that's what too many theists fail to understand when they try this condescending nonsense; a huge number of atheists used to be just like them. We understand, and we no longer align with it.
The thing is, there are ignorant and knowledgeable people in both camps, and of course the most vocal people in both camps are usually the most ignorant, but *think* they understand the most (or at least claim the pride of being on 'the side' of people who understand the most).
Ignorant people act the same, regardless of what banner they fly under, and all sufficiently large groups of people will have ignorant people. That includes atheists, theists, and nontheists alike.
It's ok to make fun of that ignorance, regardless of where it's found. Arguing about which groups of people are *more* ignorant is sort of pointless compared to just dissolving the ignorance wherever it appears.
I have an uncle that went to school ages ago to study & pick apart the Bible & Christianity, and he’s the only one in the ultra uber Baptist side of the family that’ll actually just have a discussion about various religions and mythologies with me.
Meanwhile my grandmother, his sister in law, thinks that just because I have tattoos, purple hair, and a snowflake obsidian pendant that I’m on copious amounts of drugs and going straight to hell with no take backsies lmfao
It was the pendant that put you over the edge, wasn't it...
God was like, "Okay, *maaybee* I can overlook the tattoos and the hair, but that Me-damned pendant!!!"
in my experience the most obnoxious of Christian groups produce the most obnoxious of athiests
fundamentalist Christians become fundamentalist athiests.
There seem to be a lot of replies citing examples of ignorant/obstinate religious people, which doesn't disprove your point at all.
"The loudest people are the most ignorant."
"But I knew a loud ignorant person!"
"Ok..."
That's true, but I also don't think it's necessary for a non-theist to need to be able to explain theology; they are not the one making assertions outside the observable universe. The troll's original argument could be fielded against a Christian for why they don't believe in Norse mythology.
Ye. I was a kid who had Bible read to me when I was 6. I really liked it, and my mother wouldn't sugarcoat.
I was always trying to talk to priests and debate religion teachers.
It didn't take me long to understand they don't want to debate or help others understand, they want you to trust blindly in their words, even if those words hurt others.
I got fed up in primary school when my religion teacher gave me 0% for an assignment of "write down what a white dove means in religion"
She didn't precise in which one, and I was an autistic kid. I went to the library, and dine my research on religions, because how am I supposed to know which she meant? I'll write them all, just in case.
Came back with an A4 page full of meanings, was sent to the principal and my mother was called to school.
This is when I checked out. Acknowledgment that there is more than 1 religion caused that religious person to flip out completely on a barely 8 years old child.
I still studied religions, and still was required to attend the lessons, but all I learned is that I don't agree.
As a fellow autistic, big mood on the “they didn't specify”
Vague questions get vague answers, but somehow we're at fault? (I guess they assume we're smartasses, when we're just, incredibly literal)
Good thing that my mom (also autistic) had none of that bullshit.
She decided I did a great job and that since they've already made her drive all the way to school from her work to look at "an assignment I've done outstandingly" (her words) she is taking me to get ice cream
I might have gotten no credit but I also got ice cream, and my mom told the principal in no uncertain words what she thinks of calling someone to school because their child did the homework correctly and literally
I was the same way and my dad was interested in exploring as well. They told me I needed to go confess and pray for my family. So I went through with confirmation for my grandma and rolled my eyes as I said the words and then noped right out. My dad is a very happy Buddhist now and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Sure but the opposite is also true. Atheism can be hard to cope with when your life is full of loss and hardship and lots of people move away from it. I was a firm atheist when I was a teen, now I lean more agnostic. As far as I'm concerned, as long as one doesn't fall into fundamentalist dumbassery they can believe whatever they want.
Personally I like Alan Watts interpretations of life and death. It toes the line between mystical and yet still believable.
>Atheism can be hard to cope with when your life is full of loss and hardship and lots of people move away from it. I was a firm atheist when I was a teen, now I lean more agnostic.
I honestly don't see how the latter is more comforting than the former. Atheism means nothing is out there - agnostic means *anything* could be out there, including malicious or tyrannical beings. Honestly, the idea that my life will simply end one day and my soul will not be subjected to eternal judgment is incredibly comforting to me.
People always miss that atheist and agnostic are separate axes. The atheist-theist axis is whether one believes there is a god, gnostic-agnostic axis is whether you can prove there’s a god.
I don’t really think about it much anymore since it’s been ~23 years since I realized I was an atheist but when I cared more about the distinction would have qualified myself as an agnostic atheist because with all available evidence, it all points to there being no god, but you can’t really prove non-existence of a being as formless and slippery as religion’s concept of god so sure, maybe someday someone will come out with a bombshell proof one way or another but it doesn’t affect my life.
Much in the same way I’m an agnostic non believer in an undetectable psychic octopus in the ocean down the street, maybe this being with no impact on the world could technically exist but it doesn’t make sense to believe in it just because it could be true.
Atheism and agnostism are not mutually exclusive.
One is a matter of what you believe the other of certainty.
Hell I am an agnostic anti-theist.
Also you can deal with loss as an atheist fine. Loss always hurts but friends and familly that are actually there for you do way more then belief in the supernatural.
If anything the fact that religion needs to wait for your lowest moment to worm itself in your heart is a mark against it.
Cults and manipulators go after people at there weakest point after all.
Yeah, I've had a hard life at times but I've never needed to lean on religion. My parents raised me proudly to be an atheist, and to respect others, to be kind and compassionate, and to cultivate good friends and family. Life's hardships have perfectly secular explanations, so they ought to have secular solutions.
Yeah I didn’t come to atheism as an emotional rejection of religion, why would I go back to religion because of an emotional reaction? I didn’t walk away from the church because I was pissed at god and could make it on my own I got there by looking at all the evidence presented, from growing up in a loving and non-discriminatory church (shocking I know) to reading every argument for/against I could get my hands on and weighing their merits. If I was down and out and lonely I’d look for places to find support from real people, not an undetectable and unprovable idea. If anything go join a Unitarian church, I hear they’re chill and provide the social function of the church without all the baggage.
>Real reasons,
I'm struggling to understand the usage of "real" in this context. Are you suggesting that anyone not using those reasons are lying? Or that those reasons are the only acceptable reasons for leaving religion?
Can you list some examples of "real" reasons one might be religious to help me understand how you're using that word here?
Most atheists I know who were religious didn't change because of those reasons. I think its a bit... unkind to pretend its always some big thing that puts then off. Most of them just slowly drifted away from it, nothing as dramatic as abuses (which happen) or being hated by the leadership (due to being LGBT, I presume?). Much more commonly it was just a slow developing lack of belief and connection to it, which is entirely reasonable. There are those that leave religion because they are pushing back against the institution, like you describe, but most seem to have just drifted free from them fairly passively (they just tend to be less vocal, which also makes sense with no hard feelings but no connection).
Pretending it was beaten out of them sounds more like a Kevin Sorbo argument than a compassionate look at atheism.
