Of All the Places an Atheist Display Would Be Vandalized, This One Caught Me By Surprise…

The terrorists of knowledge acting like the devil they believe in. They solve problems with sky gods and spaghetti monsters.

Old people lose their inhibitions.. Things that somewhat younger people think, the old people just do.

Do we know it was seniors who did it? Maybe some local roving gangs of Christian thugs did it.

From my frequent trips to a Senior Center (I have family that I visit), it would seem that the older and more bitter a lot of the folks get, the more Holier-than-thou they become. I cannot even begin to imagine the reasons they have for their constant condemnations and contempt for others.

I cannot even begin to imagine the reasons they have for their constant condemnations and contempt for others.

Fear, resentment, boredom, and regret.

Indeed. Perhaps we all should get the hell off their lawn.

This was four years ago. I’m sure those charitable christians have seen the error of their ways, and wouldn’t dream of doing something like this again. Right?

How do you know it wasn’t some kids?

You don’t hang out with many old folks, do you? Three words—Fox. Geezer. Syndrome.

A roving gang of christian senior thugs!

I am calling youth vandalism.

LOL Old people are the most entrenched in religion. They’ve already got one foot on the path the heaven, dontcha know. They have to make sure they stay there.

I can hear ’em now. Get that damn tree off my lawn!!!!

Not always true. My mother was 90 when she gave up religion for logical, thought out reasons. She’s a happy atheist at 92 and counting. (But then, she’s always been awesome.)

No, the article was published yesterday. It’s just the graphic Hemant uses that was 4 years ago. Not the tree we’re talking about here.

Could’ve been staff.

Wow. Just … wow. My irony meter just spontaneously combusted reading this comment.

I kinda got what you’re saying, but the condescending snide blurs it greatly.

Yes, if we, Christians, believe we are right, we should show that we are not afraid of other beliefs, or lack thereof. Let us meet each other on the field of battle of ideas, and let the better idea win.

But tearing down harmless atheist displays is the real show of an intellectually feeble bully.

Oh duh…. silly me

Wow, Hemant. This one hits close to home! About 5 minutes from my house (and home to a number of friends), Rossmoor is a residential enclave on the Orange County/Los Angles County border. It’s traditionally very conservative, lots of older folks and families with children. The schools there are outstanding (my daughter goes to one of them!) but one gets the sense that liberalism is pretty rare around those parts. I’m sure it wasn’t the seniors who vandalized the tree, but neighborhood youth whose parents had groused about it. I have to say, though, I’m impressed that Rossmoor has an Atheist and Agnostic Club at all. Looks like I’ve got a new club to join… 🙂

a few years ago a documentary about life in a senior center concluded that it was like going back to junior high school (middle school). it’s a myth that age brings wisdom.

This makes me even sadder than other forms of vandalism I’ve seen. You’d think seniors would know how to behave themselves.

OR adults so close to death that they desperately cling to any hope of surviving it. OR nurses and orderlies who think if themselves as God’s angels on earth.

I don’t know, apparently willful stupidity knows no age limit.

Aww, this one makes me smile. Those seniors were once those damn kids themselves. I love the idea of octogenarians kicking the shit outa a tree to some gangsta music, then shuffling back to their rooms to turn up their TVs too loud and fall back to sleep. Who says you’re only young once?

It doesn’t have to be the seniors of course, but it is a senior center and not a high school. Who’s more likely to be present for the act? It’s a little ageist to assume adolescents are the only ones capable of destruction. Also, it’s a senior center, not a nursing home. Plenty of people over 60 are physically capable of knocking stuff over. And if you talk to enough people on the the birth to death spectrum, you’ll find most adults will say they don’t feel any older in their minds than their mid-twenties.

It could have been someone from among the non-senior-citizen visitors to the center, or employees.

Seniors are the worst. They’ve spent their whole lives fixed in their ways, and for these seniors it was fixed in the ways of vandalism and hate for free speech. Why would they change now that they’re old? If anything, they get worse because they may have conditions limiting oxygenation, dementia or delirium caused by illness (delirium can set in very quickly in the elderly).

It was Hell’s Grannies!

Better to invest in shaping the minds of the young, rather than those who have spent a life rejecting reason.

