So the story goes, — Hanover

Do you accept all of 'the story' as true? Did moses spend 10 years in a pit, as the captive of Jethro, before he marred Jethro's daughter Zipporah? Did an angel of god???? Come to kill moses for not cutting off part of his childs penis, and Zipporah, saved him by doing the deed there and then with a sharp stone?
In the words of the Torah:

Now he was on the way, in an inn, that the L‑rd met him and sought to put him to death. So, Zipporah took a sharp stone and severed her son's foreskin and cast it to his feet

I assume you accept critical assessment, as to the likelyhood of such events and further critical assessment of the rationale, behind such events when it comes to how such should be interpreted by uniformed Rabbi's regarding how you should live your life and inform your children accordingly?
DO such events and Rabbinical translation of them, inform you how to live your life? Did you circumcise your male children for fear that an angel of god would come down and kill you if you didn't?

I assume you don't consider those who are not guided by the Torah and the Talmud on how they should live their lives, religiously damned and amoral. As an atheist we can both exist on this planet and hold such differing views, BUT, it will never ever be left like that. Many in the next generation of humans will ask anew! 'You believe what? why? How do you know that's true? what is your evidence? etc, etc.

Can you put a percentage on how much of the content of the Torah and Talmud is complete nonsense?
I assume you will not be willing to? I think it's reasonable for atheists to keep asking you what your personal version of theism compels you to believe is true, and why you believe it's true, in the face of such poor evidence. If you don't answer or give poor answers then I think the assumption will continue to be that your primal fear controls your need for some supernatural protector/arbiter.

I am not assuming that the content of the torah and talmud guides your life via rabbinical interpretation but to whatever extent it does defies my own sense of rationality?

How do you know which religious scripture it REALLY wants you to follow. How do you know it's not the Islamic ones or @unenlightened's buddhism or some other theosophist flavour?

why would I ever select the Bible, with all its absurdity, contradiction, and violence as a fictional centerpiece of wisdom? I didn't. — Hanover

Are the traditional Judaic scriptures any more reliable than the bible, as a guide to how a human should live their life?, in accordance with:

the point of religion which rather is about how to live — unenlightened

When a thread suggesting that arguments about the existence or nonexistence of gods entirely misses the point of religion which rather is about how to live — unenlightened

Dictates/commands about how to live, delivered via uniformed humans in representation of their chosen organised 'faithdom,' is rejected by many as pernicious, not only atheists. If you post 'unenlightened,' provocative sentences such as:

How atheist dogma created religious fundamentalism. — unenlightened

Don't feign surprise and annoyance when you got exactly the responses you incited.

There is absolutely no disrespect in asking such questions. I believe that Jesus inhabited a human body, so yes, He experienced everything we experience. — Watchmaker

:up:

I believe God wants me to probe as far as my intellect has the capacity for. — Watchmaker

Good, keep asking critical questions without fear then sir. I hope your god has the decency to answer you and does not decide to burn you in hell for eternity for your impertinence!

Do you think your god will punish you for asking any critical questions of it?

I like even the more base considerations. Not for any chance at mockery, but from a purely human curiosity. For example, Did Jesus fart, urinate, defecate, produce sperm, have sex, shed skin cells, get a hair cut? produce nasal mucus that made him pick his nose etc.
Did he get uncomfortable itches in his genitalia?
Did he have any benign lumps or bumps on his body?
Did he ever trip and fall and hurt himself by accident?
Did he cry, laugh, experience hate, envy?
He must have had all these experiences and a lot more or else he did not experience life as a mortal man.

If he did produce every bodily excretion that a human male does, then would these also be gods and the holy spirits productions.
Is this for example, where the American exclamation 'holy shit' comes from?
We do have dinosaur poo, still preserved! whaddyafink? Could there still be some fossilised Jesus poo in existence?

Is it unreasonable or disrespectful or blasphemous to ask such questions of followers and believers who state that Jesus was a living god.

You and I can agree that there is something called a car. However, my concept of a car (a VW Beetle) and your concept of a car (an Aston Martin) may differ greatly. — Rocco Rosano

No, they are both cars and we can agree that a bike is not a car, although you can create a hybrid between the two. Variations in the attributes of gods, do not, in anyway, challenge the atheist claim that there is no evidence that ANY god exists.

