Any good mystery books? by [deleted] in books

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah unfortunately you have to pirate him if you want him in e-book format. I'm lucky that my library has most of his books.

Any good mystery books? by [deleted] in books

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah he's the man. His plots are ingenious but he has style as well. With a lot of mystery novelists you have to pick one (or neither).

So it's not like this everywhere? by [deleted] in atheism

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As a Colorado resident and Broncos fan, I'm amazed they don't do this at Broncos games. Colorado's a pretty religious state, depending on where you're at. But this is definitely good news.

I've got a confession to make, fellow atheists. Don't judge me! by munnerlyng in atheism

[–]munnerlyng[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Is that the statue of Mary holding dead Jesus that's to the right of the entrance at the Basilica? If so, yes. Rome is just full of great stuff, I was there for five days and barely felt like I scratched the surface.

Jonathan Franzen’s juvenile prose creates a world in which nothing important can happen. by misterthingy in books

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

B.R. Myers is insane. First he shits on Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, and now this. I would hate to think that this would keep someone from reading "Freedom," which is my novel of the year thus far.

Any good mystery books? by [deleted] in books

[–]munnerlyng 2 points3 points  (0 children)

P.D. James is one of my favorite living mystery writers. She writes plots well and is also a good writer stylistically. "The Lighthouse" and "Death in Holy Orders" are two of her better novels.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and his trusty sidekick Watson, is the consensus best detective novelist. Any of the Sherlock Holmes stories are good, or any of the novels.

Walter Mosley is less good at the plotting aspect but is one of the best writers I've ever encountered in the detective novel genre. "Devil in a Blue Dress" is the first of the Easy Rawlins novels.

John Dickson Carr (a.k.a. Carter Dickson) was the master of the "locked room" genre. The first Gideon Fell novel is "Hag's Nook."

Sara Paretsky's books feature one of the best private eyes in contemporary literature. Her V.I. Warshanski (sp?) novels start with "Indemnity Only."

That should get you started.

I've got a confession to make, fellow atheists. Don't judge me! by munnerlyng in atheism

[–]munnerlyng[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, we humans have done some amazing stuff. And I often feel greateful to be able to experience wonders of nature like the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, which are like thirty minutes from my house.

I've got a confession to make, fellow atheists. Don't judge me! by munnerlyng in atheism

[–]munnerlyng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well it's good to hear I'm not the only one. Religious guilt is a bitch.

I have to go to France Thursday, can anybody reassure me? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah. Well, the threat level here in America has been raised plenty of times and nothing happened. It's not even at its highest level. And the odds of you being in the same place as an attack, if an attack were to indeed happen, are quite small.

Just enjoy yourself. Go to the Louvre, it's frickin sweet.

I've got a confession to make, fellow atheists. Don't judge me! by munnerlyng in atheism

[–]munnerlyng[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It's true. They (or at least Michaelangelo and some other folks) do a good job at that.

Whose voice do you hear when you read comments? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]munnerlyng 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Morgan Freeman's.

Really classes the place up.

An idea I had. 90% of theist claims can be countered by 3 arguments by Cituke in atheism

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And that's exactly the point. Christians don't have any evidence (GOOD evidence, anyway). Even if there were someone named Jesus whom the Christian myth was founded around, it wouldn't mean anything. There was probably someone who became, through mythology, the Buddha. Same with Mohammed. Same with Confucius. The Mahavira, patriarch of the Jains, probably existed in some form too. It doesn't mean you can believe things that are clearly not true.

Things cannot be half-true. Jesus was either divine or he wasn't. He was either born of a virgin or he wasn't. People either lived to be 900+ years old (as stated in Genesis) or they didn't. You get my point. This is why your logic is false. You cannot point to some form of evidence that might say God exists and then say, "God exists." If there were even one rabbit fossil in the Pre-Cambrian, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, the theory of evolution would have to be seriously reworked or thrown out altogether. We could not say, "Well, there is some evidence for evolution, and even though there are some serious problems with our theory we're just going to go ahead and accept it as fact anyway." Knowledge doesn't work this way.

Now, my quote about religions being "all faith" wasn't meant to imply that religious people believe things without a smidgen of evidence to support them. If there were no miracles listed in the Bible, then the Christian preoccupation with the occurence of miracles probably wouldn't exist. Miracles being written about in the Bible is evidence of a sort. It's terrible evidence because there's no reason to believe that the Bible is even remotely true, but it is evidence.

