Great, pray for people who need help: way to do nothing and still get that smug sense of self-satisfaction. Please, next time there’s some kind of disaster, just masturbate, because that’ll do pretty much the same thing as prayer.
Sorry. You lose. The people who pray are also the people who give money. The single greatest predicting factor for one’s giving is one’s level of religious dedication. Over half of atheists give nothing at all to any charity. Fewer than 20% of religious people do. And when atheists DO give, they give less than half of what a giving religious person gives.
So, how much did you send to Haiti last year? We sent over $300 to Haiti alone–$100 for to transporting $1000 worth of donated medical supplies, $78 (actually, it was $157, but it went to both Guatemala AND Haiti, so I’m counting half) to pay to send a year’s supply of food for two people, and $150 to help feed and educate the indentured children of Haiti (Restaveks). We’ll be sending at least $150 this year for the Restavek schools.
Yeah, Pootah, so give your money to organizations who line their pockets with it and then turn over their supplies to a corrupt and unorganized government to distribute. At least with prayer, you’re not condoning this behavior.
Maybe you should get your ass over there and actually HELP them if you want to help so bad. Seems to me, that more of the “praying” kind of people think of doing THIS.
That’s great, just have more untrained people showing up to a disaster area. People who will need more food, water and housing just when there isn’t enough to go around. Even if corruption wastes half of the donation, it’s still better to donate than show up (unless of course you are actually trained in disaster recovery). Just donating the money it takes to get you there would do a lot better than showing up. Of course you need some people, but that should be a small portion of the donating population. Less than 1 percent. Haiti could not handle 1 million do-gooders showing up. They need some thousands, not millions. The best thing the other millions can do is donate money even in the face of corruption.
Prayer is not some sort of self-satisfaction action, at least it shouldn’t be. Prayer is to give up your pride and acknowledge a higher power. Prayer could lead to a calling to, in fact, donate your money, but you have a good point.
If you don’t have the money to donate, prayer is all you have.
Ok im an atheist to start out with but there was something i read somewhere. Something to do with freedom of religion. eh probably some crackpot college paper someone wrote. get on with your religion bashing.
I’m not proposing any kind of government law that makes religion illegal. I’m pointing out what I see as flaws. Everyone has the same rights to believe what they want and publicly say what they believe. Christians exercise their right to bash atheism every day, Every OT printed (millions of copies every year) has Psalm 14 which says atheists are foolish, corrupt, are all no good and our their works are abominations. If they are going to dish it out, they need to be big enough to take it.
I have an idea…
We send all the priests, rabbis and other religious figures over to Haiti.
“Greetings, we are here to offer you praye…!” *Dies in a flash mob*
Or, as they pray, we throw them out of a high flying plane. They won’t die, the robes they wear will act as parachutes. Imagine the wonder and amazement the suffering people will feel. God sent down MORE priests! Now… what to do with them. Oh wait, don’t they make good fire wood?
Do you really want to help them?
Donate to universities and labs that research genetic engineering.
With Pokemon, rescue and recovery would be easy!
The atheists on Icanhazcheezburger/Failbooking make up 94% of the worlds atheists. This is where they dwell and pronounce their own little religion, yes, religion to people who they think they are smarter than.
Wow. Atheism is disbelief in a deity. It is not the same as lacking religion. The vehemence with which you disdain other (deistic) religions is proof in and of itself that you believe in atheism. Belief in anything is religious, and therefore to proclaim yourself as atheist is to follow an Atheist religion. It’s the same as Richard Dawkins: the man is so far into his non-belief in anything supernatural, and so heavily pro-evolution, that he is a religious nut. It happens that his religion is science, but it is not out of a scientific rationale; he has blind faith in theories, and crusades against the very actions he himself takes.
Unless you’re nihilistic, or haven’t considered it at all, you’re religious in one way or another.
Your just trying to spin atheism into something you can accept, because you don’t have the mental capacity to understand how it doesn’t scare some people to be without faith in the most incoherent book of all time!
What has praying ever done other than make you people feel better? It doesn’t bring back the dead, it doesnt feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or anything of use to our world. The only thing religion has ever done for us is bad. Every war ever fought has been for religion. Not only that, but why do most religious people believe that without religion we’re all doomed? I know more atheists with good morals than christians. Praying doesn’t make you a good person. And not believing doesn’t make you a bad one.
“every war ever fought has been for religion.” I’d like to see you support that claim. I could say something similar, and more true, which is that every war has been fought for money and power, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe in money and power. Whether prayer and God are real or not, fallacies like this that internet drones spout by the millions make me laugh.
