“Aside from the part about the founders being atheists”

from the video Hitchens only says they were non-Christian and not atheist. And from understanding history they were deists, they believed in a Creator.

Also Perkins seems to think that Madison’s writings found 100 years after his death, however contradictory to his own public ideas while he was alive, must be fraudulent and Perkins is stuck repeating that they’re inconsistent.

Hitchens is right in this debate. I’ve also read the 66 page verdict, and it makes a very strong case that National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional due to heavy pressure to make it a Evangelical Christian prayer only. And it makes further distinction that the National Day of Prayer Task Force marginalizes other faiths, and even other groups of Christians that don’t have the exact same belief system.

Worst part of this whole thing is that people misconstrue this as an assault on prayer and their faith. Even Hitchens states at the beginning of the video that people can choose to pray where and when ever they want. This is not going to prevent that, and the Constitution clearly states that Congress can’t prevent people from it either.

JohN is correct – this isn’t about inclusive “prayer” that embraces all faiths, it’s only about fundamentalist Christian prayer. They certainly wouldn’t want it to be Jewish prayer, would they? Catholic prayer? Mormon prayer? The fundamentalists don’t even consider Catholics or Mormons to be actual “Christians”. Therein lies a big part of the problem. It IS the state “establishing” a particular religion if it’s only a certain interpretation of Christianity, and that’s definitely what the agenda behind this is.

Overall, I just do not understand why Christians need or want the govt. involved in matters of faith. Why? If they cannot draw believers or provide their own message to do so, how in the world do they think the federal govt. is going to do so? It’s foolishness. Behind a fundamentalist agenda to promote their faith as being the only “real” Christianity. Which is bunk.

Christopher brings up an excellent point about the same people who are fighting big government are the people who are fighting for the governments imposition of prayer. And it certaintly is odd that the only people trying to fight the judges descision are christions

So what Dan is saying is that after carefully evaluationg the data, you don’t come to the same conclution he did, your not a free thinker. I have read the bible, praticed Cristianity and came to the conclution that I don’t believe it. Same data, same process, different outcome. So I’m only a free thinker if I come to the same conclutions as the majority? Interesting definition.

I wouldn’t call it narrow thinking. I look at it as positive reinforcement. I’ve found that I have a lot more problems when I ignore my senses than when I trust them. If I feel pain, I can pray (non-tangeble) or I can deal with the cause. Dealing with the cause has always produced better results in my life.

Dan, I think you’ve made the common error of defining “Freethought” in terms that suit you, or what you interpret it to mean based on the two words that make up freethought. On the contrary, the word freethought has a long history and a very specific definition that includes the rejection of dogma.

Here’s a relatively comprehensive definition of freethought: Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any other dogma.

All of the Abrahamic religions are based on tradition and authority: “generations of prophets” and a holy book or books; and many dogmas: “Jesus is the son of god and was raised from the dead to atone for the sins of mankind.” There exists not one shred of evidence for the existence of any god or gods and there never has been. Your personal feelings are not evidence. No one else can observe them and they are nothing more than the complex workings of your brain.

Most atheists I know truly are freethinkers. They are willing to look at evidence before forming an opinion. They are all almost exclusively former believers. We’ve tried the religion thing. Some have tried very hard, but the glaring lack of evidence eventually became too much. We could no longer lie to ourselves.

That said, if Christianity works for you fine. But you are not a freethinker, based on the standard definition of that word. i don’t doubt that you are a “freethinker” by your definition.

Most non-believers don’t arrive at their conclusion that there is no God casually. After all who wouldn’t like a father figure with superpowers to help them when life gets tough; or a wonderful place called heaven to escape the scariness of death. But if you are actually curious enough to study religion, you find it started way back in very primitive times before the Bible or Jesus appeared – so it has little to do with them. To understand why we originally believed in gods you have to go back to early man as he evolved to a more self-aware state. Scientists believe as we evolved beyond mere instinctual behaviors we initially had little in the way of a rational understanding of the world. We did not understand much and our emotions likely outweighed rational thinking as it does in animals today. Yet we started to learn and could also make-up explanations to ease our fear of the unknown. We thought the sun was a god, and that sacrificing animals and humans to the gods was a good thing. We also had dreams and imagination entering the picture. Dreams likely appeared to be a real “spirit like” existence to early man. Some early religions also used mind altering natural drugs like hallucinogenic mushrooms. What line between real and unreal must have been blurred and the imagination likely ruled.

