Sweetie pie, you are a grown up, Santa Clause does not exist!
Logic/reason doesn't work on theists, but compare their intelligence to a 5 year old child (not insulting the children) and maybe they will stop and think for a moment.
Check out the similarities between Santa and god: Santa-vs-God
Edit: deists > theist typo fix
Posted Jul 25, 2011, 3:27 PM UTC · edited
Just look right into the dead center of their confused deist pupils and fire back their prayers with atheist mind bullets. When they look away, and they will look away my friend, Rochambeau. F..T..W.
I was expecting South Park.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwA8V6hcqQo
I figured most people would be.... Took me a while to find a good, non-southpark vid.
One pair of hands working will accomplish more than a thousand clasped in prayer.
Praying will do nothing to convince you of religious bullshit.
"Or you could think, and realize you're not"
Wait. Deists? Deists are the most rational of all theists (IMO). Like, half of the Founding Fathers were deists.
Err...I'm not sure how you go about judging which is "more rational" of two positions which are both inherently irrational.
Both of them believe something for which they have no valid justification. Both of them compartmentalize this belief, and refuse to submit it to the same standard of evidence that they would for anything else. Both of them reject the notion of logic and evidence when it comes to this belief.
Neither is being "rational" at all.
The way I've always understood it, 'Deist' is basically 'Atheist' when actually calling yourself 'Atheist' might get you killed. Deists recognized their lack of cosmological knowledge (no Big Bang yet, no Darwin yet, no Atomic theory yet... etc.), and didn't claim to positively reject a 'God of the Gaps', even though they often recognized the weakness of that position. You could take the same stance now, but the 'Gaps' have closed considerably. And almost every 'Deist' I recall reading considered organized religion as an oppressive and abusive institution.
(edit: added to closed gaps, fixed grammer)
Then you are misinformed. That's like saying that someone who believes in ghosts is basically someone who doesn't believe in ghosts.
The two concepts are mutually exclusive. A deist, by definition, believes in a god. Granted, the god they believe in is fairly non-descript, is usually unintelligent, and has no interest in mankind. But, they still believe in a supernatural being (or "higher power") that they label "god."
Atheists, by definition, do not believe in a god.
I wasn't really going on strict definitions - my point was more that the 'Deist' god is/was such a weak concept that there is no practical difference between an Atheist and a Deist. Technically, a 'Deist' allows for a God who starts the universe (with science!), then God goes off on his merry way and doesn't check back in ever again, while an Atheist believes the same things, minus the God.
In practice, those who would have been classed as Atheist today (Jefferson, Franklin, etc.) were classed as 'Deist' primarily because they didn't DISCOUNT the possibility of a God. But when you look thru their writings, they clearly were VERY skeptical of the existence of a divine creator - they'd fit right alongside Dawkins today. But they did not actively deny the existence of a God primarily because there were things they could not yet explain - how existence came into being, how life came to be, etc. These were valid questions in their time, but those questions have been substantially answered since the late 1700s. ... and it's pretty odd to imagine that a thinker such as Jefferson wouldn't have embraced evolution whole-heartedly.
My observations regarding modern deists is that 'Deist' is simply the last step one takes before becoming 'Atheist'. The Deist god is the final 'God of the Gaps' - the last crutch to be cast aside before embracing atheism and empiricism.
Finally, the 'Deist' god is one who has long since left - there is absolutely no difference between the operations of the Deist universe and the Atheist Universe. So - morally, ethically, scientifically, and any other way except semantically, Deism is just Atheism with a sop thrown in to keep the fundies from grabbing pitchforks and building pyres.
Fixed. Brain does not work before breakfast.
And there are plenty of people who believe in god who aren't stupid. They can be very rational. They just have a blind spot in their reasoning abilities where their religion is concerned.