How come atheists are largely made up of the most intelligent and/or productive?

Even the strictest followers of the Torah and Talmud only act 'immorally' toward their own families.

Not really the point. Harris is saying that all Muslims are bad people. Sometimes he cites their holy book as the reason for their behavior, but if he's talking to someone who has read the books, he instead says that Muslims take the worst parts of their book because they're magically bad to begin with.

>Let me guess Dawkins, Dennet, and Hitchens said mean stuff about (insert Dindu here).
No. I haven't listened to Dennet and Dawkins is a reputable biologist, but Hitchen's overrated. All he seems to go on about is religion, over and over again. I never really get anything new from his talks; he doesn't provide the audience with much substance. Religion is an easy thing to talk about, especially when you're a militant atheist, as he is.

>All he seems to go on about is religion, over and over again.

When he's debating with religious people about religion.

>I never really get anything new from his talks; he doesn't provide the audience with much substance.

The arguments in favor of religion never change.

>Religion is an easy thing to talk about, especially when you're a militant atheist, as he is.

Not when you are trying to talk about it with a religious person. They can make it impossible by simply refusing to answer any questions. The only people who could possibly have an honest discussion about religion would be two atheists.

> Sam Harris believes that Palestinians want to keep their land for religious reasons, and that Israel wants to prevent them for secular reasons.

>Palestinians Dindu Nuffin

> He acknowledges that the most immoral of the holy books is the torah and talmud, but goes on to say that this isn't relevant since Jews are better people than Muslims.

Go look up Nobel Laureates.

> And he decided to misinterpret Ben Afflecks comments on Bill Maher's show. He knows it takes five minutes to explain how bigotry against Muslims is similar to racism, and he knows talk shows only give you five minutes. Rather than have a discussion, he decided to stop talking for five minutes.

They can stop being Muslim.

>Go look up Nobel Laureates.

For what reason?

>They can stop being Muslim.

For what reason?

If Sam Harris said what he says about Muslims about Jews, he would probably be in prison.

>For what reason?

To show that Jews are seriously listed among them while Muslims are way less, going in line with the long running lack of contributions by Muslims to actual civilization.

> If Sam Harris said what he says about Muslims about Jews, he would probably be in prison

Hey there pol.

>When he's debating with religious people about religion.
He can easily choose not to talk to religious people
>The arguments in favor of religion never change.
That wasn't an argument in favor of religion

They can make it impossible by simply refusing to answer any questions.
Not all the time. Some religious people have a deep theological/philosophical foundation backing up their beliefs

>The only people who could possibly have an honest discussion about religion would be two atheists.
Again, some religious people have a deep theological/philosophical foundation backing up their beliefs. Also, you don't need to be religious to argue in favor for religion

>To show that Jews are seriously listed among them while Muslims are way less, going in line with the long running lack of contributions by Muslims to actual civilization.

I don't see the relevance. Jews are Europeans who are better off on average than other Europeans, it's not surprising that they'd get prizes like that. The Muslim world was already being invaded regularly by Europeans by the time the Nobel Prize began, it's not surprising they didn't get so many.

Or you are saying Muslims are worse people than Jews. Like Sam Harris says.

>Hey there pol.

So you agree. It is politically correct to criticize Muslims.

>He can easily choose not to talk to religious people

He chose to talk to religious people.

>That wasn't an argument in favor of religion

Was it trying to be?

>Not all the time. Some religious people have a deep theological/philosophical foundation backing up their beliefs

They just never bring it up when asked.

>Again, some religious people have a deep theological/philosophical foundation backing up their beliefs. Also, you don't need to be religious to argue in favor for religion

No, of course not. But if you are religious, it's because you believe you have access to secret knowledge. How else could you be so certain about the existence of your favorite god, unless you have access to a source of knowledge that virtually all other humans lack?

So only the non-religious can argue honestly in favor of or against any religion. The religious are always arguing disingenuously.

>Was it trying to be?
I just told you that it wasn't an argument in favor of religion. How could it try to be that when it wasn't my intention for it to be just that? I simply said his talks lack substance, as in he provides little thought-provoking information and little new material; his talks are so predictable.

>No, of course not
Why not?

>But if you are religious, it's because you believe you have access to secret knowledge. How else could you be so certain about the existence of your favorite god, unless you have access to a source of knowledge that virtually all other humans lack?
While I'm no religious myself, every time I ask a religious person why he believes in his God exclusively he tells me that he feels a connection to his God or [insert holy book here] told me so.

