New to the forum: introduction, catholic story, my stand on religion and site suggestions!

silentseba
silentseba's picture
Posts: 131
Joined: 2007-07-19
User is offlineOffline
New to the forum: introduction, catholic story, my stand on religion and site suggestions!

My introduction

Someone suggested that I should introduce myself on this forum. I thought it was a good ide, as well as introducing a couple of things I wanted to talk about.

 Who am i? I was born half athiest, half catholic. (parents) Went to catholic school for elementary and high school. I was baptized when I was 12, and it was really odd. I did it because it was required in order to be accepted on my high school (public schools suck where I live... so it was worth lying to get the education I deserved). I was always the kid who stayed at the bench when the everybody went up to eat bread. Everybody looked at me weird and I always had to explain my reasons without saying that I didn't believe in god. At that time I considered myself agnostic. I went to a couple christian summer camps and there too I was the odd kid. What was weird was that even though I didn't believe in god, I was one of the most popular kids there. Anyways, now I am in college and I consider myself an athiest.

 Well, that was my somewhat boring introduction, so I will present you now with a story from my catholic experience. My school had us go to spiritual retirements every year. Here we would spend a day doing catholic activities like going to mass, speak about god, make us cry, eat crappy food, get scolded as soon as we started having fun, etc etc. My last year in high school we had one of these spiritual things. During the introductory mass, one of my friends had an epileptic attack during one of the readings. (he had attacks near me 2 times prior to this) Everybody got shocked by this and tried to help him out. Meanwhile the priest interrupted us and said that this was normal and an act of god. Then he proceeded to continue with the service, tottaly ignoring what was going on. I think this is what hit my atheist switch, and convinced me that religion was all bullshit... (even at a moral level.. ignoring the invisible friend argument ;D)


 Opinion on religion

 So here is my stand on religion, this is a copy paste from another forum I post in (which is not related to religion in any way or form):

You can't prove wrong the unknown. You can't prove it right either. But then, how am I supposed to know what to believe in? You could either blindly listen to what other people say (this goes for both religion and science), or try to figure it out for yourself. I chose being an atheist because I like living in a world guided by science. I know that a lot of what I know now will not be the truth in the future, but I have to live with that. I have to use whatever science gives me in order to make myself useful in this life and continue to understand this world. I chose science because it corrects itself way more than religion. The bible still says the earth is flat! How am I supposed to use this in order to make decisions, when the information on the bible is wrong?

The truth is that you should guide your life depending on what your goals are. (some people call this "The dream&quotEye-wink If you goal is to contribute to science and expand the knowledge and potential of humanity, then believe in science. If your goal is to refuse additional knowledge because you believe you already know everything there is to know... then so be it. But stay away from fucking science! Stop trying to turn science into a religion because it is not! Stop trying to change education to fit your religion! Education is based on science and science relies on education! If you want to teach your own children that the way to live is to refuse knowledge, do it in your freaking church!


Website Suggestions

By the way, I am a website designer and I have a couple of problems with your site. If you want my input, then I will gladly help out. For now I will only suggest what brought me to these forums. My suggestion is that you guys stream through ustream as well as stickam. This is what Leo Laported does (The Tech Guy) and it seems to work pretty nice for him. He also has a site that has stickam and ustream on the same page so people could watch both at the same time. How is this going to benefit you? Stickam seems to lag quite often on your stream. If you add ustream, people could switch to this stream when stickam is lagging. (and viceversa) Also another cool thing you could do with this is to have two different camera angles, which could be very useful for when you have two people talking. Both streams should have the same audio so you don't miss anything if one starts to lagg out.

 

PS: Post was too long, so I divided it in different sections. Also, english is not my first language. (hope I don't have too many grammar errors) 

 


silentseba
silentseba's picture
Posts: 131
Joined: 2007-07-19
User is offlineOffline
I could have called this:

I could have called this: "An all in one post" Cool


Susan
Susan's picture
Posts: 3561
Joined: 2006-02-12
User is offlineOffline
silentseba wrote: During

silentseba wrote:

During the introductory mass, one of my friends had an epileptic attack during one of the readings. (he had attacks near me 2 times prior to this) Everybody got shocked by this and tried to help him out. Meanwhile the priest interrupted us and said that this was normal and an act of god. Then he proceeded to continue with the service, tottaly ignoring what was going on.

An official welcome, silentseba!

You have an interesting background.  If one parent is/was catholic and one is/was atheist, how was religious discussion handled at home?  I would also guess that the grandparents on the catholic side might have been fervent believers?

I'm pretty horrified at your story about your friend's seizure and the priest's lack of concern.  Too bad someone didn't pipe up and ask the priest what his god thought was being accomplished by this person having epilepsy and why his god brought on a seizure during his service.  (Maybe his god thought the homily was boring and needed something to spice things up?)

Anyway, glad you're here and we look forward to your contributions to the discussions!

 

Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server.


silentseba
silentseba's picture
Posts: 131
Joined: 2007-07-19
User is offlineOffline
Ahh my theist grandparents.

Ahh my theist grandparents. They had some fked up religion derivated from the catholic church. My parents were so hardcore theist that they had some sort of service in their house. I still don't know what was the purpose of those religious services... but they usually had 30 people. At least I wasn't forced to participate on that crap. (probably because of my atheist parent). My atheist parent once told me that all they did was idolizing saints... but I don't know if that was true.

 At home there was almost no talk about religion. Although I don't remember much of when my parents were together (they divorced). I do remember going to church with my catholic parent a couple of times. But they did put me on a catholic school where I was forced to pray every morning.

 


Susan
Susan's picture
Posts: 3561
Joined: 2006-02-12
User is offlineOffline
silentseba wrote: My

silentseba wrote:

My atheist parent once told me that all they did was idolizing saints... but I don't know if that was true.

The catholics put great importance on those completely impossible saint stories. 

It's always baffled me how xians are not supposed to have "other gods" but they're out there praying to all the saints and their dead relatives all the time!  Sure seems like they're being deified with all that prayer.

 

Atheist Books, purchases on Amazon support the Rational Response Squad server.