Pat Condell is awesome

[MetalMusicMan]

Sum it all up in 3 minutes?  NO PROBLEM!

Insulting religion	Small | Large

[Jen!]

Pat Condell IS awesome.

[anarkhos]

-You're ugly!

-Well you're stupid and dumb as a butt!

-Nuh uh! You are!

-NO! I HATE YOU'RE FACE!!!!

-RAWWWWWWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Insulting each other is a complete waste of time.  All humans are wrong about everything.  We are not meant to understand anything.  One moral code is just as absurd as the next.  I know too many atheists who are just as arrogant and self righteous as any deluded god fearing jackass I've ever met.  Pat Condell (while very amusing to listen to) is so absolutely, blindly convinced that his belief system is best and everyone else is retarded, I fail to see how he's any better than a fundamentalist Muslim cleric or Fred fucking Phelps.

[oograx]

He's not.

The problem with modern atheism is that it's really not any different than any other belief system.


(also oh god another one of these threads)

[MetalMusicMan]

There are people like Anark describes in every sub culture, group, etc.  I totally agree with you there.  The difference here is that Pat makes videos on his channel and then fundies come out of the woodwork and flood his inbox with insults and threats or complain about what is rightfully free speech.  

Atheism, agnosticism, "free thinking", etc. SHOULDN'T have to be organized.  It should just BE the norm, there shouldn't even need to be a word for it.  It's like what Sam Harris has said, there isn't a word for people who don't believe that unicorns are real... because why would there be?  

Unfortunately, when the norm is a bunch of mentally insane crusaders hell-bent on preventing anyone from ever thinking for themselves, you are FORCED to organize.

You can pretend to pigeon hole this or lump it together with religious fundies but we all know that's retarded, so I won't bother going further into how stupid that is.  


When you can quantify the benefits of something, and those benefits are tangible, measurable, observable, etc., you absolutely CAN say that a particular "belief system" is better than another.  Something that is real is always better than something that is fake, because the fake thing doesn't exist and has no effect on reality.  Saying that we should have to be "polite" about other people's irrational behavior is stupid and it holds us back as a species.

[oograx]

I still think it's unbelievably arrogant to operate on the principle that what you know is right and what everyone else knows is wrong.


Basically, "My truth is the real truth because any other truth is impossible because the limited way in which i perceive the universe tells me it is".


Even dawkins cautions against that, and that is exactly what pat condell represents. Also crazy right wing religious nuts who want to keep you from living your life aren't the norm, sorry.

[MetalMusicMan]

I operate on what I know, and I seek to learn what I do not know.  

I am inherently, measurably better than anyone who operates on what they do not know and seeks only to further blind themselves with subjective drivel and fairy tales.  This is indisputable.  


If you were talking on any other subject, you would feel the same way.  It's only on religion that this kind of childish nonsense is tolerated.  If you were trying to get the best information about ANYTHING else, you would feel the same way.

Let's say you wanted to learn about something, say, becoming a doctor.  You would trust the person who did the research, had the experience, had practiced it.  You would not trust the person who said "an invisible, all-seeing force will heal your every wound, if only you just believe".

You would run from that person.  You would think that person was crazy.



This is not about me wanting to prove that I am better.  This is about being able to, literally, quantify what is better.  Religion impedes the process of self growth and growth as a species.  That's not to say that it's all "on the same level" of stupidity, but it's all stupid.

Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions	Small | Large

[oograx]

So basically you're asking me to trust the doctor who doesn't and inherently can't know everything because what you're asking him to know is at this point, unknowable.


Also:

I am inherently, measurably better than anyone who operates on what they do not know and seeks only to further blind themselves with subjective drivel and fairy tales.  This is indisputable. 

No, you aren't. Hundreds of years ago science was magic and the gods were responsible for everything. Everyone knew this to be true. Like, that shit was a fact, undisputed and unimpeachable. nowadays we know differently, but imagine what we'll know about the universe in another few hundred years that'll make all this hilarious WE KNOW HOW EVERYTHING WORKS THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE business atheists cling  to as insane as having a god create thunder and lightning. I'm not saying that THERE IS A GOD HOW DO U KNOW, i'm saying stop acting as if you're better because you think that you understand the way things work. I don't mean you specifically will, but it's a general thing atheists have, that arrogance i was talking about. You're just as much in the dark as anyone else, and not believing in the comforting fairy tail gobbledegook everyone else does doesn't make you any better than the rest of this poor idiot society because nobody knows shit.

