The universe doesn’t hate us.

Bruce Willis

kolehiyoboy:

For exposing a miracle, a man will be thrown in jail.

This is Sanal Edamaruku, President of the Rationalist International - a group that seeks to end superstition, promote an open society and endorse scientific method amongst others.

On 10th March, Sanal was invited by a TV channel to investigate a “miraculous crucifix” in front of the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni, India. This crucifix had become the center of attraction drawing believers from far and wide. For some days, there were little droplets of water trickling from Jesus’ feet. Hundreds of people came daily to pray and collect the “holy water” in bottles.

                                  

                                         The dripping crucifix.

After careful investigation, Sanal identified the drainage near a washing room as the source of the water, it reached Jesus feet through capillary action. (And I won’t even comment on implications. Drainage, really now?)

In a live program, Sanal explained his findings and accused the Catholic Church officials  of miracle mongering, as they were very aggressive in PR measures, even distributing photographs certifying the “miracle”.

The Church, obviously, got pissed.

Fr. Augustine Palett, the priest of Our Lady of Velankanni, and representatives of the Association of Concerned Catholics (AOCC) demanded that Sanal apologize. Sanal refused and engaged them in a debate in live TV instead. Most of which was spent by Church leaders berating Sanal. As if volume was directly proportional to sense.

For not bowing down to their demands, they filed a blasphemy case against him.  On the 10th April, Sanal received a  phone call from a police official  directing him to come to the police station to face the charges. He will be arrested for “hurting the religious sentiments of a particular community”.

Sanal Edamaruku is now under threat of arrest for exposing the “miracle” of dripping crucifix.

This is why blasphemy laws are ridiculous. So it’s o-kay to delude people with a “miracle” because exposing them is “hurtful to religious sentiments”? Blasphemy laws are a serious affront to the freedom of expression!

For challenging the Church, Sanal faces prosecution. How - what’s the word - medieval.

Complete story here: Rationalist International and here too: kractivist.

artoftheunbeliever:

Reasons People are Atheists vs NOT Reasons People Are Atheists

<3 u bby

oh boy

servantlo:

HELLO HELLO HELLO AGAIN! Servant Jo Lo here with some insight on things, more specifically UNBELIEF!

“Unbelief.” I’m fairly sure that belief isn’t something you can “un-“.

I was in QT (Quiet Time) with Daddy and honestly this whole discussion came out of nowhere.

There are two reasons why an atheist CANNOT really grasp the concept of there being a God.

God is such an infinite being, and the magnitude of His identity is so great, that the only person who can understand God is God Himself. This is the reason why we need the Holy Spirit to establish a relationship with the Father at all. His Spirit is in us, and therefore, He decodes the vast mysteries of God so that we can understand beyond our massively finite minds. (Paul breaks that down more in 1 Corinthians 2)

That’s a very disingenuous way to describe belief… and rather circular. 

You can’t believe unless you understand- you can’t understand unless you believe.

Circular logic is not valid.

Furthermore, by your logic, it is impossible for non-Christians to convert- something which I doubt very much you believe in. 

A comparison for your argument would be someone saying that only people who believe in fairies can see fairies, or that only people who have migraines can know they exist. 

Requiring a belief in something in order to understand it is illogical and quite suspicious.

Other ways of saying it:

• You need to have a bias for believing in something in order to believe in it.
• You need to have a pre-existing condition that will make you accept something as true in order to accept it as true.

See?

The other reason can best be described by looking at the nature of natural relationships. If a man sees a beautiful woman, everything that he understands about that woman is coming from an outside perspective at first. If that man never goes forth out of faith to talk to that woman, he will never truly know her, or have an opportunity to establish a relationship with her. But when he goes to speak to her, he’s moving out of faith that the two may have things in common, and that she will accept him for who he really is.

This is not a correct comparison. 

Atheists aren’t people who believe in god and just don’t have a relationship with god, they’re folks who don’t believe in god. 

In your story, you’d have to first make the person not believe the woman exists. It’s not an issue of atheists just not having a relationship with god, because it’s logically and physically impossible to have a relationship with someone you don’t believe in.

The same is between man and the Trinity. Without moving forward out of faith to get to know the Son personally, (instead of concluding from other outside perspectives) man cannot receive the gifts and benefits that come from that relationship. Specifically, man cannot be introduced to the Holy Spirit through Jesus, and to come to know that relationship either. Without the relationship between man and the Holy Spirit (Spirit of Truth, Spirit of Christ), man will never be introduced to God the Father.

