Stratos wrote on Mar 23^rd, 2015 at 5:54pm:



Don't be ridiculous.

Are you saying that YOUR view is complete, free of error and corresponds to reality completely??

Being demonstrated: can you please tell me how the truth of poetry, music, painting, literature is demonstrated?   This obsession with empiricism and positivism is ridiculous. We do not LIVE positivist lives. I don't, YOU don't. Nobody does.

Read the Iliad and the Odyssey and tell me how they are completely flawed and none of it happened and anyone who draws inspiration from them is a fool, because they don't correspond to reality.

This is exactly what I mean by atheist having a pinched and completely dessicated outlook on the world. Obsessive about empirical reality as if their relationships to others were purely along the lines of logical positivism.

Stratos wrote on Mar 23^rd, 2015 at 7:31pm:

What's this silly obsession about FACT??  Do you love your family because of FACTS? Do you do the right thing only after weighing all the FACTS and nothing else? We do not relate to each on the basis of other than FACTS. Do people love you - is that a FACT? Are you in FACT a good man?



CHAPTER I
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL

‘Now, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside.  The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was,—all helped the emphasis.

‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.




I wonder if you see how ridiculous this is.

Stratos wrote on Mar 23^rd, 2015 at 9:15pm:

I expect nothing from you.  It is not for me to adjust your beliefs - not something you are reciprocating as far as I can tell.

I am simply telling you about the poverty of your outlook. Keep it by all means, I have no interest in what you believe in, one way or the other.

I have not made a positive claim for the existence of a deity. I have been arguing against the careless dismissal of all who do believe in the existence of a deity. In particular, I am siding with Jews and Christians. Believing Jews and Christians have contributed immensely to humanity and I will not be siding with people who dismiss all that for any reason.

You keep on about facts and science and positivism as if that was the horizon of the world. It is not. God is in art, literature, music, interpersonal relationships, family, friendship, hope, love and kindness - none of these are scientific and so none of these would show up on your ledger of acceptable proofs.

To paraphrase, you are looking god in the thunder and the earthquake and the fire but you you should be listening to a small, still voice.
Or not. Don't listen to the small, still voice.
Insist on scientific proofs. Dismiss all the people who have gone before you as fools who never ascended to your heights of understanding.  You are at the peak of understanding, you have final comprehension.   Be seduced by your own vanity. Go on.

You keep demanding a logical positivist god. Crazy.

Will you accept any non-scientific (ie non-materialistic, non-positivistic) proofs? No.

Paradigms.

There are Muslim fanatics, Hindu extremists, and Christian fundamentalists. And then there arefire- and- brimstone atheists. Like our own Taslima Nasreen whose belligerence puts off even moderate Muslims while making fundamentalists look like victims.

Last week, she was her shrill self again—going out of her way to broadcast her atheism and renounce her Muslim identity. Rudely interrupting an interviewer mid-way, she admonished him for inadvertently referring to her as a Muslim writer.

"Don't call me a Muslim, I'm an atheist," she snapped.

If I was the interviewer I would have urged her to calm down. No need to get so upset, Ma'am."Muslim" is not a term of abuse. Not yet. But, actually, it is not so much Nasreen who is the problem. Her outburst is symptomatic of the militant, in-your-face brand of modern-day atheism she shares with the likes of Richard Dawkins, the British uber atheist whose anti-religion rants have alienated many of his own atheist mates on both sides of the Atlantic.

British literary critic Terry Eagleton and American academic Daniel Dennett, a fellow leading member of an egoistic atheist group that calls itself the Brights, are among some of his high-profile chums who have fallen out with him. And they are not the only ones.

"Richard Dawkins, What on Earth Happened to You?" queried The Guardian, one of Britain’s most atheist-friendly newspapers in a sign of growing backlash.

What has happened is that atheism has gone fundamentalist. As Lakshmi Chaudhry — commenting on Dawkins' tub-thumping anti-faith documentary — The Root of all Evil — noted there's a "virulent form of atheism" abroad "that mirrors the polarized worldview of the religious extremists it claims to oppose".

"Like his fellow fundamentalists, Dawkins has no use for moderation or its practitioners," she wrote. You’re either with them or against them.

Nasreen belongs to this band of puritan atheists--as bigoted and parochial as religious puritans they claim to fight. Obsessed with their own “superior’’ rational worldview and contemptuous of any belief they regard as irrational, atheists have acquired all the trappings of a navel-gazing cabal: self-righteous, arrogant, intolerant of criticism. Mention faith and they turn up their noses as though you've just belched in their face.

They revel in provocation, sadistically throwing red meat at the other side in a crass display of baiting the enemy. Seeking attention is the name of the game. And who knows it better than Nasreen whose reputation as an enfant terrible rests more on her penchant for controversies than on her literary prowess. She must have been mightily pleased that her "Don’t call me a Muslim" quote was widely reported with relish in the Pakistani and Bangladeshi media .

No wonder, Nasreen-Dawkins and Co.are seen as god-send by their detractors. There is a joke that every time this lot opens their mouth somewhere anew religious fundamentalist is born.

Yet,atheism was not meant to be like this. Defined as the opposite of theism, it was meant to challenge blind faith –not by hectoring and humiliating the believers but by engaging them through dialogue and sensible argument. But, ironically — to the dismay of many moderate atheists — it is rapidly morphing into a sort of faith itself. It is the latest in the long and perverse tradition of revolutions becoming the state, and change-bearing revolutionaries ending up as the Establishment. All that atheists need now is a church and a book and,voila, they will be in business at the head of a new religion of their own.

http://www.firstpost.com/living/the-militant-god-hater-taslima-nasreen-represents-a-new-kind-of-fundamentalist-atheism-2172485.html

Funny thing about that pic is that someone had to doctor a pic of a militant christian(you can still see holy bible on the book BTW) to make up a militant atheist as you won't find an atheist like that to take a pic of and by doing so show the craziness of some christians, not atheists.

Quote:

http://8ch.net/pol/res/1553971.html#1555083

Quote:

http://8ch.net/pol/res/1553971.html#1557463

Quote:

http://8ch.net/pol/res/1553971.html#1554061

We think differently, these Muslims and I.

I have been raised in a culture of skepticism, but they see my requirement for proof as a burden on my back.

The eldest weaver shakes his finger at my constant questions.

'You western people are all science, all fact, all show me. You don't even believe in God anymore because you think we came from a monkey.'

The weavers chorus a cackle, as if evolution is one of the funniest things they've ever heard. Business banter is dismissed and our talk turns to higher truths.

'You are Christian woman?' a young lime-eyed weaver across the room asks me, head cocked. 'Yeeeeeees,' I reply hesitantly again (I've given up explaining atheism in India, it's rarely understood or respected).

—Sarah MacDonald, Holy Cow!: An Indian Adventure

I'm not even going to try to make sense of this.