As a Maths teacher, almost daily 😂
I do disaster planning for counties,hospitals,big companies,etc.
I had a presentation for a hospital and basically showed them very very detailed how they need to prepare for flash flooding. And I was absolutely shot down and basically booed out of the room. “We never can get flash flooding here, it is impossible, you have no idea what you are talking about!”
Exactly two weeks later you could see them on national news, they had 120cm(around 4 feet) on their ground floor, including their ED.
Even if they had signed us it wouldn’t have changed a thing (our recommendations take years to show effects) and people died (it is actually part of one of the worst flash flooding disasters in history,over 220 people died). So I can’t be happy about it at all.
But my team and I were very very very much proven right. (And meanwhile even multiple court ordered experts have agreed on our assessment)
An ex and I were on an hour-long bus trip to the next city over where we lived in Korea. The subject of there being a subway in said city came up, and I insisted there was not. She insisted that she saw one there once. I further insisted that there was no way the city was big enough to have a subway. It got quite heated. Anger. Hurt feelings.
She was talking about the sandwich restaurant, I was talking about underground trains. We were both right.
Yes. My company wanted me to get a corporate credit card with Bank of America. I said absolutely not, they have a terrible reputation and I want nothing to do with them. In response, I was told in an email (which was Cc-ed to some VP of Finance) that this wasn’t true, and that Bank of America has a great reputation.
Now, if you’re gonna claim I’m wrong and start cc-ing people, you better be able to back it up. This pissed me off, so I googled for lists of the worst banks in America. Of the three first surveys on the topic that I found, two of them had Bank of America as the “top spot” as worst bank, and the third one had it in third place. I emailed this back to the person. I never heard back. I happily continued not using their corporate credit card ever after.
In the 2nd grade. When we got to school each morning we went to our classrooms and dropped off our stuff, then we went to the gym to wait for school to start. I was in a split class (2nd & 3rd grade in the same room) and while in the gym a 3rd grader came up and asked me what I’d do if my box of crayons went missing. I had the Crayola 128 mega box, with attached sharpener… top of the line.
Of course, when I get to class, my crayons are missing, and Tommy has a box in his desk. I walk over and tell him to give me my crayons and he says they are his. A fight is brewing, so other kids gather round. I reach down and grab the box from his desk and put them behind my back, then simply ask “If these are your crayons, where did you get them?” and he replied “My mom bought them for me at Piggly Wiggly”… I pulled the box from my back and showed everyone the ‘Wal-Mart’ sticker on the back. Then I put my crayons back in my desk.
I was always a small kid, always being picked on… this was one of my few wins as a kid and it felt so good.
You proved it with a Walmart sticker? Smart thinking.
Not to be mean to little you, but your name should’ve been on that box - on each side, and one on the inside for good measute.
“If it’s yours then why is my name on it in 5 different spots?”
And if my grandma had wheels she would be a bike!
I once got in an argument with someone who claimed a fish isn’t an animal. And I laughed and said “of course it is. What else would it be a plant?”. They said “It’s not an animal. It’s a fish!” So I said “which is an animal we can look it up if you want”
The reply I got was “I don’t need to look it up I know a fish isn’t an animal”
I got stunned into silence so I think in their mind they believe they were absolutely objectively proven correct. I don’t put much worry in arguments since, easier to let things go and realise people are just stupid and ignorant.
I had this exact same argument with someone when he said he was a vegetarian. We were looking for a restaurant to eat with coworkers. Two sentences later he said he could eat fish, so I said “fish is meat, I thought you were vegetarian” expecting something about “it’s just easier to say I am, but really I’m a pescatarian”. But no. He said “fish is not meat”
I think people get “animals” confused with “mammals”. Also there’s some weird thing with Catholicism where fish isn’t defined as meat for the purposes of Lent. But man it’s infuriating to meet someone like that.
I got confused about this too, when I found out that traditionally meat has referred to warm-blooded animals. But that’s not universal across cultures, “warm-blooded” has been an obsolete term for quite some time in biology, and thermoregulation is kind of a silly condition for something being considered vegetarian or not. A fish is clearly not a vegetable, unless in an induced coma, and I doubt they person only eats comatose fish.
Atheists. Their argument always boils down to “I don’t want God to exist because I don’t like him”
lol theists are the ones that do this “God exists because my worldview would fall apart and I’d realize I wasted my life on a manipulative fairy tale”
Life would be easier if God didn’t exist. I’d be able to follow my own hedonistic desires and do what I’d like. But I re examined my faith and realised that God indeed exists.
Sounds like you are one of the people that benefits from thinking a god is a real thing. Most of us don’t need something like that to be nice people.
It’s not about being nice people- it’s about the fact we need a Saviour because we aren’t nice people.
Religious people do seem to need it, that’s right. The prison population is one tenth of one percent atheist despite the proportion of atheists in the unincarcerated population being hundreds of times higher. It’s not like atheists are committing crimes and then start believing in a god after they get locked up, in any significant amount. It’s not even the fact that atheists get extra persecution in prison and are just pretending to believe in prison to get the same perks as the religious - because when the federal prison system allowed atheists to identify as humanists in order to receive some of the same benefits as those who identify with a religion, not very many of them did so.
Please do keep being religious, if you truly believe that you are only capable of caring about the well-being of other humans when under divine threat. Most of us can work out the golden rule and how to be empathetic as children by recognizing the shared human experience in others.
