I really don't care how or why Christians seem to need to attack people as a group, no logic there, so I just won't play until there is something a little more specific anyway. Or is it just too difficult to just say I am an atheist and you guys aren't ... and go on to something worth discussing?

PHILOSOPHY IS MADE UP OF QUESTIONS THAT MAY NEVER BE ANSWERED … BUT RELIGION IS MADE UP OF ANSWERS THAT MAY NEVER BE QUESTIONED.

The "New Atheism" is very different from the traditional atheism of earlier times--strikingly so in fact.

I'm not doubting you're one Boobz and that's fine.

Interesting though, "religious people" are all the same.  How about we're individuals instead of the labels?  It's a lot easier to talk then.

I do not view all or most Christians as anything besides misguided individuals perhaps. However, I do consider all Catholics (Muslims) as chipped from the same RCCC (?) mold so to speak. How people deal with religion on their own is their 'problem' as it was mine. Only I solved the equations well enough to convince me to take a stand for freedom and reason. We might as well just talk about "women or men in general", or  "Jews or Muslims in general", or "religious folk in general", or "Catholics in general", or hell, why talk about any individual at all when we could just be general about things and have fun like this, hahaha. As stated before I often use “religion” when I really mean “RCC” … as depicted in this clip from a ‘strong atheist’ for sure. Not much general about him but this is my view of the RCC ... and it has little to do with religion.

Your women and men analogy is a good one.  If you talk about them in an intrinsic sense, i.e., biological/anthropomorphically--then there isn't much of a "general" sense.  Outside of that context though, "men" and "women" are quite often quite general terms in application.  The same is true of atheism or Christianity or any other sort of belief system/organization.

And I don't view all or most atheists as anything besides misguided individuals perhaps.

Sorry--couldn't help that.

 

OK ... then how about generally describing this "Atheist Belief System" ... where does one go to become an atheist or to learn atheism? Myself, I went to the RCC ... and look where I ended up, hahaha.

That's actually a really good point.  In fact, there are atheist "churches that you can find in the phone book--if you live in the right area anyway and usually in big cities.  Most prominent are "Freethinker" meetings or area websites (there are hundreds easily).

They provide not only discussion meetings but presentations of science as well as rebuttals and defenses/attacks for non-Atheists and occasionally get involved in local campaigns with billboards, commercials or court cases.

Not dissimilar from the "Christian Science reading rooms" in a lot of ways.  Many new atheists enter there and go from their old belief system straight to the views of the group they hook up with.

 

Sorry, I should have made my real question easier to find. You can go online and learn just about anything you want ... ANY subject … and most especially religion. I don't think many go there to become religious and that applies to atheists as well.

Freethinker organizations are not religious institutions. They are non religious groups which provide a meeting place to exchange ideas and create "community".  Although churches do provide community and a place to meet others they certainly do not have a monopoly on such things.

Atheists who go to Freethinker groups/events do not go there to change their "belief system" which starts the same and is only changed if they decide to become a theist. There is only one belief/disbelief involve and not some system as you erroneously believe.

 

Freethinking

adj.

1.

inclined to forms one's own opinions rather than depend upon authority,

One becomes an atheist by choosing to be an atheist...by choosing to deny belief in Almighty God. 

But why do some make this choice?   

Paul C. Vitz is a psychology professor at New York University. He writes in a Jan. 2000 New Oxford Review article, that it was Freud who inadvertently developed a rationale for understanding the rejection of God.

Vitz calls it the "defective father hypothesis" and says it is far from a universal explanation. In his essay on Leonardi da Vinci, 

Freud writes that "psycho analysis which has taught us the intimate connection between the father complex and belief in God, has shown us that the personal god is logically nothing but an exalted father, and daily demonstrates to us how youthful persons lose their religious belief as soon as the authority of the father breaks down." 

Freud makes the claim that once a child or youth is disappointed in or loses respect for his earthly father, belief in the Heavenly Father becomes impossible. Vitz' book, Faith of the Fatherless, covers 15 major historical atheists including Nietzshe, David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Camus, Thomas Hobbes, Arthur Schopenhaurer, Voltaire, Samuel Butler, and H.G. Wells. He says in every case, there is a weak, dead or abusive father.

  

   

 

 

 

"Free thinker" ; "free thought" are nice sounding phrases  that atheist sloganeers have played like a harp ever since the 19th century.