Old people being the most mature? Not in america

Um, actually quite a lot of Christian displays have targeted messages against non believers of all stripes, be they atheists or members of other religions, as well as political stances.

Yes, atheism is nothing but bullying and intimidation. Which is why all atheists indulge in the vicious fiction that everyone who disagrees with them will be tortured forever.

Grow up.

WTF! That is retirement community is maybe 2 miles from my house. This is a very progressive community… So I thought!

One of the problems that seniors face is dementia, which affects people in a variety of ways.

just as there are happy drunks and mean drunks, there are dementia patients who have lost their self control.

If it was a patient, the patient may not even remember doing this.

.

By limited I mean open to types of evidence that fit a certain assumption about the universe. It doesn’t have to be a book or authority. It can be the simple observance of intelligibility in the universe. If I took you into a auto factory where various machines were creating vehicles and I told you that there is no mind behind the machines because the mind is not in the building you’d think I’m an idiot. So if we find a factory even more complex and immense, say…I don’t know, every cell in your body the idiot table somehow gets turned? This is why atheism is delusional. You want the architect to be in the wall of the house. And don’t give me that chance of the gap crap or multiverse of the gap crap or aliens in the gap crap or someday we’ll find out in the gap crap either. Just admit that you base your thinking on a different premise, a postulate – a faith in things hoped for. A certain hope that the universe is designed without a designer – that we live in a program without a programmer and that Jesus was hopefully not an avatar.

Thing is, there are some very obvious differences between car factory machines and cells. Firstly, we have good examples of people designing and building car-manufacturing devices, and any other human-designed artifacts we care to name. We have no well-documented examples of any beings designing and building living cells

(unless you count the recently-discovered technique of creating an artificial genome inside a host-cell, which is not quite the same thing).

Second, no human-designed machines can replicate themselves indefinitely. A human artifact is, more-or-less by definition, a thing which must be individually manufactured by its designer directly, or by other machines produced by its designer. Whereas living things just go on replicating themselves without any intelligence necessarily required.

Third, human artifacts are generally for something – they are designed with a purpose in mind. A car is designed to transport people along a road, a food can is designed to preserve food etc – in each case, there will be some function that some humans find valuable that accounts for why people make that artifact. But you cannot say the same thing about living things. What is a lion for? What, for that matter, an antelope? An ichneumon wasp? A cactus plant? The malaria parasite?

If you think about it, none of those living things have any discernible ultimate purpose imposed from above by someone that might have wanted to make them – about the best you can do is to say that the purpose of a cactus plant is to make more cactus plants etc.

Now, none of this proves that they weren’t designed by a god, of course, but my point is that your analogy is a clumsy fit – sure, human artifacts and living things may share the feature of complexity, but that doesn’t mean that they must also share the feature of having been consciously designed and built. This would be true only if it could be demonstrated that complexity could only arise as a result of conscious design, and no other means could possibly explain it.

This is firstly not true – we have some pretty solid explanations of how complexity can arise in the absence of conscious design (you may not like the implications of evolution by natural selection, but you have to admit that it describes a mechanism by which complexity can arise in the absence of conscious design), and secondly, it would apply just as strongly to anything capable of designing a thing capable of designing things – no theist has ever demonstrated a convincing mechanism by which the existence of a god can be explained. Any attempt to claim that a cell needs to have a conscious designer but a god capable of designing a cell does not need a conscious designer (maybe we can call it a ‘meta-god’) rests at some level on some form of special pleading; some attempt to have it both ways.

So, unless and until someone can demonstrate that
a) living cells cannot have arisen as a result of unconscious natural selection but need to have been consciously designed, and b) come up with a plausible hypothesis for how such an intelligent designer could have arisen in the first place, then you have no basis for claiming superiority over those who simply follow the best currently available evidence where it leads. Your designer doesn’t need to be ‘in the wall of the house’ – but you do need to be able to demonstrate that it must exist, and a flawed analogy with a car factory doesn’t do that, I’m afraid.

And no, I don’t have a ‘certain hope’ that we live in a universe without a designer – again, all I am saying is that as far as we can tell the universe doesn’t have a designer, so until someone can demonstrate that it does, the only honest position is to provisionally reject the design hypothesis unless and until good evidence becomes available.

