Double-standards in religion
 

So, apparently a dormitory here at IU offers classes to its inhabitants, calling itself a "learning living center" or something like that. One of these classes is centered on The Simpsons. I guess that's what a state education will get you these days. Anyhow, this class had a sociological project assigned to its students wherein they were to offer people $1 to buy their souls. This would hypothetically spur debate into "the importance of religion in daily life". End the story there, and I'd call it "pretty damn stupid".

The story doesn't end there, for which it earns a promotion to "abjectly retarded".

I don't know whether they were inspired or not by their professor's instructions, although I highly doubt it, but a number of these students boisterously entered a prayer chapel owned and operated by the University and actively interrupted people in prayer to pitch their "sociological experiment". A friend of mine was there only incidentally, taking pictures for decorative planning for her sister's wedding in that chapel, but she was quite offended. So, she posted these happenings in the local LJ community.

The most recurring theme in the responses was that the students hadn't gone far enough in badgering those praying, that it was a legitimate learning excursion, and by the way, Jesus is stupid. Clearly, what happened was a case of mass pseudo-sophism.

Now, there have been a number of studies showing an inverse proportionality between religiosity and IQ, education, and financial security. The right side of the equation is all roughly the same; people with high IQs tend to be more educated, and education is inarguably related to income. I'm not going to dispute this. I could argue ad nauseum about what "religiosity" means and how it's relevant, but I won't unless you really want me to.

The problem with this is that people tend to polarize this tendency and interpret the data to mean "religious equals not intelligent". So, there is an overbearing idea that "If I am not religious, I am therefore intelligent". Not exactly a flawless syllogism.

What strikes me, however, is that this attitude perseveres in greater abundance at my lowly state university than my former elitest private university. Yet, I'm quite sure that Chicago is on average less religious than IU. The Chicago administration takes a lot of kookiness this time of year with Scav Hunt and turns a blind eye when students go so far as building a functioning nuclear reactor, yet I can't imagine there not being a furor over interrupting the right to prayer for some asinine assignment.

So, it just frustrates me that kids here are stupid enough to attack religion in the name of intelligence. It's one thing to ask the hard questions and come up with hard answers, but I'm more than a little confident that the vast majority of atheists here are so simply because it's trendy and "subversive".

Stupid people are everywhere.

THEY'RE IN OUR SCHOOLS OH GOD THEY'RE IN OUR SCHOOLS

Oh, I can't believe I forgot the best part:

Collins LLC, the living center responsible for the class, asked my friend to remove her LJ post on the subject. She complied, even though she doesn't live in it.

Let's see the pictures!

Its essentially a bunch of stupid kids who think they've got it all figured out and people who think differently are stupid. Funny thing is, these morons rarely understand what it is they are talking about. they are just regurgitating (often incorrectly) what they heard from their teacher or read in a book(or magazine, saw in a movie or tv etc etc).

All this merely confirms my belief that the biggest mouths are usually attached to the smallest minds.

What Blanco said. They're just stupid kids looking for an ideology to cling to because they don't have the faculties to think.

Stupid people find atheism really easy to cling to. Most stupid people are lazy when it comes to furthering themselves, atheism allows them to fulfill that roll while being pop cool!~

Is it really atheism that these types flock to though? I tend to have respect for atheists because most I meet just can't buy into the notion of a god or greater being. But often I find the folks who rip on religiosity are really ripping on Christianity. THey themselves might be Budhists, or Jewish, or whatever, and will also rationalize or apologize for the actions of radical muslims. I'm guessing these kids wouldn't have barged into a mosque to do whatever crap they were doing.

"Is it really atheism that these types flock to though? I tend to have respect for atheists because most I meet just can't buy into the notion of a god or greater being."

Some atheists are respectable(most respectible atheists take on the name agnostic, though), but most of them just do it to be cool or something. I knew plenty of them when I was growing up. You're right about ripping on christianity. You have to realize, it doesn't really matter what religion or philosophy they happen to be playing the role of that week, they are still stupid people so their representation of it is going to be poor. I wouldn't even really call them atheists, they are more like victims of pop culture.

