratitude,
thankfulness for their life, peace..

I have told my kids that if I go while snorkling, taken by a shark,
or a current, or a heart attack, to know with certainty that my life has
been full, I'm doing what I love and am content, even if nothing
but oblivion follows.

Masha'Allah!

>>>> I started writing about that terror in columns almost half a century
>>>> ago.

Yes, atheists and other materialist do seem to rail against the dark..

I find it all an incredible waste of time..

The sun is shining, the tide will be high in two hours at the marine
sanctuary, the battery for the underwater camera is recharged,
....sure ...Winter is coming.. the long dark night of the soul, ;-)
the water already feels cold.. it is thrilling to the skin..
I, and the world around me ..are ALIVE!

>>>> It was, I believe, the first time these issues were raised in an
>>>> Australian newspaper.

Westerners en large, seem to have a phobia about death.

I lived some time on a farm, life and death were visible and
apparent. They are, after all, linked.

>>>> As I took advantage of the fact that they were
>>>> evolving from newspapers to viewspapers. Unable to compete with the
>>>> urgency and immediacy of electronic media newspapers were opening their
>>>> pages to interpretation of last night's news and could be encouraged to
>>>> give space to philosophical meanderings. So I used that window of
>>>> opportunity to start discussing, in newspapers like The Age, The
>>>> Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the notion of living in a
>>>> meaningless universe, without author or purpose - its only destiny to go
>>>> cold and dark in obedience to the second law of thermo dynamics.

And?

>>>> The notions of personal mortality, our denial of death or its burial in
>>>> euphemism - are central to most religious belief.

Phil, death is a door, we all go through it, either to OBLIVION
or to another world, we don't know, perhaps we are not meant to know..
anyway...

....further discussion is pointless.

>>>> For a while the attacks in response were deafening and strident but,
>>>> little by little, I got a sort of a dialogue going with people of faith
>>>> - which I still find valid. Because on a vast variety of the social
>>>> issues - the social justice issues that I care about - people whose
>>>> beliefs I find ridiculous can become my colleagues.

EXACTLY!

That is why you are that rare thing, a liked and trusted atheist! B^D

Stop discussing BELIEFS, they are fundamentally a personal matter,
focus on SHARED IDEALS and plans for ACTION.

That is why I discuss HISTORY with atheists, NOT THEOLOGY!

And we share that approach, as we both lived through this,
and fought on the SAME SIDE, in opposition to Pauline Hanson
and the One Notion party:

>>>> A decade ago Australia went through the most appalling wave of bigotry
>>>> in the way it addressed the so-called problems of a few refugees.
>>>> Building on the paranoia of white Australia, the Pauline Hansons and
>>>> John Howards - and sadly some on my side of politics - prove that under
>>>> the veneer of tolerance Australians remained deeply racist. On that
>>>> issue amongst the first people to sign up for justice for refugees were
>>>> Jesuit intellectuals and Josephite nuns. Just as Jews played a major
>>>> role in the civil rights movement in the US - yes, largely secular Jews
>>>> but nonetheless operating within a Jewish religious tradition - just as
>>>> Jews joined with black leaders like Luther King to overthrow America's
>>>> apartheid, members of Australian religious organisations (by no means
>>>> enough of them, in very small numbers) manned the barricades.

And that is the Key!

As my brother, St Rod put it so clearly years ago;

# Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:36:22 +1100
# From: fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com>
#################################################################
# For all the slow-witted Atheists who STILL insist on
# PROJECTING their obsessions with ARID theological disputes
# (because propositions incapable of falsification mean they
# can NEVER BE WRONG! ;-) please pay attention to what
# you have already been told, instead of making shit up!
#
# " I'll stick with the philosophy of my brother, St Rod,
# who says he doesn't want to hear about people's theology,
# he only cares about the way they ACT toward each other."
#
# Message-ID: <49077a4a$0$28216$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au>
#
##################################################################

And still the atheists think it's rational and productive to brand me
a Christian one minute, a Muslim the next, just because I question their
dogmatic beliefs!

It's hilarious!

>>>> As they did on Aboriginal rights. As they do on a wide variety of
>>>> issues. While it's true that atheists have to put up with bullshit from
>>>> the religious that deny us any claim to ethics or morality we must not
>>>> make the same mistake. There are atheists who refuse to accept the
>>>> possibility that Christians, for example, can be taken seriously as
>>>> social reformers. They argue that they do it for the religious
>>>> counterpart to frequent flyer points. In its crudest form, they argue
>>>> that only the atheist can be truly ethical. Well, tell that to the
>>>> Reverend Martin Luther King or the many black and white Christians who
>>>> played a leading part in overthrowing the repulsive race laws that had
>>>> been established by the Dutch Reform Church and justified by their
>>>> distorted theology. We saw much the same thing with slavery. Christians,
>>>> even Quakers, could justify the slave trade. Nonetheless, Christians
>>>> following Wilberforce worked mightily to destroy it.

Amen, my atheist brother! B^D

>>>> Atheists, finally, don't believe. But that doesn't make us better or
>>>> nobler or finer people. At least, not necessarily. Many of the great
>>>> crimes of the 20th century can be laid as much at our door as at the
>>>> doors of the churches.

The feline is out of the bag! 8^o

>>>> Atheists, like Christians, can be the best or worst of people.

Yes!

>>>> We do not have a monopoly on intelligence, on ethics or
>>>> decency. Yes, their beliefs - whether New Age nonsense or full blown
>>>> Catholicism - range from the ludicrous to the loathsome. Yes, the
>>>> Catholic Church's sickening attitude to human sexuality leads to
>>>> paedophilia on a monstrous scale.
>>>>
>>>> Its nonsense about virgin births and immaculate conceptions and the
>>>> superiority of celibacy so distorts the human psyche that, decades ago,
>>>> when making a film on prostitution and the sex industry, I discovered an
>>>> overwhelming majority of prostitutes had had convent educations. And
>>>> when I pointed this out in a series of newspaper columns, linking it to
>>>> similar findings in the UK, which found that a remarkably high
>>>> percentage of men and women in the sex trades were Roman Catholics, led
>>>> to me being the target of a Catholic fatwah. On one particular Sunday an
>>>> edict was read out from every Catholic pulpit in this country saying
>>>> that it was a sin to read any newspaper that printed me or to listen to
>>>> any radio station that broadcast me. And I hadn't even mentioned the
>>>> paedophilia problem because, at the time, I didn't know it existed.

Phil, I was aware of the paedophilia issue when the Pope visited
Australia, and wrote scathingly about the treatment of the victims and
the coverup (it's all archived in Google) and copped savage attack
from defenders of the faith.

But it was just verbal, argument.. they didn't do this to me;

"Between 1917 and 1940, 130,000 Orthodox priests were arrested.
In 1918, the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky executed over
3000 Orthodox clergymen of all ranks.
Some were drowned in ice-holes or poured over with cold water
in winter until they turned to ice-pillars."

- John Shelton Curtis, The Russian Church and the Soviet State
(Boston: Little Brown, 1953)

If you think we suffered from VERBAL ABUSE, spare a thought for
those religious suffering persecution in North Korea's atheist tyranny.

No better off than those persecuted in Iran by their theocratic bigots!

I denounce atheist terror as a counter to the endless whining about the
Inquisition and witchburning which characterised alt.atheism when I
arrived, and, I like to think, has moderated due to my presence. B^)

I will continue to dole out tough love until our more moderate position
is heard:

>>>> But when I look at these phenomena I am not moved to hate Roman
>>>> Catholics so much as I am to pity them. And I want atheists to view
>>>> these people, dragooned into belief since childhood, or coming upon them
>>>> later in life as a consequence of the most profound of fears, the fear
>>>> of death, with a degree of understanding and compassion.

Fat chance at the moment with these thugs:

# From: Steve Knight <skni...@cox.net>
# Newsgroups: alt.atheism
# Subject: A.A. BAAWA - FAQ
# Message-ID: <p8mrb5lvaf0cj5bp1...@4ax.com>
# Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2009 02:46:34 -0700
#
# We kill theists and shit down their throats
#
# Warlord Steve
# BAAWA

Not satisfied with murder, Steve favours GENOCIDE of every
Muslim man woman and child, just for believing in something
the Atheist thugs want to prohibit again, freedom of thought and belief;

# From: Steve Knight <skni...@cox.net>
# Newsgroups: alt.atheism,alt.religion.islam
# Subject: Re: Islam: the perfect religion and way of life for all
# Message-ID: <8t6ve5hs41qn3a2rv...@4ax.com>
# Date: Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:58:18 -0800
#
# On Mon, 2 Nov 2009 21:22:32 +0200, "Katrina"
# <blondes_g...@yahoo.com> wrote:
#
# >Islam: the perfect religion and way of life for all
#
# It is the most foul, disgusting filth on Earth.
# The sooner we nuke you fuckers, the better.
#
# Warlord Steve
# BAAWA


These mangy curs are no better than Hanson, when you and I
and many others took her on, and won.

Same war on ignorance, different front. ;-)

>>>> It's true that such tolerance has never been extended to us and remains
>>>> singularly absent in most major religions.

Seriously Phil, where's my fucking violin!?

You and I both have farms and townhouses, we have done well,
we are not persecuted for our thoughts...

Atheists in every free open and progressive secular democracy built by
MAJORITY RELIGIOUS societies afford atheists and agnostics the SAME
RIGHTS as themsleves.. where did ANY atheist regime offer the same
rights to Believers?

Don't shovel the self-indulgent atheist whiner bullshit at us, Phil.

>>>> The atheist remains an ultimate outsider,

by choice and BEHAVIOUR.

In EVERY atheist state the believers were terrorised tortured and killed!

Grow some perspective!

>>>> someone to be demonised, feared and detested. But
>>>> that's their problem, not ours.

Look, I've been posting in alt.atheism for a couple of years,

Atheists whine about relatives who hassle them at Christmas,
about schools that want to pray, about 'having religion thrust
in their faces' ... no one is jailed for NON-BELIEF!

I have ADVERTISING thrust in my face, every cityscape fouled with
billboards and visual pollution, I have relatives who are rude,
or beligerrant or racists.. I get annoyed by some peoples music...

GET OVER IT!

