Atheists appeal to higher power for intercession over alleged sins against privacy The Atheist Alliance International, an organisation that works to demystify atheism and advocate for secular governance, has taken legal action it hopes will prove that members’ personal data does not remain in the possession of the rival International Association of Atheists. The Alliance (AAI) first came to The Register’s …
There's no correlation whatsoever between a persons religious belief and their propensity to be a decent human being. Anything that says otherwise is propaganda.
That said, as you're trying to imply that athiesm somehow makes you more inclined towards war, you might want to take a tiny peek at the 1500 or years prior to the 20th century. The results may come as a surprise to you.
<assuming that was sarcasm>
The Romans were very proud of their piety. They believed their victories and empire showed the gods loved them best, but they tended to respect anyone following their own ancestral beliefs. Indeed, when they were fighting other Italian cities, they'd often try to lure the other city's patron god or goddess to come over to Rome instead.
Then they took over Christianity and stopped tolerating other religions.
Perhaps they haven't seen Life of Brian. (Anecdote: I introduced my sons to these films and the reaction was mainly "Oh, so that's where all thememes came from.", so perhaps the IAAI haven't used the internet either.)
Or perhaps they just didn't understand the joke.
I wonder what the disputes over tech dogma were that caused the schism.
Did one firmly deny the existence of Silicon Heaven, whilst the other lot believe that backups are a form of immortality? Were there arguments about whether or not information wants to be free, with one lot suggesting that freedom negates the concept of divine control, whilst the other envisiged their data sitting on a cloud for the rest of eternity, with the other lot being thrown into a sea of fire (when their hosting company's data centre went up in flames)?
It could have been a falling out between devotees of storing the membership DB in PostgreSQL versus MariaDB, or perhaps even the unholiest of all, Or*cle?
(Or if 'twas indeed merely a list of email addresses, a re-run of that most ancient of battles, whether the file should be edited using vim or emacs?)
In respect, proving the existence of File is somewhat easier, because the appearance of File constitutes a difficult to deny proof in and of itself.
Proving that File doesn't exist is quite a bit more difficult.
File could merely be hiding where nobody could find it, which is practically indiscernible from File not existing.
There is a shared belief that File did, at some point, exist.
Even unimpeachable evidence of the deleting of the one true File is marred by the uncertainty of whether there were other Files before it?
I think the IAA and AAI need to re-imagine File as an NFT, then, and only then, can they be assured of the simultaneous existence and lack of existence of File.
"I refuse to prove that the File exists, for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But the entry in the File Allocation Table is a dead giveaway isn't it? It proves it exists, and therefore it doesn't".
"Oh dear, I hadn't thought about that".
<Disappears in a puff of trying to convert to NTFS...>
Never mind Life of Brian. This is almost exactly how the factions are named in the multipart South Park episode Go God Go:
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Unified_Atheist_League_(UAL)
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Allied_Atheist_Alliance_(AAA)
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/United_Atheist_Alliance_(UAA)
All joking aside, this schism has some really important principles behind it, and occurred when one group of atheists declared they didn't believe in any gods, but another group disagreed.
The second group insisted they didn't believe in any gods, but even more than the first group.
Hopefully there will be an agreement about how to quantify the exact lack of belief. These things are important people.
When people argue about assets, money, debts, ancestry....or anything else associated with the real world, they get lawyers involved and start talking about documents, artifacts, provenance and physical, verifiable evidence.
*
So when we get to religion, the religious folk don't want ANYTHING TO DO WITH provenance and physical, verifiable evidence.
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Huh? Money, bank accounts........show me the proof!
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God, Jesus, Allah..........Sorry........you just need to believe!!! The problem is YOU......pity about the absence of facts!!!!
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So what's the problem with atheism?
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