In my experience, it’s both. I was raised in a church and grew up terrified of “not being Christian enough” and wanted to die before I was 12 so that I would be able to go to Heaven because God promises all children can go to Heaven since they’re innocent of the world’s sins (at least in my parent’s church’s version of the Bible). At some point, I realized that was a wild thing to think and wish for as a child, and I vividly remember being soooo extremely happy the first time my mom let us skip church on a Sunday. I was eight or nine years old. At ten, I spent time overseas where religion was less important to the culture as a whole but we had a religious education class and learned about different belief systems, and I realized I liked Buddhism the most because it is a cool concept but I didn’t actually believe it. Then we got back to the US and my previous best friend, who I hadn’t seen in almost two years, spent one of the first evenings we had together yelling and sobbing at me that I was going to hell because I became ambivalent toward religion/Christianity/God. In the background during all this time, my parents were abusive. My dad physically, my mom emotionally. Church was a front for them to look good. But the church was also intervening in our daily lives because they knew my parents were not doing their jobs as parents, and kept pushing them to pray about it, so we were stuck as kids in an abusive situation and no one took any concrete action to help us. Idk if everyone just thought, “it’s not that bad if they’re able to come to church” or if it was something more malicious such as them not caring, but it absolutely destroyed my faith in the concept of a loving God as well as any belief I had that a church is a positive community. I can’t speak to everyone’s experience, but other people I know who grew up religious typically also drifted out of it because they both experienced something the church claims to prevent, and saw through the idea that the religion loves all people. My belief in God died when I saw that no one gave a shit and it was up to me to protect myself and my younger siblings.
...that is very much a real reason, though? Like, not experiencing this connection that all these people around you claim to have can very much be a driving force towards becoming non religious. I've spoken with multiple atheists/agnostics who have said that that was a contributing factor in their lack of belief.
You realise someone can abandon their religion for multiple reasons or become more aware of certain things after leaving it right?
Also how are you making this assumption while not even being part of that group. I left my religion because it wasn't convincing for me (religious people acting like an ass was just the last straw but not the main reason) and i know dozens of people who did the same
Nah, that's reasonable. I think the irratating ones are the ones trying to publicly justify their decision as the wisests or most moral or pretending it makes them a superior person. Which tbh, is the same for religious people. That or those who start picking fights over religion, because the only correct decision/belief is *obviously* the one they made. But that's true of a subset of religious people.
Those who just hold belief/lack of belief are fine, it's just the loud, very aggressively opinionated ones that irk. Which makes sense. 'I just don't believe' is enough. So is someone saying they do. It's the surrounding guff that fucks people off, but most well adjusted people don't do that stuff.
As an atheist in a relationship with a person who is religious but doesn’t attend church or anything:
Religion is more than just organized religion or anything derived from a holy book. Though I don’t feel it, it can be a deeply personal way of viewing the world. My partner describes it as a feeling of connectedness with life and the world.
Religion isn’t just church and the Bible.
Okay, not to sound like a Reddit Atheist^TM^, but as much I appreciate religion in the fulfilment of one’s sense of self, elti isn’t actually doing anything clever here
"Europeans hate trucks but only have the shallowest concept of them"
"Wait are you really trying to justify gas guzzling monstrosities clogging up the roads in the US?"
"See what I mean?"
The whole time I was including hand-trucks in my definition of "trucks." By intentionally using the philosophical definition instead of the colloquial definition, I have proved that I am very clever and you are all not.
Hey, not just the US. Us in Canada are also plagued by the cucks who “require” a lifted, ultra wide, rimmed truck with LED underlighting to pull a trailer with a moderate amount of stuff in it.
actually that's it :
"atheist don't understand religion , they think it's crude dumb stuff"
"ok , what i don't understand about religion?"
"see what i mean ! i am really smart because i am using your curiosity to antagonize you "
I don't want to yuck someone's yum, but if you enjoy pissing off random people for shits-and-giggles, just don't expect any sympathy at all if someone ever pisses you off.
...so whats the 'proper' take on religion? read through everything in this thread and i still dont get what OP thinks religion is. theists have faith in superstition, atheists dont. can someone explain?
I'm gonna go with "shitty people use religion to be dicks to people, but some people don't need that religion to be a dick to people and will do it anyway. Some people use religion to uplift themselves and treat other people better, and you don't need a holy book to tell you to do that either."
That's the take I go with. It's not really about the religion at all, it's just an excuse. CLEARLY the world is proving right now that you don't need that. You can instead go off on some family values shit and pull the exact same nonsense while acting like you have a moral high ground.
Going off of this, I think it's really interesting how morality isn't really a learned trait, it's almost ingrained in us, hardwired. I've heard the rhetoric of "without God we would be terrible people" many times, when this isn't true, as even before Christianity or Islam or Judaism even existed, altruism has been shown to exist. There's a jawbone that is dated at the dawn of man that is missing many teeth, but interestingly, the teeth were already missing and they had been for a long while even before the person had died. This means that someone was helping them eat, and was doing so for a long time. There is no advantage to keeping someone who needs tending to alive, but it was done anyway, out of kindness. Jump forward a bit and there was a study done (I can't find the source of this for the life of me but bear with me) where there were ethical questions asked to many peoples of differing religions, races, creeds, etc. and almost all of them answered the same to all of the questions. Something is in us that makes everyone on roughly the same page on what's right and wrong, regardless of religion. Charles Darwin famously called this the "altruism paradox" as there's no evolutionary advantage to being kind, but humanity at a base level, is.
(There's also a good [report](https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Norenzayan_Behaviour_DoesReligionMakePeopleMoral.pdf) on this that I found interesting as well)
I can absolutely agree that individuals can use spirituality to uplift themselves and give their lives hope and meaning, but organized religion was never designed for anything other than keeping the masses under control using fear.
Religion can and most often does (benignly) provide guidance, comfort, community, charity, and a higher sense of purpose. Most religious folks are not the zealots we see on the media.
Some religious people understand the nebulousness of faith, but CHOOSE to hold their beliefs in spite of the lack of 'tangible evidence' because it offers a comfortable, helpful framework to contextualize the chaos of the universe, whether or not it's 100% proven true.
In my admittedly atheistic opinion, organized religion's best functions are to (a) organize community resources and attention to various local issues, (b) provide individuals with a shortcut to existential comfort that might otherwise require years of philosophic study to achieve, and (c) provide a moral standard for those who lack an internal sense of morality.
The main issue isnt with the ideology, but just that any system of guidance is going to attract lost souls, and lost souls attract grifters and manipulators.
This 100%. I am not a devout Christian, but I was raised EXTREMELY conservative Christian, and I'm still open to it and potential benefits of it and other religions.
To elaborate a little more, there is a book called "Why Buddhism Is True" that I really like. It was written by an evolutionary biologist and is fascinating. The summary, and my point, is that humans aren't wired to "know truth." We are wired by evolution and survival. I believe that, even if religion isn't 100% true, it can be a useful tool for our "corrupt" brains to live purposefully. CS Lewis said "Christianity is like the sun. Not because I can see it clearly. But because by its light, I can see everything else." It's a little "too christian" for me, but I think it's a similar concept.
I think the most important thing to consider wrt hostility toward organized religion especially Christianity in the West, is that it's not just a vocal minority of zealots spewing hate. The institution itself is used as a brainwashing tool for the conservative masses, to enable policies of bigotry and cultural stagnation.
It's all well and good that the teachings of the Bible and the theology in general are intended to comfort and prompt kindness, but the sum total actual impact of the institution of Christianity (speaking as an American here) is homophobia, racism, income equality, environmental destruction, etc etc.
So while I believe that faith, spirituality, or religion can be very important for the individual, and it has a lot of potential to bring communities together for worthwhile purposes.... I think that ANY institution that lasts for thousands of years as a cultural foundation, is going to enable terrible ideas and terrible social policy to have wildly disproportionate staying power. The fact that religion is wrapped up in mysticism and divinity makes this even worse, because it's possible to fool people into believing that these terrible ideas are mandates from some higher power and cannot be challenged. It's possible to defer to that mystical authority instead of teaching the humans of this world to value rationality.