We gave our gods human attributes as that is how we related to the world. As we evolved so did our gods. Gods became symbolic vessels of our evolving level of morality and a means of enforcing it. Structured religions and gods that could intimidate or reward us help keep us in order as religions became a form of governing. This moral structure religion provided helped us successfully develop larger social groups like towns, cities, and then empires. Religions were taught as absolute truths to children by their authority figures and most everyone believed. And, you could get killed if you didn’t claim to believe! The world is complicated and we initially did not have the tools to understand complex things. To primitive man it all had to seem magical, and we created hundreds of gods and religions, and practically every country had their patron god.

Judaism was an upgrade from many gods to monotheism, and the Old Testament is a combination of folklore, history, myths and laws. Jesus was a further upgrade as we can better relate to a human form of God. He also gave us a second chance, which is very appealing as we all screw-up at some point in our life. It is likely that Jesus was a great man who was transformed into a god as Christianity started getting organized. If you read books on the history of the New Testament you will discover that they embellished his life’s story to compete with the other religions of that era. The early church decided to have Christmas and Easter on dates of Pagan holidays to make Christianity more acceptable. Bible scholars don’t believe Jesus was born on Dec. 25th, and Easter coincides with a pagan spring celebration, which involved coloring eggs, rabbits and eating ham.

Originally there were several different groups following Jesus’ teachings after he died; they ranged in beliefs of him as a mere mortal teacher to an actual god. All the good stuff Jesus taught was taught previously by earlier religious sages, but Christianity packaged it all together in a very compelling manner. Read bible scholar Karen Armstrong’s book “The Great Transformation” for a good overview of this fact that Jesus taught nothing original. Another Bible scholar named Burton L. Mack has written books that deal with the variety of early Christian groups. Christianity came together as we now know it when Emperor Constantine adopted it as the official religion of the empire and asked the clergy to put together the official Christian Holy book. Old stories were collected and new ones written and committees decided what would go into the Bible as the official word of God. It took over two hundred years for the official version of Christianity to evolve. What is amazing is that we don’t even know who wrote most of the Bible including the key Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Even the Catholic New American Bible says authorship of many Gospels is unknown. Scholars believe Paul’s writings are authentic and he claims to never have met Jesus. His view of Jesus came through visions, and in many ways he is the father of Christianity. Some Christian sects still teach that Moses wrote the first 5 books of the OT, yet most Christians, including the Vatican don’t believe this anymore because some of those books talk about what happened after Moses died. So if we don’t know who wrote most of the Bible, how can we accept it as truth?

If you study the Bible and look at it objectively it is hard to find it divine. There is nothing in the Bible that is beyond the knowledge of man at that time. And much of it is factually wrong, like the sun orbiting the Earth, age of the Earth, etc. The Bible also has an alarmingly high number of immoral guidelines, like to kill non-believers, gays and children who misbehave. For examples see Deuteronomy 13:6, Leviticus 20:13 Exodus 21:15 Matthew 10:21, 5:17. So how do we get absolute morals from God if the Bible is full of immorality? People tend to cherry pick the good advice, and even then it often takes complex interpretations to figure out what it means. And only 3 of the 10 commandments are worthy of being laws in the USA. Fundamentalist Christians still argue for the literal word of the Bible because they see that once you undermined some of its holy “facts”, the whole house of cards could come tumbling down. For an extreme example, some Christians still argue the sun orbits the earth – see Geocentricity.com.

To take the Bible literally is hard for most, and yet if you don’t believe in much of the Bible, you are just creating your own version of Christianity. In one story in Mark Jesus chases demons out of people and into pigs. He then has the pigs jump off a cliff into the ocean and drown, killing the evil spirits with them. Many Christians still believe they can be haunted by actual demons that are fallen angels. Non-believers not only find all this hard to accept, but scary and somewhat amusing as well.

Human emotions and egos allow us to believe in anything from Astrology to Zeus to create a reality we feel more comfortable in. Christians believe Muslims are delusional about Muhammad being inspired by the Angel Gabriel to write the Koran. They also think Hindus and Buddhists are following false religions. In fact, most religions think the other religions beliefs are false. The non-believer simply concludes the most likely reality is that they are all wrong since people can believe strongly in whatever they want. Strong beliefs are not proof of anything as we all think we are right. Heck, people could justify burning people to death because they might be witches. So beliefs can be strong and overwhelming while still being dead wrong. Strong beliefs can also create a self-righteous outlook which is part of the problem with organized religions like Islam, Christianity & Judaism. The Buddha called such religions a form of “collective egotism” because they promote self-righteousness. This is ironic because these religions often teach acceptance, yet they all also teach rejection or even death for those who believe differently.