>So only the non-religious can argue honestly in favor of or against any religion. The religious are always arguing disingenuously.
I agree with you on this, if being religious means having a deep emotional attachment to your holy doctrine and being unable to argue for it effectively without resorting to using emotional arguments. If it just means a person who subscribes to a certain faith, then I disagree. While there are many people who can't back up their religion with a philosophical foundation, there are some who can.

>While there are many people who can't back up their religion with a philosophical foundation, there are some who can.
I should also mention that these sort of people tend to acknowledge that their faith may not be the correct one, but follow it for other reasons (to maintain tradition, to use as a moral guide, etc.)

> I don't see the relevance. Jews are Europeans who are better off on average than other Europeans, it's not surprising that they'd get prizes like that. The Muslim world was already being invaded regularly by Europeans by the time the Nobel Prize began, it's not surprising they didn't get so many.

>Muh White Privilege even though South Asians and East Asians are selected

>Blame Whitey

Muslims have long behind when it came to advancing civilization. Especially during the myhlthical Islamic Golden Age (really a Persian and non-Muslim Golden Age)

> So you agree. It is politically correct to criticize Muslims.

Is that what makes Leftys White Knight it despite all the slavery and conquering?

Despite any disagreements one might have with them, Harris and Hitchens seems like genuinely intelligent people. Extremely articulate in their own way

Reminder that Muslims only outperform Niggers and Abbos in contributing to civilization. There sre none great Nigger civilization (Egypt doesn't count).

>Iran, North Africa, Turkey lead ahead of Nigger and Arabian countries.

Atheism is the true religion of the white race. It was invented by whites and not sandniggers like cucktianity.

>atheists are largely made up of the most intelligent

No

Dawkins on atheism is meh-tier
Dawkins on evolution is top notch

>Atheism is

a lie

>Hitchen's overrated. All he seems to go on about is religion, over and over again.
You just admitted you haven't read any of his work

Truly forces one to become euphoric...

Why did so many nobel laureates migrate to the US?

What can I say? We're obviously enlightened by our own intelligence and we don't need the blessing of any phoney threads.

pseuds.

best place to live.

>All he seems to go on about is religion, over and over again
No he didn't.

>Dawkins
This is literally an okay answer. He's saying philosophers think outside the box. He just doesn't have time to deal with muh brain in a vat, and can't know if the sun will rise tomorrow bullshit which is mental masturbation with no real answer and no practical application. No one gives a shit about brains in a vat because of the Matrix. The only time I've ever been able to use Hume's empiricism is messing with STEMs and their conception of empiricism.

>Krauss
Typical STEM edgelord

>Nye
It's honestly not a bad response, it's fun and playful without being too dismissive. For someone that pretends to be a scientist, if you're skeptical but it's unfalsifiable, it's pretty much not worth your time.

>Tyson
Ignoramus who is unconcerned with the meaning of meaning. At least he's not an edgelord like Krauss, he's just ignorant.

I mean you just quoted the most important physicists and compared them to a TV personality for children. No cherry picking.
Science is what it always has been, natural philosophy. It answers the material abd empirical questions of existence. Philosophy answers the immaterial, mental, or immeasurable questions that still affect the human condition. You need both.

Not a religion, idiot.
Atheism isn't a statement, other than "I don't believe in God", so it can't be a lie.

Harris is retarded. He just dresses up freshmen philosophy with a veneer of science.

What is you actually believe in god though

Then the statement that you're an atheist would be the lie, not atheism in and of itself.

Chrisfags and mudslimes will fight this

HowDareYou.png

An entheogenic experience would kick all of their asses

Karl Marx.

Pretty sure Marx is underrated considering how much the majority of people hate him and strawman his ideas.

A big Ashkenazi population too. Quite a few of those Nobel laureates from Eastern Europe and Germany were Ashkenazi as well.

irrevocably btfo

Nah, fuck capitalism.

The four nihilists of autism

>"I made a contract with my wife, telling her which rooms she can enter, at which times, and when she will prepare herself for sex with me, and forced her to sign it"

t. Albert Einstein, professional smart man

Thus any other line of thought is wrong.

How are those IQ scores, Cletus?

Found Noah's Ark yet?

>Pretending Catholic priests and Muslims aren't fucking boys

>rejecting babble and shitskin mysticism is now an issue

Found the shitskin.

>muh stem

Go teach Gender Studies.

And yet he doesn't cuck for Islam like his critics.

You and all other Christcucks, Mudslimes, and poos have never shown there is a personal god.

How's the Sovient Union and Cuba working out?

Have the churces stopped cucking for women and non-Whites yet?

>t. Cuban

It is wrong to characterize Asian religions in the same way we characterize Abrahamic religions.

