Happy Atheist Forum

LGBT Hate crime bill passed

Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:33 am

by Ultima22689 (Posted Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:33 am)

Big Mac wrote:Feh, life is a game. Might as well kick people's feet from under you before they do it to you.

Or maybe set an example of not being a douche for our descendants so there will be less of them around in the future.

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woohoo for book burning!

Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:31 am

by Ultima22689 (Posted Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:31 am)
Did you begin posting after drinking again? You're going to get yourself banned saying ignorant crap like that.

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National Health Care

Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:30 am

by Ultima22689 (Posted Thu Nov 12, 2009 8:30 am)

Big Mac wrote:We are so screwed if this shit passes. You think it's awesome now but think about the cost and application of it. TO keep it afloat they would have to kill off people. Fuck the government run healthcare. Other countries who have had it have dead babies and old people. Coincidence, I think not. AMERICA RULES, REST OF THE WORLD DROOLS!! LUYLZ!!

Say what? Links plox? No one is going to be killed off to support this plan.

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Catholic Church; force for good? Intelligence squared debate

Thu Nov 12, 2009 6:44 am

by Recusant (Posted Thu Nov 12, 2009 6:44 am)
I want to add my thanks to you, SSY, for posting this. I enjoyed the debate, though Ann Widdecombe MP has a voice that could drive one to drink. She's what I would call "a real piece of work." I did a little research, and discovered the reason she converted to Catholicism is because the C of E decided to allow women into the priesthood. Amazing! She also seems to have a problem with the gays. (Doesn't think much of them, apparently, and has voted repeatedly in opposition to equal rights for them.) I could go on, but no doubt you, SSY, already know all this and I don't want to bore the other members of the forum. However, I'd be willing to bet that you folks over there will be seeing a lot more of her, since she seems to have been quite powerful in the Conservative ranks, and the last I heard, it sounded like they'll be taking over soon. (She says she's going to stand down at the next election, which I suspect means that she'll popping up as a talking head, since she already has her foot in the door in the world of television. Something to look forward to eh?)

SSY wrote:...the final vote decider I found very surprising, did anyone else not expect that result?

As a matter of fact I was pretty surprised. I'll say no more; don't want to be a spoiler.

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Bible contradictions...

Thu Nov 12, 2009 1:22 am

by LoneMateria (Posted Thu Nov 12, 2009 1:22 am)

Whitney wrote:
taylor5172 wrote:guess not.. figures..deleting my account now
\

...chill. You gave everyone a whole half hour to post. btw, you can't delete your account.

We need a smiley to show this type of failure.

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Michael Newdow slams Foxnews host on Pledge/under God issue

Wed Nov 11, 2009 5:50 pm

by McQ (Posted Wed Nov 11, 2009 5:50 pm)
All she did was shout him down, misrepresent the Constitution, Supreme Court, Atheists, Christians, History, and simultaneously embarrass the Human Race, and intelligent beings everywhere.

I fail to see the problem.

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What's on your mind today?

Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:59 pm

by Pineapple (Posted Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:59 pm)
Huzzah! I got my gym grade omitted! My GPA is now a 4.3 (out of a max possibility of 4.5)!

but unfortunately I have to keep the 3 detentions.

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Does being a Vegan have to do with religion?

Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:46 pm

by Whitney (Posted Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:46 pm)
Does your Christian friend happy to be Seventh Day Adventist? I forgot why, but their denomination views veganism as god's ideal. I think it might have something to do with them thinking humans didn't eat meat till after the fall of man...but I could be wrong; it's been a long time since I attended that church and I only went for a year while dating a member.

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Why are religions useful?

Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:22 pm

by April (Posted Wed Nov 11, 2009 12:22 pm)
I have another reason why. The first group that I opened (I am an Aflac agent) was a company called Mother of Our Savior. They supplied Catholic churches with candles, movies, pamphlets, rosaries, ect. I made some money off of them and they would not exist without religion

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Was YHVH a Drug Induced Vision?

Wed Nov 11, 2009 4:18 am

by Recusant (Posted Wed Nov 11, 2009 4:18 am)
I did a search for this subject here, but couldn't find anything on it, which surprises me. It's kind of hard to come up with the right search terms for something like this, so my apologies if it's already been posted...

