Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – reblogging a Christian bit of nonsense: The meaning of meaninglessness

not so polite dinner conversation, Uncategorized 1 Minute

This post came to my attention when Pastor Mike liked this post of mine.  It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that a Christian would like it, but I often encounter Christians who seem a little confused in what they profess to believe and what they actually believe.

Nothing like watching a TrueChristian(tm) do his best to bear false witness against others and have no clue about cause and effect. It’s a shame that Pastor Mike does claim to have all of the answers and claim that only his version of Christianity is the right one, with not one more shred of evidence than those who he decries. I am glad that he does admit that atheists wield logical arguments against his claims.  Alas, Pastor Mike falsely believes that atheists are all nihilists and in his ignorance, he trips himself up.

No wonder that Christianity is losing members when a Christian leader demonstrates that intentional dishonesty and ignorance are what he depends on.  You can see how Pastor Mike failed earlier on this blog.

Update – 4/13  One also has to wonder about Pastor Mike when he likes my post on his blog which is the following: “well, Pastor Mike, glad that a pastor agrees with my post here: https://clubschadenfreude.com/2018/02/18/not-so-polite-dinner-conversation-what-makes-christianity-christianity/  Always curious that a Christian would agree with what I’ve said, I wonder what your flock would say.  As for your claims “You have kicked God out of schools, so kids are turning to insanity to imbue their lives with some semblance of the significance you robbed out of life.”  For what is supposedly an omnipotent being, this poor god can be stopped by a human, per Pastor Mike.  Not much of a god, is it?  It’s nice to see you make such claims, when this god can’t even protect its own churches and keep its priests and pastors from abusing children, embezzling, etc right where it supposedly can get in where it wants.  As usual, you are so desperate to bear false witness against others, you dont’ think your claims through.”    What kind of fractured thinking goes with this? I do wonder if Pastor Mike thinks he is being sarcastic.

Mustard Seed Budget

imagesActually, snorting condoms makes perfect sense. As does chewing Tide pods. Along with cutting.

After all, if there is no meaning to life, then why not engage in something meaningless? If an attempt to find value shows your stupidity, then all we have left is getting attention through stupid means.

Atheists will bristle at my mockery, but their insistence that morality is an evolved feature — along humanity’s unusual drive for significance — is absurd. There is no evolutionary sense of morality or man’s quest for importance. Deprive man of God, and you get teens snorting condoms.

images-1And please, my dear atheist friends, don’t tell the gunman plowing down schoolchildren that he is inherently or obviously wrong. What is obvious is that there are no morals, no values, nothing. That is all atheism has to offer: nothing. There is no noble sense to humanity, no purpose, no beauty, no humanity…

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Published by clubschadenfreude

intelligent, female, atheist, science fiction fan, great cook, excellent alewife, cat lover

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57 thoughts on “Not So Polite Dinner Conversation – reblogging a Christian bit of nonsense: The meaning of meaninglessness”

  1. I notice you have changed your theme. This one is quite easy on the eyes.

    Mike should read his bible. Somewhere in it, he will meet a book where the author says just that; all is meaningless.

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    1. that’s a great article from the guardian. I agree. In the past, pastor mike hasn’t been so strident and so inept at his arguments. I have to wonder if he is this way since his magical financial promises aren’t working out and he is afraid since disbelief is hurting his bottom line. If no one needs a pastor or a church to be “saved” or more prosaically, happy, then he’s out of a job.

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  3. As usual, their facts never align with what we observe. They sell fear. That is their best seller to keep their bubble intact en masse. The truth is this is the safest time in recorded history to be alive. And it’s not because of the churches. Funny thing, since leaving religion and faith behind, life has been better than it ever was, and as man’s morality continues to trump the archaic misery of the Bible, things will only get better. Many people live very productive and happy lives outside of religion, and suddenly life has real meaning for me. They’ll never admit it, but their wrong, and the churches have brought more misery to the world than any other.

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    1. I agree. as I noted to Pink above, it seems that the pastor is afraid of losing his livelihood. Humans are discovering that they don’t need to support someone who peddles fear and ignorance because they need “saved”.

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  4. Interesting. Lewis did things similarly. Pastor Mike did not write that for any atheist to learn or to recant, or even to read. Rather, it is intended to shackle another chain of fear to some gullible believer. It is also interesting, how in the discussions about atheist morality, all we need do is point to the evidence. Oh dear me, there is that horrible word again: proof.