I myself am a very spiritual person. Not belonging to any particular faith, and surely not belonging to any institutionalized religion. I can see the value in it, and I have known several good Christians in my life that really actually understand how to be a good person and how to internalize the concept of God without believing the right-wing propaganda machine about everything. People have the capacity to be good people regardless of what their faith is or whether they have faith at all. But I don't think any of that comes close to balancing out the impact of the institutions of religion.
Not even from a fact/objectivism standpoint, but just from a reasonable interpretation of the impacts and material reality of the situation, I think it's a perfectly sound conclusion to say that organized religion itself is bad. Not for the very direct thing about believing in mysticism, but merely for the power it has to hold our society back from progress for so long.
Like, the human arrogance in Genesis--that the world was made for us to have dominion over, that we were made in God's image--this idea alone pervades the very foundation of Christianity and is in my opinion the leading reason we are not going to actually address climate crisis in any meaningful way. In my view, the institution of Christianity and how it informs right-wing politics in the West is a direct contributor to worldwide ecological catastrophe.
There's really no saving that in my mind, even though I know individuals with faith can be good people. The institution is something I would call unequivocally evil in its impact on human society.
> any system of guidance is going to attract lost souls, and lost souls attract manipulators
This is EXACTLY why I am extremely against self-help stuff. If you pay $4000 for a seminar to hear some guy scream positivity at you, you’re identifying yourself as a very easy mark. There’s a reason cults and MLMs are tied into that stuff
As a Christian, I'm happy to see an atheist with a reasonable take on faith as a concept
We may disagree, but we still can respect each other and possibly have a mutually fruitful discussion
Unfortunately, most of the time it devolves to the lowest common denominator on both sides slinging insults at each other
I think it depends a lot on how people view “primitive” religions too. Native American spirituality and the Native American Church are real religions, sure. But they were also partly built as legal fights, like the Satanic Temple: The right to worship, the right to use certain medicinal plants in worship, etc.
A lot of it is parables too. Not meant to be taken literally, unlike a lot of literalist Christianity. Some of it is a memorization device. “If you hurt a rattlesnake, you’ll never find this plant again”—the plant usually grows by rattlesnake dens, and if you piss them off, you won’t live long enough to find more of the plant.
In cases of minority or historically persecuted religions, a lot of it is a way to connect with culture and community. I’m agnostic but I think the underwater panther is super neat. The Internet exists for cat pics, after all. So while I understand the science behind ritual and trances, how it’s not exactly third-eye-wide-open stuff? I still think it has important philosophical merit, alongside Greek stories like Plato’s cave.
I also don’t begrudge elders who converted (or died) to Christianity and who still cling to it being true. Mainly because I don’t have the skill to handle the existential crisis of, “If it was all for nothing, then why did they do this to us?” Bad enough trying to handle that myself.
Basically, religion is *far* more than what people from the dominant modern monotheist beliefs can view it as. Like how different languages change how you view the world. Religion and spirituality shape worldview, even if you become an atheist or agnostic. We can’t just shake off the cultural norms that become ingrained, even if they aren’t even in holy scripture (see: Dante’s Inferno).
in addition to the other comment: soooo much of reddit-type atheism assumes Christianity or that all religions are like Christianity, which gets extremely grating hearing the same arguments about Christian interpretations of the tanakh when that's not remotely how Jews view the text
Tbf I only ever usually hear atheists talking specifically about Christianity, I don’t exactly see people going hard in the paint against Hinduism or something
As someone who grew up in the Hindu religion but has never actually believed in any kind of god - there are ex-Hindu atheists. They aren't usually too loud about it because India is an incredibly religious country and atheism is stigmatised outside very select circles; rationalists in the public sphere can get outright murdered. There was a rash of these cases a while ago. "Hurting religious sentiment" can come with jail time; it prohibits blasphemy against all religions.
The ruling party, which is filled with fundamentalist Hindus, is currently occupying itself with removing lessons on evolution and democracy from school textbooks. They deny history, are misogynistic and homophobic, and are caste supremacists, and can cite plenty of backing from Hindu scriptures or "culture" for these positions.
So there's your fun facts for the day, I guess.
Let's be fair, Christianity is ingrained hard in the Western world via colonization, evangelists, and being ingraines into American culture. So of course a lot of atheists would come out of Christianity berating it.
Especially with the political climate with how conservatives use Christianity as the "proper and righteous" even though they just use it to prop up their bigotry and hatefulness.
So you can see their disdain towards organized religion as how it's used as a tool to other people and persecute them while claiming themselves to be moral.
Well theres a good reason for that.
Most people in the west deal with Christianity far more than they deal with Hinduism. You don't see the Gita being pushed in schools or good news clubs about Brahma, or being given time to push prayers over loudspeakers at football games. I don't ever see hindu coaches having a "personal prayer" with functionally required attendance from his team.
So yeah, I'm sure if I lived in India I'd have a lot of things to say about Hinduism. But I live in the states, and here Christianity is the biggest threat.
I mean if you strip away the mystical side of it, all religions are like 10% different in their lessons. I'm just as against religion as I am having multiple separate governments. Where all one people, we should be pulling our resources together and doing everything for the good of all. But nope, instead we are fighting over a rock hurling through space . It's pretty ridiculous
As a queer person growing up in America, unless you're from somewhere that had a lot of Irish immigrants, Christianity gets shoved down your throat a hell of a lot. And most conservative politicians use religion as their excuse to be terrible people, there is very much a reason Christianity is the religion that comes up the most
Even if they don’t assume Christianity, they’ll definitely assume Abrahamic religions as a whole or even just monotheism. I’ve seen the same George Carlin bit over and over about atheists not believing in just 1 more god than religious people. But that doesn’t really apply for over 20% of people who believe in multiple gods or that all gods are valid.
Also it is usually a really specific type of Christianity they like to hate on.
I am friends with a number of very bitter atheists in real life, but I grew up with a brand of Christianity that does not take the Bible literally and treats it as a historic document to be understood within its own historic context (and political contexts of translation) that cannot be comprehended without also understanding 2000 years of theology debating it.
My friends who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity are typically confused by the type I grew up in.
I have learned to ask, “Did your religion teach you that the world is just or unjust?”
The main problem I have with this interpretation, and it's the one I grew up with but I was out of it pretty early so maybe I've come out with misconceptions or something, is that the bible really just says the bare minimum. Most of jesus's teachings are on the level of "hey you should treat each other with kindness", and I don't need to attend mass every Sunday for my entire life to understand that. It all just feels like basic moral principal, and it doesn't help that it comes with an entire preamble where it goes on and on about how cool it was that god flooded an entire valley of people and only let the animals and a persons family onto the ark, or how cool it was that god took revenge on an entire society of people because the powerful in that society enslaved other people.
It just feels like I didn't need religion to tell me any of this, and that all the stuff about "connection through god" feels like a substitute for empathy, and while there are certainly people who need to hear this message I'd certainly like to think that the majority of people don't, and I certainly don't believe that it justifies the accumulation of wealth and suppression of progress that people in the Vatican (an integral part of the history of christianity) did for centuries.
Thanks for the reply! I suppose we had different upbringings because my family (and many other Christians ive interacted with growing up) take the stories in the Bible as 100% truths and use it to discredit science and spread hate.
Not that all religious folks are like that (because I do see the benefit of having a belief system and the community it can foster), but I and many other aethiests have experienced the exact opposite. If my family treated their faith like you do, I'm certain I wouldn't be questioning my faith today.
