Easter, Materialism and Atheism

Found an interesting article just now, less than three months old, in a place I didn’t expect:

How Easter and Christianity undermine atheism
By Anthony DeStefano
4/26/2011 3:09 PM

This Easter it seems that atheists have a lot to rejoice about. According to the latest data in the American Religious Identification Survey, the number of self-proclaimed atheists in America has nearly doubled since 2001 — from 900,000 to 1.6 million.

In a nation that once prided itself on its Judeo-Christian heritage, one out of every five Americans now claims no religious identity whatsoever; and the number of self-proclaimed Christians has declined by a whopping 15%.

Yes, those who believe in nothing seem to be winning more and more converts every year.

The superstition of atheism

Of course, it’s not quite fair to say that atheists believe in nothing. They do believe in something — the philosophical theory known as Materialism, which states that the only thing that exists is matter; that all substances and all phenomena in the universe are purely physical.

The problem is that this really isn’t a theory at all. It’s a superstition; a myth that basically says that everything in life — our thoughts, our emotions, our hopes, our ambitions, our passions, our memories, our philosophies, our politics, our beliefs in God and salvation and damnation — that all of this is merely the result of biochemical reactions and the movement of molecules in our brain.

What nonsense. – More here

I remembered a few minutes before posting this article, that I had discovered an evidence that God is not a being that needed to be created. It was an evidence I had discovered about a week ago. Maybe I’ll talk about it later.

Related Information:

Scientific contradictions in materialism (alternate post here.

Materialism of the Gaps

Information on Tesla and Thomas Edison Updated

I finally updated the article on Tesla and Edison and changed the title seeing that I was wrong to say Edison was an atheist was wrong (I shouldn’t have assumed). I also found out some information very damaging to atheism about Edison and about Blavatsky which is damaging to the more modern neo-pagan movement.

Missing Scripture Found?: Dead Sea Tablet Indicates Christianity Was the Original Religion of the Jews

Dead Sea tablet suggests Jewish resurrection imagery pre-dates Jesus

by Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Correspondent
7/7/2008

The premise that the Messiah died and was resurrected after three days is considered the foundation of the Christian faith, one which differentiates it from Judaism. Through the generations, this belief stood at the center of the debate between Christians and Jews. But now, a mysterious tablet from the time of the second temple has led researchers to believe that this premise of messianic resurrection is not unique to Christianity, but rather existed in Judaism years before Jesus was born.

The tablet, which has been dubbed “Gabriel’s vision” because much of its text deals with a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, was discovered eight years ago, but a large part of it is illegible and researchers have had difficulty interpreting its meaning.

Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has offered a new interpretation of this text recently, which has sparked interest in the Christian realm. Knohl’s interpretation could shed light on the history of Jesus and the way Christianity grew out of Judaism.
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“Gabriel’s vision,” a previously unknown prophetic text written in the first century B.C.E., was written on a large gray limestone tablet. In the center of the text, which includes quotes from the Bible and prophetic verses, there is an image of the angel Gabriel. The tablet was not discovered in an organized archaeological excavation, therefore the location of its discovery is not clear. Some believe it was found in Jordan on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea.

The New York Times reported recently that the tablet was bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published in the coming months. – Source. More information