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  6. as Mak noted in one of his recent posts, the liking of a blog post is a curious thing. I now have Pastor Mike also liking the comment I made on his blog “”well, Pastor Mike, glad that a pastor agrees with my post here: https://clubschadenfreude.com/2018/02/18/not-so-polite-dinner-conversation-what-makes-christianity-christianity/ Always curious that a Christian would agree with what I’ve said, I wonder what your flock would say. As for your claims “You have kicked God out of schools, so kids are turning to insanity to imbue their lives with some semblance of the significance you robbed out of life.” For what is supposedly an omnipotent being, this poor god can be stopped by a human, per Pastor Mike. Not much of a god, is it? It’s nice to see you make such claims, when this god can’t even protect its own churches and keep its priests and pastors from abusing children, embezzling, etc right where it supposedly can get in where it wants. As usual, you are so desperate to bear false witness against others, you dont’ think your claims through.”

    Nice that they agree with me but it doesn’t make much sense with other things that they say.

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    1. of course, it shows just how many false things a Christian will say and does a great job of supporting my position that religion is far more harmful than it is helpful. It shows you don’t believe your bible’s words any more than I do. You might want to check out Romans 3.

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      3. Hi Vel, Thanks for writing. May I humbly suggest you watch the movie Apostle Paul? Maybe you would like to write about it. Despite its many defects as a movie, it does underscore some of the positives that can be found in Christianity. We Christians were tortured and persecuted.

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      4. Lots of people have been tortured and persecuted. Christians have done much of that to others. If you think there are positives to Christianity, please tell me about them. I have no interest in watching a movie about your religion that even you find defective. I wonder, how much of it ignores the contradictions between Acts and the claims of Paul, much like the The Passion of the Christ did amongst the gospels? You also might want to read up on the actual Roman persecutions, rather than the myths Christians tell each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Roman_Empire

        You also may want to consider what positives that Christianity has that are solely Christian. Why is it that Christians are no better off nor no better in conduct than others? Most humans and most religions are quite decent and humane. There is little, if anything, unique to Christianity to make it any better than any other religion or civilized behavior that is common in secular societies.

        now reading about the claims about Luke and Paul, it seems that Christians again don’t agree on what actually took place. Was Paul in prison or not? Some think he was just in “house arrest”, which hardly works with the claims of torture and persecution, with Luke visiting him. Indeed, the last bit of Acts has this “He lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, 31 proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.”

        Where is the persecution and torture? That movie certainly seems to be playing fast and loose with the biblical claims since it seems to be claiming this Paul was imprisoned in Mamertine Prison.

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      10. I didn’t make the claim, Mike. You made this claim “Despite its many defects as a movie, it does underscore some of the positives that can be found in Christianity.” I’ve asked you to support it. Will you?

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      11. Are there any hospitals in your town that were founded by Christians? Any schools? Any YMCAs? Any soup kitchens and rehab organizations, any post-jail programs run by Christians? I ran a church in Guatemala for 16 years. We helped some kids get out of gangs. We founded a school making a high quality education available to people of poor resources. I’m not sure why you are asking me to back up the “claim” that Christianity has done a lot of good throughout history.

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      12. yep, there are and all of those things can be done without a suppsoed god that commands genocide, hatred, etc. And funny how my local mission has to beg for funds from the entire community when there are ten pages in my local yellow pages of churches. I am not asking you to show how Christianity has done good. I’m asking if there is anything unique about Christianity that is good. It seems you are dodging my question, Mike. Why would that be?

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      13. I’m not trying to dodge a question. I think that if you look around the world (obviously I haven’t surveyed the entire world), you will find that Christianity has done more good than other religions. (My own experience includes a missionary friend who says that Muslims also do medical missions to Africa but that everybdoy knows their medicine is inferior in quality — his observations as an a eye witness, not mine). So really, the question is not “all those things can be done without… god.” The point is not theory of what could be done with “god.” The point is what is being done and what has been done. I’m not much for theory. Communisim was a wonderful theory projected to help humanity. But in practice, it set up dictatorships, oppression and loss of liberty. We can find stains in Christian history, but Western Civilization was founded (not exclusively) on Judeo-Christian principals and values. The same freedom of expression you enjoy is a product of Christianity. Christians in the first century were persecuted intensely and they thrived. Why?

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      14. There is nothing to support your claim that Christianity has “done more good than other religions”. I suspect you hope so, in order to feel superior, but nothing supports this claim. Indeed, in my own town, the local homeless shelter has to beg for money from the entire community when there are ten pages of quite small type of churches in the yellow pages. The vast number of these churches are quite well off, considering their buildings, their sound systems, etc.

