Not really. There is morality without religion.
Sure sometimes they vote against things i like based on their religion, sometimes for things i like based on it. Do you want to abridge their freedom and bar them form voting if its based on their God? Dont think i ever said religion gives us laws.

That fact that some people who label themselves as Christian have some un-Christ-like beliefs is the fault of basic human nature. If these people were secular atheists, one would expect they would hold the same loathsome beliefs. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on self-righteous hostile people. History shows that atheistic communists love to restrict the rights of others. They tend to view people as cattle. Currently, atheist NK leader Kim Jong-un may be the most murderous,evil person on earth. Maybe you like him since he is very logical in killing people who are a threat to him and starving half the population of his country.

Some uninformed people are surprised to learn that the whole concept of individual human rights in the US comes from Thomas Jefferson who based it on a belief in God. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” – The Preamble to the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson.Jan 5, 2011

Is that idea illogical?

The endowed by the creator part pretty much is.

I can't "like" this post, so I dunno how this works, +1 or something?

Sklansky and I agree on something, call the ****ing mayor.

d2_e4,

I would like you to reread this post, and then watch this short
youtube clip of Richard Dawkins explaining how the universe was
created by "nothing." Then I would like you to answer the question
as to who is the irrational one in the video clip, the bloviating atheist,
or the theists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v34QjYPuiEA

Then, I would like to kick your ass at chess.

I have confirmed this by thinking about it.

With all due respect to your formidable powers of reasoning, I'll stick with the genius and founding father of our democracy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence as being perfectly correct here. OTOH, you do have d2_e4 agreeing with you.

It's really amusing to me that your level of intellectual engagement has not shifted at all since the beginning of the thread. But it's also not at all surprising.

There are some people with whom it is pointless trying to debate on an intellectual level. For the most part, logic still eludes your grasp. You clearly lack sufficient capacity for analysis and introspection to construct a meaningful assessment of your own beliefs, let alone the beliefs of others.

At what point will you choose to actually engage in a logical thought process and rational discussion? Are you simply going to continue the path of maximal ignorance?

You mean the deist who was probably lying about the endowed by our creator? And if he actually believed that he was complete scum for owning slaves and not even freeing them upon his death.

Are you people just shamelessly doing ad hominems now? You could at least pretend to make a semblance of a reasonable argument.

In the immortal words of H.L. Mencken - "I respect the other fellow's politics and religion in the sense and to the extent that I respect his theory that his wife is beautiful, and his children smart".

It's a real shame the guy was an anti-democratic antisemite. He is eminently quotable.

I watched the first minute of this. Link me to the original version - you know, the one without the suspenseful music and other ridiculous editing, and I will respond to your question.

You should read "The God Delusion" by the way. It's a good book. As for kicking my ass at chess - I'm not very good, but if you'd like to play, sure.

North Korea is arguably the most religious country in the world

The big difference is that self-righteous atheists don't rally around some common belief and book, and seek to justify their loathsome opinions using such. If they did, well, they wouldn't be atheists, they'd be cultists.

Lots of atheists are cultists, these are not mutually exclusive categories. Or, more broadly, lots of atheists adopt ideologies, including ideologies organized around a common belief or book, that lead to loathsome opinions.

You aren't really making a point about religion or theism here so much as expressing a distrust of people who join organizations or movements.

And yet you're so upset when others don't engage themselves intellectually? Really? That's the best you've got?

Nah. If you were apathetic, you wouldn't be riled up enough to yell at the clouds. This seems much more like willful ignorance being reinforced by a sense of righteous anger.

It really seems that you want to feel better about yourself by blaming others.

They just rally around their own arrogance and sense of self-importance.

How can a reasonable person not believe in the theory of evolution? And if you are a scientist and don't believe in evolution then you should probably find another job.

Yeah, it just so happens that the subject of evolution makes it easy for the OP to almost prove his point IF he changed the word "religion" to "religions that deny evolution".

It's a massive mistake thinking that the Bible denies evolution.

The Buddhists say that there are two reasons for everything. Two different sets of rules that govern all existence. There is the standard 3D reasoning which gives us things like time and evolution. And then there is the 'spiritual' reasoning. Man was created by God, etc etc.

According to Buddhas logic our mind creates a 3D representation of whatever is happening in the spirit world. So, if in the spirit world there is an all powerful God which gave life to all beings, in the 3D world we would see some insanely powerful thing that created and sustains all life. The Sun then, would be our interpretation of this creator. The sky would be our perception of heaven. The earths core our perception of hell.

These two sets of rules do seem to work inline with physics as well, but I am by no means a scientist.

This is how I understand 'The Beginning'... Imagine there was a pool of amazing atoms which can do anything possible within time and space. Then, some God decides one day that he's going to put a fully aware human being into the atoms. In the instant that he placed the being in the pool, the pool would have to 'create' a past which could sustain a human. It would have to create air, gravity, suns moons and stars. All those amazingly fortunate things the have happened to make us appear might well have only happened because they are that which is needed to make us appear.

Both Einstein and Buddha both believed that without a conscious observer the 3D world would have no substance. If this logic is taken into consideration we can see that evolution does not disprove the Bible.

A literal reading of the OT is in contradiction with evolution.

You ramble about spiritualism and Buddhism and namedrop Einstein but you fail to make any logical argument in support of your claim.

I realise that there are many things in the bible that are not feasible in the physical world. What I am saying is that the physical world may not be the only 'world'.

There may be another which co-exists with this physical world... A 'non physical world' lol... A world where karma rules.

Perhaps it isn't the bible that's inaccurate. Perhaps all the rules like gravity, cause and effect, evolution. Perhaps they are all wrong at their root. Perhaps the entire physical world is just one piece of a far bigger puzzle.

I obviously am unsure about all this stuff. But ask yourself this... as logical people surely you must accept that there is some chance that the bible is, for the most part, true? And that you simply don't understand it.

Sure it might be so true but the same holds for pretty much any supernatural belief system and creation myth. Here's a bunch of creation myths, some more unlikely than others.

It's not really super natural...

Buddhism doesn't require any blind belief. Its not like the other religions. It's like a school of philosophy. It explains how the gods work etc etc. It explains the logic behind existence.

And so this is about as natural as anything could be. The problem is, that it's really difficult to understand the theory behind everything! It's not particularly complicated. But your mind rejects anything to do with it.

Many of those creation 'myths' could be true. I've not looked through them. But I have come to realise that there is more than one beginning.

"perhaps" and "maybe" arent evidence, or an argument