Shelby, as a fellow atheist, that part about religion causing ALL wars isn’t entirely true. Wars are most often started over territory. I don’t think ALL the world’s problems would go away if it weren’t for religion. Even in the Middle East, if you didn’t have Islam and Judaism, they’d still be fighting over the most fertile land in the area. You’d still have different races and cultural practices. With or without religion, people would find a reason to hate each other. Religion isn’t the root of all the world’s problems. Yes, people do use it to justify things (there have already been several cases of fundies going to Haiti and kidnapping children in the name of God, and some of the kids’ parents were still alive). But that doesn’t make religion by itself a bad thing. People can believe whatever they want, but until they learn to tolerate other people (that goes for believers AND non-believers), we’re not going to get anywhere.
Oh, and the answer to world peace is free trade, not abolishing all religions
1) Atheist regimes have killed FAR MORE people than any religious regime in the history of mankind. For example, the French Revolution in a single year killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition in four centuries. Communist regimes alone killed 150 million people around the world in less than a century. And I am not even including people killed by wars, though wars involving these regimes have been far more violent (compare the number of deaths of English, French and American people in WWII to the deaths of Germans and Russians). Check out the studies of Professor R. J. Rummel (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html).
2) There is no such thing as “atheist morals”. Every moral system in the world came from a religion. There are no exceptions. What often happens is that after many centuries people follow a moral system without realizing where it came from but they follow them regardless because they “sense” it is better than not following it. Most people are like that, atheists or not. There is a excellent article about this, but it is written in Portuguese.
Really? If you have to have religion to have morals, stay the heck away from me. If that’s all you have to base your morals on, supposing one day they prove definitively that there is no god. Are you going to go around raping and murdering because you don’t have to fear eternal damnation? I’m good because it’s good for me and good for society to be good. I don’t go around raping and murdering, I give to charity when I’m able, I help people out as much as I can. I actually DO things. I don’t sit around praying and hoping some invisible man in the sky comes to help.
And seriously? Atheist regimes? I suppose you’re including America in with that considering we’re a secular country, not a theocracy. In fact, most countries don’t have an official state religion. And you obviously forgot about the burning times, which lasted from the dark ages until the 1900′s, and the Crusades, and 9/11, and the whole thing in the Middle East that’s been going on for thousands of years, and the Holocaust, and human sacrifices by any ancient polytheistic religions…. Religion’s got atheism beat for murder.
I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school… I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy…
“Every war ever fought has been for religion”
Way off, The majority of wars have been fought over resources. Religion is only the rallying cry used to bamboozle Jane & John Doe into a war they have no businesses being a part off.
How Ironic that christians donate far more money than atheists do towards causes like Haiti. Also, how is it a fail that some people believe that God is more powerful than money? People are entitled to their beliefs.
If God is more powerful than money, why need money? People are entitled to their beliefs, but that goes for all including me. People can believe in God, and I can believe that’s silly. We both can speak our minds.
Is that proportional? ‘Cause unless you count China, there are waaaaay more Christians than atheists, who are like 1 in 12 people in the world, and if you count the nonreligious 1 in 4.
Great, pray for people who need help: way to do nothing and still get that smug sense of self-satisfaction. Please, next time there’s some kind of disaster, just masturbate, because that’ll do pretty much the same thing as prayer.
and it feels good.
That is awesome. I’ve been looking for a way to help out in Haiti.
You get more satisfaction from masturbation than you do from prayer anyway….. These people that say that they will pray on it just cracks me up.
Yeah, your right next time something like this happens LETS ALL MASTURBATE TO GOD. Praying is overrated.
Hey, don’t forget that Pat Robertson prayed! We should all look up to him and his money-laundering techniques.
I’m a female atheist and I’m going to go do some praying for Haiti right now!
Sorry. You lose. The people who pray are also the people who give money. The single greatest predicting factor for one’s giving is one’s level of religious dedication. Over half of atheists give nothing at all to any charity. Fewer than 20% of religious people do. And when atheists DO give, they give less than half of what a giving religious person gives.
So, how much did you send to Haiti last year? We sent over $300 to Haiti alone–$100 for to transporting $1000 worth of donated medical supplies, $78 (actually, it was $157, but it went to both Guatemala AND Haiti, so I’m counting half) to pay to send a year’s supply of food for two people, and $150 to help feed and educate the indentured children of Haiti (Restaveks). We’ll be sending at least $150 this year for the Restavek schools.
Yeah, Pootah, so give your money to organizations who line their pockets with it and then turn over their supplies to a corrupt and unorganized government to distribute. At least with prayer, you’re not condoning this behavior.
Maybe you should get your ass over there and actually HELP them if you want to help so bad. Seems to me, that more of the “praying” kind of people think of doing THIS.
