If overly religious people put nearly as much energy into examining their own beliefs as they do into trying to disprove evolution, we’d probably all be atheists.
I really, really love this. Can everyone please remember this?
Well, the Westboro Baptist Church, while clearly a bunch of Christian assholes, always make it clear that they are operating within the laws of wherever they happen to be. They kind of make a big deal about that.
And while I want all seven of them to go away forever, I put them in a completely different box than the sort of person who might, for instance, hijack an airplane and send it into a skyscraper.
Your comparison proposes a choice between having a bunch of inveterate morons shouting at a funeral from 200 yards away or having 3,000 innocent people massacred for no good reason. I know which side of the fence I’m on, but you seem genuinely confused.
When you believe in mutually exclusive propositions, as we probably all do at some point, it results in what psychologists call cognitive dissonance (or what George Orwell called “doublethink”). As your brain does a mad scramble to try to compartmentalise your impending mental apocalypse, you will experience “dread, guilt, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, etc.”
Remember this the next time you’re talking to a religious person and they display any of those symptoms.
When Jerome translated the bible into common Latin in 382 AD, he confused the Hebrew words for “shining” and “horned”, so when Moses came down from the mountain, he was described in the only bible most people had access to as “horned”.
Much of Christian art from 400 AD to when it was finally dealt with in the Reformation depicts Moses in the fashion above, including Michaelangelo’s famous sculpture of Moses, bottom right.
The Hebrew word for “shining” is “karan” and the Hebrew word for “horned” is keren. In a language which had no indications for vowels, you can understand how a mistake like this could easily happen. It is an act of extraordinary scholarship that he managed to take long, long lists of consonants and turn it into something readable at all.
So the questions for our Christian friends are:
- Do you believe that Moses had horns?
- If you lived before they discovered this translation error, would you have believed that Moses had horns?
Honest answers will hopefully send them down the path of enlightenment.
Proving that something exists is a simple matter. Proving that something doesn’t exist is, for all practical purposes, impossible. As most Christians don’t seem to respond to bare logic, a much easier way to explain the difference is to ask them to disprove something they don’t believe in, and then apply that method to their god.
A tricksy grammatical word game is not a coherent argument.
No religious person is going to get this. It’s irrelevant even to most atheists.
Just stick to the simple “I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in God” and fill in the blanks later if you have to, which you almost never will.
I don’t think anyone should come to any conclusion based on the auto-complete function of a Google search. I mean I guess it’s “funny”, but there are plenty of reasons to think Christianity is stupid without resorting to this gibberish.
It’s even more disturbing than that. The reason God asked Adam to name the animals isn’t because God couldn’t think of any names; it’s a symbolic gesture from many early cultures as well as Hebraism, which underlines that Adam, and humans in general, now own animals.
To name something is to declare ownership. This is why parents name their children, and this is why wives take their husband’s name - it’s a transfer of ownership from the father to the new husband. It’s not even symbolic in many modern ceremonies; the father literally “gives the bride away” to the husband.
If you think that’s “charming” or “cute”, then you need to get your head cleaned out.
Religion is infantile in the most sincere sense of the term, in that it exports responsibility (and hence morality) to an external third party to whom you can only relate in a manner you don’t fully understand. In fact, the less you understand it, the more likely you are to trust it.
You know, like a child.
Those crazy Muslims insisting that their women cover their hair. Where would they get a crazy idea like that?
… oh.
