Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

You have a very skewed "knowledge" of things.

Atheism is a take on one and only one claim.  It doesn't have a dogma, it's not a world view.  It's simply not being convinced that a god exists.  Just because a few influential people took that and ran with it, bastardizing it along the way, doesn't mean it's wrong or evil or bad.  Those individuals were/are wrong or evil or bad. 
It's like Nietzsche's super man....he was describing a renaissance man, not an aryan race tasked with exterminating Jews.  Hilter took the ball and ran with it, doing things unthinkable by Nietzsche.  He couldn't have fathomed what an individual would do by bastardizing his idea. 

It's nonsensical to DO anything in the name of atheism.  There's no there there.  It'd be like going out and invading Canada because you lack a belief in fairies.  It's the most absurd idea possible. 

Communism wants to put atheism under its umbrella because religion is a great big fat lie.  It says, "dont worry, if justice isn't served in this life, the bad people holding you down will suffer FOREVER after they die."  As if "this life" and "forever" mean a god damned thing, lol.  Communism simply (and sure, poorly) suggested that if everyone has an equal share, there's no need for such silly lies.

OMG, OAM is a Marxist!!!  Well, no.  I'm certain he held many tenants I'd disagree with, but we're living out a big one he's probably right about:  when the few have so much and the masses have so little, the shit is going to hit the fan.  To me, that's not a radical idea.  It's pretty predictable, imo. 

Anyway, you can say Hitler pushed athiest views (again, a nonsensical term) and I can say there's tons of evidence he was a christian.  But at least I'm honest and decent enough to know that he didn't do what he did in the name of christianity.  I know he might have killed a son if god told him to or he'd enslave those around him since the bible literally tells you to, etc......but doing what he did is not something a ho-hum christian would suggest.

You say atheism is theoretically great.  It's functionally great, too, when you're part of the 99.999999% of atheists who are nice, normal people.  I've had multiple people now tell me I'm the best christian they know, as a compliment.  I'm a good person because it's the right thing to be.  I simply don't need the threat of hell or promise of heaven.  And living forever, even in a paradise, sounds awful.

Religion was invented (yes, invented) by the meek to trick the powerful into fearing the reprisal of their unethical actions.  The meek couldn't fight off the bandits and warlords, so they tricked them.  They duped them into thinking natural processes (rain, lightning, floods, disease, droughts, earthquakes, infant mortality, etc) were controlled by the gods and that bad things happened because of their bad actions.  For simple people, that connection made sense, and it put a literal fear of god in them.  And the rest is history.  Except despite now knowing infinitely more about the world we live in, much of humanity still cling to that silly lie that while shrewd, was simply conjured by people just trying to live their lives without being erased by bigger, meaner, more savage people.
****I'm not using meek and powerful as negative and positive descriptors, respectively....meek as in unable to fight off attackers and attackers being bigger and more powerful and thus - good at attacking

I know for a fact that this post will receive all the eye-rolls, but it's reeeeeally unremarkable in my eyes and plain as day.  If you can't see it, that's cool.  You do you.  But atheism doesn't change you, it just frees you up.  If you're a good person believing in a god, you'd be a good person if you don't.  If you're a corrupt shithead child-molesting thief as a believer, you'll be the same as an atheist. 

(shrug)

First of all, I agree at least generally that if you are a crappy person you'll be a crappy person and if you are a good person you'll be a good person irrespective of your belief or lack of belief in a divine being.  However, I will say that I think you are trying to have it both ways here because I've seen you blame religion for countless wars and my view is that with VERY few exceptions those wars had a lot more to do with secular issues with religion just tacked on as extra justification.  Ie, the people who prosecuted those wars generally would have irrespective of their religious beliefs.  You admitted as much in the context of Hitler while trying to claim he was a Christian but your "tons of evidence he was a Christian" would conflict with the facts that he was not known to have attended and I've read a lot about the final days in the bunker and I've NEVER seen any mention of the guy who KNEW he was going to die very soon asking to see a Priest or Minister.  That, to me, is a pretty clear indication.  Someone who KNOWS they are about to die and who believes in a divine being is going to want to prepare to meet that divine being, Hitler didn't.  

