Just saying atheists might want to market themselves better.
No, thank you. I think atheists will leave the marketing up to Jihadists, Glenn Beck, Reverand Wright and those Christian missionaries whom attempted to smuggle Haitian earthquake victims, so-called 'orphans' away from their families last week. You don't have to wear atheism on your sleeve in order to be respected. Just living a fulfilled life that doesn't cause harm onto others is all the PR they need.
Hey now, no living human was ever around to see a dinosaur or trilobite or pterodactyl or wholly mammoth, but there is no rational case against accepting that these creatures once existed on this planet. Why can't the same methods of fossil analysis and carbon dating applied to earthly palentology not be applicable to the Martian meteorite?
Science might have something close to a monopoly explaining the physical aspect of life but there is tons of competition trying to account for the spiritual/emotional aspect.
Ha, ha. You do realize that one's spiritual/emotional self is just a chemically-induced extension of the biological processes occuring in one's brain, right? Complex alterations in chemical signaling which results in changes in mental states. When we die, the mind/thoughts/spirit dies too, in spite of what you might've been told.
Oh please! Many of the greatest mass killings in history occurred in the 20th century under a system that was explicitly atheist. No one has clean hands.
It is a complete myth that atheism is more dangerous than religion because atheists like Adolf Hitler killed millions in the name of their atheistic ideologies like Nazism or that that's far more than have been killed in the name of religion. The Nazi Party had the implicit support of millions of German Christians, of the Lutheran and Protestant church movements because they believed that Adolf Hitler was a gift to the German people from God. After the Nazis took control, Catholics turned their criticism into support and praise. Catholic churches even helped identify Jews for extermination. It is also a myth that Hitler was an atheist. There are countless writings of his that refute this claim and Christianity was promoted in the party platform. So you're very right when you say that no one has clean hands, particularly the millions of German Christians whom either did nothing or willingly participated in crimes against humanity.
I'll credit you Mao and Stalin were atheists, but atheism does not kill anyone. People kill people. And predisposition to indoctrination is a vessel personality-cultists can easily take advantage of. And if the people fighting in the Crusades had the same weapons capabilities as these three men, you can be certain that the loss-of-life would be on the same scale, albeit worse cause there was fewer people back then to sustain populations/gene pools.
Kids as easy marks sounds like a good conspiracy, but these days more people today tend to "get religion" later in life than get indoctrinated into it at a young age.
Which is more or less what I said. Parents send their kids to Sunday school, by their teens they get rebellious and say no to that. After years of rebellion, they feel lost and are enticed by the promise of family, love, meaning, purpose that a dogma can offer them and they become indoctrinated. Doesn't have to be religion, it can also be in the form of political movements using religion as a recruiting tool.
If that's what brings you joy, the belittling of others whose opinions you do not agree with, then that would make you the poster child for why the religious lifestyle is degenerate.
To say that anyone is happy living their lives through anything is open to question. All depends who's doing the questioning.
Okay. If man in the absence of laws and culture were all self-determining beings focused on just pursuing their own ends (happiness, survival, comfort) without interferring with the natural space of other self-determining beings minding their own business, is that society any worse for wear? Do humans really need guidelines from an antiquated book to tell them have they ought to live or do we each not have within all of us our own sense of natual law and morality that mitigates the likelihood of war and civil unrest? To answer your question, many people are not happy living their lives because so much of our time is preoccupied with pleasing others, or worse a dogma, that we forget how to be comfortable in our own skin.
If we didn't spend so much time contemplating our existence and impending death, it's entirely possible that religion never would have existed. But we do, and religion has been a feature throughout recorded history. I don't think it's going away.
Sure, I don't disagree with you, but there's certainly a case to be made for equal status of non-religious peoples. I don't see why Christianity should be threatened by it, no more than a straight man be threatened by homosexuality. Same as it lessens the competition for potential mates, atheism weans out the elements of the Church that never should've been there in the first place. Those whose thrist for knowledge and answers has never been satisfied by religion. You'll find many atheists started out this way. So why make them continue giving lip-service to a god with doubts, when non-belief can at least offer them solace and inner peace?