Since when is it illegal to dump games? I understand distributing them being illegal but this is my own hardware, if I wanna dump BotW to my Deck I’m gonna dump it

Me, turning on my PC every day after my main PC was bricked while rebooting for a Win10 update…

The koopa cut

I’m a very big fan.

We’d certainly be better off in the education/intelligence department if we promoted skepticism and criticized faith or any belief without evidence, but to be fair the word “better” is more broad than that…

Einstein believed in “Spinoza’s god”, which is essentially just nature and the laws that govern the universe. It’s not the same as believing in an anthropomorphic God and putting faith in scripture.

This is one of those reasons I always call myself an agnostic instead of atheist.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive terms. “Agnostic” answers whether you know a god exists, and “atheist” answers whether you believe a god exists.

I don’t know of any gods, and I don’t believe any exist, so I’m an agnostic atheist.

The most reliable way to lose faith isn’t through science, it’s reading their holy text.

In general, nothing about science ever shakes a theist’s faith, and I doubt it ever will. Reason being: the moment science breaks new ground, religion retreats further back into the unknown. As long as there is an unknown, theists will have something to take shelter from.

Bubble gum :3

I don’t think there is one single test that could encompass bad standards of evidence, but the whole “just have faith” thing is a dead giveaway. Hostility towards skepticism is another. Circular logic is also a pretty good indicator, like saying your holy text is the truth because your holy text says it’s true. I guess the simplest and most effective test would be to see if the standard of evidence could be used to justify any claim.

And for good standards of evidence, I think it depends on the context and claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. If you told me “I got a pet goldfish” the only evidence I really need is your word. But for claims about how the universe works and why it is the way it is, you might need much more sound reasoning, math that checks out when measurements or numbers are involved, a demonstration or test to serve as proof, etc…

Lastly, by agreeing that there is not universality …

The majority of people who smoke don’t die from it but that doesn’t mean cigarettes aren’t problematic. I’m not saying all religions are bigoted or anything, but I am saying having any sort of doctrine opens the door to outdated beliefs overriding what we’d normally consider moral, and that by itself is problematic.

I’d also just like to say I think this has been the most civil conversation in the whole thread, so cheers to that lol

Still arguably both. Even if their doctrine isn’t problematic, the sort of standard of evidence you seem to need to believe religious claims is what gets us things like antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists.

It may not be universal but you’re certainly opening the door for it if you believe truth comes from uncritical belief. That by itself is still “problematic” even if the consequences aren’t as blatant.

I wasn’t even disagreeing with you. But rage on, queen.

That’s true, they can mould their interpretation however they need to so it conforms to their own morality, but that doesn’t come from the religion.

If you gave an alien any of the abrahamic holy texts and then dropped it on earth it’d probably behave pretty abhorrently. In order to behave more civilly it’d have to learn from the society it was dropped into, not the religion.

Most churches and other theists do a pretty good job of doing that and that’s a great thing, but the way I see it, the religion itself is inherently problematic until people mould it into something resembling secular morality.

Useless “nobody”.

The text they rally behind as a fundamental part of their religion, in no uncertain terms, promotes violence against gay men and tells you women are worth a fraction of men and can’t be trusted to preach. Not to mention the endorsement and regulation of slavery.

It’s not that they’re a monolith of bigotry or anything, it’s that they start from a pretty messed up place and have to mould that out of their understanding of their religion, and plenty of them don’t.

But the real issue is that you can justify just about any sort of prejudice when that is your foundation. There’s no shortage of Christians who cite Leviticus to tell me my sexuality is an abomination, yet they dismiss the parts about slavery because “that’s the old testament.” The Bible also doesn’t say anything about trans people and it doesn’t oppose abortion rights, yet the majority of the Christians in my state are opposed to both.

and it seems like you’re translating every other instance of that to “GOD ISN’T REAL”.

Ah, so I was right

Both lol

Ooooh I 100% read “morality” lol, my bad

It doesn’t sound familiar because nobody here is saying God is impossible. We’re saying they don’t have good reason for believing he exists.

I don’t go around telling ten-dimensional physicists to stop believing in, and speculating about, a theoretical field that’s devoid of evidence.

You wouldn’t have to tell them to stop “believing” in string theory because none of them do. The math happens to work out so a lot of them are interested, but none of them “believe” in it because it hasn’t been tested.

Why are the atheists in this thread qualified to tell them they are wrong to hold it?

We’re not saying they’re wrong. We’re saying their reasons for believing aren’t good reasons. And in a thread about why people believe, criticism is not only warranted, but expected.

Gnostic atheists were imposing their own beliefs on the religious through unsolicited critical condemnation.

Can you point me to even one atheist here making a gnostic claim? The link you already gave is just Communist saying you don’t have evidence, and it seems like you’re translating every other instance of that to “GOD ISN’T REAL”.

You must live in a very different society than those in Europe or America if your experience with theists has just been “people hypothesizing.” You also must not have read the Bible, Torah, or Quran. Their “beliefs” are presented as facts in all three of those religions, both by their holy texts and their people, and I don’t know of any religion that doesn’t also do that.

If not, it’s absolutely arrogant to tell them they’re wrong to believe in the existence of something that science is also only hypothesizing.

And again, nobody is saying they’re wrong. We’re saying they don’t have good reason to believe what they believe. Just look at the link you sent earlier.

And if an atheist genuinely believes their own untested hypothesis about what happened before the big bang is true, whether they’re a scientist or a layman, the same criticisms apply to them, too.

To each their own, but personally that sounds like a bad reason to stop pursuing life’s greatest questions. Plenty of my family has passed away, but that doesn’t make faith seem like a reliable pathway to truth.

I’d love to believe they’re in an eternal paradise, but I’d also love to believe my next paycheck will be $1,000,000. The time to believe I’m a millionaire is when I have evidence for it, not when I’d be heartbroken otherwise.