I think that @betarhoalphadelta 's take on communism's atheism is a lot closer to the mark than yours.  You say they just jettisoned it because "it is a big fat lie" makes no sense because if that was all there was to it, why bother?  Why inflame opposition among the huge portion of the population who were believers when a substantial portion of those believers might otherwise support your economic theories? 

I read a book about the Catholic Church's dealings in the run-up to WWII and having an understanding of the time is very helpful.  When it got to the point where it was more-or-less unavoidable that Germany's democracy was going to be replaced by either Nazi's or Communists, the Catholics were compelled to lean Nazi if for no other reason than that the devil you know is worse than the devil you don't.  They had seen what the Soviets did to religious leaders and adherents.  They KNEW what that looked like.  If the communists hadn't been so militantly atheist, they may have taken over Germany.  Their atheism cost them the chance.  The idea that they did that just because they believed that religion was a big fat lie is simply preposterous.  

Communists were atheists because they saw a belief in something bigger than the state as an existential threat.  THAT was why they couldn't just jettison their atheism when it suited their goals.  

Freud's warning came true.  I think it was in part because he understood that once religion was removed there was no higher power on which to rely when questioning the state.  That helped the Nazi's and Communists to prosecute their 20th century crimes because their subjects didn't have a higher power to appeal to.  Note in this context that while the Nazi's were not as militantly atheistic as the communists nearly all high-ranking Nazi's were at most agnostic.  Himmler dabbled in pagan religions and the occult, Hitler said almost nothing on religion (probably by design).  I'm sure there were a great number of Nazi functionaries who regularly attended Catholic or Protestant services but I know of no upper-level Nazis who did.  

This, I think, supports my assertion that it is MUCH more of a class issue than a racial issue because higher class blacks are more similar to higher class whites than they are to lower class blacks.  Similarly, lower class whites are more similar to lower class hispanics and blacks than they are to upper class whites. 

One cruel irony in all of this is that the women who would be most able to successfully raise a child without a partner are the women who are the least likely to actually attempt it.  Conversely the women least able to successfully raise a child without a partner are the MOST likely to be in that situation. 

Very well summarized and stated.

And while I agree it's a cruel irony,  it's not by happenstance that this is the case.  Because the women who would be most able to successfully raise a child without a partner, are the women who are smart enough to know they don't really want to attempt to do so.  

I dated a girl in college who was wild, a total firecracker-- in the parlance of the kids these days, she was DTF at any time, in almost any environment.  She was also a 4.0 Chemical Engineering pre-med student who went on to become a very successful plastic surgeon in NYC.  And every time we hooked up, she insisted on at least two forms of birth control.  She knew exactly what risks an unwanted pregnancy posed to her future plans.

Some deep stuff here.

And very good exchanges.

Well, it's certainly no "Is a Hamburger a Sandwich" discussion, but I guess it's alright.

That reality pours gasoline on the fire that is the discrepancy between the upper and lower classes.

This ties into another problem in our modern society:

As I see it, technology is increasingly eliminating (or reducing) the number of middle class jobs.

As I understand it, @847badgerfan is a Civil Engineer and I know enough about that to at least use it as an example so for my example I'll use accounting (my profession) and Civil Engineering:

50+ years ago a Civil Engineers office would have needed three classes of employees to function:

• Upper class, college educated: The actual Engineers like Badge.
• Middle class, generally HS or maybe some technical education beyond HS: Basically draftsman.
• Lower class, HS or less: Janitors to empty trash and scrub toilets.

It was similar in an accounting office half a Century ago:

• Upper class, college educated: The actual accountants like me.
• Middle class, generally HS or maybe some beyond HS: Bookkeepers.
• Lower class, HS or less: Janitors to empty trash and scrub toilets.