From the absence of a small step of faith, man will forever be looking through a window fogged by logic at the Triune God of the Universe, when in reality, He has already extended an invitation to us all. The only ones who are truly excluded from God’s presence and Love are all who are under the rule of the rebellious one, Lucifer. We are all born captive under his rule through sin but Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection changed all of that. Today we stand in peace and joy knowing that the ransom has been payed for, and that we can now experience the amazing relationship with God we were supposed to have, now and forevermore.

Salvation has so much simplicity, that it’s foolishness in the minds of men. Why? God is SPIRIT and where the SPIRIT of the Lord is, there is liberty. No matter what people say, you are a spirit being. The body is a vessel, and your mind is a part of that vessel. The vessel is perishing, but the spirit moves on into either eternal love connection, or eternal separation condemnation. Don’t let your brain (which will perish) tell your spirit about your Heavenly Father. Take that small step to repent and invite Jesus in. I promise you, it is the longest lasting good decision you will never THINK to make. MUCH LOVE!!!

shanksinatra:

http://www.bigthink.com/think-tank/neil-degrasse-tyson-atheist-or-agnostic

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Atheist or Agnostic?

What’s the Big Idea?

Richard Dawkins, the most famous atheist in the world, created a stir when he recently declared that he was not an atheist after all, but an agnostic. The news, which came during a debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury last month, seemed at first to be a big get for God. However, in The God Delusion Dawkins was frank about his agnosticism.

So, how does Dawkins square his public persona with his lack of certitude? Easily. No matter how strongly Dawkins is associated with atheism, he is first and foremost a scientist. Therefore, ”the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other,” he claims. 

Similarly, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson claims the title “scientist” above all other “ists.” And yet, Tyson says he is “constantly claimed by atheists.” So where does Tyson stand? He tells Big Think: “Neil deGrasse, widely claimed by atheists, is actually an agnostic.” 

I’d still hit that. 

aninterestingdebate:

It only takes about 2 minutes

Especially for my gnostic atheist friends out there… we gotta have a bigger piece of the pie

Daniel Radcliffe

My godless vagina

Ernestine Louise Rose (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 1892) was an atheist feminist, Individualist Feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women’s rights movement in nineteenth-century America.

She was born on January 13, 1810, in Piotrków Trybunalski, Russia-Poland, as Ernestine Louise Polowsky. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman.

At the age of five, Rose began to “question the justice of a God who would exact such hardships” as the frequent fasts that her father performed. As she grew older, she began to question her father more and more on religious matters, receiving only, “A young girl does not want to understand the object of her creed, but to accept and believe it.” in response. By the age of fourteen, she had completely rejected the idea of female inferiority and the religious texts that supported that idea.

When she was sixteen her mother died and her father, without her consent, betrothed her to a young Jew who was a friend of his. Rose, not wanting to enter a marriage with a man she neither chose nor loved, confronted him, professing her lack of affection towards him and begging for release. However, Rose was a woman from a rich family, and he denied her plea. Rose traveled to the secular civil court, where she pleaded her case herself. The courts ruled in her favor, not only freeing her from her betrothal, but ruling that she could retain the full inheritance she received from her mother. Although she decided to relinquish the fortune to her father, she gladly took her freedom from betrothal. She returned home only to discover that in her absence her father had remarried, to a sixteen year old girl. The tension that developed eventually forced her to leave home at the age of seventeen.

Rose then traveled to Berlin, where she found herself hampered by an anti-Semitic law that required all non-Prussian Jews to have a Prussian sponsor. She appealed directly to the king and was granted an exemption from the rule. Soon afterward, she developed a room deodorizer, which she sold to fund her travels.

She traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and finally England. Her arrival in England was less than smooth, however, as the ship in which she was sailing wrecked. Although Rose did make it to England safely, all her possessions had been destroyed, and she found herself destitute. In order to support herself, she sought work as a teacher in the languages of German and Hebrew and she continued to sell her room deodorizers. While in England, she met Robert Owen, a Utopian socialist, who was so impressed by her that he invited her to speak in a large hall for radical speakers. In spite of her limited knowledge of English, the audience was so impressed that from then on her appearances were regular. She and Owen were close friends, and she even helped him to found the Association of All Classes of All Nations, a group that espoused human rights for all people of all nations, sexes, races and classes. During her time there she also met William Ella Rose, a Christian jeweler and silversmith, an Englishman and an “Owenite”. They were soon married by a civil magistrate, and both made it plain that they considered the marriage a civil contract rather than a religious one.

