Quoted from Sandamnit:

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I'm glad to see we're on the same page here in that all ideological movements can ultimately be boiled down and comparable to Nazis. Honestly though, I don't know why I'm shocked it only took five posts for Nazis to be mentioned.

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Quoted from Sandamnit:

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Look man, the only green movement I believe in is the Green movement into my bowl and me smoking it!!! Other than that, those wackos are nuts if they think I'm going to get rid of my truck that gets 10 miles to the gallon because some eggheads in their ivory tower thinks that humans are contributing to "global warming." It's clear that "global warming" is nothing more than Earth becoming more and more like Hell, because those gays got the right to marry each other in holy matrimony. Come on now. And don't even get me started on those PETA assholes. Those guys would rather me lose my job at the cow slaughtering factory and watch my children starve to death than let some stupid little dumb cow with a peanut for a brain get killed, because they think its unethical to string them up by their legs and slit their throats and let them bleed out before ripping their skin off and processing them. Fucking hippies.

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Quoted from fa:

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I now believe religions are dangerous things which breed ignorance and fear

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Quoted from Sunny:

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I'm for the most part secularist, in the sense that the state matters more to me then any religion ever has or will. Towards my beliefs, I might be considered a lax, uninvolved believer in unorganized philosophical spiritism; in that, I believe that all things have an "essence" or a "spirit" to them, neither positive nor negative. I don't believe in a God, or a creator... when it comes down to it, I'm scientifically minded and supportive of scientific ideals and thought. I don't seek moral guidance from this belief system. I typically tend to seek moral guidance from a mixture of law, respect and tact - aspects of my existence which has become ingrained in me by how I developed.

Over time my religious sympathies have changed. My parents never believed in pushing a religion on their children, so my household was largely agnostic or closeted religious. I wont deny that most stances on ethical and moral issues were based on Christian and Catholic doctrine, but that was hardly because of religion as it was my parents' upbringing. It must've become ingrained in them when they were children, so naturally it wouldn't come off as religiously ordained when they taught their children.

I bounced back and forth between religious and non-religious, attempts to be Christian or Buddhist to being completely atheist. I ended up where I am now, believing more strongly in a neutral environment, a neutral existence.

The one problem arises with an afterlife, and on its unlikelihood even though it sounds absolutely great. I'm inclined to view life and death as one in the same, neither positive nor negative, and merely a form of existence in its entirety. So, to me, the moment of death - and whatever that contains, whether it is just the brain emitting a "white light" as it shuts down, or nothing at all, or a wonderful limbo existence with clouds and whatnot - is the afterlife in its entirety. I like to imagine, as the historian I am, that it transcends time, and for a fleeting second I understand everything that has and will occur, and have observed the lives of others and those important to me. Doubtful, but it would be nice.

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Quoted from vissario:

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Quoted from fa:

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I now believe religions are dangerous things which breed ignorance and fear

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Atheists are absurd. In fact, they are either as absurd or slightly more absurd than Christian fundamentalists who picket abortion clinics or Islamic Jihadists who think God is going to reward them with virgins for blowing up fellow Muslims. The reason for this is that all three suffer from the same fundamental delusion known as faith.

Christian and Muslims have faith that God does exist despite having little to no empirical evidence supporting their conclusion. The same could be said of atheism in that, despite the total lack of evidence disavowing the existence of God, they will persist in their assertion that they are sure, for an incontrovertible fact, that He doesn't exist. Now, in my opinion this is why atheism is probably a more absurd "faith" than the other two; unlike them, its faith is based on the assumption that faith itself false without providing anything to substantiate that claim other than rhetoric, metaphors, and bankrupt moral reasoning (of which this thread is a good example). So, while criticizing faith as base and monotheistic religion as ultimately deceptive in both its logic and intent, atheism effectively commits both of those feats while cloaking itself in the white robe of rationalism.

In the bottom line, humans "invented" God in the same way that they invented atheism; to provide a reliable framework for describing how things happen in the Universe without having to consider the nearly unlimited amount of potential burrs associated with advanced intellectual self-analysis. Simply assuming God doesn't exist to explain why something happened is just as simple, and just as necessary, as a devout Catholic assuming God did exist to explain the very same thing.

Also, you guys forgot to include the option for the Big City Atheist.

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Quoted from DrNick:

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As an aside, I hate Richard Dawkins with a passion. He should stick to science and leave the philosophy and theology to people who can actually pull it off.

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Quoted from CurseOfTheGreatBambino:

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On a bit of a tangent, reincarnation is one thing, but I don't understand why, if someone were an atheist who believed that this life is it and there is no consequence to it whatsoever, why they wouldn't just kill themselves.

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