Just a little advice for new Atheists

[NothingSacred]

Yeah, if you donate enough to the "cause" the Dalai Lama will name you a holy man... LOL  I do think that any religion that has any sense or doctrine of servitude or giving up one's riches, but the leader is rich, I have issues with.

I see your point, but that's not what it's about at all.  Desire for things like money is, from his perspective, just another cause of suffering.

I never knock an individual's belief system, so I am not attacking you personally in any way.  I like your posts, I enjoy your input and your insight.  If it works for you as an individual, then I'm all for it, but as an entire system, I don't find any religions worthy of any praise at all, but I am a die-hard atheist of the worst kind.. LOL... Peace, and keep on believing... and don't think ill of me for my own thoughts.

Of course not! :hissyfit:  pastafarianism 17 ?!?!?! how dare you  FSM IS THE TRUTH... RAMEN!

[KebertX]

0. Atheism
1. Confucianism
2. Daoism
3. Buddhism
4. Shinto
5. Hinduism
6. Islam
7. Indigenous Spiritualities â†' (Native American, Aboriginal, African, and Rastafarian cultures are in this category)
8. Sikhism
9. Pagan/Neo Pagan
10. Christianity
11. Judaism
12. Jainism
13. Zoroastrianism
14. Ancient Mythologies
15. Any Cult
16. Scientology
17. Pastafarianism

 pastafarianism 17 ?!?!?! how dare you  FSM IS THE TRUTH... RAMEN!

Lol, the way I see it, A religion loses most of it's credibility when it was only made up as a joke... I stand by my list!

[Martin TK]

Yeah, if you donate enough to the "cause" the Dalai Lama will name you a holy man... LOL  I do think that any religion that has any sense or doctrine of servitude or giving up one's riches, but the leader is rich, I have issues with.

I see your point, but that's not what it's about at all.  Desire for things like money is, from his perspective, just another cause of suffering.

I never knock an individual's belief system, so I am not attacking you personally in any way.  I like your posts, I enjoy your input and your insight.  If it works for you as an individual, then I'm all for it, but as an entire system, I don't find any religions worthy of any praise at all, but I am a die-hard atheist of the worst kind.. LOL... Peace, and keep on believing... and don't think ill of me for my own thoughts.

Of course not! :bananacolor:

[KebertX]

While I find the Dalai Lama to be a personable and charming, he still lords over his believers by issuing edicts about sex and diet that are a bit odd, at best.  I'm just not fond of any religion that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, that regards life as a poor and transient thing, and seeks to enlighten folks through the dissolution of critical thought in place of nirvana, and seeks to suggest that we part from all our worldly possessions.  Sometimes I think it all sounds alike, "reach nirvana" is sometimes to me the same as "speaking in tongues" and being in the "rapture" of the Christian evangelical nonsense.

Of course, I hope not to offend anyone, these are just the ramblings of a man pushing fifty...  

I wouldn't call them edicts. It's more like: "I find this to be a wholesome way to live my life, it's possible that you might want to do the same."  In Buddhism, 'enlightenment' lies only in freedom of thought. If you're just blindly listening to a preacher, it's not going to work out well for you.

Life is not poor, it's the single richest thing there is. Without life, there's really nothing to be perceived in the universe, is there? But life is transient. No matter how you examine it, life has to end. That's why I don't like the Abrahmic religions. They believe they're going to heaven!  Are they really so egocentric that they think they will actually live forever? The finality of death is the coldest truth one must face. Religion makes the perfect distraction.

Also I don't believe in Nirvana, and 'Enlightenment' is just a fancy word for people who reach the maximum level of Buddhistiness. I'm not interested in that, I'd rather put effort like that into helping all of society, instead of 'enlightening' myself.

No offense taken. If you can't say anti-religionist things in an Atheist Forum, then something is terribly wrong.

[notself]

Perhaps posting the wording of the Precepts vs the 10 Commandments will make the point clear.

Christian:  Thou shalt not Murder.

Buddhism:  I undertake to refrain from killing any sentient being

Christian:  Thou shalt not Steal

Buddhism:  I undertake to refrain from taking that which is not freely given.

