Nice to see O'Bama working on getting rid of midnight Bush rules

[kandrathe]

... each time shrinking their strident (and violently enforced) claims to be in possession of the literal truth down to a fuzzier, more vague notion of being in communion with their deity. Outdated superstition turns into poor philosophy.

Which is your opinion. Some people would look at the contributions of people such as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Duns Scotus, Søren Kierkegaard, Rene Descartes, or Immanuel Kant as important to western philosophy and epistemology. I think you may be one of those people who secretly despises the "soft" sciences.

I have no issue with philosophy. I have issues with bad philosophy derived by sifting through the ruins of old dogmas and fanciful superstitions.

And, yet you appear to scoff at the invisible and unknowable, rather than approach the topic carefully you cast it away like yesterdays garbage. There is this notion of babies and bathwater... For example, a student asked of his teacher, "When not producing a single thought, is there any fault or not?" and the teacher replied, "Mount Sumeru!" Which is nonsense until you think about it. When some people look at a rock, they see a rock.

I think Russell's answer is most appropriate. Communism is atheist in the sense that it does not believe in external gods, but in every other sense, it is as much a religious as a political doctrine. Communism is as far removed from *freethinking* atheism as it is from Catholicism or Hinduism, maybe further. It involves the abstract worship of a dogma, expressed by heroic messiah-figures, memorized and chanted in great crowds and force-fed to schoolchildren, and enforced with violent purges of people who do not subscribe to the dogma? It might be atheist, but it seems more like an overgrown cult. Specifically, it rejects the philosophy that leads me to my atheism, skeptical empiricism, and replaces it with a kind of faith which is no less limiting than religious faith.

I would agree with that. This means the majority of atheists in this world have been forced into being. China has the advantage of a tradition of Confucianism which also doubles as a political system. Their model of Communism is not far removed from their model of Empire with the ruling party elite replacing the emperor.

So, it's not really religion that glues society together, it's tribalism?

Would that be so odd from a people that traditionally value family, clan and town above any concept of nation? The Nordic countries were late to convert to Christianity, and Iceland barely did at all. At least we don't feel we need to die with a sword in our hands anymore.

The game begins anew: got a source for that? I can't find it except on a couple of Christian anti-Marx pages, and some of them don't even cite it to him. (Besides, it makes no sense; Karl Marx was not an individualist. He didn't believe in "facing life alone", he believed in class consciousness.)

It might be an alternative translation of "Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand”. Also, I found, "The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the miscreant” Again, to get back on track here, I was commenting on allowing people to walk their own path to enlightenment. These debasements, such as referring to people as impotent or miscreant are merely cruel jeering from the side of the road. If these people need crutches, then who would desire to take them away?