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Originally Posted by photon
So? The people on this site are not necessarily representative of atheists in general, any more than the religious people on this site are necessarily representative of theists in general.
People who choose to engage in discussions about certain topics select themselves towards strong views, because the people without strong views don't care so usually don't participate in the discussion.
The lack of belief in a god does not equate to the belief that religion is the "cause of all the ills in society".
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But the atheists on this site often resort to links of both cartoons and articles/web sites by leaders within the atheist movement. Those cartoons and articles/web sites contain the arguments they use on this site. I doubt any of you have contributed an original thought to the conversation. You can't honestly believe these guys don't represent a large segment of atheistic opinion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Flawed for two reasons.. the first because the actions and beliefs of a few dozen people on a forum are not representative of all atheists/agnostics/whatevers, it can't be because it's not a statistically significant sample size.. second because even if it is, correlation does not equal causation.
If someone things religion is overall harmful to society they could (and many I know do) believe so because of the information they've evaluated, not because they don't believe in a god.
Some people who DO believe in god also think religion is overall harmful to society.
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Again the source of these few dozen atheist's arguments are from popular modern atheist thought. They quote and link to guys like Dawkins with regularlity.
Also what you call information about religion often is just thinly disguised atheistic propaganda. Eliminate the typical comparative religious study course and a couple of faithless "spiritual" authors and you will only discover those negative opinions of religion on hard core atheist sites.
Besides arguing that a Theist can come to the same negative opinions about religion doesn't negate the observable fact that Atheists are drawn to such baggage. Moreover those commonly held atheistic views of religion affects the rest of their world view.
Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
Sure, unless that's the ideology in the book  EDIT: But the ideology is coming from the book, not the simple belief that god exists. Religious books typically propose entire belief systems, entire worldviews, otherwise they'd be really really short. "God Exists. The End." |
So you believe that the Koran itself was the motivation for these Muslim's to commit these murders? Is that what your saying or are you just talking hypothetically?