Thus, in atheism, there is no common ground for a dogma on what it is that they disagree (because it doesn't exist). — Rocco Rosano

However, to hold the opinion that something does not exist, one must understand what it is that does not exist. — Rocco Rosano

A person can try as they may to conceive or perceive the notion of nothing, but always fail in the attempt.
This does not prevent an individual rejecting the proposal, that 'nothing' is or has ever been an existent state.

The 'common' ground between atheists IS sound in their insistence that there is insufficient, or no compelling evidence that ANY god exists. You are merely choosing to accept that some of the arguments put forward in presuppositional apologetics have some validity, based on the rules of propositional logic, when propositional logic itself, is burdened by such as paradox, logical infinities and the concept/context of nothing. 'Nothing' is not a valid state, under any known condition of the universe. BUT zero still exists as the absence of a contextual quantity, in that there are zero penquins, living in my ear.
God proposed as having omni attributes is far more problematic, when it comes to logic, than any proposal that presuppositional christian or moslem apologists can present to atheists imo.

The specific argument for the existence of the Supreme Being, First Cause, or Creator (God) (in this case the Kalam Cosmological Argument) and (∆) "Atheist Dogma" (something not clearly defined) is confusing at best.
↪universeness
(COMMENT) — Rocco Rosano

I am trying to understand your style of post. Is your quote above, a request for me to comment on your statement above? or are you just indicating a reference to the comments I have already made previously, regarding the Kalam?

The same law may not apply to Divinity. — Watchmaker

I don't understand that argument if the proposal is that this divinity BECAME mortal man and the trinity remained FULLY connected so that what one experiences in its totality, all 3 experienced.
Jesus and the other 2 either became fully mortal or it did not.

This is just another example of how impossible notions such as omnipotent are.
If god is omnipotent then it must be able to die properly, in other words not be eternal any more,
If god cannot not exist, then it is not omnipotent. Can god make a mistake and be penitent?
Again, if it cannot, then there are some things that god is just not capable of doing, so it is therefore NOT omnipotent.

How could they not be natural? If beaver's damns and bird's nests are natural, then guns and highways are too. — Tom Storm

Well, that's an interesting pair of examples to choose and compare. I think emulating the actions of a beaver by building something like the hoover dam can be paralleled as a 'natural' act by humans or the creation of a highway as many animals can 'clear a path,' to move more easily from place to place. Ants will clear obstructions in their path, on occasion, for example. No other creature on Earth, past or present has ever produced anything like a gun however. So I see no parallel in 'nature.'
I accept that some other species make use of a projectile action (an aquatic that spits a water jet at an insect on an overhanging tree branch, to knock it into the water, for example) but I don't think this parallels the invention of the gun or the atom bomb.
Are you content to accept that other species use of projectile actions and natures ability to equal or surpass the destructive power of an atom bomb, are sufficient parallels, for the human inventions of guns and atom bombs to be declared natural?
If so, do you consider AI natural? considering the A stands for artificial?

I always remember that whether an argument is debunked depends a lot on whether you are susceptible to or agree with the arguments made. — Tom Storm

One persons truth is another persons lie, is a fair definition of subjective truth, but I think if your epistemology is the scientific method or scientific empiricism, then I think increasing your credence level to a level of an (to you) acceptable truth, based on demonstration of a process with observable predicted outcomes, is valid. If this is your foundation then posits like the Kalam and 'presuppositional apologetics,' such as 'talking about god, presupposes one exists,' can be dismissed as highly unlikely to be true which is what I would accept as 'debunked.' Based on a definition such as:
'to expose or excoriate (a claim, assertion, sentiment, etc.) as being pretentious, false, or exaggerated'

Indeed - some forget that arsenic, heroin and melanomas are perfectly natural. — Tom Storm

Yeah, but does that make guns, atom bombs, gods and murder, natural, merely because they are products of the human mind and also, would it follow that the word unnatural has no existent.
Would it be unnatural for example, for a human to try to live life as if they were an ant or a fish or a god?