In May 1836 the Roses emigrated to the United States, where they later became naturalized citizens and settled in a cozy house in New York city in 1837. The Roses soon opened a small “Fancy and Perfumery” store in their home, where Rose sold her perfumed toilet water and William ran a silversmith shop.

Rose soon began to give lectures on the subjects that most interested her, joining the “Society for Moral Philanthropists” and traveling to different states to espouse her causes of the abolition of slavery, religious tolerance, public education and equality for women. Her lectures were met with controversy. When she was in the South to speak out against slavery, one slaveholder told her he would have “tarred and feathered her if she had been a man”. When, in 1855, she was invited to deliver an anti-slavery lecture in Bangor, Maine, a local newspaper called her “a female Atheist… a thousand times below a prostitute.” When Rose responded to the slur in a letter to the competing paper, she sparked off a town feud that created such publicity that, by the time she arrived, everyone in town was eager to hear her. Her most ill-received lecture was likely in Charleston, West Virginia, where her lecture on the evils of slavery was met with such vehement opposition and outrage that she was forced to exercise considerable influence to even get out of the city safely.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Rose joined the “pantheon of great American women”, a group that included such influential women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis and Sojourner Truth and fought for women’s rights and abolition.

In the winter of 1836, Judge Thomas Hertell submitted a married women’s property act to the legislature of New York city to investigate methods of improving the civil and property rights of married women, and to allow them to hold real estate in their own name. When Rose heard of this resolution, she drew up a petition and began to solicit names in support of it. In 1838, this petition was sent to the state legislature in spite of it only having five names. This was the first petition ever introduced in favor of rights for women. During the following years, she increased both the number of petitions and the number of signatures. In 1849, these rights were finally won.

Rose also attended and spoke at numerous conferences and conventions, including, but not limited to: the first national convention of Infidels, the Hartford Bible Convention, the Women’s Rights Convention in the Tabernacle, New York City, the tenth national convention of the National Women’s Rights Convention in Cooper Institute, New York City, the State Women’s Rights Convention in Albany, New York, and the Equal Rights Association meeting in which there was a schism.

Rose was elected president of the National Women’s Rights Convention in October, 1854, in spite of objections that she was an atheist. Her election was heavily supported by Susan B. Anthony, who declared that, “every religion – or none – should have an equal right on the platform”.

Although she never seemed to attach any importance to her Jewish background, in 1863 Rose had a published debate with Horace Seaver, the abolitionist editor of the Boston Investigator, whom she accused of being anti-Semitic.

In her later years, after a six month trip to Europe, she attempted to stay away from platforms and controversy. Within 6 months, she made the closing address at the nationwide Women’s Rights Convention. However, her health once again took a downward turn, and on June 8, 1869, she and her husband set sail for England. Susan B. Anthony arranged a farewell party for them, and the couple received many gifts from friends and admirers, including a substantial amount of money.

After 1873, her health improved, and she began to advocate women’s suffrage in England, even attending the Conference of the Woman’s Suffrage movement in London and speaking in Edinburgh, Scotland at a large public meeting in favor of woman’s suffrage. She died in England in 1892.

facesofatheists:

Greeting fellow atheists.

My name’s Neima. I’m going on 16 in May and as of now I’m a tenth grade student currently residing in Canada’s capitol. I’ve gone between atheism, agnosticism, and theism my whole life and as of September 2011 my de-conversion process was complete. To all of the people who believe that atheists have no morals, I say this; Morality isn’t a religious trait, it’s a human trait. I am an; empathetic, compassionate, funny, loving, kind, generous, happy and friendly person- despite my being an atheist. And no matter your religion (or lack of religion), I will always give you a chance to be friends. (:

Best Wishes, Neima

DFTBA

Hello Neima, you are so right- morality is a human trait. Thanks for adding to the blog!

Enjoy your stay. 

leftybegone:

a) Absolute truth exists.
b) Absolute truth does not exist.
c) I don’t know if absolute truth exists.
d) I don’t care if absolute truth exists.

Note: Absolute truth means it is true for all people at all times everywhere.

Which do you believe?

I believe there are certain things which are absolutely true at all times, but “truth” is not an actual thing to exist. It’s just a descriptor and a concept.