I don't have time for a proper responce with sources, but religion is the number one cause of war.
Atheism isn't a religion.

[url=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion]Religion[/url], from wiki
[quote]A religion is a set of beliefs and practices generally held by a human community, involving adherence to codified beliefs and rituals and study of ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience.[/quote]
I have no codified beliefs, or rituals. I simply don't believe a deity exists.

I'll be back for a proper response in the morning, on the matter of atheists and peaceful societies, as I need to be off to work.

[quote][b]You don't like religion pushed down on you but your doing the same thing.[/b][/quote]
Where did I say this? Besides, my beliefs are not religion, per my previous post.

[quote][b]From the beautiful spring flowers to the feeling of love & being happy. If there was no God, why would there be so many beautiful things in the world for us to enjoy. How do you explain your existence.[/b][/quote]
Beauty is perception, one mans trash is another's treasure. Emotions are a choice, you choose to feel them albeit sometimes through learned instinct not born instinct. It may be difficult to control them, but is still possible.
I exist because my parents had sex, through evolution, which can be seen easily in the world around you. Example: Bacterium are becoming progressivly more resistant to antibiotics. The Flu virus mutates and changes on a yearly basis. You can see these things evolve around you. Given the millenniums this planet has existed, surely it is possible for lifeforms to adapt and change to new and greater things. As climates change, plants change. Life has to adapt/evolve, or be forced out of existance. A good article from [url=http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/about/shortcourses/shortcourse08.php]UCMP[/url]
[quote][b]I suppose you believe all the great & amazing things in your body happened by accident.[/b][/quote]
No, natural selection. Survival of the fittest.
Let me guess, You think that humans have only walked on this planet for about 6000 years, and Satan put dinosaur fossils in the ground to trick you, or some other creationist fallacy?
See "The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved" By Ken Ham
[url=http://www.answersincreation.org/bookreview/dino_mystery/the_great_dinosaur_mystery_solved.htm]The creationist review[/url] And another rebuttal [url=http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/The_Great_Dinosaur_Mystery_Solved%21]Here[/url]

[quote][b]Atheism has been responsible for more mass murders than all religions put together in the past 2000 years. Atheist are very bloodthirsty & if thats what being an atheist is, well congratulations.[/b][/quote]
You should read this excerpt taken from [url=http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/contentviewarticle.asp?article=2362]here[/url]
[quote]” Atheism is responsible for the 20 th century atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung et al.”
It’s a pity so few people study history properly these days, or they would know that there is a long history of wars and atrocities motivated solely or mainly by religion. Indeed, one reason for the development of liberal and more or less secular democracies in Europe and elsewhere, based on Enlightenment values, was revulsion against religious conflict.
Hitler, Stalin et al, on the other hand, were not motivated by religion or lack of religion, but by extreme and authoritarian political ideologies, such as National Socialism, Communism and Maoism. Religious believers were sometimes targeted by them, but so were intellectuals and liberals, indeed anyone who opposed their regimes.

Religious apologists tend to forget the atrocities carried out in the 20 th C by the likes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and General Franco in Spain , by all accounts good Catholics, often supported and protected by the Church. It is also well known that the Pope and the Catholic Church in the 1930s and 40s did little to stem the rise of Fascism in Spain , Germany and Italy or to prevent the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Indeed the anti-Semitic aspects of Nazism owed much to primitive Christian beliefs about the Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. Hitler appears to have had a religious faith, and is on record as supporting faith schools: “ "Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character and training must be derived from faith." Most of Hitler’s German and Austrian supporters in the 1930s and 40s must have been Christians. After World War 2, many leading Nazis and war criminals were sheltered by the Catholic Church in South America . The apartheid regime in South Africa was supported by many Boer Christians – and many leading opponents of apartheid were atheist Communists. [/quote]

My response to Stalin and Atheism from [url=http://www.atheistalliance.org/library/nelson-atheism_communism.php]here.[/url] In addition to the previous paragraph.
[quote]There are no elements of freethought (the foundation of atheism) in Soviet philosophy. Stalin most certainly was unfamiliar with the humanistic underpinnings of atheism; they contradicted his goal, which was to create a totalitarian state in which he became the new god, whose dictates were not to be questioned. Individual rights, so central to freethought, were unknown in Soviet Russia.

