Atheist Disc Golfers

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Comment by xians421 on May 16, 2010 at 4:57pm

Member #13 which happens to be my lucky number. Except that I'm not superstitious.

Comment by eric beich on November 18, 2009 at 1:00pm

anyone else find it amusing how people will 'thank' a god for good things but never blame god for bad stuff?

Comment by Jayson Jobe on October 11, 2009 at 1:00am

long time none believer

Comment by Ben Calhoun on October 6, 2009 at 3:04pm

http://www.discgolfersr.us/group/alliedatheistallianceaaa

Comment by eric beich on October 6, 2009 at 3:00pm

after all.. it's about DISC GOLF.... not RELIGION!!!!!!!

Comment by eric beich on October 6, 2009 at 3:00pm

that and I am not going to go out of my way to try and invite a bazillion people,haha.

Comment by eric beich on October 6, 2009 at 2:59pm

right on.
I think there are a lot of people who question what they have been spoon fed since childbirth ..AKA BRAINWASHED, but are afraid to take a stand or voice their opinions.
which in itself tells us something about the fear tactics of organized religion.

Comment by Sean Perkins on October 6, 2009 at 12:16am

Not many of us for members eh? I will not be judged in my after life, only during disc golf!

Comment by eric beich on September 29, 2009 at 10:57am

A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

Comment by eric beich on May 18, 2009 at 5:44pm

yes, but religion is somewhat taught to us. it's ingrained in many of us at an early age when we really don't know what to believe, except in things like Santa Claus.
I could take a child and raise them alone in the desert and tell him the restroom was called the banana-patch and them send him to public school and the first time he raised his hand and asked the teacher if he could go to the banana-patch he would be laughed at by others just because of an upbringing.
I think we need to teach children as well as adults to question things instead of just believing in them and it's very hard to do with religion because of the guilt and fear associated with it.
sad really.

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