He also proved himself to know jackshit about the conflict with his comment about Palestinian Christians when they actually had a shit ton of Militias that committed terrorism, which also proves that Palestinian Nationalism isn't entirely religious as he says it is. Tons of Palestinian Nationalists are Christians or Secular

The Guy feels more of an Orientalism pretending to be "objectivist"

>t. pol

This is the sign of a true intellectual, being able to conduct 14 simultaneous and equally meaningless debates

...

Atheism is more of a philosophy based on empiricism than it is dogma. The rich and educated are often the ones who have the time to delve into philosophy.

Sam Harris is the type of pop culture """intellectual""" like Milo Yiannopoulos who tries to view everything through a certain lens whether that be "muh religious nuts" or "muh political correctness"

They are merely projecting their own views on contemporary society while ignoring history entirely, no person who is interested in history should tolerate this shit

Agree on dawkins and dennett but hitchens is a giant in the intellectual arena. Sam harris is meh.

>he kinda sperged on Peterson

Nah he got the better of him, Peterson couldn't substantiate his 'jungian Christianity' in any meaningful way, he always just goes off on a tangent when confronted by cold hard logic.

If they make youtube videos and the average internet user can understand them or make sense of their arguments without further study then they're not an much of an intellectual or philosopher.

just finished listening to Sam Harris's book that the anecdote of the dream about Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche came from. (You can listen to the book for free if you sign up for a free month trial of Audible, Amazon's audio book app.)
he recounted the dream to contrast with someone's NDE, which this person took as proof of heaven, etc. whereas, despite the apparent compelling evidence of his dream, he saw that it couldn't be taken as objective evidence of anything, which is fair enough.

The reason I chose to post was to point out that Sam Harris did receive the literal pointing out instruction in person from Tulku Urgyen, which he sees as the most valuable teaching he has ever received from anyone. I didn't know too much about Harris and was surprised by his accounts of his practice and experiences in the book. Briefly, he has been interested in meditation and spiritual experience since his youth. He studied vipassana in the Burmese tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, doing a number of retreats, with a year or so in retreat in total. He then practiced in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Ramana Maharshi for a while before travelling to Kathmandu with his Advaita group and meeting Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche.

He says of Tulku Urgyen, "he could point out the nature of mind with the precision and matter-of-factness of teaching a person how to thread a needle and could get an ordinary meditator like me to recognise that consciousness is intrinsically free of self. There might be some initial struggle and uncertainty, depending on the student, but once the truth of nonduality had been glimpsed, it became obvious that it was always available and there was never any doubt about how to see it again. I came to Tulku Urgyen yearning for the experience of self transcendence and in a few minutes he showed me that I had no self to transcend. [...] After a few minutes Tulku Urgyen simply handed me the ability to cut through the illusion of the self directly, even in ordinary states of consciousness. This instruction was, without question, the most important thing I have ever been explicitly taught by another human being."

I think this meeting with Tulku Urgyen (he also visited several times in the last five years Tulku Urgyen was alive) happened before the DKR dream, just to put it in a bit of context.

I would recommend the book in that he speaks quite clearly about Dzogchen and, given his past experience with the very gradual method of Vipassana and the very sudden method of Advaita Vedanta, addresses the kind of issues that come up here regularly. For example, he gives good reasons why approaching Dzogchen after years of other practice like shamata might be a good idea even if they are unnecessary and essentially point the student in the wrong direction.

>really a Persian
>non muslim
Those Persian intellectuals were Muslim. You're conflating ethnicity with religion

Stay mad Cletus.

>Pretending Red States aren't more dysfunctional than Blue States when controlling for race

White bastard births and welfare queens are in Red States.

The rich are more intelligent than the less rich. Hence the lack of Niggers as billionaires.

Found the SJW.

>pretending Persians aren't Indo-European
>pretending Jews and Eastern Christian s didn't do anything

OH shit I forgot about Marx

>Hitchens
Dude let's invade iraq cause religion is bad

Pretty sure that wasn't his point, he was just heavily anti-saddam. It's just that it became quickly obvious the intervention was badly managed and the warhawks drummed up that nuclear WMD meme to rally the plebs, when in reality they could have argued it was already in the works since 1998.

He'll be having the last laugh anyway since iraq actually has a parliamentary system now and the state sanctioned masskillings are a thing of the past. Even ISIS in northern iraq is pretty much dead now that Mosul has been essentially recaptured.

Soon people will be able to ask themselves, is it better to be an iraqi in 1998 or in 2018 and they will be hard pressed to pick the former just because muh ebil amricans.

But WE WUZ KANGZ.