Post Here To Solemnly Renounce Your God

[quote]pookie wrote:
I just noticed a flaw in my cunning plan.

Once one of the believers has publicly renounced his faith, he can keep pestering us. It’s not like his non-existing God is going to smite him on the spot or anything…

Damn. I hate being foiled.

I’ll take comfort in the fact that he paid with his immortal soul for the privilege of bitching and moaning on a thread. A fair price.

[/quote]

  1. It wasn’t all that cunning

2)Bitching and moaning is quite a stretch given my posts, but whatever helps you sleep.

  1. Without me, this thread is dead.

[quote]pookie wrote:
sugarfree wrote:
If God is inside us, then I hope he likes fajita’s, cause that’s what he’s getting tonight

My grandma got very angry with me when I was a kid. She told me “God is everywhere.” and I asked (innocently, not in a smartass way) “Even in the toilet bowl?”

That day I learned that God is everywhere, EXCEPT in the yucky places.
[/quote]

OK, that made me smile, so now I think you might be faking it.

But if not. Oden is gonna be pissed when you end your journey. Oh yes, once, before he was a Marvel Comic book character, he was a god people believed in.

[quote]pookie wrote:
Now, back to our regularly scheduled atheist programming…

You know what I miss from religion? Rituals. Ceremonies. Pump and circumstance and all that.

Religions all have pre-scripted ceremonies for most of life’s important events.

Births are celebrated with baptisms. What do you do if you’re an atheist? Throw a “meet our baby” party? Having any kind of formal ceremony looks silly.

Then there’s marriage. You can get a civil marriage, but it’s performed at the court house or at city hall in a little room with neon lighting and beige carpeting. You can play a tape cassette on a boom box for “ambiance.” It definitely lacks something. At least compared to a marriage in a large church or cathedral. The judge reads the relevant passages from whatever regional laws apply. Nothing about the wife owing obedience or anything like that. It’s pretty sucky.

Funerals. Not as much of a problem for the atheist, as if he’s the one who’s dead, well he’s gone and that’s it. But for your loved one who get to dispose of your rotting carcass, what are they to do with it? A short stay at the funeral home? Maybe. People will by flower for your corpse and comment on how nice they’ve made you look. More annoyingly, they’ll comment on how you’re in a much better place now. Really? How’bout we trade places then, ok?

But I digress. After the funeral home, you can’t really get “a service”. Again, all the ceremony and ritual is missing.

I guess the best bet is incineration and followed by flushing the ashes down the toilet.

My problem with that is that I always wanted to get a tombstone. I’d so love to have one that said “Please do not resuscitate.”

[/quote]

If I have a terminal disease that gives me a definite life span and full ambulatory capabilities until the end-- as seems to happen only in the movies-- I’m going to fake my own death and funeral a couple days before I’m due. I’ll sit up in the rafters and watch. I’ll listen in at the reception and take note of who says what. Finally, depending on my mood, I’ll either emerge from hiding to make everyone feel guilty, or I’ll do the whole “wrath of god” thing myself and smite down those who blasphemed against me with my rifle from my comfy chair above. Either those or I’ll buy an animatronic corpse with my kids’ inheritance and laugh myself to death.

Want to make a bet that we don’t get any Islamic people posting?

[quote]KJ Bridgewater wrote:
Does this mean you’re renouncing the Flying Spaghetti Monster?[/quote]

I just checked with him and he said that my punishment will be that my Beer Volcano will only produce warm American beer (AKA piss) and that my stripper factory will put out big, fat, hairy ones.

So I screamed “NOOOOOOO! Not a sasquatch factory! Think of the smell!” He then said he was just pulling my leg, and disappeared in a puff of parmesan.

The Lord really does work in mysterious ways…

I smell pride… there must be a self-righteous religious person sneaking into the place.

[quote]SkyzykS wrote:
You may never know, though, how many people tried to respond and Poof! vanished into nothingness for their transgression. The view counter was over 500 when I last looked. There could be hundreds of people that have disintegrated because of this.[/quote]

Well just looking shouldn’t be enough to get smiten. Maybe it happens when they click “Reply.” I wonder if Satan has his lawyers (he must have just about everyone of them) awaiting trying to enforce my “solemnly renounce contract.” :slight_smile:

If you’re stuck in the same room, that’s probably a good anal-ogy.

If your avatar’s anything to go by, that was what? Last week?

[quote]sugarfree wrote:
But if not. Oden is gonna be pissed when you end your journey. Oh yes, once, before he was a Marvel Comic book character, he was a god people believed in.[/quote]

A, good ol’ Wotan. A kick-ass and take names kinda guy. Not like the love-thy-neighbor-turn-the-other-cheek pussy gods we get nowadays. No wonder there’s so many of us. Odin’s priest had battleaxes and wore their enemy’s skin to keep warm. We get priests in dresses who wield small specks of bread. Modern religion is testicle free.

As for Marvel Godlike characters, I always liked Galactus myself. I mean, eating planets for lunch, how cool is that?

[quote]vroom wrote:
Want to make a bet that we don’t get any Islamic people posting?[/quote]

Even if we post cartoons?