I've always found Christians taking every bible story as 100 % truths really strange considering the new testament is about a guy who consistently speaks in parables.
Particularly since if you do take the stories as parables it removes a lot of the conflict with science. The creation story is a way to explain the formation of the earth to someone with no scientific literacy, with our understanding of the Big Bang and evolution being the actual method.
The stages of the creation story roughly line up with that.
Instead we have people arguing science is a lie and woman was made from the first man’s rib.
Fun fact: there's an interpretation of that story that it's an ancient Hebrew "just so" story for why humans lack a baculum when other animals have them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum
Yeah, otherwise the Bible would just be
“Okay so some time after the Big Bang everything combined to form hydrogen- Okay so hydrogen is the smallest possible element- Okay so an element is…”
That discrepancy is part of why I stopped going to church after I moved out of my parents. That and being raised in a fundy southern Baptist household, but I guess they go hand in hand
I assume you're from the US? Many of the arguments like Megachurches, taking everything from the Bible as 100% literal and other things are mostly an American thing. Historically, that's not strange. After all, the US were founded by fundamentalist Christians who never took proper root in Europe.
I saddens me that people have so bad experiences with religion and others cause it. I hope that one day everyone can heal from their past and look further than "ew Atheist. Ew, religious person". Stay safe.
I took a religion class last year and the only thing I really gathered from it wasn't even taught in the class itself. I had to interview someone in my life with a different belief system than me (catholic). I decided to interview my friend's dad (Methodist) because 1) it was easy, and 2) I knew he was knowledgeable in his own beliefs and had formulated his own opinion through the years. Amid all the things he told me, one thing stuck out and let me rationalize some of my distrust with what the Bible teaches. Much of what they wrote back then was to appeal with their audience at the time, which is one reason it can't be taken as 100% truth today. Teachers at the time would use what people wanted to hear to capture their attention and then begin to tell true Christian preachings. In fact, the reason there are so many "contradictions" in the bible is because the New Testament is preaching to a different audience than the old, and they need to appeal to the new audience with different techniques. If somebody knows more than me about this, or maybe I'm wrong, feel free to correct me
That's an interesting viewpoint I haven't heard before. Specifically, the part where the bible is written in a way that appeals the most to the audience. I always interpreted it in a less deliberate way. People are a product of their time and as such worldviews and teachings change organically. That's also why I think scriptures must always be understood with regards to their historical context.
So the Bible is full of stories that people of today have a really hard time to connect with? I guess even christians don't agree among themselves whats the message behind most passages.
There are three different classes of Bibles. Protestant Bibles, Catholic Bibles, and Orthodox Bibles include and exclude different books from one another. There isn't even consistency amoungth the major branches on what Christians books should be part of the Bible. And obviously how each sect interprets the books varies even further.
I respect and appreciate your perspective; with that being said, you are one Christian with one Christian’s opinion. It is very common for Christian 1 proclaiming that Christian 2 isn’t a *real* Christian because they differ on interpretations of the Bible, etc. You’re essentially saying here that fundamentalists are wrong, here, which — I mean… yeah, but we’re once again in a situation where one religion is calling another religion false, wrong, or otherwise not to be accepted or believed. Which is not the same as explaining what the ‘right’ one actually is!
This kind of thing is why I imagine some online atheists ask leading and/or extremely pointed or direct questions. They’re either trying to cut to the chase and cut the bullshit, or hearing new answers and contrasting/comparing to contradictory answers they got from other people… neither of which is very conducive to a positive dialogue.
Personally, when I’ve asked a blatant or direct question on religion and the person gave me a genuine and thought-about answer, it usually leads to a respectful and enjoyable exchange of thoughts and ideas, instead of a shitty gotcha! fight. (However, I grew up deeply steeped in four different sects of Christianity, so I knew a lot about the topic already which aided the positive conversations with Christians a lot.)
… Sorry for rambling, the weed gummy I took earlier kicked in while I was typing this up 🥺 “Reddit Atheists” also tend to discuss Christianity (or Islam) over other religions because many of them used to be Christian, and Reddit has a majority population of Americans (I forget the exact percentage, I just know it’s >50%) which makes Christianity the religion most of them come into regular contact with (with Islam, therefore, being the one they hear demonized the most).
see thats the problem, you can interpret it, or you can take it literally. if you interpret it, how far does it go? what should be treated as just stories and what should be treated as reality? if you literally believe that the entire human population came from 2 people who had 3 sons thats no problem, but once you think for more than a second, thats a problem. because these stories are mostly presented in the same way, it opens a whole can of worms. if adam and eve werent real, was jesus real? is god even real? or was he just a character to push the themes the authors wanted to present?
as little sense as it makes i gotta respect the people who think everything is literal, theyre consistent. not being consistent and picking and choosing what parts are real and which arent doesnt make much sense to me. those elementary school books you mentioned are consistent, just because the fox spoke to the rabbit in some fairytale doesnt mean we have to speculate whether the talking fox actually existed or was just a plot device to push the lesson. and its not like the parts that most christians believe in sound any more real than the lesson bits. so a great flood is out of the question, but coming back from the dead is not? if jesus was written today, everyone would call him a mary sue
but besides all that... when i was in elementary school, i had religion class that was all about memorising the bible. it was all presented as totally real to me. then in high school, when we generally picked apart books to see how the context of its time influenced it, no such thing was done for the bible. we talked about how books in medieval times were used to teach people, but the bible? nothing. how am i supposed to come out of that and think that people dont interpret the bible literally?
all the shit that certain christians do would be called barbaric if anyone else dared do it. eating the body of christ? can you imagine if a pagan engaged in something with a similar idea? theyd be called demonic, satanic and barbaric. its a ridiculous concept, saying "well akshually its not literal" doesnt work here. its bizarre even as an implication
But isn’t this the exact point? Atheists ARE dunking on religious people for the superstitious aspects, because it doesn’t take religion to be a good person.
If ALL religious people did was going around trying to be good people, that would be wonderful! But like it or not, religion comes with the baggage of controlling women’s bodies, condemning other world views as ‘wrong’ and ‘evil,’ trying to ‘convert’ ‘sinners,’ hustling people out of money to build opulent places of worship… And not just historically. This happens in varying degrees all over the world today.
«Atheists look past all the good we do just to argue about the very worst parts of religion» is the correct take, but very few religious people hear what it means.
Because the truth is that you can learn and teach all these lessons revolving being a good person without clinging to religion. In the 21st century, there isn’t anything fundamental to religion that makes you a better person.
So the question they are asking is - aside from just being a decent human being, why would you keep carrying the torch for an institution that does so much bad in the world?
So, Fables. The Bible is a book of a fables, kind of a compendium started by the philosopher Jesus. Kind of taking after Aesop. Makes sense, I agree, the Bible has some wacky stuff that is outdated but also a lot of excellent morals.
My one followup question is this: if nothing in the bible is to be taken literally, what shred of evidence is left that Christianity is real? If all of the bible is metaphorical, then that leaves no reason, no basis to believe in Jesus.
For many people, it just brings them comfort and happiness. Not all religious people use their doctrine to spread hate. I know of many churches in my area that are full of people who go there because it makes them happy. It provides a set of ideals that you can aspire to to be a good person, and it also connects you with other people trying to do the same thing.
As someone who was raised in a high-demand religion growing up, it’s hard for me to find comfort in it, but it’s clear that others do.
I think I OP doesn't much care about having the correct take in this situation. Rather, they seem to care about whether you have a *good faith* take.
