Wow... Please Read.

[Yami_Ichi]

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[caustic 0_0]

Similar article and thread here:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=2509467

This article you posted had some good quotes though.

Someone

"They want the credit for the good they do. They don't want it to be known that the God inside of them brought it forth."

o.x But since they're atheist, what God inside of them? They wouldn't look at it that way, not because they're 'bad' or 'self-righteous,' but because they just don't believe in a God to contribute it to in the first place.

People confuse me.

LOL

"If they are atheists they are probably relativists, so they would have no grounding in (Christian) ethics," Mena, 50, said. "What they do is based on feeling, and that varies for each atheist.

"You could say homosexuals have some ethical foundation," Mena said, "but an atheist devises his own moral foundation."

So homosexuals are bad, but not as evil as atheists. Glad someone cleared that up for me.
More seriously though, this thinking is just hard to get my head around. It's like this person has never actually talked with any atheists.
So many religions and beliefs, with or without Gods, have similar basic teachings. Morality is not something that requires a God in order for you to grasp. People don't bend to one set interpretation of a religion either. It's not uncommon for people of the same religion to have opposing views on things and believing in a God does not automatically mean you have a strict sense of morality.  

[Sanguvixen]

c a u s t i c

Similar article and thread here:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/guilds/viewtopic.php?t=2509467

This article you posted had some good quotes though.

Someone

"They want the credit for the good they do. They don't want it to be known that the God inside of them brought it forth."

o.x But since they're atheist, what God inside of them? They wouldn't look at it that way, not because they're 'bad' or 'self-righteous,' but because they just don't believe in a God to contribute it to in the first place.

People confuse me.

LOL

"If they are atheists they are probably relativists, so they would have no grounding in (Christian) ethics," Mena, 50, said. "What they do is based on feeling, and that varies for each atheist.

"You could say homosexuals have some ethical foundation," Mena said, "but an atheist devises his own moral foundation."

So homosexuals are bad, but not as evil as atheists. Glad someone cleared that up for me.
More seriously though, this thinking is just hard to get my head around. It's like this person has never actually talked with any atheists.
So many religions and beliefs, with or without Gods, have similar basic teachings. Morality is not something that requires a God in order for you to grasp. People don't bend to one set interpretation of a religion either. It's not uncommon for people of the same religion to have opposing views on things and believing in a God does not automatically mean you have a strict sense of morality.

I think I understand the thinking behind that second quote somewhat.

For the longest time what is right, and what is wrong has been based upon a person's religion. The religion decides what is acceptable and what isn't.

Thus a religious person does not turn to themselves for the answer to morality and such. They turn to thier religion, to thier self-made god and the ideas and beleifs that are circling around it.

When asked where I get my morals from...I would probably say "From myself. I'll choose for myself what I feel is right, or wrong." Now most religious will have a problem with that. For I am choosing on my own what to follow.

They think that what is right and wrong is already set in stone. They seem to feel that deviating from that foundation, and decided on your own is illogical...and thus they frown upon it.

Theist: Morals come from what thier god accepts and doesn't accept.
Atheist: Morals come from they personally accept and don't accept.

Athiests are more open minded. They are able to deviate freely and accept homosexuals and such...because they don't have a religion telling them it is wrong for a women to love a women, or a man loving a man.

 

[[Subject to Availability]]

I always thought morals were imposed by the soceity you grow up in as well as your own take on it.

I know of religious people worse than me.

-Matt

 

[DivideByZero14]

Article

And 39.6 percent said atheists do not share their vision of American society.

DUH! I envision a US without religion, without war, and without politics...

*wakes up*

Aww! And in the middle of a good dream, too!

Article

"Viewing atheists as immoral is the old cliche, like viewing gays as promiscuous and Italians as involved in the mafia," she said.

Hear hear!

Article

Johnson said there are about 45 million atheists in America.

Gosh, I hope so! It would my life SO much easier.

Article

"They can be good, but they are self-righteous," Gupton, 58, said of atheists.

"They want the credit for the good they do. They don't want it to be known that the God inside of them brought it forth."

I bet they had to go through several people at that bus stop before turning up this nutcase.

Article

"If they are atheists they are probably relativists, so they would have no grounding in (Christian) ethics," Mena, 50, said. "What they do is based on feeling, and that varies for each atheist.

Do not Christians reserve for themselves the right to interpret the Bible as they will? So, considering the ambiguity of Scripture, don't they essentially make up their own morals, too?

Article

"You could say homosexuals have some ethical foundation," Mena said, "but an atheist devises his own moral foundation."

What if you're both?

Article

"Sometimes there are good people who keep the golden rule but don't believe in the true God," Maldonado, 66, said.

"But when they suffer, you want them to know there is a God who will help them."

If you must be theist, please be like this person: offering your "help", not forcing it on others.  

[HaileSelassie601993]

I would have expected that completely. I live in a liberal area, but I can imagine that in a place where people are more serious about religion that they would distrust atheists.  

[Sanguvixen]

I still don't understand how they can have a problem with us building our own Moral Foundations.

So what if we decide on our own what is right and wrong.
It sounds so arrogent to think that only people who found thier morals on the scripture, or derive them from a religion are good people.