And, well, how many of them actually go there?
That’s great, just have more untrained people showing up to a disaster area. People who will need more food, water and housing just when there isn’t enough to go around. Even if corruption wastes half of the donation, it’s still better to donate than show up (unless of course you are actually trained in disaster recovery). Just donating the money it takes to get you there would do a lot better than showing up. Of course you need some people, but that should be a small portion of the donating population. Less than 1 percent. Haiti could not handle 1 million do-gooders showing up. They need some thousands, not millions. The best thing the other millions can do is donate money even in the face of corruption.
http://www.charitynavigator.com. Know it. Love it.
https://donate.mcc.org/project/haiti-earthquake
@Pootah – LOL!!!
And it will feel even BETTER than prayer!
…unless there’s something about prayer that people aren’t telling me.
Prayer is not some sort of self-satisfaction action, at least it shouldn’t be. Prayer is to give up your pride and acknowledge a higher power. Prayer could lead to a calling to, in fact, donate your money, but you have a good point.
If you don’t have the money to donate, prayer is all you have.
You’re fucking kidding me, right?
Great, instead of admitting you can’t help it’s much better to make believe you are doing something.
Religion – making believe everything is great even in the middle of disaster for millenia!
Ok im an atheist to start out with but there was something i read somewhere. Something to do with freedom of religion. eh probably some crackpot college paper someone wrote. get on with your religion bashing.
I’m not proposing any kind of government law that makes religion illegal. I’m pointing out what I see as flaws. Everyone has the same rights to believe what they want and publicly say what they believe. Christians exercise their right to bash atheism every day, Every OT printed (millions of copies every year) has Psalm 14 which says atheists are foolish, corrupt, are all no good and our their works are abominations. If they are going to dish it out, they need to be big enough to take it.
It’s not religion-bashing, it’s frustration that these people refuse to do anything but still claim moral superiority.
Wow… this should definitely be on LOLGod!!!
Prayer? Oh please…
I’m with Pootah! Masturbate for Haiti!
Prayer? Money? Oh please…
I have an idea…
We send all the priests, rabbis and other religious figures over to Haiti.
“Greetings, we are here to offer you praye…!” *Dies in a flash mob*
Or, as they pray, we throw them out of a high flying plane. They won’t die, the robes they wear will act as parachutes. Imagine the wonder and amazement the suffering people will feel. God sent down MORE priests! Now… what to do with them. Oh wait, don’t they make good fire wood?
Do you really want to help them?
Donate to universities and labs that research genetic engineering.
With Pokemon, rescue and recovery would be easy!
Totally agree, skids.
@skids prayer is all you have? What about donating time, clothes, or food? Prayer is nothing more then talking to an invisible friend.
The atheists on Icanhazcheezburger/Failbooking make up 94% of the worlds atheists. This is where they dwell and pronounce their own little religion, yes, religion to people who they think they are smarter than.
>The atheists on Icanhazcheezburger/Failbooking make up 94% of the worlds atheists.
There are hundreds of millions of atheists in the world.
>This is where they dwell and pronounce their own little religion,
Atheism isn’t a religion.
Wow. Atheism is disbelief in a deity. It is not the same as lacking religion. The vehemence with which you disdain other (deistic) religions is proof in and of itself that you believe in atheism. Belief in anything is religious, and therefore to proclaim yourself as atheist is to follow an Atheist religion. It’s the same as Richard Dawkins: the man is so far into his non-belief in anything supernatural, and so heavily pro-evolution, that he is a religious nut. It happens that his religion is science, but it is not out of a scientific rationale; he has blind faith in theories, and crusades against the very actions he himself takes.
Unless you’re nihilistic, or haven’t considered it at all, you’re religious in one way or another.
agreed
Your just trying to spin atheism into something you can accept, because you don’t have the mental capacity to understand how it doesn’t scare some people to be without faith in the most incoherent book of all time!
Prayer? Oh please…..
Until people start realizing that there’s something else out there, we’re screwed.
Something else like… A Flying Spaghetti Monster perhaps? Indeed, you have been touched by His noodley appendage.
There IS something else out there!……….ManBearPig!
What has praying ever done other than make you people feel better? It doesn’t bring back the dead, it doesnt feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, or anything of use to our world. The only thing religion has ever done for us is bad. Every war ever fought has been for religion. Not only that, but why do most religious people believe that without religion we’re all doomed? I know more atheists with good morals than christians. Praying doesn’t make you a good person. And not believing doesn’t make you a bad one.