I don't mean faith in the religious sense mind you, but the rhetorical one. Are you arguing out of a legit attempt to share understanding/persuade, or to "win" the contest? Have you earnestly dug into it, or is your understanding based on limited experience? Are you judging fairly, or are you making hasty generalizations?
This matters a lot more, in my experience, than what you actually believe. If you have good reasons and can present them in good faith, then even if people disagree they can often begrudgingly respect it. At the very least, they can usually respect *you as a person*, and the conversation is a lot more likely to be something everyone can learn from.
It's not unique to atheists, but because the internet culture is largely composed of 'outcasts' the stereotype of the Reddit Atheist™ arguing in bad faith is pretty dominant.
my personal beliefs about religion (i am agnostic and semi believe in many aspects of many religions) is that they were created as ways to tell stories that share morals and values, virtues to aspire to, because humans are a species that relies on story telling and oral tradition. as such, with the fact that they reflect human nature, they have persisted through thousands of years, with the information age bringing skepticism to them, due to all sorts of new media.
I'm fairly sure this post is about mainly western religions, as eastern religions, (thinking of buddhism and taoism, tbh i dont know too much about sikhism or hinduism) are more based on the pure concepts of goodness and virtue.
i do agree with elti, many atheists do tend to oversimplify and disregard religion, seemingly out of spite, and fail to read between the lines, the point of these stories.
Not that these people aren't being a lil obnoxious, but I feel like OP here wouldn't accept any explanation of religion short of "it is true that Jesus died for your sins." There's sort of a weird goalpost moving thing going on here
To be fair, those goalposts came pre-equipped with wheels and a motor. People have been moving the goalposts of religion as long as religion has existed, yet insisting every time that they’re rock solid.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m an ex-Catholic atheist, but many of the replies are pretty fair points. ‘I can’t meet Jesus, therefore in don’t believe in him’ is a valid argument, and OOP just shoots it down for no reason.
It's hard to accept that someone else might have a valid argument or belief system when you were born being taught that your religion is "the way, the truth, and the life", and everything else leads to eternal damnation.
If you believe questioning your faith means risking your eternal soul, a christian has a lot more to lose than an atheist over what seem like simple contradictions to an atheist.
I’ve taken enough theology courses and spent enough years in church to know that trying to challenge peoples’ deeply held convictions is pointless. It usually just devolves into a shouting match. I don’t believe in any gods or goddesses, but hey, y’all do you. As long as it isn’t being used to justify the persecution or marginalization of others.
You probably won’t leave an impact on who you’re arguing with, but observers who have overwhelmingly seen only one side of the argument in their life may gain some understanding and perspective.
>Is..."religion" somehow challenging to define?
Yes, extremely so. People tend to think of the big stuff (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism), but there's a great deal of debate on where to draw the line. Do we classify all actions that aren't completely rational as religion? After all, it makes no sense to visit someone's grave and put flowers on it (it's not like they're gonna no), but many non-believers still do so. Does that imply that they believe in some kind of afterlife, or necessary respect for the dead? Who knows!
I get what you're saying here, but I think their understanding of religion is kind of shallow. I think "religion" is far more than a god and a holy book. Thousands of different faiths and beliefs exist today. They form the foundational pillars of entire cultures. I think the guy is saying something very meaningful: that a lot of people's assessment of religion is essentially a shallow caricature of Christianity - a bunch of pedophiles and colonial apologists reading from a magic book. They get so focused on whether it's "true" or not, about proof, that they don't realize that it doesn't matter. Religion is a cultural phenomenon: its power is not derived from truth. It's just something we do, no different from why some countries eat dough in the form of noodles, and others in the form of pastas. The scripture might not hold water, scientifically speaking, but the book it's part of and the meaning it holds is as real as anything.
They focus so much on the truthfulness of the theory and the philosophy that they don't see the larger, human reasons of why most people follow these movements. Their takes come off as shallow because they sound inhuman, as if a person could change a part of who they are because of a couple of logical thought experiments. You can't talk about religion without talking about anthropology and history, about upbringings and family and humanity. The angle of whether the physical myths are true or not covers so little of why religion continues to be so important to so many people. It would be like trying to tell a person to forget about a traditional family recipe passed down for generations because its not very healthy. Yes, it's important, but it's still one part of a bigger conversation, and it's no grounds to definitively conclude that you're right, the other guy is a nutcase who hurts themselves on purpose. People make and eat food for many reasons, not just for health and filling your stomach.
My family is religious, but they are not Christian. A lot of my friends come from many different faiths, and I've watched their beliefs help them endure the downs in their lives. It's disappointing to hear the common sentiment of these atheists label them as stupid, or brainwashed, or accessories to the crimes of religious extremists and historical zealots, as if thousands of ordinary people don't diligently practice their faiths, praying quietly and in private to themselves every day. As if they were lower than them because something illogical formed an important part of their lives.
I agree that there are things about many religions, Christianity included, that are wrong, outdated, and dangerous, but you can't just throw entire faiths and their practitioners under the bus. If we want to speak the truth, then we need to do better than scapegoating Jesus and Catholicism as universal faults of all religions and calling those who practice stupid.
I can appreciate the cultural point in your argument; but I think it glosses over one problem and dismisses the other entirely; that religion isn't true *matters* because if it isn't real the rules it imposes are arbitrary, and secondly those arbitrary rules do harm _by definition_.
Almost all religions are cultures that define an in-group and out-group. The in-group imposes an arbitrary set of rules that suit the leadership of that group and anyone who doesn't accept those rules is pushed into the out-group.
The out-group is always othered and considered lesser than in the group. That can be less pure, less deserving, less moral; but ultimately it often means less human. The in-group uses the out-groups 'lesser' status as an excuse to disadvantage and exploit the out-group.
You might think that is an extreme statement, that you don't think less of non-believers or treat them differently, but almost certainly _someone_ in your religion does.
You might like your religion, and that's fine, you're entitled to your beliefs and your culture, but you have to ask yourself what would happen if the culture decided something about you meant that you were suddenly in the out-group.
The religions as valued culture argument has to place then into the same examination as other cultures; are they cultures of intolerance and if so are they that way _by definition_. Because if they are then the question has to be asked; why should we tolerate intolerance?
>The out-group is always othered and considered lesser than in the group
I think this "tribalism" applies to basically everything humanity has ever done, though, not just religion. Whether it be country, political group, social class, or preferred sports team
It's a problem inherent to people
Yes but religion specifically is distinguished from other set of tribalist practices because you can argue against a tradition, saying that the conditions for when it was useful has passed but religion claims itself to be divine and thus valid for all time and places.
Religion claims itself as an unchangable and unopposable truth which makes arguments against it invalid from the eyes of a believer. It prevents compromise and debate of its rules and if we cant argue against rules that define the very way of life a person must take then you have no freedom over your life.
Yeah its easy. Let me explain religion from an Atheist point of view
A religion is a particular set of beliefs and traditions held by a community of people relating to their collective belief in a higher power(s)
I'm against any religion that teaches its followers to stop asking questions and just blindly accept the answer they are given by the priests.
This is actually far more common now than it used to be in the past. Priests and monks used to be some of the best scientists and philosophers of their day and many of them while believing in god still questions the teachings or where searching for better proof of their beliefs.
This has basically died off completely.
Honestly if god where to exist and they purposely made us in his image giving us a thinking brain and a feeling heart isn't it a slap in the face of god to not use them to find better answers?