Plus being an atheist is the easiest thing in the world to be. Even being an agnostic takes more effort and more thought. Being a christian takes more effort and more thought, even when it comes to stupid people. Personally I'd say atheistic stupid people are the worst type of stupid people out there, just by who I've met. LETS LISTEN TO SLIPKNOT AND PARTY ABOUT HOW STUPID GOD IS. I seriously had friends like that, and they listened to deicide, the worst band in the world.

Atheism does appeal to these people because it requires no study (unlike a conversion) and is directly opposed to Christianity. Being a Buddhist or a Muslim might not throw a Christian into a rage, but being an atheist might, at least in the minds of these people. The only reason they don't join the Church of Satan is because that's scary :chatter

They do it because it's easy.
I on the other hand will never reveal my stands on religion.
Just let the damn people believe whatever they choose to.
I wouldn't want to hear someone preach their science at me.

MYSTERIOUS PRETENTIOUS FELLOW, OH HOW WE RESPECT THEE.

I SENSE SARCASM.
Oh well, everytime I put my 2 cents in...

lol sorry fathom :(

Atheism requires more faith than theism. You cannot prove God does not exist. It may be possible some day to conclusively observe a being fantastically superior to any living being we've observed thus far. A god, or gods, if you will.

But you can never prove such a creature (regardless of whether any religion has accurately described it) does not exist, especially if the universe really is infinite. It takes Faith to say that.

exactly. fucking exactly. whenever I try to explain that to people, I always get a blank stare and a "JESUS LOL." fucking stupid atheists.

So basically, someone somewhere at sometime somehow created someone. Doesn't take any faith for me to say that. But I do despise atheists, it's the in thing at my school to be an emo-homo and an atheist. I'm sure that scientology will become the new fad next year, though. People are way too impressionable by psychotic celebrities.
Whatever floats their boat.

Even adult atheists are generally stupid assholes and hate on Christians for no particular reason. That's why I declared myself agnostic. I couldn't stand those people.

I've given thought to joining some sort of cult to fill the empty void that is my social life since I moved to Texas. Trying to make friends at bars/clubs/loud parties doesn't seem to work, maybe cuz I'm just not feeling that scene anymore.

But Scientology sounds WAY too expensive, and I've been agnostic too long to take any of the name-brand faiths very seriously.

I thought about Buddhism relatively seriously for a while, but I don't wanna be a vegetarian. Plus I never can remember whether it's spelled 'Bhudda' or 'Buddha', and that could be embarrassing. :(

There's a Zen Center that has "meetings" every other Sunday at 11 less than 2 miles down the street from my house, while the Unitarians are halfway across Dallas in a much more affluent part of town.

Agnosticism is the way to go in all things religious, metaphysical, moral, etc.

Especially if you're a total douchbag, pussy, faggot, etc.

because that's EXACTLY what we were talking about. did kahl not get the point across?

I'll tell you one thing, it's definitely better to be agnostic then it is to be a gnostic.

If we are looking at this from a logical stand point, you don't have to. The burden is on us who claim the positive ie there is a God.

Then again, I never really dug philosophy, so I could be completly fucking that up.

What about a unitarian universalist church? We had one across th street from us in NY. Their masses wer basically religious lectures that varied every week, and then there was pound cake!

No, that's true. The burden of proof lies on the asserter. But I think it's still better, if at least more respectable, to take a neutral position than a negative one. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

"I thought about Buddhism relatively seriously for a while, but I don't wanna be a vegetarian."

