1. Then any hobby you like to talk about is therefore a Religion.
2. Everyone can form groups or gatherings, are sport gatherings or chess organisations now religious?
3. Yes, you can read these and else do atheists do? Also go against them with evidence.
4. Atheism as no rule or law to convert or to de-convert people, I would agree that there are some atheists who do this, but most do not.
For starters, while the coelacanth is a lobe-finned fish, it is an evolutionary cousin to land vertebrates, sitting on a branch close to lungfish and tetrapod's, rather than our direct ancestor. Furthermore, the lineage simply survived, despite being declared extinct until 1938. Originating in the Early Devonian period of Earth's history, they endured by retreating to the deep, stable environments of the ocean, which ultimately shielded them from the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs.
Additionally, calling them a "living fossil" is a misconception. They have in fact continued to evolve genetically and physically, albeit extremely slowly. The modern species found today are not the exact same species from the age of the dinosaurs, but rather deeply ancient, adapted lineages.
Finally, regarding the 2010 Poland footprints: they do not disprove Tiktaalik. Evolution is a branching tree, not a straight ladder. The footprints simply show that the split between fish and land animals happened earlier than scientists originally thought. Transitional forms like Tiktaalik frequently coexist with their more advanced descendants for millions of years, much like how primitive primates still live alongside humans today. Tiktaalik remains a crucial structural link showing exactly how a fin transitions into a limb.
1. "Authoritative texts (The God Delusion, etc.)": Literally any atheist can go against these texts and even find them problems with them.
2. "Rituals — pride parades, abortion as a sacrament, campus protests, and social media pile-ons" Some atheists support LGBT parades, some do not. By that logic, football tailgates and Black Friday sales are religions too.
3. "A god by another name — they worship Reason, Science, and Progress". Yes, there are some atheists that treat science as infallible (scientism), but that's a personal failing, not part of atheism. I have seen plenty of Christians go against Catholics, Orthodox or even Protestants, its not that deep. There are also plenty of atheists like John Gray, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, and Paul-Michel Foucault all went against the secular "progress" narrative.
4. "Organised community and conferences" again, yes. Some atheists organise. So do stamp collectors, chess players, and anime fans. Voluntary gatherings don't equal religion. There is no required membership, no clergy class, and no central authority in atheism.
5. "Evangelical behaviour (actively deconverting people)" Sure, some some atheists do proselytise. Most don't. Atheism has no doctrine commanding evangelism.
6. "Secular humanist moral code — largely inherited from Christianity" You conceded the point. Secular Humanism is a separate philosophy to atheism. Atheism itself has no moral code at all, it's silent on ethics. The "inherited from Christianity" claim is irrelevant to whether atheism is a religion.
7. "Claiming “no evidence” ignores that creation, logic, and reason itself are evidence." This is the philosophical disagreement about what counts as evidence for a God, not proof that atheism requires faith. Atheists can (and do) debate these arguments honestly (some do not). Rejecting an argument isn't "faith", it is there default position until positive evidence is provided.
8: "Evolution as creation narrative; heat death as eschatology" Evolution is a scientific theory about biology, not a "creation myth." Most atheists accept it because of evidence, not faith; they would drop it if better evidence appeared. "Heat death" is a cosmological prediction, not an article of faith or end-times prophecy. Atheists are not required to believe either one, there are atheists who reject evolution or Big Bang cosmology.
9: "Tribal in-group identity with heresy enforcement" Humans form tribes. Something we have been doing since the dawn of time. I agree, there are some atheists who are obnoxious online. The same "venom for apostates" exists in every ideology this goes for politics and sports fandoms. Atheism has no doctrine to apostatise from.
10: "Governments have already agreed — secular humanist groups have won legal religious status" Legal tax-exempt status for humanist organisations (for practical reasons) ≠ "atheism is a religion." Courts have also granted similar status to other non-religious groups. This is a legal workaround, not a metaphysical ruling. Philosophically and definitionally, it changes nothing.
11: "Concept of sin repackaged — bigotry, ignorance, and superstition" Labelling certain things is called ethics, not religion. Every worldview (including theism) does this. Atheism doesn't have "sin" or redemption rituals; it doesn't even require you to care about those labels. If you were an atheist and you went to another atheist and told them you "sinned" they would either laugh at you or be confused. Since atheists deal with social accountability not spiritual penance.
