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The Forum > Article Comments > Humans do not need to comfort themselves with fairy tales > Comments

Humans do not need to comfort themselves with fairy tales : Comments

By Kelly O'Connor, published 1/2/2008

Atheism is not the destruction of the quest for meaning - it is the necessary starting point for the journey.

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One problem Kelly, it has never been comfortable to be a Christian.
Posted by GZA1312, Tuesday, 5 February 2008 12:42:03 PM
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While the concept of a human god is flawed,do not discount the achievements of those in our past who believed and exelled way beyond ordinary reality,giving us the physical comfort and consciousness of the present.

Face it, none of us knows for sure and that is what gives life it's edge,thus passion.
Posted by Arjay, Thursday, 7 February 2008 10:23:37 PM
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Kelly’s arguments:

-Christianity is mythological which implies the events recorded in the New Testament did not happen.

-Accepting the Christian truth claims is adolescent i.e. to be a fully fledged moral agent, religious claims to truth must be ruled out from the beginning.

-Humans are value creators, values are not discovered.

-Religious commitment is equivalent to the abdication of our duty to be intelligent, i.e. Christians do not think for themselves.

-Explicitly religious truth claims are “dogmatic” (in the pejorative sense of being antirational). Antireligious truth claims are not dogmatic.

-Atheists are distinguished from religious in that they are willing to scrutinize their beliefs.

-Christianity teaches human desires are dirty.

-Christian belief is an exercise in self delusion and is held contrary to the evidence.

-God’s presence is a “looming spectre” which restricts human freedom. His presence must be extinguished to experience genuine liberation.

-Christianity causes violence, holding Christian beliefs dehumanizes non-Christians. Evangelisation is an act of violence and is only ever used to disguise its true motive –power and greed.

-Ulterior motives characterize charitable works carried out by religious people.

-God is an “imaginary dictator.”

-There is no ultimate meaning of human life, only existence and whatever activities a person fills it with.

-Religion was a crutch to help us achieve our current level of development, it was merely a booster rocket to propel us into orbit.

-There are no answers, religion prevents the search for these non existent answers??

I would join the author’s crusade against Christianity except that she conceives a degenerate version of it.

Arguing with straw men is not the honour she ought to pay to the rationality she so highly values.

To be fair I think she is rejecting an inherited religion of her upbringing. Its true an authentic human life dedicated to truth is not one lived out of the inherited values of one’s parents, they have to be made our own as individuals.

The God of our childhood expects us to break inadequate models of Him as we grow, but we go too far when our iconoclasm becomes calumny.

Godbless Kelly
Posted by Martin Ibn Warriq, Thursday, 14 February 2008 4:52:47 PM
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"...Society will slowly become more and more moral..."

Go tell it to the Pakistanis, Burmese monks, Sudan refugees, Iraqis, Palestinians, victims of senseless shooting in unis, victims of rape and child abuse on a large scale never seen before.

Not only is AJ ignorant of the facts going round him, probably evolved the wrong way!
Posted by Philip Tang, Sunday, 17 February 2008 2:05:56 AM
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OK, so, people in the main have stopped beleiving in God. Which means people therefore believe WE are God.

If we are God (completely free to self-determine) then what is it we wish to determine? How does man's wish for ourself factor in the rest of creation. Should it, even?
Posted by K£vin, Monday, 25 February 2008 4:35:12 AM
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"...OK, so, people in the main have stopped beleiving in God. Which means people therefore believe WE are God...."

Sorry, Kevin -- no. There is NO God. None, Nada, Nix, Zero, Nothing. Not us, not anybody. You will never understand atheists until you can understand the idea that God does not exist. If you can't understand it then you can't possibly even argue against it.

As for the ever-growing Outrage Scoreboard (http://atheistwiki.wikispaces.com/Outrage+scoreboard), if anyone can find me documented evidence of outrages or violence committed over the same period by atheists, I am happy to put them up too. But I suspect the religious outrages will still outnumber them by an order of magnitude at least. PS: simply being rude to believers doesn't count.
Posted by Jon J, Monday, 25 February 2008 5:44:05 AM
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