People can also have amazing mental experiences, but that is not evidence of a God , it’s just an amazing mental experience related to a change in brain chemistry. And if some people have a dream or vision that comes true, it is not surprising considering there are billions of people on the planet.

Fortunately, the scientific method evolved to rely on more then beliefs and superstitions. It relies on repeatable evidence that anyone can see. Like the fossil record that shows only simple one cell critters 3.5 billion years ago. Then progressively the fossil record shows the complexity of life increasing over time. So one can conclude life evolves from simple to more complex forms. Or, that God likes playing jokes on us. The discovery of DNA and mutations show how life can change/evolve. It also seems quite plausible that beneficial changes will create a better chance for survival and be passed along. The current variety of life on Earth also shows the progression from simple chemicals called prions (a type of protein), which can self-replicate and cause infectious diseases like Mad Cow, to viruses that need a host cell’s DNA to reproduce, to increasingly complex multi-cell critters, to us.

If it takes nature a fraction of a second to make complex beautiful hexagonal snowflakes from simple H2O molecules, think of what can happen over 14 billion years when you use all 92 natural elements and the millions of resulting compounds on the ~1000000000000000000000000 planets that are believed to exist in this universe. That one planet forms a complex chemistry called life is not that amazing. Especially if you study organic chemistry and learn how versatile the carbon molecule is in its bonding capabilities, and you have test tubes the size of oceans. If it all seems too complicated it is because we are not that smart yet. It was not that long ago we were offering human sacrifices to the gods, and the Vatican did not officially recognize that Copernicus was right about the Earth orbiting the Sun until 1992. So a cat might think the complexity of a snowflake requires an intelligent designer, yet we can accept it is due to the unique polarity of the water molecule. As we become better educated we will come to appreciate evolution as a very complicated snowflake.

But how about the big questions like where did it all come from? Modern cosmology does not say the universe has a beginning. It says this stage of the universe came from a big bang, but this does not mean there was nothing before the bang. In fact, the April 2008 issue of Discover has 3 theories of what may have preceded the big bang. Where does mother nature (i.e. matter/energy) come from – the answer is most likely the same place as God. Where does anything in the natural world come from? As best we know you cannot create something from nothing. The energy/matter in the universe does not just appear and disappear, it is conserved. But it does like to keep changing forms. So where did you, a tree or a star come from? The answer is matter/energy rearranging itself based upon the 4 forces of nature.

Humans have trouble understanding things that have no beginning, probably because we do have a beginning and end, as we are only a temporary arrangement of matter/energy. We, trees, and the sun exist for the moment, but eventually our matter/energy will rearrange based on the forces of nature and be manifested in some other form that will exist for a while. Matter/energy appears to be an absolute form of existence that can rearrange into many interesting temporary forms. So there are two forms of existence, primary like matter/energy, and secondary like us. The primary form always existed as best we can tell.

If you want to keep thinking primary things initially came from somewhere, you run into the first cause problem – whether it’s God, or matter/energy. Something had to exist since time started. Otherwise something can come from nothing. We can’t really comprehend any cause that would form something out of absolutely nothing since there would be no cause to start with. “Why” therefore is not a valid question for the fundamental level of existence, it exists because it exists. The same logic is applied to God by believers. The fact we all see and feel matter/energy all around us makes us believe it’s real. The fact there is no direct evidence of a God, and that people rely on faith to believe, makes many doubt his existence.

@Tom, I was very impressed with your comments. They were great and reflect the thoughts of a very intelligent person.

Dan,
1. Because people make up stories and people believe them. Like ~ billion Muslisms believe God spoke to Muhammad via the Angel Gabriel to write the Koran. Do you believe the Koran is the inspired word of God? But you proabably believe the Bible was inspired by God. See the problem?

2. Science does not say there is no God. It says there is no evidence of God. It also shows us how the Placebo effect works as the mind can believe whatever helps it cope. Science also has answered many questions by natural explainations that use to be attributed to God’s magic.

@ Tom
Very well said!
We used to believe that thunder and lightning were supernatural events, we know better now. We (Well not all of us, but some human beings) used to believe we needed to cut the heart out of our children to make the crops grow. There is a lot we used to believe. But we have the ability to learn and grow.
We used to believe in many gods. Then fewer. Then one. We are approching the correct answer. I guess that’s evolutions (Paraphrased from C Hitchins)

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