Traditional Americans are losing their nation...

oldsoldier wrote: Believe me folks having been in combat,"miricles" happen all the time.

eternal life...

CarbineKid wrote: FreeEnterprise wrote: eternal life... I'm sure someone is going to ask you to prove that. I for one, would love to see the evidence.

Faith man, faith.  /s

I find it strange how people point to perfectly explainable events as miracles.

OS: I hope you aren't equating canopy openings to miracles. It has been shown time after time, a canopy will open based on its design, how it is packed and the conditions of opening. I can tell you that the quality of all of my openings are predictable based on how I pack and what I'm doing when I open. I know when the canopy I packed is going to open 180 on me or open with a strong right turn. Is it a miracle that I've had one malfunction among all my skydives? No. If my packjob is that shoddy, I redo it. No divine intervention involved.

As for the the battlefield, you will find no guiding forces protecting you from harm. The bullet that barely missed your head came from a gun pointed in a specific direction when fired into wind conditions that would be no different whether or not that gun is fired. The gun's position is based on the opposing soldier's position which is based on a billion factors.

Ok, so if that soldier had spun his rifle around a little bit faster, you'd have a hole where your brain once was. Provided the low probability that a quickly spun rifle will put a bullet in you, is it a miracle when the shot he fire misses or is it a miracle when the lower probability happens and the next shot severs the femoral artery of a civilian running to cover behind you? Whose miracle is it if the mortar lands in your buddy's foxhole and not yours?

Even with current technology, we can cover many of the factors going into combat deaths. We do it all the time with forensics. The only purpose served by the idea of a miracle is to make people feel better than others, to feel blessed by the god they believe in. It serves only to make people complacant and to reduce their search for the true causes behind events in their lives.


Edited by Tolgak - 23 October 2009 at 7:03pm

OS, I really don't see how that concludes that there is a god looking out for us?

I understand its probably alot easier to say we are atheists in this situation, but that doesn't make our points any less valid. It was easier to fall in during the inquisition, doesn't automatically equate to all those people being wrong either. Fear =/= god.

oldsoldier wrote: Tolgak: Technically you are correct, but my little "Hail Mary's" and crossing myself helped the mind during these combat situations, and when you are flying into combat, rounds striking the helicopter, 15 seconds till skids down, do not tell me a little prayer will not be filling your mind, "Please god, don't let me get hit." If you say No I will not be praying, you are lying and never expierienced a true stressfull life or death situation.

I am not doubting that religious rituals have no mental benefit to those who seek comfort in them. I'm stating that the words you say will not affect your outcome. If a bullet is headed your way, crossing yourself wont change its trajectory, it wont put up a magic shield in front of you, it wont make your body armour any more effective.

BTW, I have been in several true life or death situations. I have nearly bled to death (and have the scars to prove it). I have nearly suffocated due to an aspirin allergy attack. I have had a parachute (poorly packed by me) refuse to open, on a rig with no automatic activation device, with a reserve handle that took me 4 seconds to get a grip on, to eventually open at about 1000 feet. These events span from my most religious condition to a few months ago, as a non-believing, non-religious person. Not once, from the onset to the aftermaths of those situations, when I genuinely thought it was the end, did I call out to a deity.

I went screaming and yelling to my mom and relatives, I gestured to my parents call an ambulance, I cut away the malfunction and pulled the reserve. The little reflection I had on those situations consisted of little more than "I'd better not do that again."

I don't seek comfort in the protection of what I know doesn't have an effect on my life. In dire situations, I look for solutions first and comfort last. The comfort comes in the form of my personal thoughts, desire to live, and companionship of other people (who, unlike the god you claim exists, can talk back to me.

Again, I am not arguing that people don't seek comfort in religious rituals. I'm saying that I never have. EDIT and that it's an ignorant lie to say that others are not the same way.

oldsoldier wrote: Soldiers are by nature are a religious lot in times of stress and battle, there are no atheists in a foxhole.

I think you might want to read up on Pat Tillman's final words.


Edited by Tolgak - 23 October 2009 at 7:50pm

Wow, quite a few ridiculous things said since my last entry here. FE, you never cease to amaze. We really should turn these discussions into TV shows so we can at least make some money in the process of killing all this time

So basically Atheists can't possibly be moral people because they don't believe in God yet there are Atheists around that are just as moral as religious people and sometimes more? As PP said, there is evidence that contradicts your claim that Atheists lack morality. One piece of evidence is speaking to you in this post. I am a very moral person and I do plenty of morally justified things every day. If you didn't know I was Atheist, you would probably consider me a traditional American

I think you are attributing the effects of bad parenting to Atheism just because the parents of improperly raised children happen to be Atheist sometimes. Atheist parents may not teach their children to believe in God but that doesn't prevent them from teaching morality, even the same morality that is taught in the bible. You're making a connection between two things that, based on the facts, don't seem to be connected in most cases. In my life I've seen plenty of people who were apparently raised with a weak sense of morality but as far as I know they were not Atheist at all. Most of the people where I live are Jewish and most of the rest are Christian. Within those two groups, I've seen plenty of people who go to church or temple and clearly were not raised properly based on how they behave. Does that mean that religious people lack morals? By your logic, it does.

Now, given my experience seeing religious people with bad parenting and your supposed experience seeing Atheists with bad parenting we can conclude that the only common attribute here is bad parenting and is likely to be a cause for the problems observed. Since we have evidence suggesting both religious and nonreligious people have this problem, neither one having it significantly more often than the other, we can conclude that religion (or lack thereof) is not the cause nor does it seem to have any correlation. So if you make this observation then you are justified in thinking that bad parenting is the problem. Actual verifiable data should be found before this is considered fact and preached to others as such though.
This is the logical process you should be following. Why? Because it makes sense and it works. You don't seem to have followed this process before you basically went and accused Atheists of being bad people.

It is the responsibility of the parents to teach their children morality and how to behave. Most religions include some sort of rules regarding how to conduct yourself with others but that doesn't mean you can't follow these rules without believing in that religion. And following those rules doesn't make you a believer in that religion either. You tend to think in absolutes so if something is even slightly similar to something else, you automatically equate the two. This is just foolish and unrealistic. That's the reason you come to such silly conclusions about society and everybody on the forum feels compelled to argue with you.

And the whole thing about miracles being proof of God's existence....ugh. We probably shouldn't go there because that could be a whole thread on its own. But since you did go there I can't resist saying that miracles don't prove crap. The miracle didn't whisper in your ear "God did this". How do you come to the conclusion that some greater being did that? How do you know it wasn't just luck? Strange things happen all the time without any explanation but they don't always work out to benefit those involved. Just because sometimes people benefit from miraculous situations does not mean that some greater being was behind it. If you want to believe that's what happened then fine but don't try to pass it off as fact. It's your belief and nothing more. If God left a footprint behind or dropped his wallet on his way out then you have some proof and you can argue that your belief is fact. Until then, there is no way to justify stating it as anything but a theory.

Religion provides easy answers to most of the why's and how's of life but that doesn't make any of it true. You may be content believing that God does all these inexplicable things but without any proof, many people refuse to believe it. Can you really blame them? In my opinion, life is basically an equation with an infinite number of unknowns. Each and every one of them determines the output but you can't possibly know what they all are and because of that, you can't predict or explain everything. I believe that things explained by science are the things where only some of those unknowns have a significant effect and that's why we can explain them. That's basically all there is to it. However, I can't prove this regardless of how much sense it makes to me so I don't tell other people that's how it is and that their view is all wrong. Many religious people, in my experience, don't seem to understand that concept. That is probably the main reason Atheists and religious people do not get along very well most of the time.