Whether you accept it or not, "free thought" is an absurdity, as thought is not free; it is subject to the law of thought. If 2 x 2 = 4, we are not free to say it equals 5. If right is right and wrong is wrong, one is not free to say that right is wrong or that wrong is right. Your thought is not free. What is free is your will, your power to reckon correctly or incorrectly, to do what you know to be right or wrong.

Now, if by 'free thought" you mean freedom of inquiry, of investigation to learn the truth of the matter studied, then no reasonable person would disagree. But the question of freedom of inquiry is not in the minds of advocates of "free thought". They mean "freedom" to deny God and the moral law as interpreted by true religion. That's what "free thought" has always been about. 

"Free thinkers" invariably assume that the intellect of religious persons, especially Catholics, is enslaved because reason  and Faith is the starting point of their study and acceptance of belief in the existence of God; where they claim to demand to be shown before believing. 

When these "free thinkers" send their children to school, they do so with the command that their little ones do what they did, accept upon faith, upon the authority of their teachers, the belief that one plus one equals two, and two plus two equals four, and so forth and so on. By doing so, in later life, they were able to build a lemonade stand, sell x amount of lemonade for 50 cents a cup and determine how much they earned. 

Are the minds of those children free? No...they are bound for life to the arithmetic they accepted from their teachers on faith.

But objection is raised from "free thinkers" when the same principle, the same process, is followed in the sphere of true religion.

Children are sent to Catholic schools where they learn to make proper religious and moral as well as material judgments. There they accept upon faith, through the authority of human and Divine teachers, belief in the one Eternal God, Later there comes to them the understanding that by logical reasoning from effect to cause, the mind ultimately comes to the First Cause, God. The religious child grows up believing that God made the world; whereas the "free thinking" child grows up to believe that the world or some primordial mist from which the world evolved came from nobody in the land of nowhere.

  

 

 

That depends on how literal as opposed to how accurate you want to be in defining "religious".

Never said they did.  I said that's where many pick up their thinking--it's handed to them pre-developed by whatever view is most vocal or prominent in the meetings they attend.  Not everyone who visits a Freethinker's meeting goes there as an already decided atheist--many do decide after going and hearing atheist views.  Not every Freethinker's meeting is as sanitized of inadvertent or intentional dogma as you like to think either.  Some (not all or even most) are radically pro-active in atheist evangelism/apologetics.

I've attended meetings myself.

Atheism used to be pretty easily defined as strictly a non-belief in God.  It isn't that way anymore other than at the purely non-empirical level.  It is a movement now as well.

I'll stick with Websters myself . If you wish to make up your own definitions at will to fit into some preconceived narrative that's up to you. In any case don't expect it to do anything but strip even more credibility from your fairy tales.

There certainly are various movements within the overall collective of atheists, however the collective is not a movement in itself. I guess your  "us against the rest" mentality doesn't allow you to see the difference.

 

 

Troll.  Nice.  How about another?

Smoothseas is right here. I myself a devout atheist have never been to whatever meetings you referenced so maybe it is just a religious thing. I believe that most people who refrain from religious propaganda go to the online sources for material to help represent their views and to support their own arguments. The Christians have had 2,000 years to make up their ridiculous arguments all of which are a few button clicks away ... but this of course this is only rightly acceptable for religious folk, go figure. One of my biggest complaints with religion in general (hahaha) is that they appear to be the most bigoted people I know. Everything is fine by them ... just as long as there is no oppositional research being done ... those of course are just atheists deviously plotting to do what exactly ... ??? In my mind, it is to bring some truth into the dispute for a change.

Of course there are. 20th and 21st century (Modern) Atheism has many facets, many manifestations, components and types. 

Atheists, at least the militant ones, are very seriously pushing, both behind the scene and up front in our face, a philosophico-political system which is expressly atheistic. 

Modern Atheism wants man at the center, apex and origin of all values, morals, etc. Modern Atheism has man as his own ruler busy devising a philosophico-political system that is complete without God. They want a civilization without God. 

Militant Atheists' main goal is to remove Almighty God and every vestige of authentic Christianity from all institutions and public life. For the most part, they have government, academia, the media and Hollywood working on their side. The only entity that is and has always been and will always be in their way of accomplishing this is the Catholic Church. 

 

 

We are talking about what is true for the common good for society, are we not? Tell me, then, what's true or good about Atheisitic Communism and Godless Socialism?