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I don’t want to hijack the Hitchens thread with this banter so I started another thread.
TheBrotherMario - 19 December 2011 09:51 AM
can zen, describe your life to us. Your post is stupid, if you take into consideration the description I offered of my life, in response to like-minded stupid posts about believers in God postponing the joys of this life.
Go ahead. Describe.
Hitchens didn’t sit at life’s feast. He took up residence there and became a guest who wouldn’t leave.
Again. Describe how much atheism has given to you, and how much you would have to give up if you had faith in God. Please leave out jerking off (something Hitchens liked to throw out there in debates for effect), unless it is an important part of your life.
I never accused christian theists of postponing the joys of life and that includes you Mario. I just laughed at the idea that you would even consider the joys of an afterlife as an option to what life has to offer. Naturally most of you theists enjoy the pleasures of life like, sex, family, partying, etc.
On the notion that you want to compare what “atheism” has given me versus what “belief” has given you, well this is entirely absurd. If you think that god rewards you by giving you a wife and a family, friends and a good job, while no-god gives me nothing, then no atheist would have any of the above. I don’t know what point you’re trying to make? Are you saying that you believe in god because you get rewards for your belief? What about atheists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet? Are you implying that their families and their wealth is given to them by some supernatural being that they don’t believe in? That’s crazy!
I would say that atheism has given me a level of freedom that no theist could possibly imagine. This also means, of course, that I feel more responsible for every action I take and therefore I tend take into account what my actions might mean for other people. IOW, atheism makes me morally cognizant in ways that theism could never achieve. Also, at present, I am involved in some significant paleontological discoveries and research that will certainly change the course of our understanding of evolution, and that would not have been possible had I been a theist!
On the flip side, my personal life is perhaps less fulfilling than yours but that is due in large part to my catholic upbringing. Like you, I am also gay, but of course I could not even consider marrying any of the many women that have fallen in love with me over the past 30 years because I feel it would have been dishonest to do so, althought I certainly could have. If I had thought that “god had provided me with a potential wife” or if I had a strong desire for procreation, there was never a problem of getting married to a decent woman. Even this past year when this beautiful and brilliant woman had a joyous crush on me and insisted that we should at least try a relationship, I could have given in and was certainly tempted, but of course I was in love at the time with someone I had met a few years ago and I am still very close to him.
Yet it was my catholic upbringing that prevented me from acting on my homosexual feelings early in life and when I did fall in love with a beautiful man in my late twenties and had a relationship, it fell apart due mainly to both of our christian upbringings and the self hatred and guilt that it inflicted on our innocent lives and also the reactions of our christian families.
I do have extended family and lots of close friends, and have been like a second father to all of my nieces and nephews as well as sharing in family life with my cousins and their children. Belief in god would add nothing to my relationships with the people I love most and in fact it would degrade those relationships significantly. My brothers and sisters are all atheists as well as are all their children and most of my cousins with whom I continue to have a close relationship. I have some friends who are theists, some are fundamentalists, but most of them are atheists like me.
As far as jerking off goes, I’m not sure why you brought it up but obviously it has a major impact upon your own life otherwise you wouldn’t have mentioned it. I think of masturbation as a natural human behaviour, and I find that it clears my head of obsessive thoughts about sex so that I can treat people with a compassionate openness that sometimes gets compromised when you see them mainly as sexual objects or you are so “turned on” by their presence that you no longer think rationally (and it is also pleasurable).
I don’t want to hijack the Hitchens thread with this banter so I started another thread.
I appreciate that, man.
I just hope it catches on ...
Wouldn’t be a bad thing at all if it really caught on, in fact, but the trolls in here do tend to have a harder time quite monopolizing things as they seem to on other forums I frequent, and virtually all of the attention they get is less indulgent than about correcting their mental malfunctioning (as futile as that may be). That says something about the quality standards here, I think—we’ve got far less intellectual chaos going on in here. On the other forum I primarily frequent there’s a lot of troll confusion carpet bombing and brain wreckage strewn all about, and most of the attention lavished on trolls is much more indulgent/far less admonishing/correctional.
Anyway ... I appreciate trying to keep the nonsense out of the Hitchens topic—some of the standard issue vapidity is fine, but it just wouldn’t be right for a troll to take that one over.
BTW Byron, your signature quote from Einstein is a beautiful and profound thought,
“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”—Albert Einstein
and when I read it I immediately thought of Christopher Hitchens . . . oddly enough.
Will be interesting to see if Mario plays along and answeres to his own thread.
So it looks like now I’ve become the one who’s trolling . . . for a troll!
Look, Mario is going to infiltrate every thread, indeed the forum as he has done, that has to do with promoting, discussing, celebrating and exercising nonreligious reason that he possibly can. Ignore is for personal difficulties between members, not for an admitted sabateur who’s here for one stated grand purpose and one unconscious one ... to be a spoiler of member enjoyment and for attention. Any other free speech, intellectual contribution or opportunity for reason issues have long since been surpassed and dissolved. Frankly, I don’t know why he’s still allowed here under his proven track record. And I’m holding back as best I can to keep from cussing his ass out at every response. I hate the m*f*er! Like I do all the other extreme religious nut cases. He’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen in my life and I certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with him in my personal life. Why should I here, when this is supposed to be a haven for nonreligious reason, not some religious nut’s pet project or private church. It’s not a matter of why he’s being responded to, it’s why are we still being reasonable and polite. If a JW came knocking on my door every day, do I ignore him after opening the door several times already? No. I threaten his ass or call the police or take some other action in my court, not his, to make sure he never shows up again whether I answer the door or not.
can zen, you only mention religion, never God. Dumb.