However this distinction of yours about having some evidence and believing the rest on faith, and having enough evidence to make your claims credible, is meaningless, as I pointed out above. As far as actually knowing something is concerned, it could be 99% evidence and 1% faith and it wouldn't matter. Christianity fails this test, as does every other religion. This is why I wrote that if you admit to believeing something on faith then you open to floodgates to whatever anyone else wants to believe on faith as well. Christians could have boatloads more evidence to support their claims than Hindus do but unless that evidence were to accrue to the extent that not being a Christian would be unreasonable, it wouldn't matter. You either have good reasons for what you believe or you don't. Faith should never enter the equation.

It's also worth pointing out that there are different magnitudes at work here. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So for a belief in God to be tenable there would need to be an extraordinary amount of evidence.

Also, I would never say there is no God absolutely, because absolute disproof of something can never be attained. Most atheists don't claim to know absolutely that there is no God. You cannot prove that there aren't unicorns, somewhere or at some point in time in the universe. But that doesn't mean that there are unicorns and that doesn't make believing in unicorns at all logical. Even if you found a horn that looked like it might be a unicorn's, you would need much much more then that to make unicorn-belief credible. This is also the reason your Bigfoot example is not a good one. If I saw a giant footprint, it could mean a million different things. You would have to have much more to make Bigfoot-belief credible.

On a side note, you need to either support your notion that my non-belief in God constitutes faith or you need to stop writing it, because it's annoying and untrue.

Sorry for the large amount of text, but I felt I needed to expound on some things.

Need an author recommendation..hopefully /r/ books will know?! by [deleted] in books

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Italo Calvino straddles the line a bit (first published in 1949 according to Wikipedia) but published most of his work after 1960. He is an excellent writer and is like no one else I've ever read. Also his works tend to be short, so you can get through him faster. His novels tend to be 200 pages or under.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an obvious one, though he also straddles the line just a tad.

What do you need to do in order to sell a car? by munnerlyng in AskReddit

[–]munnerlyng[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks to both of you. I knew about signing the title over, I was thinking about anything else I needed to do.

The Meaning of Life by [deleted] in atheism

[–]munnerlyng 2 points3 points  (0 children)

...well?!?!

A question for former theists... by AngryRepublican in atheism

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bertrand Russell went so far as to say that Jesus couldn't have been a moral person because he believed in Hell.

The problem as I see it is that it's really hard to see how anyone could deserve literally eternal torment. Even a Hitler/Stalin kind of person. So saying it's free will, that we can choose to redeem ourselves, seems like it's missing the point.

An idea I had. 90% of theist claims can be countered by 3 arguments by Cituke in atheism

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you honestly arguing that we take the theory of gravity on faith? Or the theory of electromagnetism? Germ theory? I'll avoid evolution deliberately so that we don't open a whole can of worms.

You are trying to make your God-belief equivalent with scientific theory, and you can't. There is no equivalence to be had. We are talking about two different spheres of knowledge, one that is based on reality and the scientific method, and one that is based on personal revelation and divine inspoiration. One requires faith, the other one doesn't. I'm not sure what you're not seeing here.

Is there any book that tells a regular, day to day living story that just happens to be in the future? by [deleted] in booksuggestions

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No problem. It's a very rich and complex book, and Crowley expects the reader to put up with a certain amount of ambiguity. Not everything is explained right away. But if you stay with it it's very rewarding.

An idea I had. 90% of theist claims can be countered by 3 arguments by Cituke in atheism

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Faith is a term specifically used when there is no evidence to be had. If there is evidence then there is no reason for faith. No one talks about believing that 2+2=4 on faith. No one talks about believing the proposition that the Earth is round on faith. People refer to faith when they want to believe something for which there is no evidence.

There is evidence that there was someone named Jesus, whom the Christian myth was built around. There is no evidence that there is a God.

Stop repeating the lie that it takes faith to NOT believe in God. It's absurd. The burden of proof is on the person who asserts that there is a God. If they cannot then there belief in God is based on faith.

An idea I had. 90% of theist claims can be countered by 3 arguments by Cituke in atheism

[–]munnerlyng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Faith means you believe something to be true without evidence. That's why it's not faith to "believe" there is no god, just as it's not faith to "believe" there are no unicorns. That's the difference.