[quote]vroom wrote:
3) Without me, this thread is dead.

I smell pride… there must be a self-righteous religious person sneaking into the place.[/quote]

Please don’t feed the heathens.

[quote]vroom wrote:
3) Without me, this thread is dead.

I smell pride… there must be a self-righteous religious person sneaking into the place.[/quote]

Pride. You know of PRIDE! Maybe it is you who is sneaking. I believe I knocked and walked in the front door.

I mean really, what would you 2 do if I left. Where does any conversation go where the only 2 in it agree?

Vroom, don’t you want to argue about some ridiculous shit? I got 13 inches of snow in my driveway so I got nothing better to do than wait it out on here.

hmmm…First off this thread is supposed to be for athiest only. You chose to ignore that and post typical holier-than-thou shit. That is being a dick. You should be strong enough in your convictions to handle that.

Secondly, I wasn’t aware that there was a direct correlation between the number of posts one has made and the validity of what the poster has to say. I have read T-Nation regularly for months but choose to post very little. What’s it to you?

I used to be a christian, born and raised one it fact. I am not any longer. I haven’t been for six or seven years now. Why? Is it because, like so many chrstians claim, I wanted live my life by my own rules where ‘anything goes’? No. Faith started cracking when I couldn’t reconcile what the bible teaches about a loving god with the real world; death, disease, disasters, poverty, hunger etc., etc. The only answers the church would give me for my doubts was to ‘dig into the word’. Not really helpful.

Maybe the Internet was what really killed religion for me. Sounds weird, I know. But what it did was give me access to information and resources. Information about science, history and the world outside the church that would answer my questions with honesty.

I was always taught that evolution was lie. There’s a mountain of evidence for it I learned.

I was told that the bible was historicaly accurate. That belief was killed, it is not.

I was brought up to believe that the christian faith was unique and that very fact supported the truth about the christ. Then I learned about Mithra the virgin born god, baptism, communion and other rituals and messiahs that predated jesus and christianity.

I also read exstensively authors like Randi, Shermer and Segan. Segan tells us to use his ‘bolognie detection kit’ when confronted with supernatural claims. I applied it to religion. You can guess the outcome.

I don’t live by my own rules. Far from it. I try to live by the rules of my society and culture (or at least by the idealized vision). I try to be the best that I can. I don’t want or need a ghostly father figure look over my shoulder threatening me with eternal damnation if I don’t measure up. My family will hold me accountable if I’m unfaithful and I will suffer the consequences, society will send me to jail if I steal, murder, etc. I have to live by a standard, everyone does in order to have a happy and productive life.

Again, this is an athiest thread. Let’s keep it that way.

Next time you find a Gideon in your hotel room, stick on of those on it:

…or this one…

…or this…


…last one. For now.

[quote]pookie wrote:
Religions all have pre-scripted ceremonies for most of life’s important events.
[/quote]

Good point and one reason why people probably remain “faithful.” I use the term faithful in quotes because I believe that a fair number, perhaps even a majority, remain in organized religion and what not because of: 1) Pascal’s Wager (better go to church “just in case”); 2) they’ve done it since they were kids, so why change; 3) they like the ceremony, and organized religion gives them a nice pre-packaged deal (i.e., they don’t have to think about planning their own) on births, weddings, funerals, and if you’re Jewish, we’ll throw in, at no extra cost, a coming of age ceremony with either a Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah; and 4) it’s a social gathering.

With some creative thought, anyone can plan their own ceremonies. For instance, I have heard of a service, although I cannot confirm if this is true, that will provide you with a burial at sea. You have to agree to be cremated, and then they take a plane loaded with a bunch of urns, they get a a certain latitude and longitude (apparently, your family gets a certficate with these coordinates), and out you go. Seems kinda cool.

Holidays haven’t lost their meaning for me - I just made up my own meanings. For instance, Christmas is a very meaningful time for me - I believe it is a time to spend with my family and to reflect on the previous year. I recently added a Festivus component where I promise myself to do at least one hard workout during the holidays (this is the show of strength part of the Festivus celebration) as a way to celebrate strength and to promise to continue to lead a fit and healthy life into the new year. Really, I’m not kidding.

The bottom line is that I don’t need pre-packaged rituals to make my life meaningful.

Sasquatch,

There is plenty of activity in here without your very important personage.

By the way, I like to keep the ridiculous shit in the politics forums… so spare me if I call bullshit in the more serious areas. I’d prefer not to have poor newbies confused with misinformation. Maybe that is just me.

Post away, I’m sure that will create lots of ridiculous shit to argue about, heh.

[quote]pookie wrote:
Next time you find a Gideon in your hotel room, stick on of those on it:
[/quote]

LOL. Nice.

As an agnostic, I still like talking about whether or not God exists. But it seems a thread like that cannot exist without someone quoting the motherfucking scripture as to why I’m going to burn in hell for thinking that way.

But watch out, Lorisco is spreading the word! I’m sure me and Pookie can hold hands and sing “He’s got the whole world in his hands” at Church next week since Lorisco told me I would burn in hell without it. Cause God judges on songs, rituals, and money for the Church coffers I’m sure…

Wooo wooo.