Everyone in your family are atheists? Bullshit.
If you believed in God it would ruin everything? Nonsense.
That you are gay (I am not, so am a bit confused by the “Like you” in your post) is no surprise, since atheism attracts people who religion has ostracized. But the Catholic church, which is filled with gay men in their seminaries and in their religious houses, does not reject gay people. It rejects sexual acts that are more animal than human. It is not right and true to sodomize my wife or treat her face as…well, you know the rest. And you do not have this right either. You are in love, and that is a good thing. But if you have accepted the world’s view that you have the freedom to do anything in expression of this love, then you have accepted a lie.
Hitchens, who you respect so much, gave himself every freedom. And it killed him. Every-time I saw him speak I felt I was watching a pitiful creature hanging on by a thread. He was a drunk and a glutton as much as he was a gifted writer or speaker. And, for me, looking at him was like looking at a junkie on a street corner. And I counseled many of them, so I know what they look like.
You threw out God (whom you never really met) with your Catholicism (a Catholicism you seem to know very little about) because it suited your lifestyle, not because it was the intellectually brilliant thing to do.
If there is one thing in the world that is overrated and misunderstood, it is sexual attraction.
You have described your life and I am sure you think it was a convincing story of the beauty of atheism.
I did not. I found it to be a story about a guy who sat in church and found it all a bit selfless and unappealing, so he went outside and found something that was more fun and gave him the attention he craved.
If I had to pinpoint one thing that makes a person feel the need to proclaim their atheism, I would have to say it is an over-whelming self-centeredness.
Hitchens was so caught up in how he felt at every moment, that he needed to constantly be eating, smoking, or drinking.
And you, can zen, by the story of yourself above, seem caught up in the attention you get from being gay, attractive (I guess), and some sort of super atheist.
Hitchens left no room in his life for a God. He was one unto himself.
There is a lot to be said for free speech and I’m sure we all can see the difference here compared with other sites and forums, where if you say a wrong word or use the wrong language you are censored .
I think freedom has to be the ethos of this place, but within the context of the argument not rampant and reinless, off subject and destructive to the detriment of intelligent conversation.
Will be interesting to see if Mario plays along and answeres to his own thread.
So it looks like now I’ve become the one who’s trolling . . . for a troll!
Look, Mario is going to infiltrate every thread, indeed the forum as he has done, that has to do with promoting, discussing, celebrating and exercising nonreligious reason that he possibly can. Ignore is for personal difficulties between members, not for an admitted sabateur who’s here for one stated grand purpose and one unconscious one ... to be a spoiler of member enjoyment and for attention. Any other free speech, intellectual contribution or opportunity for reason issues have long since been surpassed and dissolved. Frankly, I don’t know why he’s still allowed here under his proven track record. And I’m holding back as best I can to keep from cussing his ass out at every response. I hate the m*f*er! Like I do all the other extreme religious nut cases. He’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen in my life and I certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with him in my personal life. Why should I here, when this is supposed to be a haven for nonreligious reason, not some religious nut’s pet project or private church. It’s not a matter of why he’s being responded to, it’s why are we still being reasonable and polite. If a JW came knocking on my door every day, do I ignore him after opening the door several times already? No. I threaten his ass or call the police or take some other action in my court, not his, to make sure he never shows up again whether I answer the door or not.
Unfortunately, “ignore” is all an individual member can do with a BM, unless and until further actions are taken by the administration, and i’m not so sure as to the basis for that action, besides BM being an annoying, offensive, thread-jacking jerk who has nothing to say but his bleatings about his god.
Unfortunately, “ignore” is all an individual member can do with a BM, unless and until further actions are taken by the administration, and i’m not so sure as to the basis for that action, besides BM being an annoying, offensive, thread-jacking jerk who has nothing to say but his bleatings about his god.
Ignore is working fine for me Dennis. It’s like he never existed.
Unfortunately, “ignore” is all an individual member can do with a BM, unless and until further actions are taken by the administration, and i’m not so sure as to the basis for that action, besides BM being an annoying, offensive, thread-jacking jerk who has nothing to say but his bleatings about his god.
Ignore is working fine for me Dennis. It’s like he never existed.
Agree, but sometimes will see his posts cited and/or “view” one then I sometimes succumb to firing off a shot. A waste of time, I know. Mea Culpa.
Unfortunately, “ignore” is all an individual member can do with a BM, unless and until further actions are taken by the administration, and i’m not so sure as to the basis for that action, besides BM being an annoying, offensive, thread-jacking jerk who has nothing to say but his bleatings about his god.
Ignore is working fine for me Dennis. It’s like he never existed.
Agree, but sometimes will see his posts cited and/or “view” one then I sometimes succumb to firing off a shot. A waste of time, I know. Mea Culpa.
It only feeds the silly little monkey, but giving him a slap is not so much a fault as a duty.
Sadly the sickness of a wicked little troll is not so easily siphoned. He will happily eat up all this attention and continue to maliciously sabotage other threads as well. The best remedy is to simply smile and disregard.
Sadly the sickness of a wicked little troll is not so easily siphoned. He will happily eat up all this attention and continue to maliciously sabotage other threads as well. The best remedy is to simply smile and disregard.
Brick. Agree. For this sad person, negative attention is all he can hope for.