“every war ever fought has been for religion.” I’d like to see you support that claim. I could say something similar, and more true, which is that every war has been fought for money and power, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t believe in money and power. Whether prayer and God are real or not, fallacies like this that internet drones spout by the millions make me laugh.
Perhaps she meant ‘most wars’, in which case she would be correct.
Rawr, I’m Shelby the angry atheist!
Yeah, Prayer: How to do nothing and still feel like you’re helping.
Shelby, as a fellow atheist, that part about religion causing ALL wars isn’t entirely true. Wars are most often started over territory. I don’t think ALL the world’s problems would go away if it weren’t for religion. Even in the Middle East, if you didn’t have Islam and Judaism, they’d still be fighting over the most fertile land in the area. You’d still have different races and cultural practices. With or without religion, people would find a reason to hate each other. Religion isn’t the root of all the world’s problems. Yes, people do use it to justify things (there have already been several cases of fundies going to Haiti and kidnapping children in the name of God, and some of the kids’ parents were still alive). But that doesn’t make religion by itself a bad thing. People can believe whatever they want, but until they learn to tolerate other people (that goes for believers AND non-believers), we’re not going to get anywhere.
Oh, and the answer to world peace is free trade, not abolishing all religions
To Jessica and Shelby:
1) Atheist regimes have killed FAR MORE people than any religious regime in the history of mankind. For example, the French Revolution in a single year killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition in four centuries. Communist regimes alone killed 150 million people around the world in less than a century. And I am not even including people killed by wars, though wars involving these regimes have been far more violent (compare the number of deaths of English, French and American people in WWII to the deaths of Germans and Russians). Check out the studies of Professor R. J. Rummel (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html).
2) There is no such thing as “atheist morals”. Every moral system in the world came from a religion. There are no exceptions. What often happens is that after many centuries people follow a moral system without realizing where it came from but they follow them regardless because they “sense” it is better than not following it. Most people are like that, atheists or not. There is a excellent article about this, but it is written in Portuguese.
Really? If you have to have religion to have morals, stay the heck away from me. If that’s all you have to base your morals on, supposing one day they prove definitively that there is no god. Are you going to go around raping and murdering because you don’t have to fear eternal damnation? I’m good because it’s good for me and good for society to be good. I don’t go around raping and murdering, I give to charity when I’m able, I help people out as much as I can. I actually DO things. I don’t sit around praying and hoping some invisible man in the sky comes to help.
And seriously? Atheist regimes? I suppose you’re including America in with that considering we’re a secular country, not a theocracy. In fact, most countries don’t have an official state religion. And you obviously forgot about the burning times, which lasted from the dark ages until the 1900′s, and the Crusades, and 9/11, and the whole thing in the Middle East that’s been going on for thousands of years, and the Holocaust, and human sacrifices by any ancient polytheistic religions…. Religion’s got atheism beat for murder.
I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school… I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy…
Fuck all that, I want Chocolate Cake with Vanilla frosting.
PS: Nobody gets along in middle school, just ask any middle school teacher.
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I’d like to buy the world a Coke
And keep it company
(that’s what you reminded me of, LOL)
Nice.
I was quoting Mean Girls, haha.
Epic Mean Girls referemce. +200 Internetz.
this is the only intelligent response to this debate http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4076
“Every war ever fought has been for religion”
Way off, The majority of wars have been fought over resources. Religion is only the rallying cry used to bamboozle Jane & John Doe into a war they have no businesses being a part off.
“with god, everything is possible”
such as devestating earthquakes?
Excellent point, Omegastar. And hurricanes and tornadoes and all big massive snow dumps that shut down a city for days, yes.
While it’s hyperbole to blame all the world’s ills on religion, a good many of them come from religious ignorance and intolerance.
Now I need to go find George Carlin’s rant about god and the ten commandments ending with “…but he LOVES you. He loves you and he needs MONEY!!”
*snarling in Washington, DC*
now hold on there a minute. Lets not get sexual with religion. oh and next time you’re cold…rub one out for Haiti, the friction helps
He he ho i’m be doing that now!
wait….you’re rubbin’ one out for haiti or get funky with religion? BOW CHICA AMEN!
…. Yeah forget religion this is Earth… Power rich and hungry for MONEY
How Ironic that christians donate far more money than atheists do towards causes like Haiti. Also, how is it a fail that some people believe that God is more powerful than money? People are entitled to their beliefs.
If God is more powerful than money, why need money? People are entitled to their beliefs, but that goes for all including me. People can believe in God, and I can believe that’s silly. We both can speak our minds.
Is that proportional? ‘Cause unless you count China, there are waaaaay more Christians than atheists, who are like 1 in 12 people in the world, and if you count the nonreligious 1 in 4.