        As for your friend, it’s no surprise at all that a Christian missionary would try to claim that Muslim missionaries have “inferior quality medicine”, and of course no evidence of the fact. All you have is one of those “everyone knows” claims that is invented to try to throw poop at a wall and hope some of it sticks. I find missionaries not to be trusted since their entire existence is built on trying to convince people to be on their team rather than anyone elses. It’s really sad that you have to rely on such pathetic attempts as “those people aren’t as civilized as us”.

        I might agree with you if Christians would just help, not try to convert people. But they do. They have to have a payment for their help. As for what else Christianity has done, it’s tried to keep AIDS funding down. It’s tried to lie to people that contraception won’t work or will cause things like cancer. It’s made children suffer because those children were raped and they were forced to give birth. It’s made mothers die because Christians found the life of the fetus more important than the life of the mother. We can also point to the crusades, the inquisitions both Protestant and Catholic, the harm of the Jews, etc. I could say that Christianity was a great idea but look what it has done. And communism isn’t the same as the screwed up nonsense in Russia by Lenin and Stalin. Communism is sharing and Jesus Christ was all about that. Western Civilzation was not set up on Judeo Christian principles. If it were, then we’d have the same idiotic religious laws as the Muslims do. Western civilization was based on Greek, Roman and Anglo Saxon laws and cultures, which valued democracy, freedom and not blind obediance. It was based on the culture of inquiry from the Enlightenment, when the church was losing power, and doing its best to imprison anyone who thought differently than it, see Bruno and Galileo. Christians were persecuted, and then became not persecuted and then had a emperor who found that a religion that said kings were appointed by a god was a pretty great way to control a people. Promise them a heaven and they don’t complain so much. Religion has been used by humans to control people forever.

        Again, we can have all of the civilization, and ignore the hate, genocide, fear and ignorance that religion requires to exist.

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      15. your view is jaundiced. the simple evidence remains intact. Christianity has done much more help than anybody else on the planet, especially atheism. Atheism doesn’t inspire sacrifice or service to humanity. The only thing it inspires is selfishness.

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      16. If you think you have evidence to support your baseless claim “Christianity has done much more help than anybody else on the planet, especially atheism.”, then show it. Your baseless claims piled on top of baseless claims don’t show anything, Mike. My view is correct until you can support your claims, and you have yet to do so. Please do remember that you don’t even consider some self-described Christians to be Christian, so your numbers will fall every time you insist that some sect that you don’t like really aren’t Christians.

        You are right, atheism doesn’t inspire sacrifice or service to humanity. Atheism is nothing more than having no belief in your god or any gods. There are atheists who hurt humans and atheists who help humans. Atheism doesn’t inspire selfishness, and that is just one more lie told by a Christian to make himself feel superior to others. It is a shame you feel you have to do this, but it does wonders for my position that Christianity is nothing special and that it causes harm because it causes people to lie in order to defend it.

        To inspire sacrifice and service to humanity, we have empathy, we have humanism (good definitions here), we have many other philosophies that don’t need a god to give a carrot or stick to make us take care of our fellow humans. I personally have Captain America and Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the NCC-1701 Enterprise to inspire sacrifice and service to humanity to me, as well as numerous teachers, family and professors.

        We take care of our fellows because we enjoy it, we benefit from it, and we don’t have to kowtow to an imaginary genocidal deity that can’t even fulfill the definition of love in the holy book that describes it. I don’t need heaven or god or hell to make me not want to harm people and to help them.

        Why do you?

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      17. Ah, good to see you have no evidence and hope someone will do your work for you. That is just throwing shit on the wall and hoping some of it sticks. Your bible also claims that just “looking around” will prove the existence of your god, but funny how it doesn’t do that at all. Other religions make the same claim and surprise you have no more evience than they, and they have no more than you.

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      18. the only humane and empathic things in the bible are also elsewhere, and many from earlier, without the genocide, the messiah commanding believers to bring non-believers before them and murder them, the claim that some people are damned without any action on their part (Romans 9), and the ridiculous claims in Revelation with this god working with its supposed evil archenemy with the intention of corrupting more people *after* all unbelievers are murdered and Jesus Christ ruling over believers for an “eon”.

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      21. Thank you for the interesting and instructive article on the Golden Rule. I don’t think I ever said that Christianity has exclusive rights to morality. Morality can be found in all cultures. What I have said is that the very existence of a human conscience points to God, since animals (from which we supposedly evolved) have no such.

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      22. You’ve claimed that atheists aren’t moral and are to be blamed for quite a bit. How does that work with your new statement “Morality can be found in all cultures.”? What you appear to be doing is claiming that the human conscience is evidence of your god. This is little different from the Christian claim that the universe is evidence for your god. Since most, if not all, religions make the same baseless claims, why should Christianity be considered unique and its god the only one? As for conscience, how would you define that term? How do you know animals don’t have a conscience?

