God is in her heaven....

LockeProposal is back with us....

Lively discussion on v/historyanecdotes.....

The NFL play-off picture is set.....

I think Voltaire would approve of the fact that I took a moment to acknowledge my contentment.

Why yes this is a drunken shit post but cheers to all.

Fun fact: He recanted and accepted the Lord on his death bed.

Sauce? Everything I've seen says that's disputed at best.

You also get an increase in people believing in crystal power, homeopathy and other new age nonsense.

I think it's approaching your bedtime.

It's almost like the exteremes of any given situation are usually shit. That's why im agnostic so i can feel superior to everyone else.

Had Voltaire not made this statement would his prediction have come true?

I don't deny his claimed deist persuasion, but from his continuous assault on the church... and how nearly all of his adversaries claimed he was an atheist... and how in all of his writings he sounds like a snarky redditor got into a time machine.... It's easy to read between the lines, Voltaire was a hat-tippin' atheist who deserved the guillotine.

Deists criticized the church because deism is opposed to organized religion.

that's because he wasn't a Christian, openly attacked the church, and was one of leading figures that lead to THE most tragic and devastating events to ever occur in western civilization - the French Revolution.

The French Revolution was a failure, but that wasn't Voltaire's fault. It wasn't his fault that the peasants were starved to the point that they offed every aristocrat they could get their hands on. His criticisms of the aristocracy and the church were fundamentally true.

Did you even read your own link?

He wrote a letter shortly before his actual death saying "I die adoring God". His atheist and homosexual friends would've done anything to prevent their own movement from being subverted.

Again, few people were atheists. The majority of enlightenment-era humanists were deists. They believed in an impersonal creator who set the universe into motion. Why don't you actually read Voltaire's writings? He makes his beliefs quite clear. He was never an atheist.

Then why recant to a Catholic Priest? or have one there to begin with?

From what I understand, some one in his family invited a priest to give him his last rights. The fact that he was denied a Christian burial indicates that he did not in fact recant to the priest.

It's not the belief in "no creator" that has a permanent vacuum state. It's people who decide there is nothing out there worth believing in. They call it atheism but it's really nihilism.

I wouldn't go that far. Most atheists are not sociopaths and value human life, they just don't have an objective anchor point to give that belief veracity; it's just the evolutionary byproduct instilled in us all to keep us from murdering each other and ending our collective gene pool within a generation or two.

Full disclosure, I'm a theist.

Voltaire did not recant on his death bed. That's a fundie myth. He remained a deist.

You're not totally wrong. Human beings are for the most part innately religious, and will substitute one god for another. Atheists in power tend to go for Communism and the attendant cult of personality required to maintain it. Or on the one hand they want to believe that man is nothing more than relatively advanced evolved form of apes but on the other hand want to maintain that human life has intrinsic worth. We can't seem to get away from the notion of the transcendent, as much as atheists want to.

Too bad it's not true. However, less people are religious now and it only gets better with education.

Yeah he looks like a Liberal Arts student.

I wonder how it will be in another 100 years though. It will certainly be an adventure to see the next 100 years in my life time.