To me, the video sorta oversells the difficulty in identifying / escaping from "ridiculous claims", at least in comparison to my personal experiences.

I grew up in a very religious (Christian, Methodist) family / city / state / country. I was questioning the indoctrination at an early age (younger than 10), and rejecting it due to never receiving satisfactory answers to those questions by ~12. Actually, one of the most significant pushes for me was the ultimate reward/punishment thing. Zero consistency and open contradictions between different religions / sects / sources, etc. In symbolic logic, contradictions mean that one of your premises is wrong. Reconsider what you "know" and try again.

With regards to atheism vs (a)gnosticism, technically I'm an agnostic because I don't know with absolute certainty that there is no god / gods out there. However, in practice, I easily and comfortably would rather self-identify as an atheist. Why, when I don't know for certain? Because I also don't know that there isn't an Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Loch Ness Monster, or Leprechauns, yet I don't feel compelled to tell people that I'm "agnostic" about those things. No. They are pretty clearly human-invented bullshit, with readily apparent human motivations behind their invention. Sounds like religion to me.

That's basically Russel's teapot.

I agree with every point made here... and 5, maybe 10 years ago, I would happily engage in refuting any argument for god.

But it feels like society has gone backward since then.

OF COURSE, there's no god. There's no Santa, there's no tooth fairy and there's no Zeus. Thor was in an awesome movie, but so was fucking Batman (to be clear, I'm talking about the Dark Knight, not that DCEU shite). Doesn't make either of them real.

We've all made all the same logical coherent arguments for atheism, but at this stage it's so blindingly obvious, it's ... boring.

Is there a possibility of god? Uh, fine, I guess... but it's about as likely as me being the reincarnation of Elvis.

At this stage, I no longer have the energy or the motivation to debate people who still believe. Wanna believe in god? Eh, knock yourself out, as long as you don't try to push your fairytales onto my life or the lives of others, I really don't care anymore....

@harlequinn

Yeeeaaaaaah...

Judging by the incoherent rambling of that last post, it looks like I struck a nerve. I mean, come on man. You claim you can't remember everything you read, but in this case you somehow didn't remember that the Christian god is omnipotent--a fundamental doctrine of every major denomination of Christianity in existence today? That's seriously your defense?

Quit your bullshit. You tried to shut down @newtboy and got yourself shut down instead. I'm sure that's frustrating and contributed to the nonsensical nature of that last post, but still....

To answer in all seriousness your subsequent questions:

1) Yes, atheism has brought me immense peace. It felt great to let go of religion--Christianity specifically--especially all the guilt-tripping and fire-and-brimstone bullshit that went along with it. As a side bonus, I felt relieved that I was no longer financially subsidizing a bunch of pedophiles (I left long before the major scandals broke in mainstream media).

2) No, I'm not angry but I am certainly annoyed at all the numb nuts who keep blowing themselves up, discriminating against the LGBT community, and trying to tell women what they can and can't do with their bodies using only their Bronze Age (or older in the case of religions like Hinduism and Buddhism) superstitious beliefs as the rationale for their behavior.

3) No, I am not vegan. Just had fried chicken for dinner tonight.

4) Yes, I had to Google the exact passages but I knew the bible said somewhere that god was omnipotent because, as a former Christian, I'd read through it several times before. Sorry to hear you are so "forgetful" about the holy text that forms the backbone of your religion. Actually, I know you're not forgetful; the point the guy in the video is making is that most Christians choose not to look at the parts of the bible they don't like or even worse make ridiculous convoluted arguments to try to explain them away (as you tried to do here in explaining away god's omnipotence/omniscience).

Moving on, the "tenability" of Christianity has nothing to do with "Tradition." The whole thing is a house of cards. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether you want to interpret any holy text in the world literally or through some collective interpretation by an ostensibly educated priest-class. What makes all religion untenable is the fact that it is 100% made up bullshit. There is as much evidence for the existence of a Christian god as there is for Zeus, Thor, Santa Claus, or the tooth fairy (i.e. none).

Finally, no, I don't need to come up with a system to replace religion. It already exists and it is called "using reason and compassion." The idea itself that we need some system to control us or protect us from ourselves is archaic and frankly anachronistic in this day and age.