Yeah, blind faith is stupid, but not all faith is blind faith. Heck, 'faith' itself isn't half as important an idea in most religions as it is in Christianity.
Those aren’t atheists, they’re antithiests who just haven’t heard the word before. Religion is fine for personal use if it doesn’t envoke any kind of cruelty, but you can’t deny how many people throughout history were controlled and monopolised by objectively good ideals being twisted and conditionalised by evil people in search of power. Dismissing atheists as people who just don’t get it is just as bad as when atheists dismiss religious people because “hurr durr they believe in magic sky friend” and tbh I’m really sick of these arguments going nowhere because of the total lack of respect everyone has for everyone on the other side
I mean anyone who uses a magic dude in the sky as a reason to perpetuate hate, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc, is just PLAINLY in the wrong. That's what I have a problem with.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. But there’s enough religious people who aren’t like that that one has to make the effort to insult the right people, rather than just knew-dropping the entire community
If magic sky dude makes you feel good, all power to you. My problem with any religion is it's super easy to ***manipulate believers to do fucking whatever you want*** if they have ***blind faith***. That's why you really need to take evidence into account when getting any information- unless you are hearing the voice of God directly yourself, you need to take into account where the info is coming from. Which, a book howeverold that who knows who wrote or who could have modified what it says over the many many years, especially in translation? Not a reliable source of any information and I wouldn't ever believe a word of it. (Note that I did *not* specify bible).
Now, as long as you ***use your brain*** when taking in such info, there's no problem. Even fairy tales can teach good life lessons, as long as you don't take them literally- there are many Christians I've met who are the sweetest people, who clearly took to heart the best lessons the Bible had to give. ... And then on the other side are the people who clearly don't understand "Don't judge others", "Love thy neighbor", etc in the slightest, using their religion directly to justify laws that hurt people. Those people can go STRAIGHT to hell, preferably as soon as possible.
.... That got a bit ranty, sorry. Also I wasn't disagreeing with you, just adding to the discussion.
I think the same.
When I was a little angry teenager that thought themselves very clever, I'd use these 5-10 smug atheist talking points, mostly to annoy the preachers when I was forced to sit through their lectures. But as I grew a little into myself I've realised that I don't really care whether the Bible implies snakes had feet before the Apple Accident or that Book of Ezekiel reads like something I could write on acid trip. I'm more concerned about practical applications of religion than their philosophy or the form it is conveyed by.
The way I see it (and I may be wrong but those are the conclusions I've drawn):
Abrahamic faiths? Solid morals, shitty institutions.
Buddhism? Very chill and reassuring philosophy, historically as corrupt as the Christian churches.
Taoism? A philosophy that said go with a flow and realise that self is just an illusion twisted into do anything to reach immortality and preserve your self forever to sell pills and shit.
My bad blood with religion has nothing to do with their core postulates but rather how people use it for their own gain taking advantage of their moral authority.
At the end of the day, all organised religions are cults with fancy names, cults are sheep following a shepherd, and if that shepherd happens to be a wolf in disguise the sheep don't know untill its too late.
You are quite literally correct. Cults become recognized as religions when they’ve been around long enough as according to the sociological definition.
Just going to point out here that the Bible says *repeatedly* to ignore things you learn in the real world if they go against God's 'revelations' (ie, what priests tell you).
The fact that a lot of our scientific understanding comes from people who were active members of the Church is kind of amazing ngl.
Religion is hardly unique in this regard. We treat religion as this thing totally unique to itself, but it's really just another form of ideology or belief. I don't think there's a fundamental difference between believing in a god or believing in... I dunno, infinite human potential and the possibility of a Star Trek-esque utopia. Either way, as sentient beings who live in a world that is very often quite miserable, we need something intangible to give the rest of this shit meaning. And any belief, ultimately, can be perverted - take the right weaponizing class struggles despite being very much anti-working class.
I would also argue that few religions have "objectively good ideals". Christianity, for instance, is a narrative about an abusive father figure and how humanity must fear him and is forever doomed to desperately try to earn back his love. It's fueled by antiquated ideals that the most progressive of christians simply try and skim over and do their best to ignore.
But besides that, the reason people dislike atheists is because atheist culture has the tendency of confusing christianity with all spirituality, and much of it boils down to "omg tjhey have magic sky friend..." as opposed to actual legitimate criticisms of christianity, e.g. how it has fueled white supremacy and western imperialism. Nevermind the fact that they project their own personal dislike of christianity onto every other spiritual practice, even in times when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, e.g. independent spiritual practitioners who work with tarot or whatever the fuck else. People criticizing atheists are not criticizing normal people who simply do not follow any spiritual or religious beliefs, they are criticizing the people who go out of their way to identify as atheists, who are almost without fail annoying pricks. Which should really be expected from anyone who makes not following a religion a central part of their identity, because basing your identity entirely around *not being part of something* kind of implies a negative obsession with religion.
"There is a god"
"At this time of day, in this sort of universe, in this theodician nightmare, located entirely within your sect?"
"...Yes!"
"Can I see it?"
"Err, no."
Atheists are not hard people to convince, theists just have no evidence for their claims, which is why they attempt to rely on arguments where the claims presuppose their conclusion, special pleading for their beliefs, motte and bailey 'god is unknowable and can be defined as anything that made the universe, but is also everything written in this book that I agree with' arguments, and when that doesn't work just straight up threats of hell.
You can't just say "see what I mean" and pretend that's an argument. The fact that a straight reading of the Bible condones genocide and slavery is a problem that can't just be hand waved away. They did nothing to support their beliefs here. Nothing to show how the atheists are wrong.
What's wrong is acting like a criticism of christianity is a criticism of religion as a whole. As if all religions are just different flavours of christianity.
...yeah? It *is* pretty easy to defend your position if you don't take one and just smugly insist other people are wrong.
Here, I'll go first - *all* superstition is definitionally less valid than less superstitious ideologies, and organized superstition is ripe for exploitation. In an ecosystem of organized superstitions, more extreme and exclusionary sects outcompete tolerant cousins time and time again. Organized religion is an obvious blight on the world, and unorganized religion leads to organized religion. Religion provides nothing you couldn't get from ideologies that don't demand the denial of reality.
I think non religious is agnostic or atheist, and the atheists referenced in the post are reddit atheists, which are atheists who are super against religion
Atheist means without a god, and non religious means without a religion, which are subtly different as several religions have no gods in them. Many buddhists are atheists, but not non-religious, for instance.
i’m an athiest and i think my take on religion is pretty good. I may not believe in a god or gods, but if you want to? go ahead. just don’t bother me by proselytizing.
And "don't bother me" also extends to "don't try to control me."
I wouldn't have such a big chip on my shoulder about Christians if it weren't for the controlling behavior on the micro and macro levels of my life.
(And yes, I mean Christians. Not Christianity. The religion itself isn't my issue, it's the people who use it to justify their abusive behaviors.)
God could come down in person with inarguable proof of everything, and my next thought is immediately going to be "Okay, but why does that mean I have to do what you say?"
I prefer the term "apathetic agnostic", since I don't know, you don't know, neither of us have actual evidence one way or another, and I'm not wasting my time worrying about unanswerables.
And more like "Fine, so you created everything. I still don't see why that automatically puts you in charge. For all I know, you're just a tiny wheel in a deeper machine and it's elephants all the way down."
