Dan Merica at CNN Belief Blog and His Fairy Tale Atheist Category in a Box Thing

Dan Merica – CNN Blogger

R’ligion “Expert”

This belief blog at CNN is putting all atheists into six categories below. Me, I stay an Areligionist, without religion and or dogma and let all the trolls that usually munch on these CNN half-assed American “religion” page articles, do just that, read and eat the articles supersized and covered in extra cheese. LOL

They also like the Scientologists have a list of mediocre loser actor celebrity types along with the article to illustrate for their dumbed down for Americans Belief articles what “real” Atheists look like. Duh!

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/15/the-six-types-of-atheists/?hpt=hp_c4

1) Intellectual atheist/agnostic

2) Activist

3) Seeker-agnostic

4) Anti-theist

5) Non-theist

6) Ritual atheist

7) Whatever!


.

The new face(s) of American Atheism – Todd Stiefel

CNN has this “Belief” Blog page that gives all sides a chance to present their point of view. And there usually is a few thousand typical dumbed down American “Duh!” comments made and repeated hundreds of cliché times perhaps by a few dozen regular trolls left and right for the sake of balance and appearance of modern style “Journalism”.

This past weekend I think they had this piece about Todd Stiegel being the new face of Atheism in America. He has spent something like three and a half million dollars on billboards on buses selling the new Atheist religion and or dogmas of belief in anti-theism, is that a new word?

Well I am all well and glad that the Atheists are getting out of the closet for free of past fears that some red neck bible thumpers and Wayne Lapierre kill ya with a gun dandy lobbyist types will kill you for not believing in the angry desert god of the mono-theists (sounds like a disease?).

Todd’s bio about getting to the point of being a good Catholic Boy and giving up the faith when he realized in college, after reading the bible, that it is a poorly constructed OT and NT piece of uninspired writing – the bio leaves out the 100,000 word book that should fill in the gap between uninspired bible book stuff and how he got to Atheist. 

Maybe he is just a Areligionist like me and wasting all his time on the dogma of that Atheist shit.

The CNN piece sounded like it was a polished knock off of Todd’s Foundation’s mimeographed PR handout appealing for mo’ money, mo’ money like any other whoring church, synagogue, mosque, temple, storefront on the planet.

Of course Todd is soft spoken and affable and lives in laid back North Carolina where he presently makes his base trying to spend the billions his family made in chemicals or Pharmas or something like that.

Three and a half million Todd – chump change! Time to pump the chumps for their change?

Todd is no loud mouthed drunk like Hitchens or over educated academic don like Dawkins.

Stiefel and his real long term agenda, whatever it is, is tied up presently, short term, in with a coalition of other middle of the road, so-called non-religious but money collecting types, the Secular Coalition of America.

http://secular.org/

Whatever.


.

Agnostic Spoken Here

Agnostic is spoken here.

It is not the only language. I welcome differing points of view. But after something like a quarter century search for meaning and life and purpose of being, I have come to the conclusion that nobody really knows when it comes to the concept of “God” – who or what that three letter word really represents or means.

As you may have noticed I did a visual change on the blog cover overhead.

The dragon is not demonic, merely my Chinese Zodiac sign in green, a life color.  My image concession to the growing global culture of the human race.

I have also included a phrase I have used for many years.

“Just because man invented God does not mean that God does not exist.”

Hardly McShea’s Law or Logic formula on Agnosticism but a start.

I do not think that Agnosticism is half-assed Atheism because once an Atheist declares “there is not God”, he or she is not proclaiming it in a vacuum but in a functioning multi-dimensional world that needs some explaining sometime, somewhere from a scientific point of view at least.

And to explain God in terms of centuries old myth and superstitions is moot in the Twenty-first century of a common global era of the human race.

Also, I do not like a lot of the Atheists out there in the public square who seem so loud and vulgar in their defense of something that is both of a quasi-religious and secular nature.

Most Atheists I perceive to be first and foremost anti-religion perhaps due to bad past religious life experiences. The issue of God or Creator gets caught up many times entangled in that personal experience thing.

Atheism per se has gotten a bad rap through the centuries because it has always been a political term to quash any political dissent within the ruling theocracies which I think have been a majority throughout human history, both helping and hurting human history along the road to evolution of the species to bigger and better things.

That an extension of the tribe or clan has been the city state and the official party line, the official religion and or god has always been the local glue that holds the whole mess together at any given time locally along the human race timeline. 