I tend to think that if we can do it or make it, it's natural... — Tom Storm

Careful Tom! Think of what folks could throw into that statement and by doing so, claim justification in declaring any lie or evil act, 'natural.'
The concept of natural can be so strongly related to 'moral' by nefarious individuals.

Some would say God is a necessary presupposition to explain why there's something rather than nothing, why there's intelligibility, morality and goodness. Christinas and Muslims often argue this way. Kant and CS Lewis did. — Tom Storm

This is just the basis for the Kalam Cosmological argument, yes? Which has been fairly convincingly debunked, yes?

But not the temporary death of god?
— universeness

Whatever. :cool: — Tom Storm

Do you think that it does not matter, either way? If so, why?
Or is it more just a personal .... 'I just don't care about such details of the claims of individual organised religions?'

World government based on human rights with effective enforcement? As things stand, many people would experience that as a tyranny. But perhaps we wouldn't care? — Ludwig V

A tyranny? Can you give me an example of what you think their main complaint might be?

But I do think it will always be dangerous not to be willing to battle. — Ludwig V

Yes, as a final resort, and if you are under attack or absolutely sure that you are about to be, then I agree. Self-defence is also a human right and natural imperative.

The bible/religious scripture, seems to teach many folks, that god has no existent because many of the claims therein, are so flawed, irrational, impossible and contradictory. Is this just mere and more atheist dogma?

By sacrifice I meant the temporary death of Jesus, the 'blood sacrifice'. — Tom Storm

But not the temporary death of god?

On the other hand, I don't agree about "synthetic" or "fake" experiences. I don't think they are this and would have trouble imagining what a "fake experience" could be. You can say, afterwards, that your judgement about an experience was mistaken, the experience itself wasn't false. — Manuel

All substance abuse is a fake or synthetic experience in the sense that they don't produce a natural high.
A religious high, is the same imo, if god has no existent.

But there's also plenty of people who have a religious experience that don't do extreme things. — Manuel

In my opinion, for someone to have a REAL religious experience, the supernatural would have to be real.
If atheism is correct (and I think it is,) then a religious experience is induced, in the same way that a heroin high is induced, so I choose to compare that with the concept of 'fake' or 'synthetic,' to contrast it with 'real'. I accept that you could argue, (as you choose to,) that anything physically or mentally experienced is a REAL experience, whether or not it is induced. The religious experience would then be a mistake, as you suggest, regarding it's source and cause. That 'mistake' is made, due to 'fake' news (such as gospel) and 'made up' or a 'synthetic,' 'rousing of the masses,' (to borrow a recent phrase used by @Jamal,) by the emotive preaching spectacle of some evanhellical staged performance.
It's just like the hysterical screaming or hysteria that was demonstrated in the past, at a pop concert by Elvis or the Beatles, except that they admit they were just singing songs and not revealing / interpreting / imparting the TRUE word of god.

I fully believe that the human race can and will create a civilisation that is better than any human civilisation that has ever existed in the past. Civilisations like ancient Greece or USA today will be nothing more than additions to the large list of examples of past attempts that utterly failed and fully deserved to.
The best way for humans to BE is yet to come. On another thread, I listed the top 5 barriers I think we need to terminate completely or reduce to a relatively powerless minimum.
Creating that culture IS INDEED critical imo. We need to make the following benign:
1. Money
2. Capitalism
3. Primal fear.
4. Religion/theism/theosophism
5. Mental aberrations in others, such as narcissism, cult of celebrity, cult of personality, a need to follow others blindly without question.

They do say travel broadens the mind. Most Scots I know would be glad to know an altruist such as yourself.

All the military empires of those times with their colourfully dressed toy looking soldiers, whose leaders brought them in army formations, to fight and be slaughtered in muddy fields, all seemed to me to be small variations on a seriously 'f***** up' theme.

'Honour and Glory,' we start the fight at an agreed time and not a second before!
We die and kill to the background music of pipe and drum.
Open with the cannons, flank them! flank them! send in the cavalry with infantry support, ....... and we all fall down! The Prussians, The Russians, The French, The British, The Austrians, The Hungarians, etc etc. Beautiful war to see which gangland culture wins and which bunch of nefarious elite f***wits get to rule Europe!!!!
The only worthwhile lesson from all such historical events has already been put into a song.
'WAR, what is it good for? Absolutely nothin.'
Any culture birthed from or maintained by war or the constant threat of it and preparation for it, will continue to fail.

