My father is an atheist, as far as I am concerned, but he calls himself an agnostic because he can't prove with complete certainty that God does not exist. I can think back on a few times when he mentioned that nobody really knows if God exists when I was about seven years old, but I just thought that meant nobody has ever met God. The upcoming years of my religious indoctrination distanced me from what my father said those few times. He did not reveal his lack of belief to me or even express a single word about what he thought about religion again until I was a teenager, which was after years and years of immersion in a religious culture and religious parts of my family. When I was fifteen, he blind-sided me out of the blue and tried to make me feel like a foolish retard for being a Christian. It was pretty shocking. However, my mother and my grandparents brought me up to be a Christian. That is the main reason why I was one until I was sixteen. My mother never forced me to go to Sunday school and church, but she taught me that it was the thing to do. She took me pretty much every Sunday for years. My grandparents were Presbyterian missionaries who were big time religious, and they took me to their church and sunday school every chance they got. They took me to Bible school at their church a whole bunch and gave a major effort at convincing me to go to their church's elementary school. I also grew up in Mississippi, so my teachers were pretty much all protestants who did not hesitate to throw their views at their students. My friends were Christians when we were kids, so I got a lot of teaching and discussion from them. |
|
You are dreaming right now.
Funny how you bring up positiveness and atheism. |
|
"A lizard never stops growing its whole life...so if a lizard lived as long as people did (or the equivalent to living that much longer), then that would create the dinosaur creature." |
|
Lugggs and cuddles and hugs for all!!
But in reality as an intelligent person, wouldn't you acknowledge that there is a large statistical chance that many of them are smarter than you? Let alone one. |
|
It left me with a slight phobia of the afterlife and the consequences of lust and other things. It screwed me up in that way. I am pretty okay now, but I went through some freaky time periods over it in my teens. My head really started getting screwed with when I went through puberty and overwhelmingly lusted after women. |
|
You are dreaming right now.
Ooooooh, haven't been in here in a bit! |
|
I don't agree with this view that there is a negative correlation between the severity of ones belief in God and ones IQ. I think that this view creates unnecessary polarisation in the debate. |
|
There are some very smart people who are Christians, but I think most of them lack philosophical intuition, which is very different from reasoning ability and memorization abilities alone. I know several high level scientists who do amazing things in their scientific areas, and some of those same people do not have it anywhere in them to look around at the world and say with any kind of fascination, "What the fuck IS this??????" But they can memorize facts and formulas and compute mathematical scenarios and learn procedure patterns like total masterminds. |
|
You are dreaming right now.
@Psycho Student: |
|
No, it doesn't. Which is why thintelligence doesn't count, the religious folk have no logical sense, and you are digging a deeper hole for yourself. |
|
No. Philosophical intelligence involves the left side of the brain AND the right side of the brain. Robotic scientist types don't have much use of the latter. The best theoretical scientists use both. |
|
You are dreaming right now.
Bookmarks