DrAwkward wrote:I never said i was embarrassed. Find the quote where i said i was embarrassed.

You never said you were embarrassed but you did describe your faith as 'ridiculous' - 'irrational' and 'illogical' aside the word 'ridiculous' certainly suggests you think of your own faith negatively.

But whatever gets you through your day.


And *sighs* how come I can see what Rick is driving at but practically everyone else can't.

He is not saying atheists should not be allowed rights.
He's not even come close to saying that.

Here - I'll try without the vitriol:

Rick is saying that the rights - as described in the declaration - are given with divine endowment.
Whether there is any such real divine endowment is beside the point right now.

But

Rick is saying that atheists who attack theists as dumb/stupid/primitive because of their faith (note - he is not saying that that means all atheists) are belittling those who delivered to America a document stating that all it's citizens have rights endowed by a god (creator - whatever).

I imagine what he is driving at is that if you diminish the position of those who declared all had universal rights (by calling them stupid, dumb, ignorant or primitive) then you diminish the declared rights and the document itself. Particularly as the thing you are diminishing them for is the very thing they have stated is the reason for the rights declared in the document.

This - I imagine - could then lead to calls from some to ignore the document and its declaration of universal rights.

He can say 'yay' or 'nay' if I have got that wrong.

The rest can think he's attacking everyone when all he is really doing (or started doing at the beginning of the thread anyway) is attacking those so intolerant that they can't handle someone else looking at the world differently without insulting them.

hay ho

Earwicker wrote:And *sighs* how come I can see what Rick is driving at but practically everyone else can't. He is not saying atheists should not be allowed rights.
He's not even come close to saying that.

Maybe *sigh* because you read Tom a lot, and it's done you no good in the cognition department? Have you not noticed that ol' cut-n-paste-Tom *sigh* doesn't get metaphor? Or that abusive, internet-brave Tom *sigh* doesn't understand naturalism as practiced in the enlightenment? Or that Tom's thoughts are reliably rigid and brittle and that he's *sigh* just not very bright?

How is it not obvious that Foamy is arguing a retrograde, one-dimensional theistic interpretation of one word in the Declaration? If not, why does he appeal to a supernatural authority again and again in this thread? *Sigh*.

Tom thinks (or trolls) that faith is no impediment to reason. This thread is nothing more than the logical development from that laughable notion. See DrAwkward's welcome and honest characterization of faith for contrast to his. Even in the face of that, Squatter Tom thinks he's got something to add, got a rule to lay down, got some wisdom. Fucking useless idiot is what he is.

Persons reading the Declaration without Tom's intellectual limitations have a chance to see the all too human flaws in those words and will know better than to ascribe divinity to any of them.

How divine can the endowment be when the founders always knew the endowment did not apply to women and black people? "All men" it says. "White men" it meant. Without the following decades of altruism and egalitarianism in human practice -- flowing from and prompted by the words - the words were wrong. And they're still wrong!

In other words, unreasonable readings of the Declaration such as Foamy's require faithful (and disgustingly nationalist) lickspittle worship of the literal words without a single thought given to what they actually meant and mean. He's got faith in the founders. And faith is - again and always - an impediment to reason.

-r

Earwicker wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:I never said i was embarrassed. Find the quote where i said i was embarrassed.

You never said you were embarrassed but you did describe your faith as 'ridiculous' - 'irrational' and 'illogical' aside the word 'ridiculous' certainly suggests you think of your own faith negatively.

And yet it's not the case. Funny, huh?

Fuck off.

losthighway wrote: That is like claiming that all theists are of the belief that agnostics are bound to hell for eternal damnation.

I can tell you from personal experience that there are plenty of theists who don't think this way.

I am an atheist myself, and my girlfriend, who is religious to some extent, keeps telling me "god will take you anyway".

Both her mother and father are ministers, in pretty liberal denominations, and they both would say the same thing.

warmowski wrote:

Earwicker wrote:And *sighs* how come I can see what Rick is driving at but practically everyone else can't. He is not saying atheists should not be allowed rights.
He's not even come close to saying that.

Maybe *sigh* because you read Tom a lot, and it's done you no good in the cognition department?

Or maybe you read him too much and your rational fury has done you no good in the cognition department?
He doesn't say atheists shouldn't have rights. People have said he said that.
And he hasn't.

warmowski wrote:Have you not noticed that ol' cut-n-paste-Tom *sigh* doesn't get metaphor?

No, I haven't. Are you saying the writers of the declaration were using the
term 'creator' metaphorically?
Or are you referring to something else?

warmowski wrote: *sigh* *sigh* *sigh* *sigh* *Sigh*

Are you being facetious?

My *sigh* - incidentally - was meant to denote an attitude of 'why am I getting involved in this?'
Maybe that's what you mean too, come to think of it.