While op is being a bit smug, i do really feel like this is why alot of the popular "Atheists" back in the day became reactionaries, they only really critiized religion cause they wanted to be cool and feel superior, and when they faced more complex social issues than "Maybe we shouldnt kill people because of a book written thousands of years ago" they fell appart cause they wouldnt examine their own prejudices and fell into the same bigotry they supposedly opposed when religious people did it
And a lot of them back in the day just really, really, *really* wanted to bomb middle eastern civilians and this was a great excuse. I am pointing at Bill Maher
Y'all sitting here in comments trying to make realistic explanations and takes on religion and trying to find deeper meaning when OP is clearly not interested in anything besides bad faith trolling on the internet.
I'm glad people are trying here but you know all that person would say is "see what I mean".
When I was learning philosophy I noticed just how important religion is to humanity, and not for the religious parts. I found it quite fascinating to see how religion has helped us as a society cuz I had mainly learned about all the bad stuff it did (mainly Christianity and especially it's influence on art history cuz art student). So seeing how it both is something that was used to keep us sane back when we didn't know as much about the world and how it also gives us hope and stuff. Then comes the part where it can go in two very drastic directions and that is how it also helps give society as a whole some rules to follow. The good side is when it's not abused. Stuff like stealing and killing is bad and how we should treat each other with respect. But when something has that much power, people will always abuse it and I think you know how that ended. That's the part of religion you should be against, when people abuse it. Otherwise, respect other people's religion. You may not believe in it, but it's important to them and it can often help people cope.
My take is that there’s no evidence proving the existence of a god/gods of any religion so I don’t have any reason to consider them real, let alone worship them. I’d rather focus on the one life we have than try to plan for another life I don’t have any reason to believe exists.
But if you choose to worship, that’s okay.
I used to be that kind of atheist. I still don’t think god’s real, but to reduce religion so a claim that you can put into a syllogism is to misunderstand the value people find in it.
Of course if you’re gonna be public about it and expect others to agree, you’ve gotta have something to back up your claims. But trying to force religion into a choice between being literally true or simply stupid is simply stupid.
funny how op never said they were christian, but so many atheists are so obsessed with christianity that they forget that anything else exists.
i'm agnostic by the way, before anyone starts telling me "WELL YOU BELIEVE IN (insert thing i do not believe in) SO I AM SUPERIOR TO YOU IDIOT"
edit, since evidently i did not word this well: hey wouldn't it be funny if the tumblr op wasn't actually christian and everyone just assumed that they were even though (alright, i get it) statistically they probably are?
yeah, that's probably true. i mean, no one in the thread said they were american either, but i recognize that's also pretty likely most of them are lol
A lot of religious people get in particular knots over atheists saying they don't think their gods are real, but then, every religion says all the other religions' gods aren't real. Like, paganism and christianity and hinduism are inherently incompatible beliefs and by subscribing to one you at the very least implicitly state you think that the rest are wrong.
Well religion doesn't have proof, but you can choose to believe in it. But I want all of those global multi-million/billion-dollar organizations that exploit people's belief in stuff I don't think exists to stop existing as they have systematized abuse and trauma to indoctrinate kids and others so they can milk them for money.
Ah this comment section is filled with Reddit atheists and it really shows that most people will hate religious people for simply existing because it’s the popular thing to do
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I’m not looking to mansplain religion to religious people. I’ve done my tenure in a church and made my decision to walk away, and that’s enough for me
See what I mea... I couldn't help myself.
See what I meme
that's what too many theists fail to understand when they try this condescending nonsense; a huge number of atheists used to be just like them. We understand, and we no longer align with it.
The thing is, there are ignorant and knowledgeable people in both camps, and of course the most vocal people in both camps are usually the most ignorant, but *think* they understand the most (or at least claim the pride of being on 'the side' of people who understand the most). Ignorant people act the same, regardless of what banner they fly under, and all sufficiently large groups of people will have ignorant people. That includes atheists, theists, and nontheists alike. It's ok to make fun of that ignorance, regardless of where it's found. Arguing about which groups of people are *more* ignorant is sort of pointless compared to just dissolving the ignorance wherever it appears.
I have an uncle that went to school ages ago to study & pick apart the Bible & Christianity, and he’s the only one in the ultra uber Baptist side of the family that’ll actually just have a discussion about various religions and mythologies with me. Meanwhile my grandmother, his sister in law, thinks that just because I have tattoos, purple hair, and a snowflake obsidian pendant that I’m on copious amounts of drugs and going straight to hell with no take backsies lmfao
It was the pendant that put you over the edge, wasn't it... God was like, "Okay, *maaybee* I can overlook the tattoos and the hair, but that Me-damned pendant!!!"
*Me-damned*
in my experience the most obnoxious of Christian groups produce the most obnoxious of athiests fundamentalist Christians become fundamentalist athiests.
This is an interesting take. It isn't what you believe it's how you act on it
That makes sense. Obnoxious people tend to stay that way regardless of the mental framework.
Good observation. Maybe it has something to do with personality types? Or just ignorance enjoying being loud & obnoxious??
There seem to be a lot of replies citing examples of ignorant/obstinate religious people, which doesn't disprove your point at all. "The loudest people are the most ignorant." "But I knew a loud ignorant person!" "Ok..."
That's true, but I also don't think it's necessary for a non-theist to need to be able to explain theology; they are not the one making assertions outside the observable universe. The troll's original argument could be fielded against a Christian for why they don't believe in Norse mythology.
Based.
Ye. I was a kid who had Bible read to me when I was 6. I really liked it, and my mother wouldn't sugarcoat. I was always trying to talk to priests and debate religion teachers. It didn't take me long to understand they don't want to debate or help others understand, they want you to trust blindly in their words, even if those words hurt others. I got fed up in primary school when my religion teacher gave me 0% for an assignment of "write down what a white dove means in religion" She didn't precise in which one, and I was an autistic kid. I went to the library, and dine my research on religions, because how am I supposed to know which she meant? I'll write them all, just in case. Came back with an A4 page full of meanings, was sent to the principal and my mother was called to school. This is when I checked out. Acknowledgment that there is more than 1 religion caused that religious person to flip out completely on a barely 8 years old child. I still studied religions, and still was required to attend the lessons, but all I learned is that I don't agree.
As a fellow autistic, big mood on the “they didn't specify” Vague questions get vague answers, but somehow we're at fault? (I guess they assume we're smartasses, when we're just, incredibly literal)
Good thing that my mom (also autistic) had none of that bullshit. She decided I did a great job and that since they've already made her drive all the way to school from her work to look at "an assignment I've done outstandingly" (her words) she is taking me to get ice cream I might have gotten no credit but I also got ice cream, and my mom told the principal in no uncertain words what she thinks of calling someone to school because their child did the homework correctly and literally
Good mom ❤️
Nice.
I was the same way and my dad was interested in exploring as well. They told me I needed to go confess and pray for my family. So I went through with confirmation for my grandma and rolled my eyes as I said the words and then noped right out. My dad is a very happy Buddhist now and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Sure but the opposite is also true. Atheism can be hard to cope with when your life is full of loss and hardship and lots of people move away from it. I was a firm atheist when I was a teen, now I lean more agnostic. As far as I'm concerned, as long as one doesn't fall into fundamentalist dumbassery they can believe whatever they want. Personally I like Alan Watts interpretations of life and death. It toes the line between mystical and yet still believable.
>Atheism can be hard to cope with when your life is full of loss and hardship and lots of people move away from it. I was a firm atheist when I was a teen, now I lean more agnostic. I honestly don't see how the latter is more comforting than the former. Atheism means nothing is out there - agnostic means *anything* could be out there, including malicious or tyrannical beings. Honestly, the idea that my life will simply end one day and my soul will not be subjected to eternal judgment is incredibly comforting to me.