12: "Salvation through education" Valuing education is not unique to atheists, nor is it salvific. No atheist catechism says "education saves your soul." This is just a caricature of Enlightenment values.
13: "Symbols and iconography — the pride flag, the Darwin fish, and the “Coexist” bumper sticker" Some atheists use these. Most do not. None are required, or even official. Comparing to the ichthys or the Agnus Dei carry more symbolic weight than what an atheist is wearing.
14: "Sacred figures — Darwin, Sagan, Hitchens, and Dawkins" This is mostly admiration of these thinkers and probably a very minor group of atheists would actually worship them (and if they do, they are no longer atheist then). Dawkins is very criticised by other atheists and the others are also criticised. This is like saying admiring Martin Luther for doing the 95 Theses = worship.
15: "Metaphysical assumptions — materialism (only physical things exist) is accepted on faith" Ok, granted, most atheists are materialists, but atheism does not require it. They can be an atheist and believe in ghosts, simulation theory, Platonism, or some other thing. Materialism is just another philosophical position that many latch on to. It can be argued for on empirical and parsimony grounds.
I have no problems with Christians, I mostly poke hole in their argument to see if their arguments hold up. I still think Christians are generally good and brilliant people, I would not call them misguided nor evil.
I believe atheists should be more open to genuine dialogue and actually put in the effort to talk to people without turning it into personal spats, even when we come from different viewpoints (and most atheists actually do this). The problem is that some Christians often get hooked on the loudest, most combative atheists and then portray all of atheism as that “wrong” type, when clearly many are not. The exact same thing happens in reverse: some atheists paint all Christians as uneducated or evil/misguided simply because one Christian misspoke or made a claim without evidence or substance.
@Goldietheswag3 I agree, it's a dumb way to dumb down the cosmological argument, when you can poke arguments in the argument itself without the dumb downed version that misrepresents the argument.
Plus the quote is fake. This is the real one; "Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. But to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence?" Meditations (Book 2, Paragraph 11).
So then why didn't a 'Common Designer' create from scratch a unique, optimal underwater acoustic gene for dolphins and a separate airborne one for bats. Instead, we see the exact same mammalian gene tweaked in the exact same positions. That’s not top-down engineering; it’s evolution recycling the exact same genetic toolkit (exaptation) because it cannot create out of nothing.
And if so, why don't seals have echolocation? Seals (like elephant seals) dive deeper and longer than most dolphins with maxima exceeding 2,000 m in total darkness in total darkness, and yet use an entirely different toolkit to hunt. If a Common Designer was reusing the 'best' underwater acoustic solution, why not give seals the exact same optimised prestin tweaks?
It was all about conditioning that natural selection did not select for seals but did for dolphins and bats. So why is that? Because seals contain the original non-echolocating version of the prestin gene — the same ancestral amino acids found in humans, otters, and non-sonar bats.
Also FYI: I’m not going against you personally — you have an alternative view. I’m just poking holes in the argument, using the same facts that go against irreducible complexity.
The only reason these facts seem to get overlooked is that they don’t back an irreducible-complexity claim: they explain why another mammal that isn’t a bat (like the seal I am using) doesn’t have echolocation, while some bats also don’t use echolocation.
@Chris_Kamu@DivinelyDesined Read my argument again. I did not say fruit bats were the transition, I said the Egyptian bats were transitional because they use a simple version of echolocation via tongue clicks and not a larynx click.
Holy, I knew you were going to say "but it is for a different system" That is literally what convergent evolution predicts. Bats and toothed whales (like dolphins) live in completely different physical worlds—air vs. water. Sound behaves wildly differently in each (it travels faster and farther in water, with different wavelengths and attenuation). So natural selection, acting on random mutations in distant lineages, produced analogous solutions tailored to those environments.
Both on a molecular level, have the same hearing gene (prestin, which tunes cochlear hair cells for high-frequency sensitivity) underwent identical amino acid changes in echolocating bats and dolphins.
Plus you ditch the only thing that proves transitional as "a loss feature", cut with the bullshit arguments. Most fruit bats (megabats) don't echolocate at all, which dismantles that bats use echolocation with one that does not use it at all. The transitional one, the Egyptian fruit bat, uses a simple version of echolocation via tongue clicks, not using the larynx.
The only reason I can see you ignore these facts because it does not back your Irreducible complexity statement on why another mammal that is not a bat as echolocation and some bat do not use echolocation.
