Showing posts with label atheist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheist. Show all posts

Sunday, December 24, 2017

You Ask . . .

. . .  how does an atheist pray? . . .


(from http://theothercloset-atheism.blogspot.com/2009/12/19-atheists-christmas-prayer.html)
This Christmas, I pray that the struggle over the “true meaning” of the holiday is wiped away, replaced by the desire to honor what Christmas means to you and not to your neighbors.
I pray that we as a nation can learn to put aside the party lines and shields of segregation to leave the world better than we found it.
I pray that we as a race can learn to prosper without greed, without indifference.
I pray that the good times outweigh the bad, and that we enter the lives of those we are lucky enough to encounter with the grace and respect that everyone deserves, regardless of their status, regardless of our creed.
I pray we wake up one day with the recognition that – black or white, rich or poor, religious or not – we all want the same things, even if we disagree on how best to achieve them.
I pray that those who need shelter will find it.
I pray that those in pain will find an end to suffering.
I pray for peace.
I pray for hope.
Most of all, I pray that tomorrow will be better than it was today.
For all of us.


Two-Chord-Go-Two

©2017 Raymond M. Jozwiak



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Wednesday, August 6, 2014

The Letter . . .


. . . no, it'd not Sesame Street . . .





That "A" word, atheist, always scared me as a child.  I always felt sorry for people who did not believe in my 'God'.  But I guess I have to accept that if you don't believe in a 'theistic' invasive god, you MUST be an "A-THEIST".  So be it.  Maybe that's what I am. So where do these type-"A" people find hope? . . . many places . . .


(from http://ragingrev.com/2010/03/regarding-hope-the-atheists-view/)
". . . People give me hope daily. Sometimes people take some of my hope away, but when we make progress toward a brighter future it is renewed. When we do good things to one another or fight for causes we deem just, I am overwhelmed by hope. When one of us spends his or her life’s work on developing cures for diseases and cancers it gives me hope that we care about one another, and that if we keep doing so eventually we’ll get to our next step toward a society that can be considered appropriate.

I have a hope that one day our species will find a way to cope with the problems of life without a need for religion and that also one day there will be social justice for all people. I have hope that at some point in the near future that technology will be developed that can provide nutritious food for all people and that we will use that technology to actually feed people. In the idea that our prejudices and our failures will one day be forgotten. . . "



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Saturday, May 25, 2013

Redemption. . .


. . . from WHAT?

(from http://myfox8.com/2013/05/25/heaven-for-atheists-pope-sparks-debate/)
". . . Atheist leaders welcomed Pope Francis’ comments that God has redeemed atheists, saying that the new pontiff’s historic outreach is helping to topple longstanding barriers. “The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone,” the pope told worshipers at morning Mass on Wednesday. “‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!” Francis continued: “We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.” Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, said that although he has been skeptical of Francis’ outreach to the nonreligious, he welcomed Wednesday’s comments. . ."


(from http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/511016-i-find-something-repulsive-about-the-idea-of-vicarious-redemption)   [Christopher Hitchens, world-reknown atheist who preferred to NOT be called an atheist]
“I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.”


(from http://content.unity.org/homepageArchive/features/ponderFuture.html on John Shelby Spong's writing)
". . .The trouble with traditional Christianity, he said, is that it is built on two assumptions that are inadequate and dying. First, salvation must come from a God outside us—a theistic God, in Spong's term. Second, human beings are fallen, broken, sinful and in need of redemption. In other words, Christianity is based on a God with the power to save and humans who need to be saved. People are cast as “quivering children before a punishing, divine parent figure.” Human depravity is necessary before we can see the grace of God, who “saved a wretch like me,” Spong said, quoting the old hymn. No one has been helped by being told how wretched they are. . . “”






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Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Well I'll be . . .

. . .  a monkey's uncle. . .

 . . . I guess she doesn't believe in evolution NOW. . .

(from CNN)
"Leah Libresco, who’d been a prominent atheist blogger for the religion website Patheos, announced on her blog this week that after years of debating many “smart Christians,” she has decided to become one herself, and that she has begun the process of converting to Catholicism.

Libresco, who had long blogged under the banner “Unequally Yoked: A geeky atheist picks fights with her Catholic boyfriend,” said that at the heart of her decision were questions of morality and how one finds a moral compass.

“I had one thing that I was most certain of, which is that morality is something we have a duty to,” Libresco told CNN in an interview this week, a small cross dangling from her neck. “And it is external from us. And when push came to shove, that is the belief I wouldn’t let go of. And that is something I can’t prove.”