Your post is mostly misguided, but I will say that the point of “hope without optimism” is that optimism in effect dismisses the horrors that people have experienced, because it is a temperamental and unearned turning away from reality in favour of an imagined great future; and without knowing and feeling the horror, it negates hope in the most meaningful sense, namely the yearning for a better world in the midst of the lived and felt reality of hell on Earth.

The optimist thinks it will happen, come what may, thus nothing already experienced matters at all. In contrast, the hoper wants it to happen, despite everything. — Jamal

I don't value or garnish anything compelling from your depiction of optimism or hope in the way you present them in the above quote. This approximately 3 min offering from a holocaust survivor, talks a little about the future and he employs no religious doctrine, in doing so.
Do you think that I agree with what he says due to some 'temperamental,' 'unearned' notion of empathy?
I have never experienced anything like he did, but I think his optimism shows him to be someone who believes that humans can and WILL do better in the future by learning from the horrors he describes. He even says he wishes he had spoken about what he went through/witnessed, much earlier in his life. Optimism and hope feed determination to get more involved in the day to day fight to make things better for people in anyway you can. It is not some 'idealistic' and distant platitude that is ignorant and powerless "in the midst of the lived and felt reality of hell on Earth," that some people are experiencing as I type. It is the opposite of the pessimism that bystands at a distance and exclaims 'well, I am sorry, but that's just the way things are and will always be and there is nothing I can do about it!"
Which of these possible responses to "the horrors that people experience,' do you think is most likely to prevent such horror repeating and expanding to others?

I realize that you've had a long dialogue about this already. Perhaps you're bored with it. But if I'm right that psychopathic behaviour is part of the human condition, removing religion may reduce the opportunities, but won't cure the problem. Those personalities will just find other ways to wreak havoc on the rest of us. I'm not saying there's nothing we can do about them, just that it's will be a continuous battle. Remember the slogan that freedom is not a place you arrive at and relax. It always needs defending. — Ludwig V

I think it's about reducing injustice and creating a more equitable and balanced experience for all humans from cradle to grave. For most or perhaps all of the last say, 10,000 years, the battle for fair and just treatment for all, has indeed been a continuous battle. But irrefutable improvements have been achieved. Life for most is not as bad as it was in say, the days of Spartacus imo.
I think the human experience will be much better in the future than it was in the past, because for many, its much better now than it was in the past. I don't think the 'continuous battle' you seem to be suggesting MUST be a permanent state of life for most humans due to some obscure dictate that humanity is too inherently flawed.

You ask me this because I attempted to confront the reality of the twentieth century? — Jamal

No , I commented earlier on a balanced viewpoint you posted. So, I am asking about YOUR interpretation, that YOU label 'confront the reality of the twentieth century.'
A lot of good work done by humans that improved the lives of many, happened in the 20th century, same with the 19th and 18th and hopefully it will be the same for the 21st.

Why should I be an optimist? Seriously, why? — Jamal

Wow! why the passion? It sounds like you give a f***! Maybe that's why we will, and can do better despite past failures such as the USSR and RED China, both now ruled by capitalist elites, and current failures such as the UK and the USA, who are also ran under uncontrolled/very poorly constrained capitalism. Why should you be an optimist? How about, to add to our chances of doing better.
Just another voice that says 'yes we can' as opposed to 'nah, were all doomed.' helps imo.

This is a venue for philosophical thinking and discussion, not for atheist proselytizing or rousing the masses into revolutionary fervour. — Jamal

Does philosophical thinking and discussion not include discussing atheism versus theism?
Anything that comes out of such discussion that some would label 'proselytizing' or 'rousing the masses,' others may interpret, as the welcome output/results of honest debate. I am personally with the latter group.

Optimism is often facile and banal. — Jamal

Is this your honest answer to my question 'are you another pessimist?'

The optimist cannot despair, but neither can he know genuine hope, since he disavows the conditions that make it essential.
— Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism

The title is where I'm at: hope without optimism.

