64Digits

Im an Atheist.... + Good "Tribal" pic

Posted by Adventus on April 10, 2007, 11:35 p.m.

Rant: the passage below is purely my opinion, feel free to disagree in the comments….

Yep you heard right, im one of those godless people bent on destroying the human race.

All jokes aside, I really cant understand what the big deal/social taboo is about Atheism. From my experience, Its very rare you come across someone who will openly call themselves an atheist, even in fairly unreligious countries like Australia. Its not like I wish harm upon anybody, or harbour hatred of other religious beliefs…. actually all i really hold true is the thought that, even if there is some form of supernatural force, what's the chances we know exactly who they are? Still i do not condemn the ideals, virtues and holy relics upheld by specific religions, i just treat them from a scholarly perspective…. to me, they are artifacts designed to teach from what was learnt in the past, not words from the gods themselves.

One effect the declining numbers of "church going" people in western countries have caused, is that the extreme faithfuls now have greater power over their particular sect. This has lead to greater animosity between paricular religions, and increased extreme acts of faith.

I remember in high school a teacher once telling me you've got to really smart and sure of yourself to be an atheist…. I replied "Probably less sure of yourself than to explicitly follow a single religion". What makes one religion more probable than another? Especially since they are generally based on supernatural occurrances and beings, so we cannot use past "natural" experiences as a yard stick.

Life:

Just got off uni (which is really cool, by the way) for 2 weeks break, but i've still got 2 assignments which sucks, especially since one is a group assignment AKA one person (me) ends up doing all the work. Just discovered that my Aunty converted to Mormon-ism which finally tipped me over the edge and made me write the rant.

GameMaker:

Done a little work on Tribal, mainly makes sprites and backgrounds so i can develope a consistent artistic style. Just discovered why i never made high res games in the past…. animation. Making the textures is fairly easy but animating it is a real bitch…. so ive developed a simple skeleton based system (single object though) for the humans.

Also made it so you can change the lighting quality on the fly…. which is having a wierd build up of video memory usage which i cant quite pin down (maybe another bug to add to the tally). Implemented a super secret smoothing techniques and a blur to the lighting so scaled surfaces dont look as bad. The super secret part refers to drawing them at 0.5,0.5 pixels instead of 0,0 because if you have linear interpolation on it will do a hardware accelerated 2x2 box blur…. neat.

Also moved back to GM6…. I know yoyo blogs are banned but i gotta say GM7 is really shitting me.

Heres a few good quality picture of tribal with new, more consistent sprites and showing what difference changing the light quality has:

Cheers,

Comments

OL 17 years, 7 months ago

Totally agree Jay, and I just made my final post on this matter at Omicron1's blog if you are interested in reading.

http://64digits.com/users/index.php?userid=omicron1&cmd=comments&id=16091&comment_cmd=leave_comment&comment_id=

Anyway, I am going to retire from this debate as it is worthless trying to.

Juju 17 years, 7 months ago

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but in the Roman books of that age.

That doesn't alter the fact that it is one man's viewpoint. He could be entirely neutral or totally biased, but we don't know.

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They conquered most of Spain and all of the Byzantine Empire, and committed at least as many atrocities as the other side.

But they didn't do it in the name of their god. The Muslim method of holy war, called Jihad, is that they attempt to retake lost cities and holy sites, not conquer new ones. You can of course argue that Jerusalem should have been owned by Christian lords and we were in theory retaking our lost lands, but I'm sure if you read the Torah it says the same thing for the Israelites and the Qu'ran states that Temple Mount is a sacred site for Islam also. So who's right? In your opinion, it is a Christian city, but in reality no one owns it entirely.

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I see I misstated something again. What I should have said was this: "A society without Christianity is a society doomed to evil."

Wrong. That should be "A society without Christianity is a society doomed to evil that is determined by Christian doctrine." I think that it is weird that they eat frogs in France and they wouldn't like the thought of coating cod in batter and eating it with fried potato, but this doesn't mean that either culture is wrong, just that they think differently.

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A life is created the instant the sperm fertilizes the egg.

How do you know that? It's not mentioned in the Bible. Are you using free will to determine or are you swallowing what someone told you in church without truly understanding their logic and thinking about the consequences?

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The true religion, Christianity, is against homosexuality.

You have not stated what branch of Christianity you folllow, what doctrine you abide by or even if you are a Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox Christian. I know many, many Christians who are gay. I know many, many Christians who are friends with lesbians. These people live their life with dignity and they love their fellow man. You are unjustly prejudiced against homosexuals. Selective reading is not a justification of your view.

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If homosexuality is an attribute as you claim, rather than a conscious decision, how on earth do you explain that?

Free will. Your god, in his infinite wisdom, gave me free will. He gave you free will. He gave every living man, woman and child free will. I didn't like pizza until I was 14, but I do now, does this mean I have dishonoured all tha tis holy? No, I'd say that god would like people to change their mind instead of becoming mindless slaves. In relation to the argument on homosexuality and the church, just because an attribute is forever changeable does not mean that it shouldn't be ignored by the church. That is, if I may say so, fucking stupid. My mood swings as a pubescent teenager are, in your mind, a sin against your god for I am changing my mind. But you are right, you don't hate gay people. You are just utterly prejudiced against them, something that is worse than well-founded hatred.

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I say to you, no one on earth lives a good life.

That's a surprisingly nihilistic view for a Christian, someone who should believe in salvation.

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There is NO ONE on Earth who deserves heaven - not me, not you, not the best, most morally upright person alive. It's not about what we deserve, but about what He gives us.

The logic, therefore, is that religion is pointless adn we are destined for some sort of magic hat affair where I am randomly chosen to go into heaven or not. That is not only offensive to pretty much every religion with a belief in assension but also undermines morality itself.

The cruel irony is that religion tends to split the world in terms of good and evil despite the original purpose to unify all peoples. So long as humans have free will, we will argue and as such religion must only be a guideline to correct behaviour. It is Saint Thomas Aquinas, a man of your religion and held the highest regard, who said that decisions must be made through two passages - One, by instruction of religious text and two, by debate and judgement. Using the Bible or Qu'ran or Torah as the be-all and end-all of decision making is wrong and all major religions accept and even promote this fact. It is intolerant views that divide the world and through this division comes conflict. Jesus was a pacifist, like it or not, and your refusal to even acknowledge the existence of other beliefs, religious or moral, is unforgiveable.

You disgust me.