>>>> The current frenzy for faith, and fundamentalism, may be as I've
>>>> occasionally speculated, the storm before the lull. The last gasp of
>>>> religion as it yields to the mighty analysis and discoveries of science.
>>>> That might be the case. But the confidence that I had in my teens - that
>>>> religion would be dead by the end of the 20th century - that the
>>>> synagogues, cathedrals and mosques would be museums - was foolhardy in
>>>> the extreme.

I'd go with the those known facts, not wishful thinking, Phil.

Religion is GROWING, globally. It HAS TO BE engaged with to solve any
of the major problems facing us.

It's either find ways to work together, or fail.

The role of cultural provocateurs is to challenge prejudices,
not pander to them.

>>>> Indeed, while the religious monoliths did seem to be
>>>> crumbling, the spontaneous combustion of ever more foolish faiths in the
>>>> supernatural smorgasbord of cults, largely created in California, and in
>>>> the tenacity of superstition to remain alive and well even in its
>>>> trickle-down form of those astrological features in daily newspapers,
>>>> remains awesome.

And atheism remains insignificant and ineffectual.

So, antagonising the faiths is a pointless strategy.

Got it?

>>>> Furthermore I'm assailed by people who argue that while God didn't
>>>> exist, doesn't exist, he she or it is coming into existence through the
>>>> new technologies.

OMG, the Dawkinite Delusion.

Science did not save the Atheist states. End of story.

Science is a valuable tool, it needs to function in harmony with
human spiritual values to provide it's moral framework.. otherwise
you get Josef Mengele.

>>>> That the internet is the harbinger of a vast new form
>>>> of consciousness that will fill the galaxies and will, in some strange
>>>> way, neutralise the second law of thermo-dynamics. Now I think this is
>>>> twaddle.

Damn right. A Russian, (or was he Iranian), pointed out that
in the past the secret police would have had to round up all his
comrades and torture them to extract information on their movement..

now they just read facebook and twiter.

>>>> But it shows that even amongst people who claim to be totally
>>>> secular, who would see themselves as being atheists of some degree,
>>>> there's always a danger of creating a new ism or ology that, like
>>>> communism at its worst, may have a disastrous impact.

DING!

It was DONE with the atheist regimes, and the other disastrous
secular ideologies, Fascism, etc, of the 20th Century.

They do not have, and cannot 'steal' what spiritual teachings have
provided for mankind.. but they can SHARE it, and still even be
non-believers. they just need to respect it for what it is.

>>>> Yes, we must rage against religious extremism. But we must also be
>>>> intelligent enough to understand its origins, in the individual and in
>>>> society. We are not strong enough, we don't have sufficient numbers to
>>>> change the balance of power.

And likely never will.

>>>> The fact that religious belief may have
>>>> evaporated in western Europe, that it really ceased to exist in Japan,
>>>> that does not mean that we've won. It simply means that in many areas
>>>> religion has lost. But giving up on religious belief is not the same as
>>>> becoming a thoughtful, highly rational atheist. There may be 2,500 of us
>>>> here today but we are still a tiny minority.

And, as for the religions, your FIRST task is to deal with the rabid
militants in your ranks.

And learn how to co-operate with the moderates on the OTHER side.

That is the global imperative.. Time is ticking.

>>>> Most people who've abandoned religion have not embraced the thoughts and
>>>> values we might try and articulate. They've taken up shopping. They are
>>>> dulling the pain of existence in the mall, by buying things they don't
>>>> need with the credit cards they can't afford. Or they're dulling the
>>>> pain in alcohol or narcosis. Or they're just sitting in front of the
>>>> telly or the computer screen bathing themselves in violent drama or
>>>> hyper violent games. In pornography or the pornographies of violence.

Atheism has NO techniques to deal with materialism, it IS materialist.

Spiritual teachings and practices have wrestled with materialism and
it's seductions for centuries. Learn from them.

>>>> Don't be fooled into thinking that we're at the edge of victory.

Of course not, you are wallowing in the wake of massive defeat last century.

>>>> That would be a delusion.

And that particular atheist delusion is widespread.

>>>> It concerns me that by becoming too arrogant, too
>>>> strident, too aggressive we will stultify rather than intensify debate.

And this is where I came in, a few years ago. B^D

Major figures in the atheist community are now warning of
atheist arrogance and hubris, just as I have done for some
time now. I have punctured a good deal of it, in this tiny forum,
but the prejudice and bigotry remains.

>>>> I've known Christopher Hitchens for decades and know how he operates. In
>>>> any area, on no matter what he's tackling, he has two positions. On or
>>>> off. And when he's on he can be absolutely exhilarating.
>>>>
>>>> I remember chortling with delight at his attacks on Mother Theresa -
>>>> when he called for Henry Kissinger to be tried as a war criminal. But I
>>>> was horrified when he threw his lot in with the Bush administration and
>>>> the neo cons. Mind you, many of the neo cons started their intellectual
>>>> life as Christopher did, as Trotskyites. In other words whenever
>>>> Christopher is writing something he cannot help but pound the keyboard
>>>> like a pianist playing one of the noisier works of Rachmaninoff. His
>>>> response to what he correctly sees as Islamist fascism brooks no
>>>> argument and takes no prisoners. It goes straight to shock and awe, to
>>>> the botched invasion of Iraq and ends up with up to a million dead (Not
>>>> that we'll ever know the figure because a body count has always been
>>>> studiously avoided) and Abu Ghraib. And Christopher remains
>>>> unapologetic. Because that's the way he thinks and that's the way he
>>>> writes. And nobody does that sort of thing better. Much of what Richard
>>>> writes and says and broadcasts has the same... energy.
>>>>
>>>> I propose, if you like, a third way while recognising how devalued that
>>>> notion has become in politics. But a willingness to sit down and talk to
>>>> these people who are not necessarily our enemies and who may, on a raft
>>>> of issues, be our friends.

Atheists need some, if they are to become relevant.

>>>> Sometimes their efforts to be our friends are
>>>> grotesque and ludicrous. I think of the Templeton prizewinners, the long
>>>> list of scientists, almost all of whom I have either known or
>>>> interviewed at length, cop a million dollars for building bridges of
>>>> understanding - usually misunderstandings between science and Christian
>>>> beliefs. But when it comes to human suffering, whilst I can see that
>>>> much of it has been exacerbated by religion,

and even more by atheist states

>>>> we must accept the reality
>>>> that we need 'em on our side if we are to effect social change.

more than they need you. 8^o

>>>> There was a time when, for example, the Christian world seemed wholly
>>>> unsympathetic to the climate change crisis. But there is now a strong
>>>> movement, within Christianity, to see the destruction of the planet as a
>>>> form of blasphemy.

And they have the grunt to get something done, atheists don't.

>>>> People of religious faith are, in my view, more to be pitied than
>>>> blamed.

That's patronising and insulting, part of the reason others
wont work with atheists.

The respect for the Hard Yards the religions have done, dragging
humanity out of the caves, is still missing among the arrogant atheists.

>>>> They are, I believe, victims of the faiths they profess. But
>>>> there are countless millions of them who are decent human beings.

And that is what matters.

>>>> As decent as the 2,500 gathered here today.

It must have felt, to Adams, just like those tiny meetings
of the Communist party.. all certain they posess the truth,
all wondering why no one listens to them.

B^p

>>>> And I return to that notion of the atheist as honest broker.
>>>> Of the atheist as go-between. Of the
>>>> atheist who can sit down with Protestant, Catholic, Sunni and Shiia,
>>>> Muslim and Hindu and try to talk some sense into them.

Mate, you may be too late. The Christians and Muslims are forging
close links at the HIGHEST levels, the levels of POWER.

There is already a flourishing inter-faith movement, and the
Parliament of World Religions.

They will try and foster the inevitable global rapprochement
among world faiths WHILE TRYING TO MAINTAIN their Hierarchies
and their power. I believe they will fail to achieve the latter,
but the process might not be pretty.

What do atheists bring to the table?

>>>> And I've done it. I've conducted little experiments along these lines by
>>>> getting myself invited to some very strange places. For example,
>>>> Australia's leading Pentecostal ministers - running vast churches - had
>>>> me along to talk to them about atheism. I described myself as a mangy
>>>> old lion in a den of Christians and got a very good hearing. And by the
>>>> end of the discussion I like to think that they would not be so quick to
>>>> condemn, demonise of vilify atheists in the future.

Yup, and I've been invited to speak to students at a Catholic School
shared platforms with Sherine Hassan, buddhists and Hindus,
visited Sikh Gurdwara's and led temple tours, and spoken
to other religious gatherings and interfaith groups on a range of topics..

but it's still small beer.

At present it is operating at the polite level of M Scott Peck's pseudo
community, people share cups of tea and avoid tough issues,
occassionally people WORK ALONGSIDE each other on real projects,
and thus friendships and understanding grow...

....my fear is that it will take a larger crisis before
that transforms to genuine community.

>>>> In running this line at this conference I realise that it will not be
>>>> popular, that it's much more fun to shake the fist and pound the table.

Take the Road less travelled.

>>>> But in a world where the religious have done so much of that for
>>>> millennia, and continue to do it in the 21st century, somebody's got to
>>>> be sane. And sanity is, or should be, a characteristic of atheism.

IF the atheists ever develop some humility, as their history entitles
them to do, they may do better in attracting an audience.

It worked for all the religious leaders.

>>>> And may the blessings of Bertrand Russell rain down upon you.

...

> fasgnadh speaks for all

Thanks Virgil, but actually I only speak for myself, it's just that
among you intellectual pygmies I look like a giant! B^D

And who do you speak for Virgil?

> theists with small testicles,
>
> and for no one else!

I asked who you speak for, not who you bend over for.

[Fred Hall]

On Wed, 04 Apr 2012 09:41:07 +1000, fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com>
wrote in <dULer.5225$v14....@viwinnwfe02.internal.bigpond.com>:

>Except in EVERY atheist regime in history!

Genocide?

Religious wars?

How about the Thirty Years War? Christian v Christian. est 3 - 11
million dead.

French Wars of Religion. Christian v Christian. 2 - 4 million dead.

The Crusades. Christian v Muslim. 1 - 3 million dead.