Or is it the other way around? — Jamal

I will leave you and Terry Eagleton to debate that one.
I am BOTH hopeful and optimistic, so I don't understand the use of a notion such as 'hope without optimism,' but perhaps you have read more on such philosophy than I.
It what way does a 'hopeful optimist' disavow the conditions that make such essential.
In what way do you assume that I personally disavow conditions that would help improve the human experience?

So yeah, in some ways it hasn't gone very well so far, despite N's optimism. — Jamal

In a cosmic calendar scale, we have only been here a few seconds. You honestly don't think we have achieved much in the small time we have been here????
All the books, words, songs of hope for a better human future? Wars in which millions died to free others or bring down/end so called god sanctioned dictates delivered by fake prophets and messiahs. The divine right of Kings sanctioned by gods has at least been replaced with god wanabee humans who cannot convince very many now that 'god is with them and sanctions their rule.'
You seem to accent the negatives more than you accent the positive achievements of humankind.
Are you another pessimist?

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has so far possessed, has bled to death under our knife, who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What purifications, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history so far!” — Hanover

FREE AT LAST! Now, we just have to rid ourselves of
1. Money
2. Capitalism
3. Preoccupation with the primal fears we experienced via natural selection.
4. Religion.........theism...........theosophism (if Mr Hanover's last post is correct. I wish it was! as it would mean we can focus on stopping humans like Stalin, Trump, Putin et al, who are wannabee gods on Earth, and we no longer have to worry about what nefarious humans, dressed in religious uniform, tell us that their imagined gods demand of us)
5. Acceptance of or lack of recognition and treatment of mental aberrations in others such as narcissism, cult of celebrity, cult of personality, a need to follow others blindly without question.

The last 3 of my top 5 barriers to humans becoming all they could become are interchangeable in position based on personal experience.

. I'll try to avoid it. — Hanover

No, logic can be abused and used out of context, just as you sometimes do.
Don't avoid it, just employ it correctly/honestly. Perhaps It's your dalliances with theism that is causing the jamming signals! Something for you to logically ponder perhaps, but only if you can gain sufficient control over your own personal primal fears, instead of allowing them to force you to theism.
I accept that this is merely my personal interpretation that you will of course reject.
All addictions are hard to admit to, especially when its only others who are trying to convince you, that a particular one is harming you, when you are convinced, it is one of your most fundamental supports.

Let's first focus on eliminating the ongoing repercussions of the last failed attempts before we start rolling out the next five year plan. — Hanover

Oh we have many many millions of years, not 5 more years (Hear D. Bowie below).
So how about a 100 year or thousand year or ...... year plan?
We just have to avoid extinction events and causing such ourselves.

If you can't offer an example of an atheistic leader who is evil even in the hypothetical because definitionaly their exercise of power is "religious" in an essential way, this is all tautological. I'll stop offering counter examples to disprove your argument so that you can tell me there are no married bachelors. — Hanover

"either the ball is green, or the ball is not green" is always true, regardless of the colour of the ball.
I don't care about your concern with logical tautologies. In REAL human life, ALL totalitarian dictators past and present are god wannabees, and you holding up an irrelevant shiney from propositional logic, in a futile attempt to dilute from the observed behaviour I am referring to, is part of why I claimed earlier that your theism manifests in you at times, in rather sinister ways.

Good question. Let me get back with you on that. I will say though that I have never heard an audible voice, or any voices in my head...no burning bushes, etc. — Watchmaker

But surely that is exactly what it would have to be, even people who suffer from multiple personalities have some 'realisation' of that. Joan of Arc may have been such a person with multiple personalities that was undiagnosed and 'of her time.'
You should at least be experiencing Joan of Arc type messaging surely.
I have a trinity of voices in my head, me, myself and I. Perhaps because you can model the human brain as triune. The R-Complex, the Limbic system, and the Cortex.
Mr 'yes, go for it,' 'my no, run away, now.' and Mr 'now wait a minute, think carefully about this, don't listen to those other two guys yet!' If I die, all 3 of members of that triune die to. I die, myself dies and me dies.