Benny Shanon, professor of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writes about his hypothesis that Moses was partaking of entheogenic (read "sacramental hallucinogen") drugs when he "met" YHVH. OK, professor Shanon has been conducting an in-depth investigation by taking ayahuasca himself "over 160 times," so he might not be the best source.
Still it's a very interesting hypothesis, and he does have some anecdotal reports, as well as his own experiences to give at least a shred of credence to his idea. The thing is, he says that certain compounds trigger something in the human psyche which results in an experience many relate as "seeing god." And there are a couple of plants that grow in the area that the meeting with YHVH supposedly took place, which contain these compounds. Not only that, but they are a known part of the pharmacopeia of indigenous inhabitants of the region.
This hypothesis makes at least as much sense as others I've heard, and more than some.

You can read about it here, or if you would like to go to the source, you can read a PDF of the original article on this site.

The abstract of the original Time and Mind article I link to above:

A speculative hypothesis is presented according to which the ancient Israelite religion was associated with the use of entheogens (mind-altering plants used in sacramental contexts). The hypothesis is based on a new look at texts of the Old Testament pertaining to the life of Moses. The ideas entertained here were primarily based on the fact that in the arid areas of the Sinai peninsula and Southern Israel there grow two plants containing the same psychoactive molecules found in the plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew Ayahuasca is prepared. The two plants are species of Acacia tree and the bush Peganum harmala. The hypothesis is corroborated by comparative experiential-phenomenological observations, linguistic considerations, exegesis of old Jewish texts and other ancient Mideastern traditions, anthropological lore, and ethnobotanical data.

There will never be conclusive (or perhaps any) proof for this idea, but I dig it man.

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Official* HAF Video Game Thread

Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:25 am

by karadan (Posted Wed Nov 11, 2009 3:25 am)
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 is amazing.

Too..many..great..games..out..at..the..moment...

Btw, a new car i painted in Forza 3:

http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd16 ... 0/lg71.jpg

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2nd Annual Texas Freethought Convention coming in November!

Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:50 pm

by Whitney (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 8:50 pm)

Squid wrote:
Whitney wrote:Squid, I'll be getting into town friday evening if that works better for you. However, I won't have a car because I'm riding with friends so we'd need to meet at the hotel bar.

Hotel bar? Sweet. I have to make a run to Cuero Friday evening and back to SA so I may not be back in town Friday evening until about 9, if that's cool. But I'm up late on the weekends anyway. You can give me a buzz or I can text you or whatever works.

No problem, 9 is not that late for me. I'll also be in town Saturday night.

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Is God Intelligent?

Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:46 pm

by joeactor (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 6:46 pm)

LARA wrote:I'll have to find a way to check out Black Adder, joeactor.

Season 2 is the best, closely followed by Season 1 and Season 3 (skip 4 in my opinion)

Glad you're able to post!

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Christ the Magician

Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:54 pm

by LoneMateria (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:54 pm)
Very good point about how magic is condemned in the bible. There is a ton of strange stuff about this article. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be a hoax. Maybe these people wanted to sell that artifact for more money so they engraved that on the cup. Who knows. However even if this is disproved (like the shroud of turan) many people will ignore it and say its a matter of faith and that it still furthers their belief in Jesus. It's a lose lose fight on so many levels, but its just sad its over something as non-convincing.

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Night Owl

Tue Nov 10, 2009 11:02 am

by LoneMateria (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 11:02 am)

karadan wrote:
LoneMateria wrote:I normally am up to about 2 in the morning ... well I was but my sleep schedule got screwed up around daylight savings ... last night I could barely manage to keep my eyes open past midnight.

Heh, i know what you mean. I literally got jet lag this year when the clocks went back.

I would consider this Jet Lag if it wasn't my grandparents fault. They were visiting so I was getting up early and driving to my dads to visit them and do things with them. I consider what happened to me (i'm pretty much adjusted now) I went on old folks time . It was worse when my gf and I went down south to visit them last winter. We got to the point where we were up at 7A.M. eastern time (we live in Central time) when we are used to getting up at 10 Central time. That was a more severe case of old folks time but still .

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Hi from Michigan

Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:54 am

by Whitney (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 10:54 am)
Hi Jen, welcome to HAF.

Have you tried meetup.com ?