 

[Orson Welles]

After reading that, I feel like an outcast. I knew Atheists were hated by many, but I didn't know that we were hated by nearly half of the United States. Now I know how homosexuals feel when people are protesting against them, some of those ignorant remarks made me clench my fists and punch the nearest inanimate object. Maybe if they took enough time to learn about us, they'd see that we have morals too.  

[Sanguvixen]

Blasphemize

After reading that, I feel like an outcast. I knew Atheists were hated by many, but I didn't know that we were hated by nearly half of the United States. Now I know how homosexuals feel when people are protesting against them, some of those ignorant remarks made me clench my fists and punch the nearest inanimate object. Maybe if they took enough time to learn about us, they'd see that we have morals too.

Don't be so hasty!

They only polled about 20,000 people. There are more than 20,000 people in the U.S.

To make a generalization on such a small amount of people is foolish.

 

[Orson Welles]

Sanguvixen

Blasphemize

After reading that, I feel like an outcast. I knew Atheists were hated by many, but I didn't know that we were hated by nearly half of the United States. Now I know how homosexuals feel when people are protesting against them, some of those ignorant remarks made me clench my fists and punch the nearest inanimate object. Maybe if they took enough time to learn about us, they'd see that we have morals too.

Don't be so hasty!

They only polled about 20,000 people. There are more than 20,000 people in the U.S.

To make a generalization on such a small amount of people is foolish.

It was only 20, 000 people? Oh, okay. I was thinking that more people voted in that poll. Just to let everyone know, I was also getting pissed because I was in a particulary pissy mood when I read this. sweatdrop  

[caustic 0_0]

Sanguvixen

Blasphemize

After reading that, I feel like an outcast. I knew Atheists were hated by many, but I didn't know that we were hated by nearly half of the United States. Now I know how homosexuals feel when people are protesting against them, some of those ignorant remarks made me clench my fists and punch the nearest inanimate object. Maybe if they took enough time to learn about us, they'd see that we have morals too.

Don't be so hasty!

They only polled about 20,000 people. There are more than 20,000 people in the U.S.

To make a generalization on such a small amount of people is foolish.

That's not relevant at all in statistics. You'd have to look at the methods they used for conducting the poll before declaring it invalid but with randomization and a good way of getting subjects without bias, 'only' 2000 people wouldn't be a problem.

Edit- And about what Blasphemize said, I wouldn't worry about it and start preoccupying over that and assuming people don't like you/think less of you/whatever. Just go by your own experiences with individuals, because if you don't want them assuming anything about you, you can't be assuming negative things about others either.
I haven't had any problems and everyone's treated me the same regardless.  

[DivideByZero14]

caustic is right; 20,000 is a significant sample. I think that their conclusions are far from baseless.  

[Sanguvixen]

DivideByZero14

caustic is right; 20,000 is a significant sample. I think that their conclusions are far from baseless.

Hmmm...personally 20,000 people polled is not enough for me. it is not enough in my eyes to say "Most people in America disprove of Athiests the most"...for that is a logic fallacy. It is a statistical fallacy, and it is jumping to conclusions.

If there were 200,000...I might think differently. In my eyes though, 20,000 is not a lot of people, and not enough.

 

[caustic 0_0]

Sanguvixen

DivideByZero14

caustic is right; 20,000 is a significant sample. I think that their conclusions are far from baseless.

Hmmm...personally 20,000 people polled is not enough for me. it is not enough in my eyes to say "Most people in America disprove of Athiests the most"...for that is a logic fallacy. It is a statistical fallacy, and it is jumping to conclusions.

If there were 200,000...I might think differently. In my eyes though, 20,000 is not a lot of people, and not enough.

Again, that's not how statistics work. A properly chosen random sample of 20,000 can be more accurate than any badly chosen sample of 200,000.
You can't say it's jumping to conclusions and a fallacy until you look at how they got their data and did their statisical analysis.

Taken from the Federal census pdf-> (yeah, I was dorky enough to go look this up xD But it's really interesting. I'll probably make a topic on it later.)
"The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001 was based on a
random digit-dialed telephone survey of 50,281 American residential households in the continental U.S.A (48 states)."
Actually, if we wanna get picky, there is bias in their sampling. Only people with home telephones in the continental 48 states are sampled, but they tell you that. And it's really hard to eliminate all bias.
Statistically, you really can get accurate results with what you are considering a small sample. It's all about randomization.

http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html#religions
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/aris_index.htm
I couldn't find anything more specific about their methods than this->
"Nevertheless, the range of error will not be very large even in these cases. The sampling error in the survey is 0.5% for the overall sample of 50,000 and 1% for the sub-sample of 17,000.

Another way to express the power of the results is to look at confidence intervals within religious groups. At the 95% confidence level (i.e. that results will fall within the stated range in 95 samples out of 100 sample drawn from the population) the percentage of adult Catholics who are women is 54% +/- 0.5% -- namely between 53.5% - 54.5%. "

a good article about random sampling- http://www.custominsight.com/articles/random-sampling.asp  

[Uchihas Blood]

If someone said anything like that to my face, I would be forced to punch them. There are some cases here I wouldn't, like when I was surrounded by christians and someone said something like that to me, but I have a good memory.