The prison population is one tenth of one percent atheist despite the proportion of atheists in the unincarcerated population being hundreds of times higher.
Source?
I expected you wouldn’t just Google it, but you can get started with the federal bureau of prisons providing raw data: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xwzrnrwp46v34wp/Prison_Data_Shareable.pdf?dl=0
Starting with United States data makes sense as the incarceration rate is so high there. I’ll leave the state and international prison searches up to you to follow up on if you decide it’s an interesting enough subject. Pew did a summarized study where they lump atheism in with scientology, Satanism, druidism, etc., but it’s still a good read.
You might find that there are also correlations between demographics of the incarcerated, uneducated and undereducated, low income, and religious. One certainly isn’t necessarily a cause of any other, but it is interesting to find a consistent correlation among all of them.
Moreso there exists no proof of sky daddys existence, why would I invent something to believe in, that places arbitrary rules upon how I live, just for funsies? If civilization collapsed, and humans had to start over from square 1, we would discover all the same scientific principles, all the same laws of thermodynamics, all the same measurements of our solar system and it’s age. What we wouldn’t do is make up the same BS stories of whatever god you happen to believe in.
If Christianity is man made fake stories, why does it go against all of man’s desires?
You know all the stories in the bible existed in other religions before yours? Just with different names and slightly different details here and there. Every religion was made up by people from slightly altered previous religions… it’s, comically enough, just another example of evolution.
All religions are about why people shouldn’t be jerks, but most of us don’t need to believe anyone is watching us to behave. Stories are helpful, but they don’t have to have any “magic” to get their point accross. Just examples of things people don’t like or do like is enough to make it a good guiding story. A god figure is superfluous and unnecessary.
because that’s how they wrote it
This argument always fascinates me because it makes it sound like you’d be a psychopath if you weren’t afraid of the consequences. I have my own internal compass, thanks. People that don’t? I’d rather stay away from them.
I have my own internal compass
Yeah, because of the Garden of Eden. We all do.
Do we all have an internal compass because of the garden of eden, or from believing in Christianity? If it’s just from the garden of eden and doesn’t require belief, then atheists are just as moral as you are and your argument makes no sense.
If a moral compass comes from religious belief, then you are telling on yourself that you only abstain from being a shitty person because you’re afraid of consequences from God.
As an avowed agnostic since the 3rd grade, you’re not wrong.
My fundamental problem with atheism is that I don’t believe it’s possible to answer the question of why is there something rather than nothing without acquiescing to the possibility of a higher power.
That being said, my qualms with organized religion are much more severe, so I rarely have reason to bicker with atheists about technicalities.
That logic is flawed. Just because we don’t understand why there is something rather than nothing, there is no logical implication that there could be a higher being. “Coincidence” would seem to be a much more likely reason (until/if we understand why) - much like coincidence being the reason for most (all?) observed miracles
“Coincidence” would seem to be a much more likely reason
How so? How do you define “coincidence” in this context?
Even if “coincidence” is more likely, that doesn’t rule out the possibility of a higher power.
Atheism is the assertion that there is no God, agnosticism is the acknowledgement that we can’t actually prove such an assertion. As an agnostic, I dont necessarily believe that a higher power is likely to exist, I simply know that I am unable to definitively prove otherwise.
If you claim to be an atheist, you should be able to logically demonstrate that a higher power cannot possibly exist. Go ahead.
Atheism is the assertion that there is no God, agnosticism is the acknowledgement that we can’t actually prove such an assertion
Most atheists tend to identify as agnostic atheists. You’re arguing against gnostic atheists, which are few and far between in my experience. The qualifier is usually dropped out of simplicity.
I’m gnostic about the Judeo-Christian god existing, and agnostic about any god existing. I still identify as an atheist.
Fair enough. I guess my understanding of the terminology may be obsolete.
But I’m unsure how you can be gnostic about the Judeo-Christian God existing. Doesn’t that require the exact same amount of faith as actual Christians, just in the opposite direction? I’m not comfortable with claiming certainty of anything in the absence of any logical framework, and thus I do not identify as an atheist.
I do identify as an atheist, and I would say it has nothing to do with some sort of faith in non-existence. I know there is a lot more to be found out about the universe, and as our methods of observation and tools improve so will our understanding of how everything fits together and where it all “came” from. What I dont understand is what would a 2000 year old book’s character have to do with anything? Why would the Abrahamic god enter the picture at all? If you can imagine that there’s some ultimate creative force that is responsible for existence, why would it resemble the “God” in the Bible? It could be something like a “white hole”, spewing matter in to the universe as another interesting but ultimately mundane cosmic feature. It certainly wouldn’t give a shit that you exist, or ever hear prayers, or that people are cruel to each other, and all the other stuff people made up and have been telling each other about God. I acknowledge that we don’t and can’t know everything about how the universe works but I don’t get why that has to leave the back door open to believing in some sapient paranormal omniscient presence floating somewhere in space. The Bible is a work of fiction. There are lots of great lessons to be learned in fiction, and it can be a great comfort and an escape, but it was written and made up by people.
why would it resemble the “God” in the Bible?
Why wouldn’t it? We have no frame of reference to make a value judgment about what a higher power should or would be like. We simply have no way of knowing.