As far as the UU church goes, I do have an atheist friend who attends and know of UU ministers (or whatever they call them) who are atheists...the only complaint I've heard about them from the atheist side is that it promotes all beliefs as equally valid. This pluralistic view is unlikely to appeal to most atheists and I can only assume most atheists who attend/lead UU churches view it as an attempt at coexisting or they simply have no better option.

We have UU here as well as the Church of Freethought....I was thinking of maybe starting to attend the UU church once I had kids who were old enough to play with friends but the CoF is like the UUs minus the pluralism and basically acts as a community for freethinkers; so now I know that unless I have to move I won't have to go to the UU church to find addl social activities for my future kids. You could start a CoF in Michigan...but it would be a lot of work. I'd suggest starting a meetup of your own, if necessary, first.

For Camp Quest...many of the camps have camperships (from looking at the site it appears Michigan does too). You could contact them and find out how to apply.

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Christ On the Cross

Tue Nov 10, 2009 7:02 am

by Justme (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 7:02 am)
Beside others, Jesus had to die to be able to pop up from the dead again and to demonstrate that way the claimed god-status. (How convenient for the preachers.)

1. It doesn't show anything. It's just an old story with no evidence.

Let's assume he acutally was a real person and the crossing happend.

2. It only shows, that it made the appearence as if he would have died and was rosen from the dead later on. Uri Geller & Co. can do that too. (And those days they didn't have youtube to check it out. )

Let's further assume it was no trick on his side.

3. Could be, he still was alive, maybe just clinically dead - hope that a proper english expression . Later on he used his supposed dead for producing a nice miracle for his fellow people and to vanish then from the puplic in order to run away from the romans. You find people who believe he travelled to India. They even "know" where he lived there I think.

Let's assume he actually was dead and came back to life.

4. That's still not good enough. It shows, he was dead and came back to life. Although this is something reallyreally astonishing, it does surely not prove the god-claims. He could have been any kind of supernatural being, maybe even the devil, or a demon, or a vampire or whatever crazy stuff you can imagine. Or maybe he wasn't but he had a supernatural helper. This helper could have been god, but that doesn't automatically make Jesus a god too.

In summery: Nothing would be crazy enough, that you wouldn't find someone who believes it. Guess that's faith ...

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Our ATHEIST billboard in Lakeland, Florida

Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:31 am

by karadan (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 5:31 am)

LoneMateria wrote:
Ninteen45 wrote:I can imagine rush hour there!

Nathaniel Thomas said he respects the group's right to free speech but still wishes the billboard wasn't there. "We've got a lot of churches in this neighborhood, a lot of black churches in this neighborhood, and we don't need that," he said.

he he.

Why does he specifically denote black churches?

I wondered that, too.

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Difference between belief and agreement

Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:47 am

by AlP (Posted Tue Nov 10, 2009 12:47 am)
I appreciate your outburst Renegnicat.

I've been thinking about this some more. I think that calling something a belief is reification error. Believing seems to me to be behaving or thinking in a certain way. In the instant in time that one believes something, one is agreeing with oneself or someone else.

Sometimes we talk about "an agreement". I don't think this is necessarily an error. An agreement usually involves a future obligation or right. I think humans have probably been forming agreements for a long time. "The agreement" itself is intangible from a detached standpoint but real enough from a human perspective. An agreement, while abstract, has time value. It's like insurance.

Belief on the other hand is slippery. I'm not sure what "a belief" is. A belief has no substance at all. Specifically, there is no long term obligation. It is something that has a tenuous existence in the instant of time that it is thought or expressed. In human terms, what is it other than a mistake? Is there some value I'm missing here?

I hope this adds some substance to an OP that was admittedly rather vague. The idea still needs work though... =(

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Noah's ark...the great myth.

Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:13 pm

by Pineapple (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:13 pm)
I think it's funny how Christians take all of the parables in the Talmud seriously. Even to most Jewish people today, those are what they are: old myths. Passing off Noah's Ark as anything more than a parable is like trying to pass off the creation of man as having been done by Prometheus.

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Hello from USA

Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:57 am

by Renegnicat (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 11:57 am)
Go ahead and jump right in, let's see how good your intellect is... *Muahhahahaha!*

*ahem* Welcome to the forum. This place is bustling with ideas about the big questions, so don't afraid to challenge ours and submit your own.