Yep, those nasty atheists have got a lock on it, FaghNutz.
--

http://blackhelicopternews.blogspot.com/

http://blackhelicopternews.blogspot.com/p/award-winners-1994-2012.html

http://fnvw.databasix.com (awards descriptions and more)

[Uirgil]

In article <dULer.5225$v14....@viwinnwfe02.internal.bigpond.com>,

fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On 1/04/2012 5:35 PM, Uirgil wrote:
> > On 1/04/2012 5:21 PM, fasgnadh wrote:
> >> dolf speaks for all the atheists with small testicles:
> >>> On 1/04/2012 8:31 AM, fasgnadh wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> "The atheist delusion"
> >>>> Phillip Adams
> >>>>
> >>>> "atheism does not presuppose, let alone impose, a set of views.
>

> Except in EVERY atheist state in history!

The atheist state is one of being from Missouri!

[fasgnadh]

On 4/04/2012 10:38 AM, Fred Hall wrote:

> Genocide?

Yeah, the atheist warlord advocates it, the atheist regime of Pol Pot
carried it out!

[Kangaroo Court Australia]

From: peter...@hotmail.com
To: emmado...@hotmail.com
Subject: Letter to Indian High Commissioner
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2012 06:51:15 +1030

This situation has ramifications for every Australian and in every
part of the Commonwealth. The utter and complete contempt shown by
Chief Justice de Jersey when na constitutional issue was raised is
manifested after he refused to accept that a s 78B Judiciary Act
notice is mandated by Commonwealth legislation.


Regards to al


Peter




Peter Alexander Gargan

20 Coonawarra Drive

Vermont South 3133

Mr Biren Nanda

Indian High Commissioner

Indian Embassy

Canberra 2600.

3rd April 2012

Dear High Commissioner,


It is part of your job and part of your Government's job to ensure the
citizens of India are safe when they come to the Commonwealth of
Australia. Harpret Singh is an Indian National imprisoned by the State
of Queensland for 53 days this morning. An Atheist Supreme Court
Judge, one Chief Justice de Jersey on Friday the 30th March 2012 in
the Supreme Court in Queensland refused an application by Emma Renee
Donald a woman from Nerang and a friend of his, for a Writ of Habeas
Corpus. She then went to the Federal Court of Australia and they
refused to even allow her to apply.


Chief Justice de Jersey is an Atheist, and the Supreme Court is an
Atheist Court because he believes he is only bound by an Oath of
Office he took when he allowed Queensland to secede from the
Commonwealth. As Chief Justice he could have disallowed Schedule 1 of
the Constitution of Queensland Act 2001, which abolished Christianity
in Queensland. If the Atheist Cabal entrenched in the Federal Court of
Australia would allow filing, he would have been overruled in 2001.
The safeguards for the populations of Australia come from Her Majesty
Elizabeth the Second. Omitting Her name, allows Atheists to rule.

He has abrogated his superior Commonwealth Oath, which is the Schedule
to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, and Our Prime
Minister who is a proclaimed Atheist, has allowed him to continue.
When we were granted self government in 1900, it was a condition
precedent agreed by all that no government could impose Atheism as a
compulsory religion. That was S 116 Constitution, and our Indian
visitors are protected by that provision, no matter what their
religious beliefs.

Evidence exists in the English Hansard, that the United Kingdom, the
sixth largest economy in the world, guaranteed the integrity of the
Australian Government. Harpreet Singh is entitled to daily
compensation from the United Kingdom in the amounts lawfully claimed,
if the Australian Government and State of Queensland refuse to pay him
what is due. His claim as attached in the letter from Emma Renee
Donald to the Hon Jarrod Bleijie Attorney General of Queensland for
$62,832,000 is attached.

Would you please raise this matter on behalf of Harpreet Singh, with
the English High Commissioner and the Australian Government. The
Australian Government has the power to fix this situation but so far
has refused to do so. An Australian Federal Police Officer could have
protected him if he was present to stop the Atheists, Judges and
Magistrates ruling the Commonwealth.

Yours faithfully


Peter Alexander Gargan
2 attachments — Download all attachments
Emma Donald Letter Beijie.pdf Emma Donald Letter Beijie.pdf
45K View Download
Peter Harpreet Singh.pdf Peter Harpreet Singh.pdf
39K View Download

[Richo]

On Apr 3, 4:01 am, raven1 <quoththera...@nevermore.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 01 Apr 2012 08:31:51 +1000, fasgnadh <fasgn...@yahoo.com>

> wrote:
>
> Thanks for posting this well-written and thoughtful article. A pity
> you felt the need to follow it up with your own tedious and
> thoughtless meanderings. I've snipped those so readers can enjoy the
> original. HTH.
>

It was a great speech - I was there when he gave it.
It was actually the first talk at the convention and I was glad it was
a kind of "We are correct but don't get a swollen head over it" kind
of speech - because a bunch of people getting together to pat each
other on the back for being sooo clever would have been sickening -
and it set the tone for the whole conference - thoughtful, good
humored and measured.
And it was very well received by the crowd.

I actually preferred it to Richard Dawkins Speech - he does sometimes
come off as too self important and self congratulatory.

Oh and i am still not here!

Did you go to the "Reason rally" Raven? Was it good?
The 2012 Global atheist conference in Melbourne is on in 2 weeks time
- if its anything like the 2010 conference it will be great. Tickets
purchased and flights booked!

Mark.

[Kangaroo Court Australia]

On Apr 4, 4:56 pm, Kangaroo Court Australia <nwn.webmas...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> From: petergar...@hotmail.com
> To: emmadonal...@hotmail.com

[fasgnadh]

raven1 demonstrates atheist hypocrites fear of discussing atheism:

>On 1/04/2012 8:31 AM, fasgnadh wrote:

>> #
>> # "The atheist delusion"
>> # Phillip Adams
>> #
>> # "atheism does not presuppose, let alone impose, a set of views.

>> # Ah, the solitary dissidents, the lonely thinkers, the people who
>> # may be the only disbeliever in a family or community.

Yup, things have sure gone downhill for atheism since the atheist
regimes failed catastrophically in the 20th century!

In the same 7 years that atheist numbers in the USA crept up by a
pathetic 719,000 to reach a feeble 0.7% of the US population, the
number of believers in China exploded by 300,000,000 new believers!

China's explosive growth in religious faith, after decades of
persecution and oppression of religious freedom under Mao, is
accompanied by incredible prosperity and progress, while America's
economy falters, as atheism creeps upward.

Now atheists are looking to COPY religion, in a doomed attempt to become
more respectable and more attractive:

# To that extent we need to borrow
# from our enemies and have some missionary zeal.

Mao's Red Guards had that, it failed.

>> # Whilst we should avoid messiahs,

Sure, previous attempts to deify Lenin, Mao, Stalin, all failed,
Only Kim Wrong Un in Nth Korea remains, leading an atheist shithole
that can't even FEED it's people!

>> # we need disciples to go out and spread the word and seek
>> # converts.

Why, you have nothing to sell! Atheism offers mankind NOTHING!

Even with the entire propaganda power of the atheist state, it's
coercive secret police, and totalitarian tyranny, you couldn't
convince people that atheism has anything to offer them! B^D

>> # I see some parallels here between atheism and homosexuality.

Both like putting thinks in their arses? with atheists it's their heads:


http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Head-Up_Ass.png

>> # Atheism was, and to a large
>> # extent remains, the view that dare not speak its name.

This is another atheist myth, the ARIS data, showing atheism
at INSIGNIFICANT levels, was an anonymous survey, no 'reprisals'
were possible.. .. the reason atheist numbers are low is not
because they were afraid to identify as atheists, but because the
number of atheists is VERY LOW!

Get over it!

Even at the Atheist "World Convention" at which Adams was presenting
this talk, there were only 2500 attendees, that's LESS than the
congregation at ONE Sydney church on any weekend!

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA

>> # But in becoming prouder and louder I want to argue that we should not be
>> # too loud. And that we should not overestimate our importance as the
>> # tectonic plates of religion move slowly, rubbing against each other to
>> # cause mental and social earthquakes. By all means let us congratulate
>> # each other - but let us not fall prey to hubris.

Too late, clearly!

>> # The disintegration of many a previously monolithic faith cannot be
>> # attributed or credited to us.

Neither can any civilisation, or even a decent secular democracy.. no
atheist regime ever managed it! And you can't claim responsibility for
evolution, scientific progress in general...

>> # Roman Catholicism founders because
>> # conservative prelates have tried to undo the progress of Vatican II. The
>> # faithful refuse to comply with anachronistic instructions on the pill
>> # and the condom.
>> #
>> # They're embarrassed by their Church's archaic stance on women and
>> # appalled by the ongoing attempts to cover up paedophilia scandals.
>> # Others bitterly resent the undermining of liberation theology - those
>> # valiant social justice campaigns. Or the stacking of the pulpits of
>> # Western Europe with arch conservative priests from Poland.
>> #
>> # The woes of the Catholic Church are self inflicted. We've barely laid a
>> # glove on them. Ditto for the Anglican Church which is increasingly
>> # stacked to the rafters with agnostics while Australian Anglicanism and
>> # US Episcopalians self destruct over the issues of women priests and
>> # continuing ecclesiastic homophobia.

Adam's is correct that atheism plays no significant role in any of the
reforms or changes from the Reformation on.. it is the evolution of
understandings WITHIN the churches which has radically transformed them!

>> # But even the foundering of major faiths doesn't necessarily swell our
>> # numbers. There's evidence that the major faiths have atomised,
>> # Balkanised into the ongoing nonsense of cults, the New Age and pseudo
>> # science. Religious energy, like energy itself, cannot be destroyed. It
>> # tends to morph into new forms.

Correct, Religious ORGANISATIONS in the west may be old and tired,
but FAITH in countries recently released from Atheist oppression are
going gangbusters.. and in China this growth is DESPITE the OFFICIAL
Church, sanctioned by the State.. the growth and the ENERGY is in
massive House Church movements.

The only role atheism played in these movements is making those new
religious aware of how much Atheism was NOT a viable option! B^]

>> # Twenty years ago Dick Smith and I aided and abetted the creation of the
>> # Australian Sceptics, the local branch of CSICOP - the Committee for the
>> # Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
>> #
>> # Far from winning, the Sceptics and CSICOP have lost ground to
>> # Millenarian and Shirley Macleanish madness. Turn on cable or free to air
>> # telly and you'll see an ever increasing number of programs based on
>> # paranormal detectives while John Edwards and his fellow frauds talk to
>> # the dead. And the amount of space in newspapers given to astrology has
>> # by no means decreased. We live in a parallel universe to these people.