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      26. again, how does this show your god exists? It may be just how some animals are thanks to brain structure and chemistry. Why didn’t another god do this too?

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      28. I’m not asking if you have trouble working with a satanist, though it is interesting that you seem to consider the end justifies the means. I’m asking if you have trouble with god working with Satan, its archenemy, in order to damn believers after they have been governed by Jesus Christ for an “aeon”, as per your bible.

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      30. That isn’t a surprise since it has been my experience that most Christians haven’t a clue about what is in their bible, including pastors and priests. A fair number of my atheist friends started their path toward the conclusion of atheism by actually reading the bible. They had believed what others told them about it, and when they read it, they realized that they had been given false or at least incomplete information. Let’s correct your ignorance.

        Revelation 19:17 Then I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly in midheaven, “Come, gather for the great supper of God, 18 to eat the flesh of kings, the flesh of captains, the flesh of the mighty, the flesh of horses and their riders—flesh of all, both free and slave, both small and great.” 19 Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against the rider on the horse and against his army. 20 And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed in its presence the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. 21 And the rest were killed by the sword of the rider on the horse, the sword that came from his mouth; and all the birds were gorged with their flesh. Revelation 20:1 Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. 2 He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and locked and sealed it over him, so that he would deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be let out for a little while.

        4 Then I saw thrones, and those seated on them were given authority to judge. I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus[a] and for the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years. 5 (The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended.) This is the first resurrection. 6 Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. Over these the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him a thousand years.
        7 When the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison 8 and will come out to deceive the nations at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, in order to gather them for battle; they are as numerous as the sands of the sea. 9 They marched up over the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire came down from heaven and consumed them. 10 And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

        Here we have the final battle between unbelievers, Satan and God and his team and then, Satan being chained in the pit. For some mysterious reason, this evil entity must be let loose. Now since God is the omnipotent, omniscient being, creator of the universe, etc, then there is no power other than his. This god wants it released after a thousand years and after all of the nonbelievers have been killed by this god. There is no one else to blame.

        Then we have Jesus ruling with the righteous for the thousand years, over all of the believers.

        And then we get Satan back because this god wants it this way. This evil entity is allowed to deceive “the nations at the four corners of the earth” which are believers in this god. There is no one else alive. This god takes them out with a rain of fire. This evil entity cannot function without the direct assistance of your god. They are working together. Of course, these two also managed to kill a family back in Job, because one wanted to show off to the other.

        Please explain the words of your bible if you think I am wrong.

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      32. when I like your post, I like your energy. You are definitely passionate about the subject, and that resonates with me. I like you as a person. I’m a big believer in agreeing to disagree, in getting along with one other, of discussing ideas and being tolerant of each other’s ideas, of respecting each other’s ideas. So why not “like” what you have to say. I would hope we could be friends.

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      34. and your claims form your blog “You have kicked God out of schools, so kids are turning to insanity to imbue their lives with some semblance of the significance you robbed out of life.” and yuo can’t explain how this god of your, suposedly ominpotent can’t get “in” somewhere, or why it fails to protect those who are in places you claim this god can get into.

        Not that I expect you to, I’m very used to Christians making false claims and then running away when called to support those claims, as if they can pretend no one knows that they are failures. This is why I find it very important to show with evidence just how deceitful and cowardly some Christians are. It shows that Christianity has no lock on morality or on making people better.

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      35. Well Vel, I was going to let all that pass because I don’t want to be pulled into a war of words, of picking apart every phrase, to trying to trap each other into logical arguments. What I have said, I stand behind. I believe it to be correct. I embrace your counter opinion and rejoice in your right to voice your opinion even on my blog. I like discussion but I prefer some discussions to others. I’m lazy. I’ve seen people get into a nit-picking back and forth that seems to me to be a bit unproductive. So I was just going to respect your opinions, leave your comments on my blog, but not respond. Cheers!

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      36. I’m sure you don’t want to be pulled into a “war of words” aka having to support your claims. It’s no surprise at all that you will make a false claim about atheists and bear false witness against them. I’ve known that from the start. You claim you stand behind your claims, but funny how you refuse to support them when called on it. It does seem you think you can lie about others with no ramifications, which does call into question your belief in your holy book.

        I know you are lazy too. Anything to avoid having to support what you’ve said and retain your willful ignorance. What does it say about a religion that depends on ignorance and baseless accusations against others, Mike?

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      39. My posts can either stand or fall on their internal reasons. If you feel they fall, that’s find. But I’ll stick with them. And yes, I’ve made mistakes. No, I don’t think everything I say or think is perfect and correct. but I will assert that generally, I’m in the right direction.

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