White Lightning Productions

Take your rants about religion, and how other people get your religion WRONG, here!

***waits for blackjoker to show up**

*waves* Hey, how are you doing?

*looking around* You wantede to have the argument and even seemed eager for it. just waiting for you to put up an argument, or would you prefer that I start?

I like how "The Religion Thread" has been up for several days now, was created to prevent a derailment in another thread, yet nobody has actually started talking about religion or lack of it. I guess it's one of things where the proprietor says "Take it outside," yet doing that just breaks everybody's momentum and suddenly they don't want to fight anymore.

Atheism is a default position of spiritual belief. Everyone starts out that way. You have to learn about religion and build up an emotional attachment to whatever god or goddess first in order to start worshiping and defending one. Whatever flavor that happens to be depends almost entirely on the culture you are around the most. There are as many different interpretations of God as there are people believing in God.

Because of that, fellow atheist Blackjoker and myself aren't really gonna be the ones to start up a discussion about why we don't believe in religion or God because:

A: It's too long of a list, and

B: We shouldn't have to anyway.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you believe in God and souls and Heaven and Hell, well, the onus is on YOU to say why there is, not us to say why there is not.

So, having said that, if anyone wants to start up a discussion on something specific, feel free. Ask us why we don't believe, explain why you DO believe, debate , etc.

I'd argue that it's probably mostly a community thing. Now it can have two contexts but I do think the main focus for a lot of people on church attendance is the community, either in the seeing and being seen aspect or in the aspect of socializing. Seeing and being seen tends to be prevalent in fairly wealthy communities and also among places with a large amount of self righteousness where they compare who got there when and what they were wearing. People dress up to show off to each other and also give the idea that how one is dressed shows devotion, amusing to me, but meh.

The other aspect is in the socializing, people get a chance to catch up with family or friends that don't necessarily live nearby. If the church provides events or groups go to certain restaurants after services then they meet there. The church thing is essentially a location to start from that they then use as a launching point to go somewhere else or as a way of meeting with others.

The main reason I figure these are the focuses rather than on praising is that people can pray at home as easily as they can at church, or they can go do service works. That's just my view anyhow *looks for theists*