According to a Patheos post she wrote on Monday, entitled “This is my last post for the Patheos Atheist Portal,” she began to see parts of Christianity and Catholicism that fit her moral system. Though she now identifies as a Catholic, Libresco questions certain aspects of Catholicism, including the church’s positions on homosexuality, contraception and some aspects of religious liberty.

“There was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth,” Libresco wrote about Catholicism in her conversion announcement post, which has been shared over 18,000 times on Facebook. “I asked my friend what he suggests we do now, and we prayed the night office of the Liturgy of the Hours together.”

At the end of the post, Libresco announces that she is in a Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults class and is preparing for baptism. She will continue to blog for Patheos, but under the banner, “A geeky convert picks fights in good faith.”

According to Dan Welch, director of marketing for Patheos, Libresco’s post has received around 150,000 page views so far.

“Leah's blog has gotten steadily more popular since she arrived at Patheos, but a typical post on her blog is probably closer to the range of 5,000 page views,” Welch wrote in an email. “Even now, a few days later, her blog is probably getting 20-30 times its normal traffic.”

Libresco’s announcement has left some atheists scratching their heads.

“I think atheists were surprised that she went with Catholicism, which seems like a very specific choice,” Hemant Mehta, an atheist blogger at Patheos, told CNN. “I have a hard time believing how someone could jump from I don’t believe in God to a very specific church and a very specific God.”

Mehta says that Libresco’s conversion is a “one-off thing” and not something that signals any trend in atheism. “The trends are very clear, the conversions from Catholicism to atheism are much more likely to happen than the other way around,” he said. . . "




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Saturday, December 17, 2011

The modern-day Mecken. . .

. . . whenever convincing people to read Hitchens, I would say he was the H.L. Mencken of our age. By this I meant fluent to a fault, unafraid to think, and ALWAYS, whether you agreed with him or not, entertaining.

(from http://www.washingtonpost.com)
Published: December 16 | Updated: Saturday, December 17, 6:00 AM

"Christopher Hitchens, an English writer whose powerful, persuasive essays took on moral and religious hypocrisy, died at 62 in a hospital in Houston. As Matt Schudel reported:

Christopher Hitchens, a sharp-witted provocateur who used his formidable learning, biting wit and muscular prose style to skewer what he considered high-placed hypocrites, craven lackeys of the right and left, “Islamic fascists” and religious faith of any kind, died Dec. 15 at a hospital in Houston. He was 62.

He had pneumonia and complications from esophageal cancer, according to a statement from Vanity Fair, the magazine for which Mr. Hitchens worked.

Mr. Hitchens, an English-born writer who had lived in Washington since 1982, was a tireless master of the persuasive essay, which he wrote with an indefatigable energy and venomous glee. He often wrote about the masters of English literature, but he was better known for his lifelong engagement with politics, with subtly nuanced views that did not fit comfortably with the conventional right or left.

In his tartly worded essays, books and television appearances, Mr. Hitchens was a self-styled contrarian who often challenged political and moral orthodoxy. He called Henry Kissinger a war criminal, savaged Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, ridiculed both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, then became an outspoken opponent of terrorism against the West from the Muslim world.

In 2007, Mr. Hitchens aimed his vitriol even higher, writing a best-selling book that disputed the existence of God, then enthusiastically took on anyone — including his own brother — who wanted to argue the matter.

His supporters praised Mr. Hitchens as a truth-telling literary master who, in the words of the Village Voice, was “America’s foremost rhetorical pugilist.” Writer Christopher Buckley has called him “the greatest living essayist in the English language.”

Hitchens became one of the most respected figures in the atheist community, partly because of his willingness to debate members of the religious establishment. As Susan Jacoby explained :

My old friend Julius Hobson, an unconventional Washington civil rights leader in the 1960s (he once drove a cage of rats to Georgetown and threatened to release them at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street so the power brokers would know how the other half lives), used to say, “I sleep mad.” When I mentioned this many years ago to Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer Thursday, Christopher remarked, “What a great epitaph that would be!”

We have lost an irreplaceable person in this age of American unreason. By “we,” I do not mean only atheists (although Hitchens is irreplaceable in that respect too) but everyone who values rationality and the English language. Hitchens, whose obituaries are devoting equal space to his atheism and his support for the Iraq war (he once called me stupid to my face for disagreeing with him about the latter), was a great, scathing Anglo-American writer in the tradition of Thomas Paine, George Orwell and Jessica Mitford. We may not see his like again, because the respect for language exemplified by his writings is fading away."





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Saturday, May 7, 2011

Sunday. . .

. . . seems like an appropriate day to quote everybody's favorite atheist. . .

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."

"[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods."

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

"Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it."

"[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

"The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me."

"Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence."

"To "choose" dogma and faith over doubt and experience is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid. "

"Organised religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

"I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me."

. . . Christopher Hitchens



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