Not only are the precepts training rules voluntarily followed for the experience of a compassionate and moral life, the Buddhist precepts have much wider application than Christian commandments which are narrowly applied as murder or direct theft of objects.  It is perfectly "moral" for a Christian to execute a prisoner.  It is not moral for a Buddhist to do so.  It is perfectly Ok for a Christian to make threats of damnation if a church member does not tithe.  It is immoral for a Buddhist monk or nun to even ask for money.

[notself]

The word Nirvana is often mistranslated as enlightened or as a place.  It is so commonly done that only the picky (like me) challenge it.  Here is a quote from an essay that tries to clarify the meaning of the word.  Nibbana is the Pali word.  Nirvana is Sanskrit.

Back in the days of the Buddha, nirvana (nibbana) had a verb of its own: nibbuti. It meant to "go out," like a flame. Because fire was thought to be in a state of entrapment as it burned â€" both clinging to and trapped by the fuel on which it fed â€" its going out was seen as an unbinding. To go out was to be unbound. Sometimes another verb was used â€" parinibbuti â€" with the "pari-" meaning total or all-around, to indicate that the person unbound, unlike fire unbound, would never again be trapped. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... averb.html

So the word Nirvana should actually be translated as free of suffering, clinging and aversion.  It is a state of perfect equanimity, of quiet, of peace.

[radicalaggrivation]

I am very happy that I converted over from being religious to being atheist. I grew up in the black community and black Americans are very superstitions and devout. The irony kills me today but when I was a kid, it was all very normal. I was raised a Muslim but surrounded by Christians. I constantly had to defend myself from their attacks and assertions that I was going to hell. My Islamic roots were mostly for show. Most of my life I believed in a heavenly being that cared about me. The older I grew the less I cared about being a part of organized religions. Because I was always under siege by Christians, I was able to understand their contradictions very early. My first unanswerable question to theists was, "If I have never heard of or been exposed to Christianity and I do not accept Jesus as my personal deity, will I go to Hell?" The answers were either "yes" or "uh what?"

I will admit that after I shed Islam, I really tried to "get" Christianity. I went to church, I listened, and I opened my mind to the ideas. Unfortunately, the skeptic in me was already taking over and I could not make sense of it. At first I thought it was me but I later realized that it was the religion that did not make sense. That was a wonderful revelation. I am still a fairly new atheist. I did not openly reject a personal God until late 2008. It was an amazing and eye opening experience. The rejection of a "mental North Korea", as Hitchens so deftly puts it, created a whole new world for me to marvel at. It has only been a few years but every book, article, and thread I read that challenges religion deepens my disbelief. When you are religious you fool yourself into a sense of certainty. You question this certainty often because it is not true. For those of use who rejected that certainty, we are truly the ones who are "blessed" (an emotion I still feel but do not attribute to God).

When you are an atheist no one can dictate to you what you should be. You are allowed to be yourself. More than that, you are forced to be moral or cope with your own immorality. There is no deity to blame your weaknesses on. It is absolution and reality unfiltered. It  is understanding just how special we are in the universe to have the opportunity to live conscious, dignified lives. Atheism is the height of human clarity and the spoils of unbridled curiosity. For those of you who were never believers, that is good on you. For those coming out of the darkness of religious oppression, breath deep on the fresh air. No one but those who had to fight for their mental freedom can truly understand just how much courage it takes to go against everything you learned in order to seek truth. I applaud you and hope that you can feel proud of yourselves because it is truly an accomplishment.

I did my undergraduate work at an historically black college in South Carolina, then spent a number of years teaching there and working on the staff.  I lived most of my life in South Carolina where the population is about 70 percent African-American in the area I grew up in, so I am very aware of the spirituality of African-Americans.  I don't have as much issues with them, however, as I do in the Southern Baptist in the South, at least the African-Americans I knew and love accepted me for the person I am, not for the person they think I should be.

I guess I was never an open atheist around Blacks. I discovered my atheism here in Utah. I assume the more devout and religious you are the more adverse your reaction to an atheist would be. It would be nice if I could think I am wrong about that but I have read about many instances were it is not the case. I think that if they did accept you, they were just good people, who understood that their beliefs are not the only ones that are valid and that those beliefs do not make a person who they are. That is rare and good on you that you got to witness that type of rare tolerance.