The massacres of Stalin's reign were committed in the name of statism, not atheism, and statism is a by-product of the fundamentalist religious mindset.[/quote]

On nations and prosperity, predominantly Atheist nations are the most prosperous, and healthy.
[url=http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=pzuckerman_26_5]This[/url] is a very long, very good read, but I will happily take several excerpts from it.

[quote]The twenty-five nations characterized by organic atheism with the highest proportion of nonbelievers are listed in Table 1. When looking at standard measures of societal health, we find that they fare remarkably well; highly religious nations fare rather poorly. The 2004 United Nations' Human Development Report, which ranks 177 countries on a "Human Development Index," measures such indicators of societal health as life expectancy, adult literacy, per-capita income, educational attainment, and so on. According to this report, the five top nations were Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. All had notably high degrees of organic atheism. Furthermore, of the top twenty-five nations, all but Ireland and the United States were top-ranking nonbelieving nations with some of the highest percentages of organic atheism on earth. Conversely, the bottom fifty countries of the "Human Development Index" lacked statistically significant levels of organic atheism.

Irreligious countries had the lowest infant-mortality rate (number of deaths per 1,000 live births), and religious countries had the highest rates. According to the 2004 CIA World Factbook (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook), out of 225 nations, the twenty-five with the lowest infant-mortality rates had significantly high levels of organic atheism. Conversely, the seventy-five nations with the highest infant-mortality rates were all very religious and without statistically significant levels of organic atheism.[/quote]
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[quote]Regarding homicide rates, Oablo Fajnzylber et al., in a study reported in the Journal of Law and Economics (2002), looked at thirty-eight non-African nations and found that the ten with the highest homicide rates were highly religious, with minimal or statistically insignificant levels of organic atheism. Conversely, of the ten nations with the lowest homicide rates, all but Ireland were secular nations with high levels of atheism.[/quote]
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[quote]In regard to rates of AIDS and HIV infection, the most religious nations on earth-particularly those in Africa-fared the worst. (Botswana suffers from the highest rate of HIV infection in the world; see http://www.avert.org/aroundworld. htm.) Conversely, the highly irreligious nations of Western Europe, such as those of Scandinavia-where public sex education is supported and birth control is widely accessible-fared the best, experiencing among the lowest rates of AIDS and HIV infection in the world.[/quote]
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[quote]Concerning gender equality, nations marked by high degrees of organic atheism are among the most egalitarian in the world, while highly religious nations are among the most oppressive. According to the 2004 Human Development Report's "Gender Empowerment Measure," the ten nations with the highest degrees of gender equality were all strongly organic-atheistic nations with significantly high percentages of nonbelief. Conversely, the bottom ten were all highly religious nations without any statistically significant percentages of atheists.[/quote]
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[quote]In sum, countries with high rates of organic atheism are among the most societally healthy on earth, while societies with nonexistent rates of organic atheism are among the most destitute. The former nations have among the lowest homicide rates, infant mortality rates, poverty rates, and illiteracy rates and among the highest levels of wealth, life expectancy, educational attainment, and gender equality in the world. The sole indicator of societal health in which religious countries scored higher than irreligious countries is suicide.[/quote]
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Crap, atheists lost on suicide rates. Is it any wonder with all the oppression that religion causes?
Conclusion of the article.
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[quote]Belief in God may provide comfort to the individual believer, but, at the societal level, its results do not compare at all favorably with that of the more secular societies. When seeking a more civil, just, safe, humane, and healthy society, one is more likely to find it among those nations ranking low in religious faith-contrary to the preaching of religious folks.[/quote]
----------------------------------------------------

Feel free to fire back, I welcome the challenge. No hard feelings to anyone for my slightly off-kilter flare up, I did say I was drunk and should abstain while drunk, and for this I do apologize.
I already responded as to why I use the term "Imaginary Friend" in place of a god. To me, there is no difference.

Yaznaki, Here is some good read for you Arguments agains atheism You should give it a read & take some time to think about it.

What you linked, after finishing that paragraph is utter rubbish. We can use our senses, and science to detect gravity, I can see it when I drop something, I can feel (sense of touch on my feet/ass) the pull of it holding me down...yeah, that's pretty good so far, not much to do but laugh.