[MetalMusicMan]

"Science was magic"... exactly, it wasn't science...

You're just as much in the dark as anyone else, and not believing in the comforting fairy tail gobbledegook everyone else does doesn't make you any better than the rest of this poor idiot society because nobody knows shit.

Yes it does, the person who admits what they do not know and seeks to understand it will always be better than the person who makes up fairy tale gobbledgook and never seeks to understand their surroundings.

[Uneven Pavement]

Surprise, surprise.  But I of course agree with Will here.  It's not arrogance to vehemently express ones affirmation in science and reality - measurable, observable things.  Why would that be arrogance?

Would you think me arrogant to say that I am ABSOLUTELY 100% POSITIVE, there can be no question, that unicorns are not real?  No, of course not.  So why should the conversation about god be any different?  

A person who would argue about the existence of unicorns, a person who has convinced themselves that unicorns are real and have made it their life's work to go around trying to convince people that they exist - Would you not consider yourself smarter than this person?  Better?  More "enlightened"?  Yet that would not make you arrogant, you are just conscious to the fact that the person is not making decisions based on rational thought. 

(i'd like to keep going but I gotta go...  later)

[oograx]

How do you know that in the infinite vastness of the universe, there isn't a unicorn. Statistically, if the universe is infinite (as we understand it to be), unicorns do exist. That's my point. Just because you don't know something is, doesn't mean it isn't. And assuming that thinking the opposite makes you inherently a BETTER PERSON than  someone else is low (and would in fact make you a worse person!)

[anarkhos]

I say unicorns can't NOT exist.  I believe the universe to be infinite, meaning dimensions are infinite, meaning every conceivable, as well as inconceivable, being exists in one form or another.

Just because no one, to our knowledge, has ever seen a unicorn, doesn't automatically rule out their existence.  THAT is arrogance.

edit: I wrote this apparently while Oog posted above me, still leaving it up even though we basically said the same thing lol

[oograx]

holy shit i think this is the first time in the history of one of these threads that someone isn't all over will's dongage.

[MetalMusicMan]

Great post, Kolbert

holy shit i think this is the first time in the history of one of these threads that someone isn't all over will's dongage.

People disagree with me all the time, yet every time you say something stupid like this ~_~




Back on point, I don't find it rational to assume that fictional creatures are part of the infinite probability theory of the universe.  When you're discussing probability of the existence of things, it's really not sensible to assume that something imagined from the mind of a person is "out there".  Maybe something similar, but a magical horse that shoots rainbows of love, etc.? 

Surely you can distinguish between the concept of infinite possibilities and fiction becoming reality.



While we're on the subject of the universe's theoretical infiniteness...

Personally, I think our planet is far more rare than most people do.  All of the factors that had to come together for us to exist, the conditions, the events... and then the TIME it took for that to happen.  Personally I'm very skeptical that, even in the vast and *seemingly* infinite reaches of our universe, we would ever find a similar planet.  However possible that may be, and I don't think it is very likely, it is even LESS likely when you account for the TIME it takes for something like our planet to come to the state that it's in now.  And then you have to consider that we would have to match up with the time it took for the other planet/species to devlope as well... it's just so, so, so, so unlikely.

Unlikely that we would even FIND it, and VASTLY FURTHER UNLIKELY STILL that if we COULD find it, it would exist at the same time as we do (even in the billions of years as far as the difference in time goes).

When you consider just how rare life, intelligence, or ANYTHING beyond rocks and elements is in the universe, I don't see the theory of "anything is possible" as very practical.

Now, if we actually found out that the multiple dimensions theory was true, I'd probably change my stance.  As it stands, that's just science fiction, as are wormholes, etc.

[Uneven Pavement]

Just because you can "conceive" of a god or a unicorn that "could" exist out there, that does not in any way effect the probability of that creatures existence.  To say that you believe the universe to be infinite, therefore everything you can conceive exists, is at best naive and at worst mental, ego-maniacal masturbation.