LONGECITY

Elijah do you have anything at all to comment about the videos and how they accuse religion/Christianity/Catholics as being delusions and their faith being destructive and poisionous?

An interesting point and approach from the author of God is not Great in that he merely asks followers of religious faiths to keep to themself and to not push their views on to others. He suggests that it is the forced attempts to instill their views so strongly onto others that is the problem.

Your thoughts? Elijah or luv2increase?

I agree 100 percent that the world's religions are destructive and poisionous and their thinking is deluded when they reject the the true teachings and practices found in the Scriptures. But atheism will be worse once it gets it a strong foothold in the world and begins to more openly force its thinking on others as one of the respondents to Dawkin's ideas pointed out in the video.

I'm starting to wonder if this whole God delusion idea of Dawkin's and others might not be another one of those conspiracies to further the agenda of the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industry to oppress and enslave a larger segment of society in the interests of capitalism. What do you think?

"A Look at Regent University"
http://www.pbs.org/m...2007/watch.html
(available for download here: http://www.pbs.org/m..._regent_480.mov )

A video on the connection between Regent University, who is set up by fundie Pat Robertson, and government figures. Kind of scary.

Dawkins on his lecture in Second Life and other aspects of virtual reality:
http://www.mediaplay...2b-841aeabd20e7

Not really that religious, but interesting nonetheless.

Elijah do you have anything at all to comment about the videos and how they accuse religion/Christianity/Catholics as being delusions and their faith being destructive and poisionous?

An interesting point and approach from the author of God is not Great in that he merely asks followers of religious faiths to keep to themself and to not push their views on to others. He suggests that it is the forced attempts to instill their views so strongly onto others that is the problem.

Your thoughts? Elijah or luv2increase?

Ill kick in here as well. It’s interesting what you say, what I can’t stand about biblical debate is when people start arguing about things that are not actually in there. i.e. the idea of going to heaven when you die, or the idea of going to hell when you die, neither of these ideas are presented in the bible as the majority of Christian religions present them. Even the idea of the trinity is a heavily contentious issue, decided by the Council of Mysia in 450AD; their 'biblical evidence' for any of that tradition is non existent. But anyway.

No, you should never push your beliefs on other people; the Catholics are described in the apocalyptic times as being the mother whore and the other religions that came out of that as being their prostitute daughters. Their entire line can be traced back to Babylon, and Babylon can be traced back to Cains first religion he set up in the times of Adam and eve (you know, Cain, the guy who killed able, they were Adam and Eves first children... off to a nice healthy start)

Admittedly, I do like Elijah's approach to the bible, to use it as a means of living a good and healthy life. To defend it when asked to, bot not to try and shove it down peoples throats and make them believe. People always have a choice and what they believe should never be believed so because of fear of the alternative. That’s a very healthy realisation of biblical teaching; to then take that teaching and tell other people what they should and should not do is again another matter. Using 'biblical evidence' to stop scientists doing what they do is also not as acceptable as you are impinging on others liberty to do what they need to do to help others. They are different viewpoints. Don’t destroy religion, just don’t let fanatics get in the way of you doing things you want to... they can disagree all they want, but I thought that’s what made up a democracy..? Different views, different opinions they are all good for creating a good society as long as no one goes crazy. This, unfortunately, happens.

CBC News interview with Dawkins where he talks about US presidential politics, and other stuff:

Go Richard Dawkins!

The Price of Atheism (story on 20/20):




Also available at: http://www.glumbert..../priceofatheism

Daniel Dennett on Danish TV (intro is in Danish with English subtitles, but main interview is in English):

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:




I love his Darwinian interpretation of religion and how/why it propagates.

Dawkins on his lecture in Second Life and other aspects of virtual reality

And my already high respect for Dawkins moves up one more notch. Most people half his age don't have nearly the grasp on technology he does. Even more so, I loved the speculation on artificial life in second life. I'd briefly participated in an ongoing project in Terminus there, before giving up on the platform as too limited for even the fairly simple emergent behavior I was hoping for. Still, that said, it's quite fun to see what people have been able to do with alife there in what amounts to overglorified javascript.

And, as far as I know, there actually are more than a couple churches run there by ordained priests and ministers at the moment.