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scouts and kids

Mon Nov 09, 2009 8:24 am

by Tanker (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 8:24 am)
I'm not a parent but I was a boy once...and in the scouts even. I can tell you what my mom did. My mom never told my brother or I what or how to believe. She would answer any and all of our questions openly and honestly and never tried to talk us out of anything that was not overtly unhealty or dangerous. I was a scout when I was a kid, even vaguely a christian and all I can remember was her being supportive and again answering any questions I had. In fact my mother was so noncomital about religion I didn't learn she was an Atheist until I was 21 or 22 (im 26 now). I had always figured she belived in a god just not a religion. The end result of my brother and I being left in a religious vacume when we were growing up was we were forced to think for ourselves and use our own unbiased (as far as that goes anyhow) opinions regarding religion. Independently, as my brother and I weren't close, we found Atheism to be the most reasonable and logical position.

Go figure when left to decide for ourselves without indoctrination Atheism was the most reasonable.

As for the dealing with the overt Christian nature of the scouts I would go with the old Atheist standard and not volunteer inforamation on you beliefs and be as vague as possible when asked.

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Atheist image dump

Mon Nov 09, 2009 2:54 am

by Rastelin (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 2:54 am)
This was to good to pass on. Proves the point on religion doesn't it...

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bible stories and holidays

Mon Nov 09, 2009 2:18 am

by April (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 2:18 am)
Does your kids know the Bible stories? My really doesn't . Today he asked me how Easter started. I asked him how he thinks it started. He said, "well, I think that people thought that there are not enough holidays with candy. They made up a new one where a bunny brings candy". DH agreed and said that he was right Easter is all about candy. I then told him that some people believe that Easter is the day when Jesus rose from the dead. Others believe that that never happens. Mostly Easter is just another holiday where the family gets together and eats.

Bible references come up quite a bit it seems. A couple of years we were delivering food to a food pantry at an organization called Noah's Ark. On the wall was a mural of the ark with the animals. The kids (we were with the scouts) were shown the mural. The lady showing it asked the boys to tell her about it. Issac actually asked who it was (oops). All of the other kids were able to tell her the whole story. This is just an example. I need to find those (yes, there has been several) picture Bibles that my mom has given the kids and let them learn about the stories. I am wanting them to learn the stories as stories.

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Camp Quest

Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:27 am

by April (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:27 am)
I am really interested in Camp Quest. If the money is there for us this summer I will probably be sending Issac. I will probably not be the TX location, even though it is tempting since we have family in the Dallas area.

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i need a job.

Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:04 am

by April (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 1:04 am)
Well, you will have to get your insurance license first. The test is hard and the price will vary from state to state. Indiana's was $95 when I took it 4 years ago. The job requires a lot of cold calling, which sucks. The hardest thing is to get past the company owner. Once you present to the employees the policies sell themselves. About 60% will buy. The commission is 40% of the yearly premiums. The first year is really hard. It was a month and a half before I made anything. I was actually spending money on new clothes,a gps, gas... Once you get things starts the payout is great. Once you have been their for 12 months you will start to get renewal checks.

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HAF Offical Facebook/Myspace/Other Thread

Mon Nov 09, 2009 12:58 am

by quizlixx (Posted Mon Nov 09, 2009 12:58 am)
I made a facebook account after much pressure from friends. I love it. I need to add my HAFriends.
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=quizl ... 0086933..1

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Jesus can Save You...

Sun Nov 08, 2009 11:42 pm

by jrosebud (Posted Sun Nov 08, 2009 11:42 pm)
A good portion of those who aren't hurting anyone with their religious beliefs are, in reality, scarring children with tales of Hell or voting down same-sex marriages. As someone who grew up with loving, peaceful parents who raised me in the Catholic religion, I can attest that I was harmed substantially.

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Camp Quest Texas 2010

Sun Nov 08, 2009 11:24 pm

by jrosebud (Posted Sun Nov 08, 2009 11:24 pm)
That's not really my thing, but thanks.

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Freethought Convnetion - San Antonio (see you there?)

Sun Nov 08, 2009 5:23 pm

by jrosebud (Posted Sun Nov 08, 2009 5:23 pm)
Next time I'll search the events section before asking for more info.

I *really* want to go, but my daughter's school fall fest is that day. Maybe we can go early and then I can skip out.

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