God is fraud? 3/12 UCC debate (Michael Nugent - Atheist Ireland - speaking for motion)

Michael Nugent, writer & Chairperson of the newly founded Atheist Ireland.

Activism:
In 2002 he helped to prevent the Football Association of Ireland from selling broadcast rights for international matches to Sky television, but failed in an attempt to create a representative body for Irish football fans. [11]

In 2000 he helped to prevent the Irish government from appointing a disgraced former judge to the European Investment Bank. [12] [13] [14]

In the 1980s and 1990s he campaigned against IRA and loyalist violence, co-founding the New Consensus and Peace Train groups with his partner Anne Holliday and others. [15] In 1996 he won a libel action against the Irish author Tim Pat Coogan, who had wrongly linked the founders of New Consensus with terrorism. [16]

In the late 1980s he was spokesperson for a campaign against the conviction of two Tallaght youths who were later pardoned. [17] He has also been active in liberal campaigns against the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on Irish society, and an internet-based campaign to save one of the childhood homes of James Joyce. [18
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Writer

■Thats Ireland and Bionic Bohs (two blogs), 2007
■I, Keano, a comedy musical play with Arthur Mathews and Paul Woodfull, 2005 http://www.ikeano.com/ikeano/
■Absurdly Yours The Michael Nugent Letters, 2004 http://www.blackwaterpress.ie/title_detail.php?bookid=10
■Thats Ireland A Miscellany, with Damian Corless, 2003 http://thatsireland.com/ http://www.amazon.com/Ireland-Damian-Corless-Michael-Nugent/dp/1841316334/ref...
■Ireland on the Internet The Definitive Guide, 1995
■Dear Me The Diary of John Mackay, 1994
■Dear John The John Mackay Letters, with Sam Smyth, 1993 http://www.iol.ie/nugent/dear-john/index.html
■Majority Ethos, prank newsletter with Arthur Mathews, 1991
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Websites:
http://www.michaelnugent.com/
http://thatsireland.com/
http://www.atheist.ie/
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God Is Fraud
The following is the contribution by Michael Nugent to a debate at the Philosophical Society of University College Cork, on Monday 23rd of February, in support of the motion that God is Fraud.

Thank you for inviting me, and it is a pleasure to be here. I am going to suggest this evening that the ideas of God as an intervening personal supernatural being, and God as a moral guide and lawgiver, are both false. And I am going to suggest that the ideas of God as a personal commitment to unconditional love and goodness, and God as an impersonal force, are separate ideas that need to be disentangled from the first two false ideas.

God as a supernatural being

Lets start with the false idea of God as an intervening supernatural being.

Im including in this all of the supernatural claims attributed to God, from creating the world out of nothing, to impregnating a virgin in order to give birth to himself, to answering or ignoring millions of prayers every day, to turning pieces of bread and volumes of wine into his own body and blood every time a validly ordained priest of the human species on the planet Earth chooses to pronounce a certain set of words.

This type of thinking exists in the same intellectual realm as magic and superstition and witchcraft and sorcery. Last year the Pope announced a special promotional offer: if you visited Lourdes during 2008, you would get a free plenary indulgence which would give you early release from a place called Purgatory after you die, and this would get you to a place called Heaven faster.

In any other field, making claims like this, particularly claims aimed at sick and vulnerable people, would be clearly seen as fraudulent. And I suggest that we should apply the same criteria to fraudulent claims about Gods.

God as a moral guide

Now lets look at the second false idea, which is that of God as a moral guide

Wherever we get our morality, we do not get it from books like the Bible and the Koran, regardless of whether we read these books literally or metaphorically

Heres what happens what we read these books. When we see passages telling us that it is good to love your neighbour as yourself, and to be kind and forgiving to each other, or we read the story of the good Samaritan, we say: yes, those are morally good ideas.

When we see passages telling us that it is good to stone a man to death for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, or to stone a woman to death for not being a virgin on her wedding night, or to kill Babylonian infants by dashing them against rocks, we say: no, those are morally bad ideas - http://blog.atheist.ie/?p=46

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Michael
• Nugent
• Atheist
• Ireland
• UCC
• Philosophical
• Society
• Lourdes
• Purgatory
• Heaven
• Pope

[AtheistIreland]

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[michaeldsmith2013]

@gta747 No, I was not meaning that naming a person Michael would make him religious. I was simply pointing out the etymology of the word Michael, that the name in itself points to God. And clearly I don't have a third grade intelligence. I'm not superstitious about names at all.

[michaeldsmith2013]

@MyJibJib Actually, I have opened my mind to intelligence and not just blind belief. Actually studying is my profession right now. One thing I study is etymology, so I was pointing out the etymology of the name Michael, which points to God in itself.

[michaeldsmith2013]

@AtheistIreland I'm talking about the pure etymology of the word "Michael." That's all I'm pointing out. I'm saying that the name in itself points to God.

[jjclassjj]

really informative and interesting

[simysimss]

love the video man

[irlsarge]

Atheist 4 life :)

[sprinkle888]

Dr. Witaker was an theist but he found Jesus Christ here his testimony.........On youtube type in (Hell Testimony Dr Donald Whitaker)......Jesus Christ is the only way one can be saved, Oprah Winfrey said there are many way; wrong! only one way.  Romans 10:9...Read and accept Jesus Christ time is running out.

[O2streaming]

We do not know if God is fraud; but we do know that the cultural notions of God are certainly fraud- Since no one has met the creator of the Universe (God). God does not write books, but people do write books about God- And people write from a very limited understanding of the Universe and the world, via their culture and their time & place in history. So the view of God from any one people, one culture or from any point in human history, could never be a definitive view of any God in existence.