Actually, why not hijack the word church. Might end up changing its meaning--continue to stand for a community, but lose the religious aspects.

Originally posted by AngryCymraeg

I've never heard of Atheists burning people at the stake for failing to obey the orders of an old man in a silly hat. Or cutting someone dead in the street because they were a member of the "wrong" section of a religion. As far as I'm aware there's never been an atheist war either.

So, you really do care about the lives of strangers huh? Because humans in female wombs can't smell hear or feel? Because war is only justifiable by athiests?
Just earlier on another thread, a self-proclaimed athiest was accused by anotherof not qualifying for the title on the basis of his fear of hell. Not all people who call themselves Christians are Christians, do you understand that, at all?
Honestly I don't believe that athiests in general are as morally superior to religious folk as they'd like to believe.

^It has nothing to do with moral superiority. It's about logical fact vs faith/guesswork. No one group is morally superior to another, regardless of what belief system they follow or don't follow. Atheists have been oppressed for a long time, so you can't fault them for speaking out against the religiously dominated world.

It's hilarious. Religious folk have been doing this for many millennium, but now that non religious wish to do the same, there is outrage! Don't throw rocks if you live in a glass house.

OK Athiests, riddle me this. I see the words logic and fact thrown around here, yet no one cares to share these facts that undeniably prove that God does not exist.

Yikes. Can't prove a negative can you?
Then why do you tell us to prove to you that God exists IF you are so sure that God is not real? After all I can't prove a negative.
In all honesty, I do very much believe that there is sufficient evidence for God's existence.

People either want understanding or they have higher priorities such as "brotherhood", most people will go to a church where they don't really believe what's being taught , but they go because they're lonely.

Also, so many folk say, I refuse to believe that God is good because people are bad. I suppose I'll have to point out the elephant in the room, God is God, people are NOT God..still, people are hostile to a God they don't believe in...they want no responsabilities if God is real, they'd rather blame God for the decisions other people have made.

Sure some athiests want to be more like the self-proclaimed Christians who do things that they don't like, imo people who say things like, "you can't fault us for retaliating" shouldn't accuse others of living in a glass house if they want to be just like their oppressors. I could easily find a lot of hateful comments written by athiests, I guess atheists will think that's the right thing to do....while they remain angry that Christians aren't turning the other cheek like they're supposed to... oh well...

A meeting place for likeminded folk who do not believe in gods is well overdue in my opinion.
The religious churches certainly have something beneficial with their sense of community and support for members of their 'club' so if a similar weekly meeting for non-believers sets up in my area I shall definitely have an investigation.

It's funny how the tired old accusations of 'it's a religion!' are yet again wheeled out in the discussion. Maybe the theists feel threatened by this and worry that an alternate meeting place for non-believers on a Sunday will reduce their dwindling congregations even further. Who knows, but what a brilliant idea I say, the idea of a community founded on respect for fellow humankind but not built on fear of the wrath of an invisible entity.
How nice to think of likeminded folk meeting because they want to, not because they feel obligated by the rules of which particular gods X or Y religious organisations worship.

Aetheists are entitled to the same TAX EXEMPT weekend social gatherings that book worshippers receive.

The Catholic Church along with Christian groups get BILLIONS in FREE GRANTS from Governments every year to purchase Satellites to broadcast "The Word" over "Free to Air" satellite tv. They also operate over 1 Billion Watts in radio transmitters to broadcast "The Word" to countries around the world.


Aetheists deserve the same Government grants to run their own Satellites in space along with their own Billions of Watts in Radio Transmitters to broadcast what they want.

Who do YOU think is paying the energy costs for "TWR's" mega million watt radio transmitters blasing christianity?

US Taxpayers.

Originally posted by CJCrawley
Hmm...the thing about hallucinations and dreams is you need a functioning brain to experience them.

What if you experience these events without a functioning brain?

What if [drum roll] you experience reality without a functioning brain?

What science says is impossible has happened.

This presents 2 problems.

1. Near death experiences do not prove god. Soul / afterlife / spiritual realm do not require god to exist. It's an entirely separate phenomena.

2. Proving a NDE happens without a functioning brain is impossible. It's just personal experience and nothing more. It would be like somebody saying they could prove god because they talked to Jesus yesterday. It's impossible to verify.

Originally posted by Pervius
Aetheists are entitled to the same TAX EXEMPT weekend social gatherings that book worshippers receive.

If the Atheist group in London secure formal charity status then they will be able to enjoy similar exemptions of tax as most churches do. Faith, and belief in unprovable mystic entities is (sensibly) not a requirement under UK legislation so a non-religious group can share an equal taxation status as any religious organisation.

Traditional Xianity worships the Nazarethan avatar, whereas more original christs such as Jizu are from B.C. China, although there is Yezo Island (Hokkaido) which recently experienced an earthquake. No, the little statues of Jizu along the road in Japan are not of Buddhist origin. Again, this is confiscation of pagan temples stuff: as Buddhism entered China, young monks would coyly approach the taoist grottoes to see what they could see: reading texts by the light of directed glow-worms along the printed lines, or perhaps by the eery glow of the Gymnotus, akin to theologians visiting C.G. Jung's place on Lake Constance after his deep-dives in psychology. See Amazon.com for The Chinese Sky During the Han. The book's price is higher than a Georgia pine and we would expect an avaricious xian being involved in that pricing, perhaps some psychopath from Emory University. Having examined the book, we note that the star charts (ca. 250 B.C. or so) locate, in the constellation Lupus, the asterism Jizu 'a group of soldiers.' This same asterism is elsewhere in that volume named Che Qi, and would indeed resonate with Taoist yarrow-stalk and tortoise carapace (che 'turtle') divinations. Some of these yarrow stalks could reach six feet in length, so it would be a specatacle to watch an adept using them. Another Chinese christ is mentioned by Livia Kohn: " It's just that I've got a 'hang-up' about Ti Tsang, who saved little children from the underworld."

Slavoj Zizek to Pussy Riot: "Even though I'm an atheist, my prayers are with you."

'Radical atheism locates an internal contradiction in the desire for salvation and enables us to read the religious idea of salvation against itself.'
(Haegglund M, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life)