1) These people were not accomplished. They had the education and world knowledge of an anti-social, slightly retarded turnip. Which explains their current followers.
2) Christianity is DYING, not spreading. It's gaining among the stupid and where it is spread at gunpoint, but in the civilized, educated world it's shrinking at a rate that has the Vatican in a tizzy. Soon your little zombie god will be on the scrapheap of history with Horus and Attis and the other "born of a virgin, died, resurrected, eat his flesh" pagan gods that the Christians stole him from.
Sorry I understand your fairy tales better than you do and that you view knowledge of the facts of where the biblical myths came from to be "intellectually dishonest". But of course, if you knew jack about your invisible man in the sky you wouldn't be able to believe in him. Just console yourself that if god didn't want us to use our brains to kick your ass with them he wouldn't have bestowed them upon us, so perhaps it's all part of his plan that you make yourself look so silly.
The Christian ideas might be fine, you know, except for the ones that command you to rape, pillage and sell your enemies and even your own children into slavery. Too bad you can't find any Christians that actually practice the good ideas. Modern Christianity is greed, violence, oppression and hatred of everyone including themselves because since god hates christians they feel they might as well go along with him. Or are those the good ideas you're talking about?
That's not true. Most atheists realize that all beliefs regarding God and religion are actually opinions being held by individuals. Being an atheist means being of the opinion that there is no God. Being a theist means being of the opinion that there is a God. If all either of them have is an opinion based on limited evidence, there's no way that either should be able obtain certainty.
That said, being uncertain is not the same thing as having no opinion on the matter. Therefor the degrees of atheism and theism can be said to follow a pretty smooth gradient from "feeling" certain that there is no God on one end, to "feeling" certain that there is a God on the other, depending on the strength of the individual's opinion. Most atheist fall somewhere in between, while I think it's pretty safe to say that most theist are clustered near the extreme theism end.
Atheist=Non Theist
Your Strawman is just a Strawman. You are essentially saying that Believing in "God" is as stupid as Not Believing in "God". There is no position that isn't "Stupid", according to your argument.
No, atheism is the extreme and only the extreme. Once you admit there might be, you fall down to agnostic, and then you can have your degrees and gray areas.
I would also say that your experience of theists is shallow. Most are actually pretty agnostic in my experience. Like most things, the distribution falls on a bell curve with most on the middle and very few at the ends.
No. I'm saying holding others to your standards when you are at either extreme is stupid, stupid.
So you're using the most extreme definition of atheism in order to attack all atheists. Welcome to my ignore list.
Fail.
There is only one definition of atheist. Welcome to agnosticism.
How? Was it the part where I implied your intelligence does not qualify you for the conversation. Try your trolling over on the Disney forums.
Being an atheist is equally as stupid as holding fervently to a religion which defines god.
Stating unconfirmed opinion as fact in any form is stupid. It's not a 'Christianity vs atheism' thing but something that applies to every facet of life.
A better way to put is that uninformed opinion is always the wrong opinion. Even when it happens to be factually correct, it's still wrong opinion because its correctness is then purely by happenstance. An uneducated prole who happens to be atheist because he read it on the Internet isn't automatically a smarter person than a religious philosopher who questions dogmatic law.
More than anything, it's simple statistics. If 80% of the world is religious then 80% of idiots are religious.
Agnosticism = Not Knowing
It is a completely different thing from Not Believing. One can be both Agnostic and Atheist.
Edit:
Also, 'atheistic' just means 'godless'. Its opposite isn't 'religious' but 'theistic'.
Just like there are atheistic religions (personality cults and, arguably, Buddhism) in the world there is nothing preventing areligous theism that ignores scripture, 'revelation', and dogmatic law while still holding belief in a higher power. It's generally referred to as 'Deism'.
So everyone is an idiot? That's rude!
Well, no, but you fail statistics
It also means that 80% of non-idiots are religious.
I'll change it to theistic. I mean fervent believers in god who sit in judgement, though you have to admit most of these are going to fall into a religion of some sort.
I'm not sure if I'm following, but it sort of falls into the same hat. If we keep it strictly to the dogmatic type then you're not going to see much difference in average intellect between the type who adheres to the Bible and who adheres to the Communist Manifesto (for example) as unwavering truths.
To me, it's not a matter of what you believe in but why. Anyone who can back up his beliefs and opinions based in critical reading of these texts is always going to be smarter than someone who can't. I don't think it matters one bit whether it's a belief in a deity like God or a personality like Stalin. Both can be religions but neither is always a religion. Likewise, one is theistic while the other is not. How smart their followers are doesn't really factor into it because it's so dependent on their level of skepticism towards these 'truths'.
On a personal note, I can say that there are more than enough Christians in my social circles but I don't know a single one that believes in dogmatic crap like the Ark or a young Earth or homosexuality being a sin or any of that nonsense. And two of them even happen to be ordained priests with Master's degrees in theology. All of these fall into the religious camp but it certainly doesn't prevent them from being critical and intelligent people.
This is just a pure troll thread at this point. Really after being on these boards Techs has not been banned for intentional trolling such as this?
I assume that you are correct; and I don't begrudge anyone what they believe; But you should take note that you're correcting the person that said "hey, don't be an asshole" as opposed to correcting the asshole shitting all over the place.Everything you said applies to Islam too. And Hinduism and Bhuddism.
Yep, I pointed out acceptance of macro reasons to disagree with how Christianity has been used and limited my statement to disagrement with the intellectually vapid shit spewed forth.As for the spread of Christianity, it was co-opted by the Roman Empire for political reasons and forcibly spread through Europe by violence and coercion.