Posts by Stephen Judd
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That is very well put and how I feel too, Jackie.
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Dear fellow atheists: do you read Dinosaur Comics? Cos that one's gold.
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Are many of our regulars also Usenet veterans?
I am, yes. Early 90s. I lost my taste for Usenet some time around 98 or 99, I think, after the signal to noise ratio decreased beyond my tolerance. PAS actually does remind me of the better times on, say, soc.culture.new-zealand, for sure.
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I think that Darwinian struggle may have some unintended consequences, Rich, at least as far as contentious issues go. Certainly I have had my rhetorical arse soundly (albeit deservedly) kicked when venturing a half-formed opinion, and that makes me a little bit wary about posting musing comments.
If other people feel the same way, then there might be less diversity of viewpoint in some threads because only a few commenters have the logical chops, the information, and the fortitude to put a sound case.
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Um, is that like discussing the Ugandan situation? You may just have invented my new favourite euphemism.
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I suspect Pratchett is going to lead to a generation of atheists. Small Gods is virtually an atheist manifesto, but in general there's a lot of sly digging at the foolishness of organised religion contrasted with the sense of trust in oneself and ones community.
And I was totally thinking of Hogfather when Gio brought up the tooth fairy.
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In my personal experience there's certainly more empirical evidence for the tooth fairy. That God guy is a massive disappointment -- the tooth fairy delivers.
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My difficulty with this is far more rational people than I have believed. Should I think lessor of them because of this?
You know, lots of great thinkers believed some really odd stuff -- Newton for example was an alchemist and a mystic as well as being a great mathematician and scientist. I have no trouble both admiring Newton the mathematician and scientist, and thinking that Newton the alchemist and mystic was frankly a bit of a loon.
Our generation has the 'luxury of disbelief', because it just doesn't seem relevant in this 'world in which we live'.
No. Many previous generations of our ancestors saw the consequences of violent sectarian strife and created constitutional structures to enshrine freedom of conscience. It has nothing to do with "relevance" and everything to do with not having belief backed by violence or the threat of violence.
Freedom of conscience is not a luxury, it is a necessity.
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if we must respect these attention seeking people for their active non-belief, surely we have to extend the same respect to those who have belief. Otherwise we are just being bigoted.
Bear in mind I gave the campaign $20 because I find it a hilarious (if immature) jape...
No, the situations aren't equivalent. If I understand you correctly, you seem to be arguing that certain kinds of rationally unjustified belief (religion) should enjoy the same sort of respect as a rationally justified one, and I can't agree with that. The only way your position would make sense is if you thought that atheism is also an rationally unjustified belief -- which I also can't agree with. I don't want to have a big argument about that, because I'm sure we can bore the pants off everyone and it's not as though it's new ground for anyone who's thought about atheism before. But anyway...
... if I did grant that atheism and belief are positions somehow equivalently worthy of privilege or respect, well, the country is filled with unselfconscious manifestations of religious belief, which I am expected to tolerate and accept. Some of those manifestations attack me (and believers of other faiths), telling me that I'm wrong, evil, going to hell, sinful, shallow, inadequate...
By contrast, non-believers don't usually make any particular demonstration -- obviously, since we don't believe in anything, there isn't anything to demonstrate. We are defined by what we don't do.
("Hi Stephen, it was great not to see you in church/at the mosque/in the temple yesterday!")
We're invisible. This is just a little reminder from some of us that we're here, there are quite a few of us and (I mean this lovingly) we think the rest of you are a bit silly.
My only reservation with the campaign is that it's quite a bit of money to collect for such an abstract purpose when there are lots of people in need, but then again, the same could be said about church tithes and collection plates, only more so.
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lack of options for Pacific New Zealanders to send remittances.
I heard a long piece about this issue on Laidlaw's Sunday programme on National Radio a few months ago. Someone was definitely investigating just that. I'm sorry my memory is vague, but I suspect that if you wrote to RNZ about the programme you could get a useful response.