Anywho, time to get 3 hours of sleep before work. Ughhh

i am going to say # 1 i didn't want it to come to this but here it is years a go aka 2002 i was a drunk ass drug attic that had a $200 habit and i'm not talking weed man i'm talkin lsd pcp meth coke and all the nam vet pills i could put down my gullet and why the hell not wash it down with wiskey cheap wiskey aka 10 high or evan willams half gals are cheap so i'm hitchin all around the contry doing my thing drugs sex rock & roll you know gettin crazier by the day had a lot of fun woke up in a lot of bushes, police stations, girls beds, my own puke but one day i don't quite know what happened but this white light came down on me and burnt my soul from within it felt like every stupid thing i had done had become a flame and was burning my soul i sucked real bad this happened at a drum circle at the first bonnaroo well i didn't think much of it because obiousely i was high as a kite and that seemed to be an easy way to explain it away so i went on my way to rainbow gathering {www.welcomehome.org} that's there website and things seem cool on the way there i got pulled over drunk i was drinking a pint of jegger with opum in it so i prayed the usual god if your out there get me out of this and i'm yours just get me to gathering so the cop asks boy are you drunk i say no he says can i see your licence i say i ain't got one he says get out of the car i say fine he says i want to run a few tests i pass the field test like a charm i'd been studying but now for the hard one he pulls out the breathalizer so i start to pray i take the breathalizer some how i pass i had a pint of jeg and a 6pack of miller in me but i passed then the cops left the hippie girl who's car it was wouldn't start so she starts screaming at me about how i'm bad carma so on and so forth leaves me on the side of the road in the rain well to get to the point this was indiana they don't sell boose on the side of the interstate there and when i finally got out of indiana into MI no one would sell me a beer on top of that guess whos there waiting there jesus kitchen so i yell at them about how they won't give me a ride even though were going to the same place so on well some months pass buy i start living with this crazy biker lady and this voodo lady and some huge biker dude i reck is van going about 90mph into the trees and wake up in jail get out and that damn light is back after me but it's freeking me out because it's telling the futuire and stuff which was cool and stuff i knew exactly how long i would be waiting for rides and what kinda car and what would be in the car so on and so forth but i pissed it off some how and it decided it wanted to kill me and i had to book bear with me this is the clincher so about 2 month of this go down and i'm sober the whole time so one nite i pray i'm like god i know your out there and i know that if i do drugs i'm going to die so here it is if you want me show me who you are and if you don't i'm going to go get fucked up man. at the time of all this i had a custom which was to go to the new age shop buy and read a book and yell / mock the owner he pissed me off well on my way this hippie stopped me and says to me what you doing tonight i said not a damn thing then the shiesty street kid in me was all like that man is going to smoke some weed and all i got to do is pull it to geather and shiest my way in so i asked him what you doing tonight and he said i'm going to a bible study so i said to him i've never herd it call that before but if you didn't want me to come all you had to say was no man. but the thing was that he asked me to come after all that so i went and it was a bible study they started preaching i started to curse at the preacher then i appoligized and sat down he started to preach i started to curse and tell him about the light problem he plopped a bible in my lap pointed out a verse in 2cor which was satan can mascarade as an angel of light so i don't know god healed my brain in that yeah i wish you all could have met me back then i was an anamialy i'm sorry to bore you all with this crap but it's what i've seen and i know this much it is writen that we should not argue about these thing but that the god i believe in is not passive and that i don't need to defend him he has a will of his own and that he will make himself known he works though natural means like floods but he also works there maraculase meens like miracles healings and things that just shouldn't happen i know that science will try to explain every thing a way but that's what they are there for and thats what they do i've seen enough proof i've seen hell with my own eyes it's good enough for me no hate much love to all i hope this was atleast understandable sorry again callifornia doesn't do good schooling i made it to 11 grade still don't know how to spell and can't write leggibley but i can weld and frame a door and build a chimney from scrach so i guess dropping out wasn't so bad

I'm glad you chose to make better of yourself Shaggy, I too enjoy my chemicals, but those days are over for me.
Much like you, I chose not to take them anymore. I didn't need some sense of a security blanket to do so however. It's called free will, you do what you choose to do. Yeshua isn't proven to have existed in the flesh, and he didn't write the bible, however, there are some decent morals in there through all of Yahweh's perversion.
If a man rose from REAL death before my eyes, I would assume he either experienced ego death, or I had taken to many psychedelics myself. You would have to have a soul for you to "feel" something in it. Which sense did you use of the 5 we have evolved over time? Emotions are not a sense, they are a choice.