You don't have to be a vegetarian. There are, however, a few good reasons for being one, besides health and such. This might sound kind of crazy but I'll try to present it in a normal way later maybe. The belief you shouldn't eat animals has been shared by many people, including pythagoras. Pythagoras declared that no judge should make a judgement after having eatten meat because it impairs the judgement. That's probably the best example of why buddhists don't eat meat-- it impairs judgement.
The idea behind it is that the animal itself had a type of soul or energy, and when you eat it you eat it's energy and everything it's eatten. Including the genetically modified corn feed and whatever else. Also, the energy of the beast interacts with your energy and can cause negative effects. Part of buddhism and yoga is taking a LOT of time to carefully balance and manage your energy so it's at the most balanced point, distributed evenly throughout the entire body. You get the idea! I'm hungover and have to go eat pizza.

So it's not really that you can't eat meat, it's more that you shouldn't because it interferes with your 'inner balance'. Any buddhist, especially a zen buddhist, who tells you to follow the rules isn't much of a buddhist.

I really don't get how adverse people in the US are to atheists. Sure, these guys are dicks, but that's from being frat boy versions of OAO.

I think in terms of social impact and other influences, not just faith, atheism is alot easier and has less of an effect mostly due to their interaction with the pop culture world. The decision to not believe in god isn't really an intellectual decision in their case, if it was they would be agnostic, but rather a decision to acclimate themselves to some social atmosphere. It's really the same either way, though, however the circumstance is generally much different.

Another thing to consider is that being a christian or any other 'faith' also incorporates alot of lifestyle changes. There's at least one or two things you'll change in your life when you become a christian(waking up at six in the morning on sundays), with atheists the ramifications would be nill or too variated to really correlate as there isn't really a unified Atheist lifestyle manual.

Making the decision to believe in something, in my opinion, is pointless unless it is accompanied by some kind of change in you or your perception of surroundings. Neutrality in this instance doesn't really require belief.
One thing I find particularly funny about this breed of Atheists is that in many cases it's accompanied by that frustration with christianity. I think somebody who makes a decision to escape something, especially an idealogy, while still under it's frustration is being ridiculous and is obviously still influenced by it. The ramifications of such a psychosis are obvious.

You are right that we could probably never prove there's no god, but that really depends on how you look at it. Within the perceptions of these people, I'd say you could never prove there's no god, but that's only because they have the wrong understanding of god and gods, I think. Unless you count dying and not going to heaven, but that's not so much a proving thing.

I love the new tool album ;( vicarious really isn't much next to the rest of it.

By "neutral", do you mean agnostic? Cause I think you're absolutely right, but neutral and agnostic are far from the same thing.

Both sides feel discriminated against, honestly, and that is only because of the continuous venom inserted by the idiots on both sides (idiots like me).

We should just forget about it and chill out.

I do not think it even matters if there is a problem, because life itself is a series of problems that are not even resolved by our deaths.

Neutral with respect to the statement "I believe that there is/is not a God."

Agnostic is about as neutral as you can get in this circumstance. If you have another more neutral option to submit I'd be glad to hear it, because to me agnostic screams neutrality.

neu·tral (ntrl, ny-)
adj.

1. Belonging to neither kind; not one thing or the other; indifferent.

Yeah, yeah, it's Wikipedia, but it works. An agnostic theist believes, but does not claim to know there is a god, like an agnostic atheist doesn't claim to know there is no god. Still, none of them are neutral on the subject of the existence of the divine.

But I think we've just got a definition thing going on here, where I was thinking of agnosticism as a gradation of another term describing one's take on theism (small-a), while I guess everybody else has standalone Agnosticism (big-A) in mind. It's a tricky word.

I was just thinking in terms of belief and religousity.

Agnostics don't believe there's a god.
Agnostics don't believe there's not a god.

Personally I think it's as neutral as you can get when it comes to religion. People who aren't religous obviously aren't religous, so the circumstance wouldn't really apply to them. If they were taking part in a religous debate how would they contribute? They couldn't, really, but I get your point.
I think alot of agnostics actually are irreligous, and are irreligous because they are agnostic. What's the point in thinking about it if nothing can/has been proved, after all?