[Tank]

Bump for n00bs

[notself]

There was a time when I would have given you that Eastern Religions are different than the more Western ones, until I did some actual research into the history of them.  Most Eastern religions do teach more on love and peace, but at the core they still seek to establish a "one" mentality and to control the thoughts and actions of the membership.  During WWII, Budhist Monks in Japan were among those who were recruiting kamaazi pilots, promising them eternal bliss.  All religions are oportunistic and at their core they are self-serving.  Some of the richest religious leaders in the world are Eastern Religious Leaders,  Even the Dahli Llama, who is charismatic, has a claim to the thrown of Tibet, should they ever get their freedom from China.

I completely agree.  Buddhism has much in it that makes it a wonderful philosophy but it also has much in it that makes it a religious cult as narrow as any other.  If one wants proof of this, just join a Buddhist forum and observe the "fundamentalists" talk among themselves.  Suggesting that the Buddha was not omniscient will result in outrage.

Almost all forms of Buddhism have amulets and talismans, rituals and clerical hierarchy.  Lineages fight among themselves over control of temple land.  Buddhists burn Christian Churches and support and fight wars. The government of Sri Lanka is being investigated for war crimes against the Tamils.  When these discrepancies are brought up one hears the same defense that Christians use, "Well those guys are not true Buddhists".  

Just as the Catholic Church and many other Christian churches teach the words of Paul rather than of Jesus and talk about miracles of Saints, many Buddhist monks don't actually teach the dhamma but rather just preach jataka tales such as the Buddha being born from the side of his mother, walking as soon as he was born with lotus blossoms appearing in each footstep.

[Existentialist]

I see it all a little bit differently from some.  I think that we have all been indoctrinated into the ways of religion.  Whether we individually believed in god or not makes very little difference.  The opening post of this thread was a very refreshing read, talking about isolation, guilt and punishment as being the factors that characterise Christianity's grip on the human mind, rather than going down the old route of emphasising proof or empirical evidence as being the prime determinants of the atheist's whole mindset in relation to life.  The thing for me, though, is that psychological control isn't just applied at the point when somebody leaves the religion.  It is a series of moment-to-moment behaviours.  I also think that these methods of psychological control - guilt, isolation, punishment - are used as tools of oppression in capitalism.  We are all, whether we like it or not, born and live in capitalism and are party to its ways of defining relationships.  The connection between capitalism as an oppressor and religion as an oppressor has been a symbiotic relationship for a long time.  It is difficult for me to put my finger on which came first.

As an atheist, I recognise that I am just as susceptible to learned or inherited oppressive behaviours as those who adhere to a religion.  In one way I think  we atheists are even more likely to resort these methods of psychological control, infact I see it quite a lot.  Many of us seem to acquire a kind of righteousness which is based on our decision to reject belief in any gods, seeing ourselves as superior to religious believers who are unable to deploy empirical or evidential support for their beliefs.  I therefore don't share the idea that atheism is at the top of any list for 'believability'.  Believability of what?  Authenticity, genuineness, humanity?  It depends on the individual atheist.  A particularly nasty atheist could be more 'religious' in his oppressive behaviours than an enlightened christian.  There is no hard and fast rule that makes atheism more likely to result in better relationships or a better understanding of political oppression.  It depends on the individual.

If I were asked to illustrate or quantify what I mean, I would say that we are all on this planet at least 70% religious in our habits of thinking and our relationships.  Atheists give themselves the opportunity to become 69% religious - the chance to take a small step in the right direction and to prepare the way for future advances.  But to be 100% atheist in a capitalist society is impossible.  And bear in mind I'm talking about religious habits of oppressive behaviour, not the headline definition of atheism as a disbelief, nor even as a belief that there is no god.  I think it is better to be realistic and aware of our failings than be unrealistic and fall into the same mould as generations of religious believers before us but without even realising it.

[Matt]

Could you explain more about capitalism's symbiotic relationship with religion and give specific examples?  Or about how it is a religion if that is what you meant.  Also, please define what you mean by "religion".  I say that a lot of atheists are not religious at all, even the ones who are "nasty".

I... don't share the idea that atheism is at the top of any list for 'believability'. Believability of what? Authenticity, genuineness, humanity?

This doesn't make any sense.  Could you rephrase, please?

[notself]

Existentialist,

I, too, would like you to rephrase.  Your point about capitalism and its relation to religion is a bit murky.  Perhaps you can begin by explaining what you mean by capitalism, religious behavior, and oppression.

[Tank]

Bump for n00bs