I did read all of that, albeit it would have been easier if you pressed the carriage return key every couple 3 lines or so.

You made it farther than me in school, I gave up in 7th when they started teaching me everything in a repetitive circle, and continued to attend till 10th, dropped out, and passed my GED without taking any extra GED schooling. I would like to start college when I turn 30.
The church of [url=http://www.venganza.org/]The Flying Spaghetti Monster[/url] can help you too. Much like christianity, it was written by man, man says its the true god and creator, it explains a lot of things in life. It must be true!


@Troutstoker
I could easily tear what you linked me to to shreds, if I felt like it would help you. This guy is sadly lost and mistaken. I did read it, but I can't stop laughing from how off he is on his lack of proper interpritations. No need to think about it in the least. It's rubbish. I'll see if the [url=http://rationalresponders.com]RRS[/url] has it ripped to shreds for me, for you however, but it really isn't worth the effort it's so poorly written and thought out.
[b]Edit:This guy couldn't even sign his name so I could do a proper search for it, go figure[/b] wtf does mp stand for?

[quote]Everything you have written in your defense, if you really read what you wrote, is just proving my points further.[/quote]

I proved Hitler was an Atheist? Negative
I proved Stalins atheistic view caused him to try to become god, and decimate a civilization? Negative
I proved Atheistic nations are a failure? BIG Negative
I proved religious nations are a failure? Correct

Looking around at what may be beauty to some and trash to others elicits an emotion, emotions are a choice somewhat necessary for civilization to prosper and survive, which is how they would have evolved by natural selection, they have nothing to do with god(s). They don't show us there is a god, they show us we have choices. I prefer rational and logical ones, and use reason to find them.
If what you are saying is true, then The Flying Spaghetti Monster must be the reason for creation!
Maybe it was the paradoxical [url=http://www.invisiblepinkunicorn.com/]Invisible Pink Unicorn[/url]?
[img]http://www.invisiblepinkunicorn.com/download/ipulogowhite_small.gif[/img]
[quote]Like most Goddesses, she's invisible and highly unlikely to exist. However, there is much argument as to her exact colour, her shape and size, and other properties of her nonexistence. She burns with anger against theists, and allegedly grinds them beneath her holy hooves.[/quote]
The "believers" famous sayings about faith in the invisible pink unicorn is that, like other religions, it is founded in science and faith. Science - that states that she must be invisible, since we cannot see her. Faith - because we know in our heart that the invisible pink unicorn exists. This is of course a parody of the theological reasoning of other religions.

Seriously though, clamming you can't use one of the 5 senses to detect air and gravity? Even you should realize that's ludicrous.

I said possibly agnostic atheist in one of these horrendously long posts, or was it a shorter about to pass out one? I d have quite a bit of knowledge up there to support my view however, and rationality, reason, and logic will always triumph
There is nothing wrong with being "without knowledge" no-one imho can have all the knowledge in the world. Nothing wrong with trying to seek knowledge either, a lot of people fail in this pursuit and instead they follow blindly like sheep. I see this as being wrong. I'm an obvious seeker.

The FSM and the IPU are obviously man created, in response to show how silly looking (or blasphemous depending on what you believe) following something man wrote as a faith(belief without knowledge) is. The FSM has been making great steps in keeping creationism out of schools, they have won FL and KS(I think) so far, working on TX currently.

and Yes, Scientology is rubbish.

Happy new year to you, TS, and to all!

You obviously didn't read my rebuttal to air/gravity.
I touch air every time I move my hand, as a matter of fact, if I didn't touch it, I would be in an absolute vaccume and therefore unable to breath and exist.

I touch gravity just by my feet staying on the ground, I can feel (by touch) my feet bearing my weight, assuming I'm not sitting, and opposing gravity with my legs in the air for some silly reason.

And I allready say I agree, I cannot possibly know everything, I can only know what can be scientifically tested and proven to be true, time and time again, and what rational thinking, and logic, reason, and objective observation dictate. I cannot prove evolution happened, that's why it's theory. I can see it happening however, which is where logic, reason, rational thinking, and observation step in.

By creationist logic, this shouldn't be an empty cage.
[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v295/Yaznaki1/Myspace/e7bfc77e.jpg[/IMG]

Have fun dude.