Atheism has to bully in order to assert itself.

Just look at the way science has to defend itself against Creationists pushing anti-science as science.

Atheists are just pushing back when there are religious attacks on rationality.

Evolution is science that is continually refined, but it is a fact.

Creationism is the name for the many different types of alternatives to evolution used for the various anti-science claims in defense of Biblical science.

Creationism is still popular with a large portion of religious people.

Heliocentrism is science that is continually refined, but it is a fact.

Geocentrism is the name for the alternative to heliocentrism used for the various anti-science claims in defense of Biblical science.

Geocentrism is not as popular because it is much more difficult to pretend that the Earth does not move.

..

Nope. We don’t _want_ the architect to be the wall of the house. We don’t _want_ the answer to be anything in particular, we just try to understand. What Christians do that atheists do not is to pretend they know the architect.

Your argument is an argument for deism, not for the gods of the Bible (i.e. Elyah (the most high god) and one of his sons, Yahweh (“the LORD” or “Jehovah”)).

Interesting how you attack the analogy through
self-replication. You demonstrate that cellular/molecular machinery is more sophisticated than anything that human intelligence make so far. In that way it is a bad analogy but it hardly supports your argument – it simply demands a higher level of intelligence. I also don’t need documentation to tell me that someone built something. I see a mark of intelligibility and I can assume that intelligence is behind it. If I see some scratches on a tree or a single carved letter on a rock I can assume that something intelligent put there – although there is a remote chance that I could be wrong.

Human artifacts are for something? If you see a lack of purpose in things it might be an issue of perspective. People with aspergers have this issue and there are studies that suggest that atheist psychology leans that way.

Why would a convincing mechanism need to be used to explain a creator? In order to do such a thing you’d have to relegate the creator to be just another object in the universe. The creator, by definition, cannot be contingent on anything in this universe. You’re mixing categories. It’s like asking me to prove the existence of Ford through the mechanics of my car engine – that demands another category. The same thing can be said of purpose. Engine mechanics isn’t going to tell me the purpose of why the car was designed (to make money).This is one of the fundamental flaws of atheistic argumentation. You mix categories in order to make a point. Natural selection, while it has some explanatory power is inadequate on a number of levels and it does not provide answers for the framework in which it functions. Again, the mechanics of something can only tell you so much.

Now one nice thing about mechanisms is that it can cause you to look for the mechanic and for the purpose. You’d need something akin to a manual. Christians call that the Bible.

I didn’t make assumptions or a prediction so it can’t be a “major fail”. I in fact wrote, “I’m missing something”. None of the info you just provided was in the article.

My wife works in a senior center and both she and I are old enough to move into this Rossmoor senior center. The people in her senior center are mostly in wheel chairs, and lots of them are senile. We don’t think of ourselves as “old people” who need the care of a senior center. Heck, I have friends who are retired in their late 60s who are not in a senior center. One of our friends and neighbors just entered a rest home but she’s only because she was too frail to be by herself any more.

Nor do we segregate based on age. My friends run from young kids, to kids in their twenties, parents in their thirties, to seniors. I thought the article was about some place people go to be cared for. I had no idea that there was a market demand for people my age to segregate themselves from the community based on age. I’m not sure why anyone would do this.

I learned at a very young age that news stories tend to be highly inaccurate, so I tend to be skeptical of them even when they actually contain claims. This article had about as close to zero information as is possible. I don’t think asking for more info before jumping to conclusions is a major fail.

You misinterpreted my comment. You assumed all sorts of inaccurate information about me. You didn’t take into account that things may be done different in different places. Do you think you are a major fail?

Fair enough. A Senior Center is a place that’s open during the day and offers activities, like dance, yoga, and other exercise classes. They often have a cafe and offer other social activities. Most advertise that their services are encouraged for those 60 and over. They are not live-in facilities with nursing staff.

What age is one considered a senior citizen? That depends on who you ask. Some places offer a “senior discount” as young as 50 or 55. Others say 60 or 62. Of course, old is a relative term. I’ve known many people over 70 who say they feel plenty young. In 20 years, you may not feel up to being referred to as old either.