Swordfishstick

Did we get hit by Niburu yet? Would be annoying if the world just ended in firey cataclysm, and nobody bothered to tell me.

I actually have a grandmom who, while believing in God, tends to say things as she sees them. As my father got diagnosed with ALS, my grandmother commented to me that she's learned, through her life, that "God's a real asshole sometimes".

The passage discussed here is perhaps the most OBVIOUS and inescapable indication that, should there exist such a thing as God, either the Bible isn't the perfect word of God, or most people alive today are much more loving and just than God.

It is unsurpricing that most Christians have never r...

When it comes to pseudoscience like the climate change denial movement, it only takes one purposefully dishonest person who initially cherry picks information from scientific papers, distoriting the information to support a false conclusion, and a little publicity; the rest is easy. People will p...

What an awesome song! :D

Europe was not much different, not long ago, so clearly trying to change things is not futile. The number of atheists even in America is increasing - and there are many who are struggling in a religion-dominated environment, for whom hearing that there are confident atheists out there is a lifeli...

Liked the cover, except for the addition of a few adjectives into the lyrics that just intefered with the flow of the song. This song is a piece of carefully crafted poetry, and adding to it can only detract from the outcome.

I remember MTV from the days they played this sort of stuff too - though it usually happened late at night, when decent people were asleep. Man I'm happy to be indecent!

Shara Worden has such an awesome voice, and such great control over it, she truly is my brightest diamond. :)

The most important message in this video, I think, comes at around 41-42 minutes. The demonization of people, viewing another group of people as "other", whether on the basis of religious views, appearance, culture, sexual identity or any other point of difference, is the linchpin that enables th...

That is a fallacy called "argument from authority"; that an intelligent person believes something has no bearing at all as to whether that something is true or not, only the reasons given for the belief, the actual evidence, matters.

As it stands, Einstein used the word "god" poetically, to ref...

Loved the mass effect series, but ME3's ending was so amazingly bad, that I have yet to find the will to replay the game. It isn't just that it was a cheap deus ex machina ending, but it essentially forced you to suddenly co-operate with some space-boy that was behind the main villains in the gam...

Have to check some of these out, thanks!

I'd add a couple: qualiasoup, and theremintrees. Both are awesome with lots of creative and very intelligent content.

Without religion, there'd still be biggotry, but biggots couldn't convince themselves that they have divine sanction for their views; that a perfectly just supreme being agrees with, and supports their biggotry.

There is great harm in believing a book - any book - to be infalliable, or to belie...

Of course that is true. However, while accuracy in physics would be preferable, such accuracy isn't strictly necessary for the thought experiment's purpose.

89teroy - It's actually not very likely that humans would change as radically as you think. That's because evolution doesn't happen by magic, and organisms don't evolve just because a lot of time has passed, and it's "time to evolve". If you understand the mechanisms that drive evolution, especia...

Yeah, cause a typo is a clear indication of a lack of education. For your information, I am an atheist, and don't think God "blessed" me with anything. I was recounting, on request, an experience I saw, at the time, as a religious one, when I was a teenager. So how about having enough fortitude t...

So NOT promoting your particular belief system is tantamount to promoting atheism? That is just silly. Keeping religious instruction out of the perview of public education means that OF COURSE atheism is NOT promoted. Promoting atheism would mean actively arguing against the existence of god. Whe...

...I was the first to get up, walk to the altar, and neal there. To my immense relief, others followed me, and most eventually got up there. As the priest blessed me, I felt a surge of adrenaline, and a huge wave of emotion go over me - was all that I could do not to collapse. Had never felt anyt...

Ah, ok. With such an extreme view, I do think our views of the world are without much commonality. I don't think there's any further we can get in this discussion; all I can say is that I am very, very glad I don't live in a society you envision as an ideal.

...likely that this event or phenomena took place - but that would hardly be comparable to religious faith. Such belief as is gained through evidence is tentative belief, which is also subject to change with new evidence; nor would I build any elaborate theories on the foundation of such a provis...

...means signing on to the basic rules of a society, including taxation, and the notions that that society has as to where tax money should go. That is not authoritarian, when these things have been decided by freely elected representatives of the people, and when there is widespread agreement th...

I'm looking forward to december 22nd. I can't wait for the backpedling, and creative explanations of the doomsday believers, as to why nothing happened. My guess: "oh, something DID happen: a spiritual cataclysm, and we are now living in a new age of spiritual awareness!"

Or perhaps the ufo's he...

Greece also has a lot of pasta, and grece's economy tanked, so that must mean that pasta is bad for the economy?

Correlation does not establish causation. As it happens, free education, or education with nominal fees, works quite well in northern European countries, that are financially stable,...