That God for a lack of a better word is a metaphor, real at least to me, matching reality to a point and not unlike that of my childhood imaginary friend.

I think that when people say they believe in God, they are really saying that they conform to the local standards and enjoy the myth coming off of stained glass or the printed page and not necessarily in relation to total reality.

That looking at Dawkins Atheist Forum dissolve into chaos and dogmatic warfare says to me that Atheism is too on a certain level just another religion full of useless dogma.

As I have stated here on more than one occasion, I am Areligionist first, without religion and or dogma, before I am second Agnostic, with doubt about all popular religious cultural myths. I simply do not know.

That if anything, I am a closeted Quaker, not an official member of that party, but believe in the specialness of my own personal being and or personal God within aka the divine spark within.

Seeing the political scape descend into madness is seeing too much money and too much religion in politics these days.

That must change. Theologies do not work in the face of technology. Reality and myth conflict and reality is probable in most cases as opposed to any myth.

I remain a Cultural Christian because I believe in the basic teachings of Jesus. I do not however believe in his so-called divinity. 

.

Anne Rice - Heretic or Areligionist?

Author Anne Rice’s strange twist on belief, recently announced, is not an easy knot to untie.  Her brief return to Catholicism has turned her off to the whole Christianity title and religion thing.

Novelist Anne Rice ditches Christianity for Christ

Novelist Anne Rice says she's quit being a Christian but she's hanging on to Christ. She's just fed up with his followers.

The author, whose vampire books (i.e. Interview with a Vampire) were huge sellers long before Twilight and whose return to her childhood Catholicism dominated her more recent works, posted a series of comments on Facebook (confirmed by her publisher as authentic, according to Associated Press).

Is this author a heretic – wanting to follow Christ without being one of the followers of a religion and a rulebook?

Or is she now Areligionist – without religion? Believes in a higher power and does not want or need a rulebook religion.

Perhaps the true flaw in all or many religions is that every generation lays on perceptions that future generations do not understand or see. In other words, belief can be as individual as the individual themselves.

This all reminds me a bit of a quote from evangelist Brian McLaren.

I don’t believe making disciples must equal making adherents to the Christian religion. It may be advisable in many (not all!) circumstances to help people become followers of Jesus and remain within their Buddhist, Hindu or Jewish contexts …Wikipedia

ATHEIST - AGNOSTIC - ARELIGIONIST

.
A T H E I S T

A G N O S T I C

A R E L I G I O N I S T

?

(ar-e-lig-ion-ist)

The term Cultural Christian means a lot of things these days. Looking through a search of the subject on the Internet, I believe the fundamentalists have out blogged the day and anybody or anything that calls themselves a Cultural Christian is going to Hell with Richard Dawkins, the Brit, famous first for being an Atheist and second for being a scientist.

Anyway I have a fall back plan. Since I have written a lot about my quest for a new definition of God in this emerging Global culture that is increasingly less theistic and more materialistic or even humanistic, a new term for me is in order.

The title shows three terms, two of which already have definitions and are in the lexicon on the language.

Atheist is broken down into A and Theist, meaning without theism or denial of the traditional concept of God.

Agnosticism is broken down into A and Gnostic, meaning without knowledge and implies a doubt about the concept of God. Also means that there is no proof of God as in a modern scientific approach to any theory.

Areligionist is broken down into A and Religionist, meaning without religion. A religionist is one addicted to a need to have a rulebook on the side of the Theist issue.

Since I do not see anything in a dictionary yet, let me add my preferred pronunciation of the word as (ar-e-lig-ion-ist) as opposes the Atheist sounding pronunciation of (A- re-lig-ion-ist) – don’t want to get swept up anymore in the Dawkins heretic burning phenomenon from the right.

Being Areligionist means not believing in any man made rule book about the God thing, the definition of which I am still plotting.

Religionist fanatics like Saul of Tarsus are part of the present failure of Christianity along with the emperor god Constantine’s hijacking of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth to help redecorate his palace, on a coffee table so to speak, in Constantinople. If he really was a Christian, which I doubt, would he not have named the greatest and newest city in his empire Jesusopolis or Christianopolis for his new found god and not for himself?

There are as many rule books and searches for spirituality and or God as there are people on the planet. We no longer have to be stuck with “sacred” writings written in tents or caves or Roman Empire army barracks.

Time for a change in the way humanity approaches the sacred as free individuals instead of as in shackled groups, tribes, clans, packs, as in the past.