In today's offices we still need #1 and #3. There are still Engineers/Accountants and we still need Janitors but the drafting and number crunching people have mostly been replaced by CAD/Excel.

This, IMHO, is a major problem for society because the middle class was a bridge. They had shared concerns with both the upper and the lower classes. As they become less and less prevalent there is an ever-widening gap between the Engineers/Accountants and their Janitors.

This ties into another problem in our modern society:

As I see it, technology is increasingly eliminating (or reducing) the number of middle class jobs.

As I understand it, @847badgerfan is a Civil Engineer and I know enough about that to at least use it as an example so for my example I'll use accounting (my profession) and Civil Engineering:

50+ years ago a Civil Engineers office would have needed three classes of employees to function:

• Upper class, college educated: The actual Engineers like Badge.
• Middle class, generally HS or maybe some technical education beyond HS: Basically draftsman.
• Lower class, HS or less: Janitors to empty trash and scrub toilets.

It was similar in an accounting office half a Century ago:

• Upper class, college educated: The actual accountants like me.
• Middle class, generally HS or maybe some beyond HS: Bookkeepers.
• Lower class, HS or less: Janitors to empty trash and scrub toilets.

In today's offices we still need #1 and #3. There are still Engineers/Accountants and we still need Janitors but the drafting and number crunching people have mostly been replaced by CAD/Excel.

This, IMHO, is a major problem for society because the middle class was a bridge. They had shared concerns with both the upper and the lower classes. As they become less and less prevalent there is an ever-widening gap between the Engineers/Accountants and their Janitors.

I'm not sure it's so much an elimination of jobs, as a redistribution of them.  Because along with CAD and Excel (distributed and scaled across ever-larger organizations), came a large amount of IT infrastructure, and the IT specialists that are associated with that.

However, I don't think that disproves your point-- when it comes to socioeconomic class, the IT specialists are going to be more like the engineers and accountants, than they are like the janitors.

This was probably true for most of human history but I specifically referenced successful civilizations.  The way that humans lived before creating civilization isn't really germane to the topic at hand.  Well, how?  It most certainly hasn't been.  We HAD a system that helped to minimize single-parent situations and it worked for literally thousands of years.  When we dropped it the upper classes still continued by-and-large to have kids as married couples but the HS dropouts:

Big issue I've got here is that to an extent I think you're creating a concept of a "we" that "acts". 

"We" didn't have a system. Religion existed, a lot of people in America believed in it, and so more people conformed to religious norms than today. But "we" didn't drop it. Religion still existed, fewer people in America believed in it, and so fewer people conformed to religious norms than before. 

Nobody decided to change the system. People individually changed. And now you're looking at aggregate statistics of the results of that change as if the "system" changed.

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Second thing I'd say is that I highly doubt we can point to the rise in unmarried mothers as being due to a lack of religion. You do point out some increases in single mother families across demographics, but those increases MASSIVELY dwarf any rise in atheism.

This is particularly egregious from a statistical standpoint because religious belief seems to be more sticky in the lower classes:

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/income-distribution/

For people with household incomes <$50K, 85% believe with absolute or reasonable certainty that god exists. That number drops to 75% with the >$100K crowd, and the number that affirmatively state they don't believe has jumped from 7-9% for those <$50K up to 14% >$100K.

IMHO a growth in the lack of religious belief may be *a* factor in what is going on, but it doesn't seem, demographically, likely to be the *dominant* factor.

It&#039;s a matter of &#039;when not if&#039; Apple buys ESPN, says Wedbush&#039;s Dan Ives (cnbc.com)
It's a matter of 'when not if' Apple buys ESPN, says Wedbush's Dan Ives (cnbc.com)

So the PAC 10? should have taken the AppleTV deal, parlayed it into a sweetheart ESPN deal and added UNC, UVA, and ND?!?!?!