Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was meeting last week with representatives from a teachers union in his home state when things quickly devolved.
Before long, Fetterman began repeating himself, shouting and questioning why “everybody is mad at me,” “why does everyone hate me, what did I ever do” and slamming his hands on a desk, according to one person who was briefed on what occurred.
As the meeting deteriorated, a staff member moved to end it and ushered the visitors into the hallway, where she broke down crying. The staffer was comforted by the teachers who were themselves rattled by Fetterman’s behavior, according to a second person who was briefed separately on the meeting.
Based on what the article said, your general intolerance of religion might be the very symptom they were referencing.
Their research doesn’t suggest that damage to that particular area of the brain causes religious beliefs, but rather that it more or less locks you into your beliefs religious or otherwise.
The injured brain becomes less able to consider other viewpoints, so changing beliefs becomes less likely even when confronted with facts that disprove the belief.
Right, it bears pointing out that atheism is in itself a faith, or at least its adherents treat it very much like one to the point that it might as well be one. For me it is the faith in the non-existance of a supreme being or deity.
I agree. I prefer to consider myself agnostic rather than atheist.
I’m really a dishonest agnostic since I can’t really imagine a proof of deity that I wouldn’t discount as a hallucination.
I did have a dream many years ago in which I woke up with absolute proof that God existed, but then I went back to sleep.
When I woke later, I couldn’t remember what the proof was. If the proof was real, and God let me forget it, then he’s an ass and he doesn’t deserve my belief.
I think the problem is that most people think of god as non material. In my view m whatever you want to call god is a material thing and you are touching it right now. And there’s absolutely no conclusive evidence to prove that this isn’t true and most thought exercises will have you reach the conclusion that there is a high likelihood that we are indeed part of a bigger thing that could be defined as god.
I guess a big divide here is how you define god, for most people it’s this intelligent and willful being. But that’s just what a human, who fashions gods in his image, thinks a god is.
For me intelligence is not a requirement for supremacy. I believe the universe itself for all intents and purposes is god. It has no will and no intelligence but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.
That belief is either pantheism or panentheism.
No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.That’s a 400-year-old take. There are pre-Socratic philosophers and Taoist and Buddhist scriptures with similar messages that are far older (500 BCE or so), and Hindu ones a couple millennia older than those.
It doesn’t require faith to NOT believe in something. It requires faith to accept religion which cannot be proven.
It does require faith when you’re disbelieving something that has as much proof of its existence as of its non existence. There is no conclusive proof against the existence of a supreme being, in fact like I said in another comment there is physical evidence of one if you observe the universe, which is that all of existence collective is god.
If you zoom into a human being there are millions of microorganisms and bacteria that inhabit us, and at that level of zoom they all look like they inhabit their own little planets, zoom in more and you start to see the very molecules that make us up. But you zoom out and see a person, zoom out and see a planet, then a galaxy, then clusters and so on. Who’s to say that if you looked at the universe from outside of it, it would not be the very body of another living organism?
Repetition of patterns at different scales is a sign that some aspects of reality are fractal, not evidence of a creator deity.
Never said it was.
I have a pet flying dragon that breathes fire and devours people I don’t like. Do you believe me?
This isn’t as smart of an argument as you think it is.
And your reply wasn’t one at all.
I wasn’t arguing. I was giving you an analogy. What’s the difference between not believing in a god and not believing in a pet dragon? Does one require faith and not the other? Why or why not? That’s an argument.
If my argument is so easy and stupid, rip it apart. Condescension gets you nothing.
It’s a very bad faith (heh) argument to compare god to a mythological creature. I’m not arguing that the abrahamic god is real or that Zeus et al are real. I’m saying that as the thing that encompasses everything that exists, the universe, could be a god of sorts. Or the God if you want.
The argument is that atheists believe so much that god does not exist and become so hostile to the notion of religion itself that it behaves as a religion and becomes like a religion itself.
Perhaps the fault in communication here is that atheist mostly define gods as intelligent and willful entitities when there is nothing that suggests that other than the deities that we invented in our own image. But to say, conclusively that god does not exist, meaning that we know that the universe is without a doubt not a transcendental entity is just faith that god does not exist because you have no proof of that nor any way to prove it without looking at it from outside of it.
There is no difference.
I like this thought experiment and think about this a lot. However this does nothing to remotely indicate the existence of the Abrahamic god. People tell you with certainty that god exists and he’s three persons and jesus rose from the dead yada yada. That’s a complete fantasy derived from literally nothing.
No proof but still believe? Faith.
Not believing in something that has zero evidence requires no faith. I don’t need faith to tell you Cthulu isn’t real
Well atheism is not just denying the abrahamic god but the idea of any supreme being at all.
There was no distinction between atheism and agnosticism until the early 1900s. Bertrand Russell made the distinction to signal that his motivation for not believing was scientific, not dogmatic.
Atheism is not the idea of denying any gods, but rather not believing claims that they exist. This requires not faith, but by definition, the lack of it.