Like atheism, the New Age, (and it's revival of obscurantism, astrology,
paganism) does not perform the traditional community building, nor the
creation of schools and hospitals, which traditional religion performed.

>> # Yes, atheism is on the march in the US, according to statistics. But
>> # we're starting from a very, very low base.

And, as most atheists are disenchanted Westerners, they consistently
ignore the GROWTH IN RELIGION across the GLOBE, which makes the tiny
advance in American atheism look even more pathetic.. part of the
overall decline in America.


>> # "At the dawn of the 20th Century approximately one half
>> # of the world's population identified itself as either Muslim,
>> # Catholic, Protestant, Hindu or Buddhist, and 100 years of
>> # secularism, and technological advancement, and scientific
>> # progress later and that number is now two thirds.

Contrary to the atheist DELUSION, religion GROWS with Rationality
and education! 8^o

>> # So, for those of you who enjoy beginning coffee shop
>> # conversations with "The Death of God" .. it's time to change
>> # the subject! It's time to talk about something else , because
>> # it's not happening at all.
>> #
>> # People are becoming more religious, not less religious,
>> # and religion itself is also evolving"
>> #
>> # - Dr Reza Aslan
>> #
>> # http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2010/2929354.htm

It is that last point which even intelligent atheists such as
de Botton and Adams fail to grasp.

>> # And we should look across the
>> # census figures at the equally dramatic growth of Islam in the US. It's
>> # not coming from immigration but from conversion. Conversion within the
>> # prison system! Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali certainly started something.

Ding! B^] Sound of penny dropping.

>> # So beware of triumphalism. Over the last half century I've learnt that
>> # my euphoria about atheism's progress, inevitable to us, about the
>> # advance of science leading to the retreat of God, was wildly optimistic.

It was, in fact, delusion.

Like most atheists, Adams was an adolescent UTOPIAN, and he became
an idealistic young communist. His disillusion with atheistic communism
faded after the Invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union, but the
atheism, inexplicably, remained. He can't seem to see that it failed,
just as communism did. In fact China, without the atheist persecution of
the Maoist era since it reformed it's constitution in 1982 to allow
greater religious freedom, has seen other freedoms slowly expand as
well, and has prospered, even though it remains a one party communist
state. The evidence of history is that state atheism is more deadly to
human progress than state communism! In fact the control of the
commanding heights combined with market forces at the lower levels is
proving to be a more effective hybrid capitalism than the corrupted
corporatist model which is failing in the US! 8^o

The Communist government of China is economically outperforming the USA,
since they abandoned Maoist persecution of religion and allowed the most
fundamental freedom.. that of thought and belief! 8^o

>> # Yet the triumph of science, even in the scientifically triumphant US,
>> # has failed to convince the vast majority of Americans that evolution is
>> # a fact rather than a blasphemy.

Science has nothing to do with atheism. The evolution denying ignorance
of fundies is a particular American phenomena.

>> # Members of religions see atheists as their mortal enemies.

Rubbish. You are just a minor irritant. The broader forces of
materialism and greed, which are destroying the planet we all depend on
for survival, are the threat.. everything else is small beer.

Even after warning atheists against hubris, Adams can't help but IMAGINE
his precious atheism is more important than it is in reality! B^]

>> # Not immortal,
>> # of course, because atheists don't linger on through all eternity. We
>> # simply return to the nothingness that preceded our birth. Religions'
>> # immortal enemy is religion. We might shake our puny fists at the
>> # Vatican, at Islamic fundamentalism, at the religious right who
>> # turbo-charge the US Republican party - but it is the ancient and modern
>> # squabbles, the murderous contests between faiths and within them, that
>> # dwarf our dissent.

A bitch fight in the apartment upstairs dwarfs atheist dissent.

As Adam's himself admits, the great reforms in religion are caused
INTERNALLY, eg the Reformation.. religion, despite what atheists
believe, EVOLVES and it's evolution has been critical to broader social
progress. It was Wilberforce a Christian, who fought against and
outlawed slavery, It was Islam which delivered Greek thought, Indian
mathematics, and their own contributions to Calculus and medicine,
el Oud and Astronomy, and the 'arab numerals' without which capitalism
and world trade would be impossible, into Europe and sparked it's
Renaissance and Enlightenment.. It is MAJORITY RELIGIOUS societies which
have evolved open, tolerant, rights-based SECULAR democracies..

MOT ATHEIST STATES, which have ALL been catastrophic failures! B^]

Atheism, Mr Adams, is a failed hypothesis,

rational folk would move on!

>> # Hitchens, Dawkins and the rest of us are, at best, at worst, the most
>> # minor of irritants.

Exactly.

I use you as teaching tools, to warn adolescents against folly. B^]

Just like we warn them of the danger of smoking, or unprotected sex.

>> # The ancient and recent Christian crusades against Islam,

now they meet together, form World Parliaments of religion, acknowledge
they share the SAME GOD, and share ideas on world issues.

>> # the titanic struggle of the Protestant heretics against Mother
>> # Church,

transforming Christianity and the Mother Church itself..

A 2000 year old church has evolved more than any atheist state could
manage! They all failed and passed away in the twinkling of an eye!

Astonishing!

>> # the recent internecine horrors in the Balkans, the genocidal
>> # hatred of the Jews incited by Martin Luther that evolved into Holocaust
>> # - these are the big stories. Savanarola was burnt at the stake by fellow
>> # Catholics - as was Joan of Arc. Atheists neither gathered the faggots
>> # nor fanned the flames. When religions are not at war with each other
>> # they tear themselves apart.

Yes, Phillip.. that's what turned us all away from religion as youth.

But after witnessing the FAR Greater terror, torture and Mass Murder of
the the atheist states, the Union of Savage slaughter and Repression,
Mao's Great Leap Backwards and Cultural Devolution, Pol Pot's Year Zero
Genocide.. killing more than 80,000,000 people, more than ANY RELIGION,

well, 300,000,000 in China alone have turned to religion, as, at worst
the LESSER or two evils, and at best, the greatest inspiration for
progressive, evolving CIVILISATIONS that ENDURE, that the world has
ever seen.

Got it? Humans are not blind, as mosh atheists are to the RELATIVE
superiority of faith in building and sustaining effective communities,
even though, just like ANY organisation, the formal religious structure
can be corrupted.. there remains something capable of eternal RENEWAL
in the SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS of the founders.. which survives and grows.

>> # We cannot take the credit for the dramatic decline in religious
>> # observation in most Western nations.

You don't even UNDERSTAND IT.

Large, hierarchical Church Authorities, with priests and Imams
administrating, (and like all power elites, tending to do so in
THEIR OWN INTERESTS) are certainly passe. The Holy Roman Empire is
gone, and it ain't coming back, thank God.

Ever since Guttenberg, and mass literacy, the hierarchies based on
EXCLUSIVE control of knowledge, religious, political, scientific..
ARE OVER. Some the the very BIG and IMPORTANT ones, just take longer to
die.. hence the Vatican has outlived most European Monarchies.

But faith is alive and growing, globally. In China the official church,
sanctioned by the State, is moribund, the explosion of over 300,000,000
new believers is mostly in House churches, more like early Christianity
when it grew amidst fierce persecution.

Why do people expect Traditional religious worship on a Sunday to
continue when already traditional sport and family life doesn't
because, hey, it's just another Shopping day, so people have to work!

>> # At last count, 90 per cent of
>> # Australian Catholics were not attending Mass. But that's not because of
>> # our arguments. It's because of their arguments with their priests,
>> # bishops and the more recent Popes, particularly those from Poland and
>> # Germany. Take us out of the equation and that rapid erosion will
>> # continue, perhaps accelerate.

Ding! You are absolutely correct, the threat of atheistic communism in
post war America DROVE the evangelist revival and made Billy Graham a
national Icon!

But the decline in membership and attendance in traditional churches
is not the death of faith. (Just look at Dawkin's toying with the
fantasy of evolved Gods, and de Botton suggesting atheists steal the
best bits of religion, in an attempt to make atheism relevant and
successful! B^)

Adams own despair at the spread of New Age Crystal healers and revivals
of paganism simply affirms that "those who don't believe in something
are likely to believe in ANYTHING." B^)

Westerners, and in particular Americans are drawn to Buddhism, because
the practice can be done in private, it doesn't require a fixed
scheduled sabbath, in fact it doesn't demand much of a sacrifice at all!

How Western can you get!? B^D

But atheists are deluded by what they see LOCALLY, they don't get the
GLOBAL picture. 700,000 new atheists in the US in 7 years, 300,000,000
new believers in china in the same time period.

Discussion OVER, losers! B^D

You don't have a FUCKING CLUE what is going on, do you!?!!!!! B^D

>> # It's even observable in the United States amongst the Pentacostalists.
>> # Just as the hippies were a reaction against stultifying and emotionally
>> # stunted parents, a great many children of US fundamentalists are
>> # shrugging off the dogmas of Mum and Dad.

Of course. Religion evolves. Atheism didn't.

>> # At very least they're moving at
>> # least fractionally towards the left.

>> # And American religious excess has
>> # certainly helped dim the flames of faith as far away as Western Europe.

Sure.. why do you think I Leave Bukakke alone, tilting at fundie
windmills.. the atheists perform a valuable service by helping
to prune American religious beliefs.. getting rid of the deadwood
which was already INTELLECTUALLY demolished by Theist critics, (eg
Shelby Spong).

In my country Evolution is taught in every faith based school,
Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Bahai, Sikh, Buddhist.. they CHOOSE to do
so, it's not a problem for their faiths.

So if Bukakke becomes a religious scholar and scarifies the fundies,
that's a social service. It's NOT a threat to religion, (but don't tell
him that! ;-)

>> # But it is important for us to realise - and let me borrow a couple of
>> # metaphors from the realms of cutlery - that it's self inflicted wounds
>> # that have done the most damage - particularly the Christian variants -
>> # than the cut and thrust of the atheists' arguments. We are, perhaps, the
>> # beneficiaries of this process but we cannot claim the credit.

No, you are NOT even the beneficiaries.. any reasonable assessment
of the data shows that atheism is not growing in any way approaching
the decline in Catholic attendance at Mass!

I have friends who teach in a Catholic school, they have been using
contraception for decades, they don't go to mass, they still believe in
Jesus, they are shamed by the Church's handling of paedophile priests,
they are still committed to traditional Catholic Social Justice,

ie they have KEPT the Spirit and abandoned the BODY (of the Church)

That, mate, is what BORN AGAIN really means.

