Rick Reuben wrote:It's a simple deduction

employing a logical fallacy.

DrAwkward wrote:Wow, i can probably point to about a dozen logical fallacies that this would qualify under.

EDIT: Awk beat me to it.

Don't forget, Tom, that atheistic bigots are also saying two other things:

1-More women than men believe in God.

2- The more believers within a gender, the dumber the gender.


By deduction, we can clearly state that atheists are misogynists.

Rick Reuben wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:

reuben wrote:Fewer minorities are atheists, when compared to the population as a whole. So if atheistic bigots insist on associating religion with stupidity, they in effect are exhibiting racism, because they are calling behavior that shows up among minorities at a higher rate ( belief in God ) a sign of stupidity.

Wow, i can probably point to about a dozen logical fallacies that this would qualify under.

Try supplying one. I see zero so far.

The idea that race and belief in a god are directly related is a false assumption, false causality, whatever you want to call it. To say nothing of the appeal to emotion that labeling someone "racist" evokes.

Your oversimplified analogy willingly ignores the amount of influence that educational, economic, and cultural factors have on personal belief systems. It's intellectually dishonest and is cherry-picking in order to associate the group you've attempted to attack (atheists) with a group that is universally abhorred (racists). It's intellectually dishonest and logically fallacious.

Rick Reuben wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:The idea that race and belief in a god are directly related is a false assumption, false causality, whatever you want to call it.

Do you believe that a belief in God is chronic among stupid people? Is that allegation true or false?

No, i do not.

Dude, you know i believe in a god. I've said that a million times here.

The best, and most historically important, part of the declaration is that they say the we hold these truths self evident. i.e. "We consider these rights to come God, but that's not important, what is important is that we consider people to have those rights, beyond belief and ideology".

Three important things:

-it doesn't matter where the rights come from, they are evidentally there
-they don't need to be pointed out or explained, they are self-evident
-they are held to be self evident, which is really clever. that means philosophical and political discussions should not interfere with human rights, which are held to be self evident. Even when they are not. In theory this should prevent American courts and law makers from debating the human rights of gays, life sentence prisoners, women who want to abort, immigrants, etc. because the constitution says that their equality should be held as evident before anything else. You guys shouldn't have to prove that you deserve your rights, because your fancy calligraphy toilet paper sheet says "held to be self-evident". And neither should anyone who ever interacts with the American government, citizen or not.

The rest of it can go to shit, but I really like that part. I wish European law had more "talking won't make someone's rights disappear" clauses like it. Shame the money-lenders and wig-powder aristocrats had to jizz the words God and Nation all over it. Ce la vie.

There are big words in that document, but I think that "hold" is the most semantically interesting. This thread is bullshit, feel free to recycle it into a paper-mache model of a penis.

Rick Reuben wrote:Of course it matters. That is why they used the phrase 'endowed by a Creator'- because it matters. The authority for their declaration of unalienable rights is traced back to the Creator.

It goes back to the Creator according to those few gentlemen who signed it. Is it possible for an atheist to think people have natural rights? I think so. If it is, than they certainly don't have to throw away those inalienable rights just because they disbelieve in God.
Your point about the Founding Document vs. Founding Legal Document is an interesting one, although it does nothing for your argument. What are rights without laws to protect them? Those laws that the gentlemen who signed the Declaration created to protect the rights they philosophically agreed on were NOT based on a link to a Creator of any stripe. In fact, the man most commonly linked to the writing of the Declarative document was clearly pro-including atheists into those rights.
The only one who seems bigoted (in this thread, anyway) is you, with your anti-atheist anger. That anti-atheism is not just bigotry, it also goes against the very spirit of the document you're theoretically protecting.

Atheists are misogynistic, racist traitors that should be afforded no rights under the Constitution because of their beliefs (or lack thereof).

Everyone clear on that?

Rick Reuben wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:

Rick Reuben wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:The idea that race and belief in a god are directly related is a false assumption, false causality, whatever you want to call it.

Do you believe that a belief in God is chronic among stupid people? Is that allegation true or false?

No, i do not.

Well, then why am I the only person you have chosen to argue with in this thread? Here's Gramsci:

Gramsci wrote:Enlightenment, i.e. the period of human thought when we broke free from the primitive ideas expressed in supernatural beliefs that have no foundation in evidence.

It's fairly obvious that Gramsci is labeling 'belief in God' as behavior that only primitive ( stupid ) unenlightened humans engage in.

Do you or do you not see that as prejudice, and if so, what will you say to him about it?

You agree that science has neither confirmed the possibility of a higher power or ruled it out, right? Gramsci, without any scientific support, is claiming that belief in God is symptomatic of stupidity. If Gramsci claimed, without any scientific support, that black skin is symptomatic of stupidity, would you say something to him about his prejudice?

I'm arguing with you for my own entertainment. I don't have any issue with what Gramsci says because i fully admit that my own belief is illogical, irrational, and ridiculous. I don't take his calling it "stupid" personally.

A sad, sad little man named Tom wrote:Then you are unable to recognize

Foamy! King of the shut-ins!

Are you typing that inalienable rights endowed to us by a creator somehow magically go away if we don't subscribe to supernatural dogma? That a "creator" can't possibly mean our parent? That a "creator" can't possibly refer to the natural world? That "creator" can't possibly be a component of a metaphor connoting a new-at-the-time pro-human prejudice against government?

I think you don't recognize what these guys were doing with words because it is so alien to you. Unlike you, the founders were inventors - not squatters typing away for years on a witless employer's dime for no real reason. They invented wide ethical bounds for their new system - those who are born are born with rights. What they invented was at once poetic, functional, pragmatic and wise. The pragmatism is the important part here.

It's important because you don't recognize it - and no wonder. Your sad "career" of abusive rhetoric, cheap thinking, cutting and pasting and stale plot babble contains not one invention, not one functional feature, not a single thing that will outlive the hard drives you have jerked off upon. The founders' spectacular pragmatism doesn't register in your dim mind - probably because you can't Google it.

To claim that theism is a literal prerequisite for the endowed to remain so endowed is not only a shockingly stupid interpretation of a brilliant invention, it's a slap in the face to all the dark-skinned who had to wait - and are still waiting - for the allegedly divine endowment. They understand what that stuff means - you don't.

Isolated halfwit nationalist douchebag.

-r

Rick Reuben wrote:

DrAwkward wrote: i fully admit that my own belief is illogical, irrational, and ridiculous. I don't take his calling it "stupid" personally.

Then you are unable to recognize prejudice. Prejudice is not restricted to bigotry against people because of things out of their control, like race. Prejudice is a blanket allegation against any subset of society that is not backed by evidence. Gramsci makes no distinction between any theists. He calls them all primitive and stupid, because of a choice they have made.

If you had chosen Judaism as your faith ( another example of a belief system, a subset of theism ) and Gramsci said that all Jews were the same and were all primitive and stupid, would you tolerate that?

It seems that you tolerate slurs against your faith because of the dominant peer pressure on the forum. That's a reckless choice, and it shows that you have surrendered science to the atheists. There is nothing in science that proves your faith to be irrational, illogical, or ridiculous. You must have a real inferiority complex about your faith to make that your description of it. By allowing this prejudice to go unanswered, you encourage it to be used against others.

We are posting bullshit to a message board. Develop some goddamned perspective for once in your life.