If Jesus believed that His mission was to suffer and die, I can see how that would create no small amount of inner turmoil. — Watchmaker

Yeah, maybe if I was in so much pain as he was claimed to be in, then maybe I would talk to myself out loud as well. I know that if you do so in most human company, you come across as schitso!
IF Jesus KNEW he was god, then the whole scenario of the blood sacrifice was a staged spectacle, a con job. God is posited as immortal, therefore death is totally impotent to it. Via the trinity connection, the same MUST be true for Jesus, unless they were separated for his 30+ years of cosplaying a human male. If that IS the case then, for that time at least, the so called trinity CANNOT be disconnected manifestations of a single entity.
If the trinity is true, then when Jesus died as a human dies, god died, for 3 days, and that means it MUST have been 'unaware of self,' for 3 days! There is no escaping that logic, no matter what flowery claims about wearing different masks or occupying different versions of yourself are offered.
The trinity suggests that what one member of the trinity experiences, all 3 experience.
Including REAL human death which means NO AWARENESS AT ALL!

The USSR, and China are just another two failed attempts to 'get it correct.'
If the people at the time had managed to recognise and kill/stop a personality cult such as Stalin or Mao gaining totalitarian control, their attempt might have succeeded. No point in crying over failed attempts.
WE MUST TRY TRY TRY and then ......... TRY AGAIN! Until we succeed, on a global scale.

Or you could think that given enough time, that which has ossified or petrified maybe softened.

(b) (which seems to be where universeness is coming from) is usually just a defence against those militant theists who claim that atheism is inherently evil. I think (b) is fair enough. — Jamal

Yes, I would agree that my pushback here IS against the argument from theists/religious groups, that atheism MUST dictate a return to amoral human behaviour.

Me, I certainly wouldn’t say that atheism or secularism necessarily result in totalitarianism. The minimal point I suppose is that society can end up in oppression, war, and violence whether it’s religious or not, and therefore that these evils have other causes. The idea that it's all caused by religion is no better than a conspiracy theory. — Jamal

Yes, that seems quite balanced to me. Even if I am labelled as a 'militant atheist' and that is considered a negative label by some ( I don't consider it negative, but it is probably inaccurate in many ways) I DO NOT claim that all horrors humans face are caused by religion BUT I DO list it in the top 5 of the biggest barriers to human ability to individually 'be all you can be!' whilst we still have the very short lives we do.
COME ON science! We wait impatiently for those extra options that increased longevity and robustness might offer us! AND f*** off theism! stop holding us back!!!!!

Excellent point! I defend the right of individuals to hold any religious faith that suits them, and to congregate and commune with like-minded individuals, but when dogma arrogates to itself the right to trespass on the political realm it deserves to be critiqued and resisted, and hopefully, put back in its place. — Janus

As a democratic socialist, I am forced to broadly agree with your quote above but how do you suggest we prevent such horrors and such horrific final solutions as the branch Davidians (Waco Texas), the Jim Jones mass poisoning in Guyana, the heaven's gate mass suicide in 1997, etc, etc? Even this May, I heard in the news about:
Children were targeted as the first to be starved to death in the final days of a Christian doomsday cult in Kenya, according to fresh accounts emerging.

This is an example of an atheist dogma, certainly an example of the enforced secularism and not a religious evil. — Hanover

No, It's not, it's yet another example of a human's wish to kill off any competition to their own rise to god status, in the minds of their followers. How many dictators believe and promote a cult of their own personality? EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM, past and present imo. Hitler is just one of the modern examples. Alexander the butcher was no different. Hitler manipulated religion, yes, such always does. If the nazis won, then I agree that they would not have tolerated dictates from ANY religious organisation that 'competed' with nazi dictates about how people MUST live and WHO will be allowed to live.
They certainly would have killed any religious leader who dared to challenge their absolute power.
BUT, this is a religious position! All totalitarian, cult of personality, autocratic control level of a large mass of people, are IDENTICAL imo, to the rule of a king or a messiah who claims to have gods sanction, (the so called, divine right of kings) to BE what they/he/she/hesh wants to be, ie, YOUR GOD!
Dead Roman emperors were often raised to god status. We even see a diluted version of this today in the catholic tradition of raising some 'personality,' THEY approved of highly, by declaring them a 'saint.' :rofl:

There's an old critique of A C Grayling which seems to agree with Un's view of this, its emphasis being that 'militant atheism' in a sense needs religious texts to be rendered literally, to make its literalist critique possible: — mcdoodle

I enjoyed reading the article you linked to. That's the biggest benefit I get from TPF in that I can take such small steps, in improving my knowledge of philosophy, by reading such linked articles. I had not heard of A. C Grayling, but I now, really like him. The one word that I did not read in Mr Ree's review was the word 'socialist.' That's a more important label for me than 'secular' or even 'humanist.' But that in no way dilutes the importance of 'secular' or 'humanist.' Is Mr Grayling a professed socialist?

There's no question that in a world packed with various forms of religious fundamentalism, which can significantly damage a culture and disrupt the world - from Trump's evangelicals, to Modi's Hindu nationalists (and let's not forget Islam) - these ideas are worth resisting, debunking, challenging. Just as the ideas of secular dictators are also worth debunking and challenging. — Tom Storm

Yes, that's a good mission statement. Perhaps even a good contribution to 'general guidelines' for establishing a palatable secular morality that's 'fair and just,' for all stakeholders, and, what I especially like about such statements from 'HUMANS' is that imo, such demonstrates NO IRREFUTABLE NEED for the divine source of moral guidelines/dictates that theists claim, humans need, to escape a 'guaranteed!' return to purely instinct driven, feral behaviour, devoid of any palatable morality.

But it's not about truth, it's about values — ChatteringMonkey

In REAL life, not philosophy, your values come from what you experience and what you learn.
If those values are based on lies peddled as divine truth, the people get seriously messed up.
Some get so messed up that they behave like Stepford wife stye automatons, in their inability to question the religious doctrine being peddled to them. However, as you suggested, we can 'park it' there for now, if you want.

it doesn't matter so much that it isn't literally true in the details. — ChatteringMonkey

Of course it matters! It remains almost critical as interpretation of what non-existent gods want, has plagued our species since it came out of the wilds. Theism, was a side effect of the primal fears early hominids experienced under the survival rules of the jungle, that was still fresh in the minds of early more settled and less nomadic tribal communities. It was from these mental schisms that the superiority of one human over another was manifest, alongside xenophobia, conquest and territoriality. This had it's most horrific consequences in such as the divine right of kings, messiahs and so called prophets and our entire species still suffers from this terror. For anyone to suggest that the 'truth' of preached religion does not matter, is irrational, provocative and irresponsible.

I know what secularism is. How about the tribes that lived by the seasons, and had pagan based celebrations? What are you calling a state? The early city states? Nomadic tribal communities?
Much early worship was based on nature and animism. Such societies could be quite secular in the sense that respecting the forest or even manifesting a forrest deity, did not necessarily affect how you shared the forrest provided food amongst your tribe. We don't have a great deal of knowledge on how early civilisations separated their pagan beliefs from how the tribe/state functioned.
Epicurean Communes were not ran under religious dictates for example.

As a side note, and maybe to piss of militant atheists some more, secularism specifically came out Christianity. — ChatteringMonkey

No secularism before Jesus Christ? Really? :rofl: Did every human on Earth that existed before Jesus Christ (who himself probably never existed), believe in gods? Did no tribe ever live without a god to worship? Do you know for sure they didn't?

If you guys are interested in Hitler's religious beliefs, you can read them here: — Hanover

They are, as I have said, inconsistent and varying over time. He was not a religious ideologue or zealot. It's just not a credible argument to make that Nazism was just yet another iteration of religion gone wrong. — Hanover

I am already quite familiar. He weaponised religion and USED religion as aid to his narcissistic rise to autocracy. I already highlighted that use of religion by the vast majority of evil leaders, past and present.
I also made it clear that I do not assign blame to god posits, for such abuse of god posits, by nefarious humans. My annoyance and Mr Hitchens annoyance is manifest by absurd claims (or just plain lies) by theists, that the Hitler regime was atheist.

, @Hanover
I think Mr Hitchens backs up your claim here in this 1 min clip: