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Our founding fathers WANTED GOD.....IN our government and IN our society......so if you are an atheist or in ANY way.....offended.....MOVE OUT or ACCEPT those who ARE believers in GOD, prayer and Christianity!
Prayer was NEVER REQUIRED, but kids were allowed to pray or have Bibles in school. If I was caught with a Bible in a public school, I'd have been suspended, if not expelled. If I were to talk to other kids about God, I'd probably be expelled from school.
These are the words of someone who doesn't have a clue.
These are the words of someone who doesn't have a clue.
At my HS we could take classes in the following faiths:
Judaism
Islam
New Testament
Buddhism
Hinduism
Taoism
Confucianism
There is a class called "reading the bible as literature"
another called "god and politics in contemporary America"
Existentialism
and others!
Granted, that's at a prep school with an endowment that is worth about $750,000,000 (down from a pre-recession high of $1 billion), but still, religion was/is taught at a school that was/is 100% secular.
OP-you really think all of these problems are the result of removing school prayer? You really think saying our praises to 'God' will lower teenage pregnancy, drop-out rates, increasing violence, etc? Is that all it takes?
I'm grateful that the community colleges offers remedial coursework to give those who are not college-ready a second chance, such as re-entry students. My beef is WHY does the community colleges have to remediate students who are fresh out of high school? Why are our high schoolers not ready for college-level math and English? Why do they need assistance with reading comprehension. For all of the money we are throwing in the public schools, we should NOT be having these dismal results.
The simplest answer is too many people who lack college-level ability are attempting to take college-level classes.
Quote:
Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.
Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.
These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.
In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college--enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104. Extra - WSJ.com
Atheism is a religion as it is the belief system that God does not exist. Just because you don't engage in "rituals" does not make atheism any less of a religion.
Are you for real with this? The following may be a bit complicated, read carefully....
Quote:
Atheism, by definition, is the absence of theism. If you cannot say "I believe in a Deity/God/Supreme Being" then you are an atheist. If you are not a theist, then you are an atheist.
As mentioned in the Introduction page, there is a subtle but important difference between "believing there is no God", and "not believing there is a God". The first is a belief, the second is a lack of that belief. I don't know any atheists who "believe" God (take your pick, there are plenty) does not exist. All the atheists I know simply do not believe God does exist. There is a big difference between positively believing that a thing does not exist, and simply lacking belief in it's existence. In many cases, atheists will say "That God does not exist", not because they choose to do so, but because, from the description of the God, it cannot exist due to contradictory attributes. In the same way that a square circle cannot (and therefore does not) exist, a God defined as (for example) all-knowing, yet cannot see into the future, cannot and does not exist because the definition is self-contradictory. If you describe your God with self-contradicting attributes which make it logically impossible, then I may safely say that such a thing does not exist as described. This is not faith - this is reason.
Is atheism a religion? (http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/atheismreligion.html - broken link)
Location: The Chatterdome in La La Land, CaliFUNia
39,031 posts, read 23,020,628 times
Reputation: 36027
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pug Life
No, it's not.
Stop trying to convince yourself that.
It's not a religion to not believe in MORONIC religions.
I don't believe in God because there's nothing that has ever proven a "god" theory to be correct. That's not a religion, that's called being sane and logical. I don't believe in fairy tales and imaginary friends.
No one has been able to disprove the existence of God either. You can deny it until you are blue in the face but atheism is a religious belief in the non-existence of a deity.
No one has been able to disprove the existence of God either. You can deny it until you are blue in the face but atheism is a religious belief in the non-existence of a deity.
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