That is because atheism does not answer those questions and answers one question "Does God exist?" and to them the answer is either "I lack belief" or "No". It does not struggle with "contingent life, order, reason, or moral reality" because that is not the answer to those questions. Why? Because atheism is bare bones.
However, when the atheist proposes naturalism or something else, then they will after eventually address it, they cannot stay behind of the shield of "not my job" forever. But to clarify, "contingent life, order, reason, or moral reality" would have to come from elsewhere, not atheism by itself.
So, this argument is not even about atheism but naturalism v. theism.
Hutton is the father of geology, who developed the concept of deep time while in Scotland, if there was Hindu influence in Scotland in 1726 to 1797 that is a new one on me. His entire work was based around sites like Siccar Point using evidence of repeated cycles of sedimentary layers deposited underwater, hardened into rock, uplifted by volcanic forces, eroded, and repeated. This came to the conclusion in 1788 called uniformitarianism, you can also see this with the Grand Canyon. At most, Hutton was a deist influenced by Scottish Enlightenment and friends with David Hume and Adam Smith, though is entire work was empirical not mythology.
Lyell built directly on Hutton's observations in "Principles of Geology", using field evidence from volcanos like Etna, fossils, and strata to argue for vast timescales.
Darwin explicitly credited Lyell's geology during his Beagle voyage. As for Haeckel and the X Club were later advocates of Darwinism and naturalism. The X Club pushed secular science against clerical amateurs, but their work was grounded in empirical biology and geology.
They only thing I can come across what vividly mentions Hinduism was in passing by David Hume and creation myths in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. But that is just that, passing nods. If you actually read it, it is more critical than endorsement. Here is a snippet "Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that Divine Being, so much the better." Philo (a fictional character that voices Hume's opinions) mocks the idea that you need an external intelligent cause to explain the world's order—because that just kicks the explanatory can down an infinite road.
Think of it this way: Just because a sci-fi movie and a real NASA scientist both talk about travelling to Mars, it doesn't mean NASA stole its rocket designs from Hollywood. One is a fictional story; the other is based on math, physics, and engineering.
Your argument is just as superficial. Just because Hinduism has a myth about an ancient Earth, it doesn't mean Hutton and Lyell copied them. The geologists didn't read Hindu texts; they just read the layers of rock at Siccar Point and Mount Etna. They used empirical observation, not Eastern mysticism.
So I will ask again, now that your history lesson is over: What is the best evidence for irreducible complexity throughout nature?
Reptile eggs already had thousands of pores for embryonic breathing 320 million years before chickens evolved. If ‘chicks dying from lack of air’ means pores can’t evolve, how did the first amniotes ever hatch?
The egg came first. Which would mean that Porous shells were refined by natural selection over deep time.
@Seth_A_Cooney@darwintojesus Retarded comeback. Do better. But I would like to invite to a chat back and forth on why you think irreducible complexity is true throughout nature and not evolution, what is your best argument.
I knew you would say this and you just proved my point. You agreed on biology, then pivoted to "supernatural suspension" and now claim that miracles aren't natural so we need other means to test it.
Which is basically saying "trust the bible until we find a way to prove it." this does not fly when you want to test something. You want me to accept the conclusion until evidence somehow appears that humans (which is biologically impossible) can give birth asexually. This is still special pleading.
If we were able to test this — like you suggested with ‘other means’ — how would you go about it using biology rather than scripture?
To add nuance, it was due to timing. While I agree, Josephine did spend more in raw data collected. The problem was is that Marie Antoinette spent money amid a structural fiscal collapse that was already pushing France towards revolution; while Josephine (even after the divorce in 1809) spent money during mega cash money inflow from conquest and tribute. Like for example, Prussia gave France 120 million francs indemnity in 1806, Austria gave 85 million francs in 1809, and earlier campaigns (like in Italy) gave more tens of millions annually.
The thing that ironically caused it to collapse was the French blocking the British off to Europe and used the continental system to starve Britain. While it worked on paper during the boom of France, the British responded with Orders in Council, which is where the British used the full might of the British navy to blockage around Europe and seized neutral ships trading with France and its allies. This eventually led to the Jefferson's Embargo Act (1807) and eventually the War of 1812 (since America was caught in the middle). Then eventually Napoleons allies quietly backed out of the embargo and started smuggling in goods from Britain. Though this never touched Josephine the way it did Marie Antoinette (only until the very end of 1814 did it touch Josephine).