Now, I mean this in all seriousness--I wish you the best. I was you once, a long time ago, trying to stave off the cognitive dissonance of being a rationale human being yet also believing in a religion. I'd argue with atheists just like you're trying to do now. But the thing is... they made good arguments. The stuff they pointed out stuck with me. At first I'd shrug it off, but the facts nagged at me and nagged at me until I finally set out to prove those pesky atheists wrong--only to find out through research that everything they were saying was 100% correct.

Like I said in the previous post, you'll either face the facts or turn away and hide from them. I can't tell you if you'd be happier or not without religion--no one can. What I can tell you is that at the very least you would no longer be contributing to a collective hive-mind that has very real and very negative effects on the world we live in, regardless of whatever benefits the religion may bring to you personally. Either way, I sincerely wish you peace.

Your video, James Catches the Tooth Fairy (on Camera), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

*ban
Tooth Fairy Workshop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzKNiKLmm5g

Not a dilemma at all actually. What we will tell them, whether it be with the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, or Jesus Christ, is that some other parents believe some things that we don't, and they teach those things to their children.

We are fortunate to know some people who were raised with parents who were truthians and hearing how they handled all those things makes it clear not only that it is possible but how it's possible to raise a child in an environment of ~total honesty.

(Funnily [to me] is that one such guy I know told me how his parent told him, "We will never lie to you so you can always know that what we tell you is the truth. That's how you know Jesus Christ is really your lord and savior." LMFAHS. If you're wondering, yes, he's a die hard Christian.)

Why do we lie to kids? That child is going to resent that later when she learns that there is no tooth fairy.

Boy, will she be surprised to find out Mom is a snitch for the tooth fairy and totally tipped off that cheapskate dentophile. I hope for mom's sake she's never heard the saying 'snitches get stiches'.

On another note, are her teeth so bad that she really thought a folded piece of paper was an indistinguishable substitute? I think she should have tried a rock.

That just means the Tooth Fairy will have to bury two bodies now.

That bird is in trouble now, the Tooth Fairy doesn't like anybody cutting in on her action.

100% agree. Too much pussy footing around ( not accusing Tyson here just in general )
The bullshit fairy tales have got to go
and guess what ? There's no Father Christmas or tooth fairy either.
There is no equivalency in the different sides. One is just plain lies and bullshit. The other is objective truth.
I have never heard a religious person gently explain they a religious and like to tolerate science, they just start screaming 'Praise Jeebus'
For fucks sake, even religious morons use a cell phone, hospital, electricity, cars etc etc So Fucking Dumb

@RedSky

Crossing your fingers and waiting for the tooth fairy to fix everything is not a valid response to global crises. That is what passivity amounts to whether your eventual, hoped for remedy is shiny's simple-minded faith or failed economic models that got us into this mess in the first place, or unforeseeable scientific advances that may never come.

You've been using the most preposterously optimistic projections available, okay, let's assume they're correct and we level off at somewhere around nine to eleven billion. You want all of these people to live worthwhile, prosperous lives; well that's at least five times as many high energy consuming, 21st century humans as we've ever actually been able to support.

This coming at the end of an economic and technological bubble of readily available, dense energy supply for which we have no replacement; relative efficiency gains in spending that energy that can never be replicated (because efficiency doesn't go above 100%); casual environmental damage that cannot continue; and diminishing returns in every scientific field, where advancement is always becoming more difficult and more expensive.

This isn't a pessimistic view. Humanity has a bright future, all we have to do to secure it is stop creating more and more people out of nothing for no reason. Barring extra-terrestrial threats like meteorites, solar flares and relativistic missiles launched by hostile alien species; we have the knowledge we need to build a civilisation capable of enduring for millions of years, or burn out in a couple of hundred.

I kind of think its healthy to lie to them so long as its blatantly untrue. Stuff like Santa and the tooth fairy helps to teach them how to think critically, They are after all going to be lied to about much bigger and more dangerous things for the rest of their life.

It's only bad if you keep up the lie/unsubstantiated assumption past the point where they start to question it.

Learning for myself that the mythical characters from my childhood were fabrications made it all the easier for me to deal with the later revelation that almost everything else I was ever taught was a lie also.

Plus, the hilarious crap you can get children to believe is half the pleasure of having them. As a practicing Discordian/Chaos "git" wizard I'm downright envious sometimes of how easily they can slip into the "magical state of mind".

It takes me serious effort and repetition to create a convincing delusional experience, these little gits can do it without even trying!

He rebuild his house just for the tooth fairy???