{"id":197,"date":"2008-03-18T16:56:07","date_gmt":"2008-03-18T20:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/blog\/?p=197"},"modified":"2008-04-28T15:31:30","modified_gmt":"2008-04-28T19:31:30","slug":"only-atheists-can-digg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/?p=197","title":{"rendered":"Only Atheists Can Digg"},"content":{"rendered":"

People on Digg make me so angry sometimes. There’s an article on the front page today that says “Believers are happier than atheists”<\/a>. All the top comments are along the lines of this:<\/p>\n

Well of course they are, they live in a dream world. Its GOT to be nicer than the real one :)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m sorry, I must have missed that study that proved God doesn’t exist and all religions are wrong. I don’t understand these people. What is so wrong with believing in something? Sure, you can’t prove God exists, but you can’t prove the opposite either! Everyone has to take their best guess. Is it so wrong to be optimistic and believe that bad things happen for a reason, that there is greater meaning to life, that we exist in some form beyond death? Does it hurt anyone? Even if it’s not true, which we don’t know, is it so wrong to believe in something if it makes you happy?<\/p>\n

Religions are harmful when wars are fought over them, when people kill for their beliefs. When someone is discriminated against, or they feel like they’re a bad person for doing something that isn’t really wrong. Religions may do more harm than good sometimes, but they really do a lot of good too.<\/p>\n

They give people a community, they give comfort, they help those who can’t help themselves. I’m not a religious person, and I don’t agree with most religious concepts, but it really bugs me when people call anyone with any religious beliefs ignorant, naive or stupid. How can you criticize people for not being open minded, for pushing their beliefs on other people, when you’re doing the same to them?<\/p>\n

If someone wants to believe that there are little invisible fairies flying around throwing pixie dust on things to make them move, I say, hey, let them believe whatever they want. I can’t prove there are no fairies, so who am I to judge. Is any one belief really better than another?<\/p>\n

–edit– And I made a small update to the site. The top commenter sidebar plugin was really stupid in that it grouped the commenters by name instead of url, so the right name would show up with the wrong URL. It’s fixed now. Took me about 2 minutes. How can you write a semi-complicated plugin but do something stupid like that. I don’t get it. –\/edit–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People on Digg make me so angry sometimes. There’s an article on the front page today that says “Believers are happier than atheists”. All the top comments are along the lines of this: Well of course they are, they live in a dream world. Its GOT to be nicer than the real one :) I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8bQP0-3b","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/silvercpu.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}