They have been BURNED by the hierarchy, and their kids will grow
up free of it, unless and until it becomes RESPONSIVE, once again,
to the membership, the SIGN of that will probably be full membership
for women.

Meanwhile that same SPIRIT, enlivens millions in China, building
families communities and new, freer, national body.

>> # Nor have we laid a glove on Islam or Hinduism. They are indifferent to
>> # us and our arguments. No, indifferent isn't the word, as in some Muslim
>> # countries our lives might well be at risk. You could argue, perhaps,
>> # that secular atheistic Jews are in constant conflict with the orthodox
>> # and ultra orthodox in Israel. Not that they seem to have won too many
>> # rounds (After all, Israel began its life as a secular state and, over
>> # the generations, has had to abandon territory to the religious right.
>> # They mightn't yield territory to the Palestinians but the religiously
>> # xenophobic don't seem to have lost much influence).

As Adams admits that atheism has made no headway, even in spots RIVEN
with religious conflicts, it must become apparent that the faiths are
CRITICAL to solving these problems.

The smartest thing Australia has done in the past couple of decades is
put Aid money into building Islamic colleges in Indonesia, Madrassas.

Now it goes right against the separation of Church and State, atheists
oppose this sort of thing.. but in Indonesia the poor cannot afford an
education, and Saudi money was funding Wahabist Madrassas, and Wahabism,
while a minority within Islam, was an influence on Bin Laden and
Islamofascist terror. So now we have moderate Madrassas, funded by OZ,
welcomed by Indonesia, teaching Science AND the Qur'an, the message of
peace, as part of Indonesia's sensible war on IGNORANCE, and hence on
terror!

Atheist opposition to state funding of religious schools would simply
PROMOTE ignorance and violence.

Get REAL!

>> # So perhaps we should reconsider our role,our allotted tasks,

YES! YES!

ARM YOURSELVES!

The Atheist Reform Movement needs to informally link with
the Parliament of World Religions to foster mutual co-operation
and understanding to SOLVE WORLD PROBLEMs, not bicker.

Just as I say to Muslims, be the best Muslim you can be, to Christians-

be the best Christians you can be.. I say to atheists - be the best

atheist you can be, and I will be the best agnostic I can be.. and,
together, we can tackle and solve some problems.

Instead of telling each other to become MORE LIKE OURSELVES..

it's fruitless.

>> # as people who believe in none of this nonsense

Oh, see, you have lost it already, because you have NO RESPECT.

>> #we might see ourselves as honest brokers.

That's just silly. It's the Hubris you warned other atheists against,
Phillip.

>> # Negotiate in their all consuming conflicts.

>> # Given our
>> # anthropological detachment from Messianic and Milleranian madness, from
>> # the boiling hatreds between Sunni and Shiia, we might share the role of
>> # the Norwegians. They're not particularly powerful or numerous but fight
>> # above their weight in hosing down dangerous situations. Confronted by
>> # rabid religiosity people who don't believe could try to ameliorate the
>> # hatreds of those who do. Mind you, you could mount an argument that
>> # that's exactly what the likes of us have been doing for the past few
>> # centuries.

>> # As to trying to convert the believer to disbelief - I tried
>> # that for the last half century and found it not only a fruitless but
>> # thankless task.

Masha'Allah.

>> # A confession I must admit to is being swept up in a religion as a
>> # teenager. I became, during the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its
>> # coldest and McCarthyism at its height, a member of the Australian
>> # Communist Party. I was 15 when I signed up and 18 when I was kicked out.
>> # And one of the reasons I lost my faith in atheistic communism was
>> # because it revealed itself as a parody of the Catholic Church.

And THAT is the problem with Alain de Bottons unoriginal suggestion
that atheists 'steal ideas from religion' they stole the FORM, but not
the SUBSTANCE: pffffffft!

>> # Catholicism had Rome, Communists had Moscow. Catholics had God the
>> # Father and his son Jesus. Communists had Karl Marx as God and Lenin as
>> # the saviour. They had the Bible, we had Das Kapital. They'd had Martin
>> # Luther and we'd had Trotsky. Both of us had forms of dogma, the show
>> # trial, confession, heresy, expulsion. Both published an Index of books
>> # not to read.

One lasted 2000 years and inspired a great, enduring and EVOLVING
civilisation, the other was an atheist tyranny, killed far more people
and failed, catastrophically, in just 7 decades of misery and despair.

Q.E.D.

>> # I remember noticing the eerie parallels between cheap Catholic tracts
>> # sold by the Catholic's Evidence Guild and cheap Marxist tracts sold at
>> # the international book shop perhaps a mile from where we are today. One
>> # tract would warn against heresy. The other against revisionism. One
>> # would have the upturned bearded face of Christ on the cover, the other
>> # the upturned bearded face of Lenin. Towards the end of my involvement in
>> # the party I used to swap them over, putting communist tracts into the
>> # racks surrounding a Gothic column in St Patrick's Cathedral - and
>> # smuggling the Catholic counterparts into the small Marxist bookshop. God
>> # knows, Marx knows, what happened as a consequence. How many Catholics
>> # were converted to communism, how many Commos accepted Christ as their
>> # own personal saviour.

Today there are 1,800,000,000 Catholics and almost enough atheistic
communists to fill a telephone booth.

Masha'Allah.

>> # I mention these parallels to dramatise that the atheist can be as
>> # susceptible to authority and dogma as the Catholic.

More so. The Christians built free open progressive prosperous
secular democracies, the atheists built dull, oppressive, tyrannies
riven with terror torture and murder.

So they copied the organisational forms, what was lacking?

just the Spirit, that which gives LIFE.

>> # And that's one of
>> # the reasons I differ in emphasis from Christopher and Richard.

And that is why agnostics and moderate atheists love you, Phil.

You are a decent bloke, you try and build bridges, you are a mensch.

>> # Just as I
>> # differed totally from Christopher on the war in Iraq.

Me too.

Hitchins demonstrated that atheists can copy the religious far right, as
well.

>> # I've been an
>> # atheist for 66 years. I became atheist at the age of five, a decade
>> # before I knew what an atheist was. Before I'd even heard the word. But
>> # as a little boy, the son of a Christian minister, I realised I couldn't
>> # believe, that the notion of God was totally redundant. The great
>> # argument for God was that there had to be a Creation, a beginning.

No, that's not right. You were sold a pup, Phil.

Like many atheists, perhaps those responsible for your 'religious
upbringing' poisoned the well.

The great argument for God is the EXISTING WORLD, especially
the success of civilisations inspired and sustained by spiritual
teachings.

Compare it to the atheist failures and you will see the point.

>> # Some sort of cosmic orgasm that got things going.

Science agrees, and calls it the Big Bang, Lemaitre, a Catholic
professor and a priest, developed the theory.

>> # But my objection was simple.
>> # If God was the beginning who began God?

Most 5 year olds are too young for Russell's paradox,
in fact they can't grasp paradox at all.

It's time you grew up, Phil.

Metaphysics is what adults do when all the other important
jobs are done.

>> # When I was discovering why I was not a communist

...on the rebound, eh?

>> # I read Bertrand
>> # Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian. In it he explained that he was 18 or
>> # 19 when he asked himself that all important question. If God was the
>> # beginning who began God? And it was at that moment that he lost the last
>> # vestiges of faith.

... and yours began.

>> # But I understand the yearning for belief. The poignancy, the wanting to
>> # believe.

We hear it in your radio interviews, Phil.

You have absorbed all the spiritual qualities Jesus taught were
important, except faith, ...like so many people, by ACTING
righteously they fullfil the commandments of God, sometimes more
completely than the believers themselves. Another paradox.
Somewhat like those believers who have no conception of God,
but follow the greatest Commandment.

>> # It is driven, principally, by the fear of death.

Rubbish.

It is driven by the Joy of Life.

Go back and look at what you wrote about your daughters
conversion to Judaism. Is she living and believing in
the fear of death? 8^)

"I have come that they may have LIFE and have it in abundance" ;-)

It is common, however, to hear ATHEISTS who think that is the case...

so .. who really is obsessed with it? B^]

>> # Christians
>> # postulate a lopsided creation in which personal existence goes on and on
>> # and on for billions of years in Heaven.

Dawkins now proposes the same, but as the result of EVOLUTION.

All you havfe now is a difference in TIMESCALE and starting point!

Atheists have conceded the EXISTENCE of God/s! BWAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAAA

>> # Yet that creation had a sudden,
>> # magical beginning with God.

Oh for goodness sake Phil, most Christians are NOT fundie creationists.

The UNIVESRSE of space and time 'magically' came into existence.. the
rest evolved.. the question of God remains OPEN.

Get over it, you only look silly when you try to demean believers by
pretending they are all fundie creationists.

Humans have a myriad ways to create, physically, artistically,
economically, intellectually.. why are fundies AND fundie atheists
hung up on God's METHOD?

>> # I realised, at the age of five, that I'd already been dead forever.
>> # Because what happened before birth - all those billions of years of
>> # non-existence was identical to what happened after death.

That's a reasonable BELIEF, but if multiverses exist, you may have
merely passed from one world to another...

pretty much what religions teach happens upon death, and quite
compatible with Buddhist rebirh...

All this stuff is mere speculation.. get on with LIFE! B^D

>> # Now, although I share much of the anger, indignation and rage that
>> # Hitchens and Dawkins express I am well aware of that vastation of terror
>> # that greets anyone who considers their mortality.

We die. Get over it.

I love my life, but I don't regret sleep, even dreamless sleep
when I am not living my life for hours each night.

Where is the terror in a sleep from which we may never wake?

I had epilepsy in my youth, but I went skydiving.. never did relative
work or anything that could endanger others. Knew the risks, embraced
them. I survived. The Epilepsy went away.

I have seen death, kissed it's cold face, and felt no fear,
what I did feel is beyond words... acceptance, gratitude,
thankfulness for their life, peace..

I have told my kids that if I go while snorkling, taken by a shark,
or a current, or a heart attack, to know with certainty that my life has
been full, I'm doing what I love and am content, even if nothing
but oblivion follows.

Masha'Allah!

>> # I started writing about that terror in columns almost half a century
>> # ago.

Yes, atheists and other materialist do seem to rail against the dark..