But you get all sensitive about it if you like.

warmowski wrote:How is it not obvious that Foamy is arguing a retrograde, one-dimensional theistic interpretation of one word in the Declaration?

'retrograde' - maybe
'one dimensional' - maybe
'theistic' - I don't see that myself.

warmowski wrote:If not, why does he appeal to a supernatural authority again and again in this thread? *Sigh*.

He isn't.

He was saying the writers of the declaration did

warmowski wrote:Tom thinks (or trolls) that faith is no impediment to reason. This thread is nothing more than the logical development from that laughable notion.

Someone can have faith in one area of their life and be perfectly reasonable in other areas.
I see nothing laughable about that myself.

warmowski wrote:Persons reading the Declaration without Tom's intellectual limitations have a chance to see the all too human flaws in those words and will know better than to ascribe divinity to any of them.

He's not ascribing divinity to the words - he's not saying God wrote it.
He's saying the men who wrote it were appealing to divinity.
And that that makes them idiots in some people's eyes.

Why on earth do you care what he's saying anyway?

warmowski wrote:How divine can the endowment be when the founders always knew the endowment did not apply to women and black people?

The founders appealed (seemingly) to divine authority.
That doesn't mean there is any divinity to actually appeal too.
It means they were men of their time carrying the same social prejudices (and irrational beliefs) that most men did at that time.

warmowski wrote:In other words, unreasonable readings of the Declaration such as Foamy's require faithful (and disgustingly nationalist) lickspittle worship of the literal words without a single thought given to what they actually meant and mean. He's got faith in the founders.

That's one way of looking at it.

Another way is he thinks it's an important document and doesn't like to see the authors of it belittled for fear of it's worth being diminished.

That and he seems to get a kick out of stirring up the ire of a lot of people on the board who - apparently - don't read him.

He seems to succeed fabulously at that last goal if nothing else.

DrAwkward wrote:

Earwicker wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:I never said i was embarrassed. Find the quote where i said i was embarrassed.

You never said you were embarrassed but you did describe your faith as 'ridiculous' - 'irrational' and 'illogical' aside the word 'ridiculous' certainly suggests you think of your own faith negatively.

And yet it's not the case. Funny, huh?

Fuck off.

No need to get so tetchy wrestlemania boy.

Ridiculous means worthy of ridicule or derision.
Why would you want to believe something that you think worthy of ridicule or derision?
I can see why people would hold beliefs that they know others will ridicule them for but I can't see why you would hold a belief that you yourself think is worthy of derision?

I think it's odd is all.

But please - try not to let that bother you.

From what I've read about the founding fathers, their intentions, and the documents created therein, the majority of them were deists, as opposed to theists.

So you're a fucking shrink now?

DrAwkward wrote:

Earwicker wrote:

DrAwkward wrote:I never said i was embarrassed. Find the quote where i said i was embarrassed.

You never said you were embarrassed but you did describe your faith as 'ridiculous' - 'irrational' and 'illogical' aside the word 'ridiculous' certainly suggests you think of your own faith negatively.

And yet it's not the case. Funny, huh?

Fuck off.

If I were you I'd ignore Tweedle Dee, baiting Tweedle Dumb is fun enough.

Lets' review:

Foamy the internet shut-in denies, hilariously, that words can have flaws:

Foamy wrote:There is no such thing as 'human flaws' in words. There are only human flaws in humans.

Foamy the internet shut-in denies that ambiguous words are wide open to interperetation or that metaphor could ever be in place when they are used:

Foamy wrote:The words 'endowed by their Creator' mean what they mean

Foamy the internet shut-in glosses over the problem that the presumably all-powerful literal Creator named and allegedly revered by the founders must have fucked up when he went endowin' by creatin' himself a serious paradox - an endowment for "all men" that somehow white men could then overrule. That a group of white men wrote the document is lost on poor Foamy:

Foamy wrote:...your argument that women and slaves did not immediately have full rights after they were written means nothing. Even if Jefferson specifically said that only white males would be endowed with these unalienable rights, that still means that the authority named was the Creator

Foamy displays a lack of education of the enlightenment / naturalist mindsets of the founders by i) stupidly conjoining deism and theism, ii) presuming the founders were never figurative in the Declaration, and iii) claiming the Declaration for theism:

and that still means that a theist mindset guided the construction of that document.

Remember, Tom: you don't understand what's going on here because you've never created a thing in your life. You don't know what it means to make something new, how it happens, where things end up, etc. You're a shut-in, a no-show, a do-nothing and unqualified to claim any understanding of the process.

Faith, like the dull-witted, tautological kind you display here:

Foamy wrote:The words 'endowed by their Creator' mean what they mean

is always an impediment to reason.

-r