I find it all an incredible waste of time..

The sun is shining, the tide will be high in two hours at the marine
sanctuary, the battery for the underwater camera is recharged,
....sure ...Winter is coming.. the long dark night of the soul, ;-)
the water already feels cold.. it is thrilling to the skin..
I, and the world around me ..are ALIVE!

>> # It was, I believe, the first time these issues were raised in an
>> # Australian newspaper.

Westerners en large, seem to have a phobia about death.

I lived some time on a farm, life and death were visible and
apparent. They are, after all, linked.

>> # As I took advantage of the fact that they were
>> # evolving from newspapers to viewspapers. Unable to compete with the
>> # urgency and immediacy of electronic media newspapers were opening their
>> # pages to interpretation of last night's news and could be encouraged to
>> # give space to philosophical meanderings. So I used that window of
>> # opportunity to start discussing, in newspapers like The Age, The
>> # Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald, the notion of living in a
>> # meaningless universe, without author or purpose - its only destiny to go
>> # cold and dark in obedience to the second law of thermo dynamics.

And?

>> # The notions of personal mortality, our denial of death or its burial in
>> # euphemism - are central to most religious belief.

Phil, death is a door, we all go through it, either to OBLIVION
or to another world, we don't know, perhaps we are not meant to know..
anyway...

....further discussion is pointless.

>> # For a while the attacks in response were deafening and strident but,
>> # little by little, I got a sort of a dialogue going with people of faith
>> # - which I still find valid. Because on a vast variety of the social
>> # issues - the social justice issues that I care about - people whose
>> # beliefs I find ridiculous can become my colleagues.

EXACTLY!

That is why you are that rare thing, a liked and trusted atheist! B^D

Stop discussing BELIEFS, they are fundamentally a personal matter,
focus on SHARED IDEALS and plans for ACTION.

That is why I discuss HISTORY with atheists, NOT THEOLOGY!

And we share that approach, as we both lived through this,
and fought on the SAME SIDE, in opposition to Pauline Hanson
and the One Notion party:

>> # A decade ago Australia went through the most appalling wave of bigotry
>> # in the way it addressed the so-called problems of a few refugees.
>> # Building on the paranoia of white Australia, the Pauline Hansons and
>> # John Howards - and sadly some on my side of politics - prove that under
>> # the veneer of tolerance Australians remained deeply racist. On that
>> # issue amongst the first people to sign up for justice for refugees were
>> # Jesuit intellectuals and Josephite nuns. Just as Jews played a major
>> # role in the civil rights movement in the US - yes, largely secular Jews
>> # but nonetheless operating within a Jewish religious tradition - just as
>> # Jews joined with black leaders like Luther King to overthrow America's
>> # apartheid, members of Australian religious organisations (by no means
>> # enough of them, in very small numbers) manned the barricades.

And that is the Key!

As my brother, St Rod put it so clearly years ago;

>> # Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:36:22 +1100
>> # From: fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com>
>> #################################################################
>> # For all the slow-witted Atheists who STILL insist on
>> # PROJECTING their obsessions with ARID theological disputes
>> # (because propositions incapable of falsification mean they
>> # can NEVER BE WRONG! ;-) please pay attention to what
>> # you have already been told, instead of making shit up!
>> #
>> # " I'll stick with the philosophy of my brother, St Rod,
>> # who says he doesn't want to hear about people's theology,
>> # he only cares about the way they ACT toward each other."
>> #
>> # Message-ID: <49077a4a$0$28216$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au>
>> #
>> ##################################################################

And still the atheists think it's rational and productive to brand me
a Christian one minute, a Muslim the next, just because I question their
dogmatic beliefs!

It's hilarious!

>> # As they did on Aboriginal rights. As they do on a wide variety of
>> # issues. While it's true that atheists have to put up with bullshit from
>> # the religious that deny us any claim to ethics or morality we must not
>> # make the same mistake. There are atheists who refuse to accept the
>> # possibility that Christians, for example, can be taken seriously as
>> # social reformers. They argue that they do it for the religious
>> # counterpart to frequent flyer points. In its crudest form, they argue
>> # that only the atheist can be truly ethical. Well, tell that to the
>> # Reverend Martin Luther King or the many black and white Christians who
>> # played a leading part in overthrowing the repulsive race laws that had
>> # been established by the Dutch Reform Church and justified by their
>> # distorted theology. We saw much the same thing with slavery. Christians,
>> # even Quakers, could justify the slave trade. Nonetheless, Christians
>> # following Wilberforce worked mightily to destroy it.

Amen, my atheist brother! B^D

>> # Atheists, finally, don't believe. But that doesn't make us better or
>> # nobler or finer people. At least, not necessarily. Many of the great
>> # crimes of the 20th century can be laid as much at our door as at the
>> # doors of the churches.

The feline is out of the bag! 8^o

>> # Atheists, like Christians, can be the best or worst of people.

Yes! Individually that is true, but history shows that COLLECTIVELY,
majority religious societies have evolved into free open secular
democracies and atheist states have ALL been totalitarian shitholes,
atheists make the WORST of brutal, tyrannical governments!

>> # We do not have a monopoly on intelligence, on ethics or
>> # decency. Yes, their beliefs - whether New Age nonsense or full blown
>> # Catholicism - range from the ludicrous to the loathsome. Yes, the
>> # Catholic Church's sickening attitude to human sexuality leads to
>> # paedophilia on a monstrous scale.
>> #
>> # Its nonsense about virgin births and immaculate conceptions and the
>> # superiority of celibacy so distorts the human psyche that, decades ago,
>> # when making a film on prostitution and the sex industry, I discovered an
>> # overwhelming majority of prostitutes had had convent educations. And
>> # when I pointed this out in a series of newspaper columns, linking it to
>> # similar findings in the UK, which found that a remarkably high
>> # percentage of men and women in the sex trades were Roman Catholics, led
>> # to me being the target of a Catholic fatwah. On one particular Sunday an
>> # edict was read out from every Catholic pulpit in this country saying
>> # that it was a sin to read any newspaper that printed me or to listen to
>> # any radio station that broadcast me. And I hadn't even mentioned the
>> # paedophilia problem because, at the time, I didn't know it existed.

Phil, I was aware of the paedophilia issue when the Pope visited
Australia, and wrote scathingly about the treatment of the victims and
the coverup (it's all archived in Google) and copped savage attack
from defenders of the faith.

But it was just verbal, argument.. they didn't do this to me;

"Between 1917 and 1940, 130,000 Orthodox priests were arrested.
In 1918, the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky executed over
3000 Orthodox clergymen of all ranks.
Some were drowned in ice-holes or poured over with cold water
in winter until they turned to ice-pillars."

- John Shelton Curtis, The Russian Church and the Soviet State
(Boston: Little Brown, 1953)

If you think we suffered from VERBAL ABUSE, spare a thought for
those religious suffering persecution in North Korea's atheist tyranny.

No better off than those persecuted in Iran by their theocratic bigots!

I denounce atheist terror as a counter to the endless whining about the
Inquisition and witchburning which characterised alt.atheism when I
arrived, and, I like to think, has moderated due to my presence. B^)

I will continue to dole out tough love until our more moderate position
is heard:

>> # But when I look at these phenomena I am not moved to hate Roman
>> # Catholics so much as I am to pity them. And I want atheists to view
>> # these people, dragooned into belief since childhood, or coming upon them
>> # later in life as a consequence of the most profound of fears, the fear
>> # of death, with a degree of understanding and compassion.

These mangy curs are no better than Hanson, when you and I
and many others took her on, and won.

Same war on ignorance, different front. ;-)

>> # It's true that such tolerance has never been extended to us and remains
>> # singularly absent in most major religions.

Seriously Phil, where's my fucking violin!?

You and I both have farms and townhouses, we have done well,
we are not persecuted for our thoughts...

Atheists in every free open and progressive secular democracy built by
MAJORITY RELIGIOUS societies afford atheists and agnostics the SAME
RIGHTS as themsleves.. where did ANY atheist regime offer the same
rights to Believers?

Don't shovel the self-indulgent atheist whiner bullshit at us, Phil.

>> # The atheist remains an ultimate outsider,

by choice and BEHAVIOUR.

In EVERY atheist state the believers were terrorised tortured and killed!

Grow some perspective!

>> # someone to be demonised, feared and detested. But
>> # that's their problem, not ours.

Look, I've been posting in alt.atheism for a couple of years,

Atheists whine about relatives who hassle them at Christmas,
about schools that want to pray, about 'having religion thrust
in their faces' ... no one is jailed for NON-BELIEF!

I have ADVERTISING thrust in my face, every cityscape fouled with
billboards and visual pollution, I have relatives who are rude,
or beligerrant or racists.. I get annoyed by some peoples music...

GET OVER IT!

>> # The current frenzy for faith, and fundamentalism, may be as I've
>> # occasionally speculated, the storm before the lull. The last gasp of
>> # religion as it yields to the mighty analysis and discoveries of science.
>> # That might be the case. But the confidence that I had in my teens - that
>> # religion would be dead by the end of the 20th century - that the
>> # synagogues, cathedrals and mosques would be museums - was foolhardy in
>> # the extreme.

I'd go with the those known facts, not wishful thinking, Phil.

Religion is GROWING, globally. It HAS TO BE engaged with to solve any
of the major problems facing us.

It's either find ways to work together, or fail.

The role of cultural provocateurs is to challenge prejudices,
not pander to them.

>> # Indeed, while the religious monoliths did seem to be
>> # crumbling, the spontaneous combustion of ever more foolish faiths in the
>> # supernatural smorgasbord of cults, largely created in California, and in
>> # the tenacity of superstition to remain alive and well even in its
>> # trickle-down form of those astrological features in daily newspapers,
>> # remains awesome.

And atheism remains insignificant and ineffectual.

So, antagonising the faiths is a pointless strategy.

Got it?

>> # Furthermore I'm assailed by people who argue that while God didn't
>> # exist, doesn't exist, he she or it is coming into existence through the
>> # new technologies.

OMG, the Dawkinite Delusion.

Science did not save the Atheist states. End of story.

Science is a valuable tool, it needs to function in harmony with
human spiritual values to provide it's moral framework.. otherwise
you get Josef Mengele.

>> # That the internet is the harbinger of a vast new form
>> # of consciousness that will fill the galaxies and will, in some strange
>> # way, neutralise the second law of thermo-dynamics. Now I think this is
>> # twaddle.

Damn right. A Russian, (or was he Iranian), pointed out that
in the past the secret police would have had to round up all his
comrades and torture them to extract information on their movement..

now they just read facebook and twiter.

>> # But it shows that even amongst people who claim to be totally
>> # secular, who would see themselves as being atheists of some degree,
>> # there's always a danger of creating a new ism or ology that, like
>> # communism at its worst, may have a disastrous impact.

DING!

It was DONE with the atheist regimes, and the other disastrous
secular ideologies, Fascism, etc, of the 20th Century.

They do not have, and cannot 'steal' what spiritual teachings have
provided for mankind.. but they can SHARE it, and still even be
non-believers. they just need to respect it for what it is.

>> # Yes, we must rage against religious extremism. But we must also be
>> # intelligent enough to understand its origins, in the individual and in
>> # society. We are not strong enough, we don't have sufficient numbers to
>> # change the balance of power.

And likely never will.

>> # The fact that religious belief may have
>> # evaporated in western Europe, that it really ceased to exist in Japan,
>> # that does not mean that we've won. It simply means that in many areas
>> # religion has lost. But giving up on religious belief is not the same as
>> # becoming a thoughtful, highly rational atheist. There may be 2,500 of us
>> # here today but we are still a tiny minority.

And, as for the religions, your FIRST task is to deal with the rabid
militants in your ranks.

And learn how to co-operate with the moderates on the OTHER side.

That is the global imperative.. Time is ticking.

>> # Most people who've abandoned religion have not embraced the thoughts and
>> # values we might try and articulate. They've taken up shopping. They are
>> # dulling the pain of existence in the mall, by buying things they don't
>> # need with the credit cards they can't afford. Or they're dulling the
>> # pain in alcohol or narcosis. Or they're just sitting in front of the
>> # telly or the computer screen bathing themselves in violent drama or
>> # hyper violent games. In pornography or the pornographies of violence.

Atheism has NO techniques to deal with materialism, it IS materialist.

Spiritual teachings and practices have wrestled with crude materialism

and it's seductions for centuries. Learn from them.

>> # Don't be fooled into thinking that we're at the edge of victory.

Of course not, you are wallowing in the wake of massive defeat last
century.

>> # That would be a delusion.

And that particular atheist delusion is widespread.

>> # It concerns me that by becoming too arrogant, too
>> # strident, too aggressive we will stultify rather than intensify debate.

And this is where I came in, a few years ago. B^D

Major figures in the atheist community are now warning of
atheist arrogance and hubris, just as I have done for some
time now. I have punctured a good deal of it, in this tiny forum,
but the prejudice and bigotry remains.

>> # I've known Christopher Hitchens for decades and know how he operates. In
>> # any area, on no matter what he's tackling, he has two positions. On or
>> # off. And when he's on he can be absolutely exhilarating.
>> #
>> # I remember chortling with delight at his attacks on Mother Theresa -

Sure, atheists are big on MOCKERY, but no one 'chortles' over Lenin,
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or any of the other Atheist tyrants.. they are no
laughing matter!

>> # when he called for Henry Kissinger to be tried as a war criminal. But I
>> # was horrified when he threw his lot in with the Bush administration and
>> # the neo cons. Mind you, many of the neo cons started their intellectual
>> # life as Christopher did, as Trotskyites. In other words whenever
>> # Christopher is writing something he cannot help but pound the keyboard
>> # like a pianist playing one of the noisier works of Rachmaninoff. His
>> # response to what he correctly sees as Islamist fascism brooks no
>> # argument and takes no prisoners. It goes straight to shock and awe, to
>> # the botched invasion of Iraq and ends up with up to a million dead (Not
>> # that we'll ever know the figure because a body count has always been
>> # studiously avoided) and Abu Ghraib. And Christopher remains
>> # unapologetic. Because that's the way he thinks and that's the way he
>> # writes. And nobody does that sort of thing better. Much of what Richard
>> # writes and says and broadcasts has the same... energy.
>> #
>> # I propose, if you like, a third way while recognising how devalued that
>> # notion has become in politics. But a willingness to sit down and talk to
>> # these people who are not necessarily our enemies and who may, on a raft
>> # of issues, be our friends.

Atheists need some, if they are to become relevant.

>> # Sometimes their efforts to be our friends are
>> # grotesque and ludicrous. I think of the Templeton prizewinners, the long
>> # list of scientists, almost all of whom I have either known or
>> # interviewed at length, cop a million dollars for building bridges of
>> # understanding - usually misunderstandings between science and Christian
>> # beliefs. But when it comes to human suffering, whilst I can see that
>> # much of it has been exacerbated by religion,

and even more by atheist states

>> # we must accept the reality
>> # that we need 'em on our side if we are to effect social change.

more than they need you. 8^o

>> # There was a time when, for example, the Christian world seemed wholly
>> # unsympathetic to the climate change crisis. But there is now a strong
>> # movement, within Christianity, to see the destruction of the planet as a
>> # form of blasphemy.

And they have the grunt to get something done, atheists don't.

>> # People of religious faith are, in my view, more to be pitied than
>> # blamed.

That's patronising and insulting, part of the reason others
wont work with atheists.

The respect for the Hard Yards the religions have done, dragging
humanity out of the caves, is still missing among the arrogant atheists.

>> # They are, I believe, victims of the faiths they profess. But
>> # there are countless millions of them who are decent human beings.

And that is what matters.

>> # As decent as the 2,500 gathered here today.

It must have felt, to Adams, just like those tiny meetings
of the Communist party.. all certain they posess the truth,
all wondering why no one listens to them.

B^p

>> # And I return to that notion of the atheist as honest broker.
>> # Of the atheist as go-between. Of the
>> # atheist who can sit down with Protestant, Catholic, Sunni and Shiia,
>> # Muslim and Hindu and try to talk some sense into them.

Mate, you may be too late. The Christians and Muslims are forging
close links at the HIGHEST levels, the levels of POWER.

There is already a flourishing inter-faith movement, and the
Parliament of World Religions.

They will try and foster the inevitable global rapprochement
among world faiths WHILE TRYING TO MAINTAIN their Hierarchies
and their power. I believe they will fail to achieve the latter,
but the process might not be pretty.

What do atheists bring to the table?

>> # And I've done it. I've conducted little experiments along these lines by
>> # getting myself invited to some very strange places. For example,
>> # Australia's leading Pentecostal ministers - running vast churches - had
>> # me along to talk to them about atheism. I described myself as a mangy
>> # old lion in a den of Christians and got a very good hearing. And by the
>> # end of the discussion I like to think that they would not be so quick to
>> # condemn, demonise of vilify atheists in the future.

Yup, and I've been invited to speak to students at a Catholic School
shared platforms with Sherine Hassan, buddhists and Hindus,
visited Sikh Gurdwara's and led temple tours, and spoken
to other religious gatherings and interfaith groups on a range of topics..

but it's still small beer.

At present it is operating at the polite level of M Scott Peck's pseudo
community, people share cups of tea and avoid tough issues,

occasionally people WORK ALONGSIDE each other on real projects,

and thus friendships and understanding grow...

....my fear is that it will take a larger crisis before
that transforms to genuine community.

>> # In running this line at this conference I realise that it will not be
>> # popular, that it's much more fun to shake the fist and pound the table.

Take the Road less travelled.

>> # But in a world where the religious have done so much of that for
>> # millennia, and continue to do it in the 21st century, somebody's got to
>> # be sane. And sanity is, or should be, a characteristic of atheism.

IF the atheists ever develop some humility, as their history entitles
them to do, they may do better in attracting an audience.

It worked for all the religious leaders.

>> # And may the blessings of Bertrand Russell rain down upon you.
>> ...
>> # This is an edited version of a speech Phillip Adams gave last weekend at
>> # the 2010 Global Atheist Convention."

>
> Thanks for posting this well-written and thoughtful article.

You are welcome, but I know you haven't even read it, you
always complain that any post longer than a few hundred
lines "Hurtz your brane" and as we constantly see, atheists
are frightened hypocrites, INCAPABLE of discussing atheism
in the NG designed for that purpose! B^]


# From: raven1 <quotht...@nevermore.com>
# Newsgroups:
alt.atheism,talk.atheism,alt.agnosticism,alt.philosophy,alt.usenet.kooks
# Subject: Re: verbal diarrhea continues unabated!
# Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:10:44 -0500
# Message-ID: <vl3kl7d2v4ee3di5s...@4ax.com>
#
# <snip>
#
# In what universe do you think anyone is going to wade through 1047
# lines of your nonsense to see if you actually have a point?


# From: raven1 <quoththera...@nevermore.com>
# Newsgroups:
alt.atheism,alt.religion.christian,alt.agnosticism,talk.atheism,alt.usenet.kooks
# Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:46:59 -0400
# Organization: Asylum
# Message-ID: <is16n7dtjqu6v3een...@4ax.com>
#
# <snip torrent of logorrhea>
#
# Try being a bit more concise if you want anyone to actually *read*

I never ask too much from atheists, like 'reading' or 'understanding'
or 'intelligently responding' .. I post to reveal their fear of the
facts, and their cowering from the truth. B^]


I OWN this NG and post unchallenged! B^]

[fasgnadh]

>> # And may the blessings of Bertrand Russell rain down upon you.
>> ...
>> # This is an edited version of a speech Phillip Adams gave last weekend at
>> # the 2010 Global Atheist Convention."

>>
>> Thanks for posting this well-written and thoughtful article.

> It was a great speech - I was there when he gave it.

but clearly didn't understand enough of it to be able to discuss it.

B^]

Or interested enough to post it for others to read, because you
knew it would go RIGHT OVER THE HEADS of all the knuckle-dragging
BAAWA thugs!

> It was actually the first talk at the convention and I was glad it was
> a kind of "We are correct but don't get a swollen head over it" kind
> of speech -

Ah the smugness of atheists, first you beg the question "We are right"
when there is NO EVIDENCE that you are, it's just your BELIEF, and
then you praise yourselves because ONE sophisticated spokesman says
what I have told you for two years!

We have corresponded, you know, Phil and I, he thinks I'm a 'good
bloke', I think he's the acceptable face of atheism, and it's the
typical arrogant, self-inflated, USENET atheist bigots he's warning
about the movement becoming! 8^o

> because a bunch of people getting together to pat each
> other on the back for being sooo clever would have been sickening -

It is., especially when you all support BAAWA and the a Warlord(sic)
who threatenes to "kill theists and shit down their throats" and
then goes on to propose another atheist genocide, killing every Muslim,
Men, Women and Children, with Weapons of MAss Destruction!

What you reveal is the HYPOCRISY of contemporary atheism, it's
smugness, insularity, violence and bigotry cannot be covered over
by ONE lone voice who warns your atheist conflab in his KEYNOTE
adress and then is IGNORED by all the atheists!!!!

NOT ONE OF YOU DISCUSSED IT IN THE PAST TWO YEARS!

I, an agnostic who wrote to Phullip Adams afterwards and discussed it,
who received his thoughtful repkies, POSTED IT IN YOUR FUCKING BRAIN
DEAD newsgroup AFTER TWO YEARS OF DISINTERESTED SILENCE from atheists..
and even now NEITHER of you actually discussed it!

No wonder de Botton advises you all to STEAL Ideas from the religious..

because CLEARLY, NONE OF YOU HAVE ANY OF YOUR OWN!!!!
woan

> and it set the tone for the whole conference

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAA

Sure.. that's why it's NEVER BEEN MENTIONED BY YOU, OR ANY
OTHER ATHEIST SINCE!

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Till *I* posted it, and waited, in vain, for any intelligent
discussion from atheists!

Then I posted it with my own thoughts and commentary,

> - thoughtful, good humored and measured.

thank you, but NOT ONE ATHEIST HAD ANYTHING INTELLIGENT TO
DISCUSS ABOUT IT!!!

Not ONE!

In fact it was Snipped, ..ATHEISTS HATE DISCUSSION ABOUT ATHEISM!

Atheists FEAR constructive criticism, because their mindset is so
FRAGILE, that's why they follow violent thugs like your Warlord,
who does all your thinking FOR YOU!

> And it was very well received by the crowd.
>
> I actually preferred it to Richard Dawkins Speech -

B^D So much so that Dawkin's has been talked about ENDLESSLY
in alt.atheism, and has countless followers for his Atheist God
Delusion, while Phillip Adams KEYNOTE address to the Atheist
Global Bullshit Festival has not been mentioned once, till I posted
it and suddenly YOU claim it was your favourite bit!

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA

Do I SET YOUR AGENDA OR WHAT!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!


BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA

> he does sometimes
> come off as too self important and self congratulatory.

Pot kettle, black.

He's a TYPICAL Atheist, you hear his voice echoed by all his Acolytes
every day in USENET.. Adam's never got a mention, until *I* posted
his talk aver it was IGNORED by atheists FOR TWO FUCKING YEARS!!!!

he's the EXCEPTION to the smug, self satisfied, arrogant, thuggish
atheist rule!

Priceless!

> Oh and i am still not here!

Morally and intellectually you have been off the reservation for YEARS!

> Did you go to the "Reason rally" Raven? Was it good?
> The 2012 Global atheist conference in Melbourne is on in 2 weeks time
> - if its anything like the 2010 conference it will be great.

IT will be the same self congratulatory atheist wank-fest it was last
time, with a tiny audience no bigger than the attendance at ONE Sydney
church on ANY weekend! B^]

Take plenty of lube. B^D

> Tickets purchased and flights booked!

and brain packed away in a little box and stored in the attic.

> Mark.
>


--

[Kangaroo Court Australia]

101

[Uirgil]

In article <ae2fr.5262$v14....@viwinnwfe02.internal.bigpond.com>,
fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com> wrote:


Snipped the bits of fasgnadh's farts that no one reads anyway!



The "Big Tent" Creationist Charter

(established circa 1980)

1. Don't ask, don't tell what happened when (must cover up those
weaknesses and contradictions of those failed YEC and OEC
"theories"!).

2. Bait and switch between proximate and ultimate causes.

3. Promote doubt of evolution, and leave it to the audience to infer
what happened instead, when, and how.

4. Bait and switch between evolution and abiogenesis.

5. Bait and switch between abiogenesis, which had to occur at least
once by definition, and the yet-unknown proximate causes of how it
occurred.

6. Use the word "Darwinism" at every opportunity.

7. Quote mine like thereąs no tomorrow.

8. Play favorites with the evidence, just like YECs and OECs, but
donąt infer anything other than that "Darwinism" is falsified ­ or
unfalsifiable ­ or dead, dying, etc., whatever the audience will buy.

9. If the "activist judges" rule in favor of the "Darwinists" ditch
the "creation" language, and use something like "design" instead.

10. If you need to do #9, claim that your "theory" is not
creationism; critics will take the bait and react with "is too
creationism!" Which lets youŠ

11. Exploit multiple definitions (especially of "theory"), and the
public misconceptions based on them.

12. If all else fails, whine about being "expelled" and play the
Hitler card.

[Uirgil]

In article <YO3fr.5363$%E2....@viwinnwfe01.internal.bigpond.com>,

fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> >> # "atheism does not presuppose, let alone impose, a set of views.
>
> Except in EVERY atheist regime in history!

There never has been an atheist regime.

Are you referring to Atheist regimes, as dirtinct from atheist regimes,
which are quite a different thing?
With a small 'a', atheism = non-theism. but with an upper case 'A',
Atheism = Anti-theism.

The distinction is important, at least to us non-theists!

But those like fasgnadh are entirely unable to distinguish between truth
and falsehood.

[dolf]

Ned Kelly v's Police

Toulouse, France on 21-23 March 2012

And what's my crime that I should be besieged by Kings Cross Police.

How will they explain that shame to police in other countries

Rufus Cy-Borg

[raven1]

On Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:20:46 +1000, fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>raven1 ignored 1788 lines of kook-spew

Fixed it for you, windbag.

[raven1]

On Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:33:16 +1000, fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

>raven1 demonstrates the futility of Fasgnadh posting 1655 lines of noise.

Fixed it for you. HTH.

[fasgnadh]

On 5/04/2012 10:50 PM, raven1 wrote:

...

Ah the unwarrented smugness of atheists, first you beg the

question "We are right" when there is NO EVIDENCE that you are,
it's just your BELIEF, and then you praise yourselves
because ONE sophisticated spokesman says what I have

told you for two years, and atheists STILL IGNORE! B^D

We have corresponded, you know, Phil and I, he thinks I'm a 'good
bloke', I think he's the acceptable face of atheism, and it's the
typical arrogant, self-inflated, USENET atheist bigots he's warning
about the movement becoming! 8^o

>>> because a bunch of people getting together to pat each
>>> other on the back for being sooo clever would have been sickening -

It is., especially when you all support BAAWA and the a Warlord(sic)
who threatenes to "kill theists and shit down their throats" and
then goes on to propose another atheist genocide, killing every Muslim,
Men, Women and Children, with Weapons of MAss Destruction!

What you reveal is the HYPOCRISY of contemporary atheism, it's
smugness, insularity, violence and bigotry cannot be covered over
by ONE lone voice who warns your atheist conflab in his KEYNOTE
adress and then is IGNORED by all the atheists!!!!

NOT ONE OF YOU DISCUSSED IT IN THE PAST TWO YEARS!

I, an agnostic who wrote to Phullip Adams afterwards and discussed it,
who received his thoughtful repkies, POSTED IT IN YOUR FUCKING BRAIN
DEAD newsgroup AFTER TWO YEARS OF DISINTERESTED SILENCE from atheists..
and even now NEITHER of you actually discussed it!

No wonder de Botton advises you all to STEAL Ideas from the religious..

because CLEARLY, NONE OF YOU HAVE ANY OF YOUR OWN!!!!

Ritcho snipped all of Phillip Adams warning about the Atheist Delusion,
he and Ravin1 prefer to remain deluded

> raven1 ignored 1788 lines of kook-spew

We can see you ignored EVERYTHING The Keynote Atheist speaker warned
about, and continued with your ignorance, arrogance lies, post
forgery and hubris.

[Uirgil]

In article <dDLfr.5328$v14....@viwinnwfe02.internal.bigpond.com>,
fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com> wrote:


Atheism (non-theism) does not presuppose, let alone impose, a set of
views.

[abelard]

i'm gratified to understand that my existence is dependent upon
your ability to explain how i got here....

now...how did you get here?
was it by magic?

-------god



--
web site at www.abelard.org - news comment service, logic, economics
energy, education, politics, etc over 1 million document calls in year past
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
all that is necessary for [] walk quietly and carry
the triumph of evil is that [] a big stick.
good people do nothing [] trust actions not words
only when it's funny -- roger rabbit
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Kangaroo Court Australia]

On Apr 7, 7:13 pm, abelard <abela...@abelard.org> wrote:
> i'm gratified to understand that my existence is dependent upon
>      your ability to explain how i got here....
>
> now...how did you get here?
> was it by magic?
>
> -------god
>
> --

> web site atwww.abelard.org- news comment service, logic, economics

>  energy, education, politics, etc over 1 million document calls in year past
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----
>   all that is necessary for       []     walk quietly and carry
>   the triumph of evil is that    []           a big stick.
>   good people do nothing      []    trust actions not words
>                     only when it's funny -- roger rabbit
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----

NO, u are just a figment of my imagination

[raven1]

On Sat, 07 Apr 2012 10:11:57 +1000, fasgnadh <fasg...@yahoo.com>
wrote:

Wow, you don't read for comprehension very well. I *thanked* you for
posting Adams's article, which makes some excellent points for his
fellow atheists to consider. I see it went right over your head, like
everything else does.

---
raven1
aa # 1096
EAC Vice President (President in charge of vice)
BAAWA Knight

[Kangaroo Court Australia]

On Apr 7, 9:18 pm, Kangaroo Court Australia <nwn.webmas...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Apr 7, 7:13 pm, abelard <abela...@abelard.org> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > i'm gratified to understand that my existence is dependent upon
> >      your ability to explain how i got here....
>
> > now...how did you get here?
> > was it by magic?
>
> > -------god
>
> > --

> > web site atwww.abelard.org-news comment service, logic, economics

> >  energy, education, politics, etc over 1 million document calls in year past
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----
> >   all that is necessary for       []     walk quietly and carry
> >   the triumph of evil is that    []           a big stick.
> >   good people do nothing      []    trust actions not words
> >                     only when it's funny -- roger rabbit
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----
>
> NO, u are just a figment of my imagination

10005