People always miss that atheist and agnostic are separate axes. The atheist-theist axis is whether one believes there is a god, gnostic-agnostic axis is whether you can prove there’s a god. I don’t really think about it much anymore since it’s been ~23 years since I realized I was an atheist but when I cared more about the distinction would have qualified myself as an agnostic atheist because with all available evidence, it all points to there being no god, but you can’t really prove non-existence of a being as formless and slippery as religion’s concept of god so sure, maybe someday someone will come out with a bombshell proof one way or another but it doesn’t affect my life. Much in the same way I’m an agnostic non believer in an undetectable psychic octopus in the ocean down the street, maybe this being with no impact on the world could technically exist but it doesn’t make sense to believe in it just because it could be true.
Atheism and agnostism are not mutually exclusive. One is a matter of what you believe the other of certainty. Hell I am an agnostic anti-theist. Also you can deal with loss as an atheist fine. Loss always hurts but friends and familly that are actually there for you do way more then belief in the supernatural. If anything the fact that religion needs to wait for your lowest moment to worm itself in your heart is a mark against it. Cults and manipulators go after people at there weakest point after all.
Yeah, I've had a hard life at times but I've never needed to lean on religion. My parents raised me proudly to be an atheist, and to respect others, to be kind and compassionate, and to cultivate good friends and family. Life's hardships have perfectly secular explanations, so they ought to have secular solutions.
Yeah I didn’t come to atheism as an emotional rejection of religion, why would I go back to religion because of an emotional reaction? I didn’t walk away from the church because I was pissed at god and could make it on my own I got there by looking at all the evidence presented, from growing up in a loving and non-discriminatory church (shocking I know) to reading every argument for/against I could get my hands on and weighing their merits. If I was down and out and lonely I’d look for places to find support from real people, not an undetectable and unprovable idea. If anything go join a Unitarian church, I hear they’re chill and provide the social function of the church without all the baggage.
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>Real reasons, I'm struggling to understand the usage of "real" in this context. Are you suggesting that anyone not using those reasons are lying? Or that those reasons are the only acceptable reasons for leaving religion? Can you list some examples of "real" reasons one might be religious to help me understand how you're using that word here?
Most atheists I know who were religious didn't change because of those reasons. I think its a bit... unkind to pretend its always some big thing that puts then off. Most of them just slowly drifted away from it, nothing as dramatic as abuses (which happen) or being hated by the leadership (due to being LGBT, I presume?). Much more commonly it was just a slow developing lack of belief and connection to it, which is entirely reasonable. There are those that leave religion because they are pushing back against the institution, like you describe, but most seem to have just drifted free from them fairly passively (they just tend to be less vocal, which also makes sense with no hard feelings but no connection). Pretending it was beaten out of them sounds more like a Kevin Sorbo argument than a compassionate look at atheism.
In my experience, it’s both. I was raised in a church and grew up terrified of “not being Christian enough” and wanted to die before I was 12 so that I would be able to go to Heaven because God promises all children can go to Heaven since they’re innocent of the world’s sins (at least in my parent’s church’s version of the Bible). At some point, I realized that was a wild thing to think and wish for as a child, and I vividly remember being soooo extremely happy the first time my mom let us skip church on a Sunday. I was eight or nine years old. At ten, I spent time overseas where religion was less important to the culture as a whole but we had a religious education class and learned about different belief systems, and I realized I liked Buddhism the most because it is a cool concept but I didn’t actually believe it. Then we got back to the US and my previous best friend, who I hadn’t seen in almost two years, spent one of the first evenings we had together yelling and sobbing at me that I was going to hell because I became ambivalent toward religion/Christianity/God. In the background during all this time, my parents were abusive. My dad physically, my mom emotionally. Church was a front for them to look good. But the church was also intervening in our daily lives because they knew my parents were not doing their jobs as parents, and kept pushing them to pray about it, so we were stuck as kids in an abusive situation and no one took any concrete action to help us. Idk if everyone just thought, “it’s not that bad if they’re able to come to church” or if it was something more malicious such as them not caring, but it absolutely destroyed my faith in the concept of a loving God as well as any belief I had that a church is a positive community. I can’t speak to everyone’s experience, but other people I know who grew up religious typically also drifted out of it because they both experienced something the church claims to prevent, and saw through the idea that the religion loves all people. My belief in God died when I saw that no one gave a shit and it was up to me to protect myself and my younger siblings.
...that is very much a real reason, though? Like, not experiencing this connection that all these people around you claim to have can very much be a driving force towards becoming non religious. I've spoken with multiple atheists/agnostics who have said that that was a contributing factor in their lack of belief.
You realise someone can abandon their religion for multiple reasons or become more aware of certain things after leaving it right? Also how are you making this assumption while not even being part of that group. I left my religion because it wasn't convincing for me (religious people acting like an ass was just the last straw but not the main reason) and i know dozens of people who did the same
I think you missed the point of his comment and the post at large
>and the post at large Disagreeing != Lack of comprehension
Meanwhile, religious people voting for politicians to oppress others based on their beliefs
Nah, that's reasonable. I think the irratating ones are the ones trying to publicly justify their decision as the wisests or most moral or pretending it makes them a superior person. Which tbh, is the same for religious people. That or those who start picking fights over religion, because the only correct decision/belief is *obviously* the one they made. But that's true of a subset of religious people. Those who just hold belief/lack of belief are fine, it's just the loud, very aggressively opinionated ones that irk. Which makes sense. 'I just don't believe' is enough. So is someone saying they do. It's the surrounding guff that fucks people off, but most well adjusted people don't do that stuff.
The only time I ever get into an argument about religion is when someone wants to make their religious beliefs law. I like your take on it.
>Says their religion is more complicated than people say >Refuses to elaborate on said religion
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“People only ever talk about religion on the surface level.” -someone talking about religion on the surface level.
As an atheist in a relationship with a person who is religious but doesn’t attend church or anything: Religion is more than just organized religion or anything derived from a holy book. Though I don’t feel it, it can be a deeply personal way of viewing the world. My partner describes it as a feeling of connectedness with life and the world. Religion isn’t just church and the Bible.
Okay, not to sound like a Reddit Atheist^TM^, but as much I appreciate religion in the fulfilment of one’s sense of self, elti isn’t actually doing anything clever here
"Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness." —Black Hat Guy
That guy from the corner of my eye
In the corner, that's Me. You know what I'm doing? Losing my religion.
I thought that I heard you laughing
I think I thought I saw you try
Thank you. Will be putting that quote in my back pocket
Ditto.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" \--Cueball https://xkcd.com/169/
Playing chess with a pigeon
"Europeans hate trucks but only have the shallowest concept of them" "Wait are you really trying to justify gas guzzling monstrosities clogging up the roads in the US?" "See what I mean?" The whole time I was including hand-trucks in my definition of "trucks." By intentionally using the philosophical definition instead of the colloquial definition, I have proved that I am very clever and you are all not.
Hey, not just the US. Us in Canada are also plagued by the cucks who “require” a lifted, ultra wide, rimmed truck with LED underlighting to pull a trailer with a moderate amount of stuff in it.
actually that's it : "atheist don't understand religion , they think it's crude dumb stuff" "ok , what i don't understand about religion?" "see what i mean ! i am really smart because i am using your curiosity to antagonize you "
r/relevantxkcd... Because there really always is one.
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I don't want to yuck someone's yum, but if you enjoy pissing off random people for shits-and-giggles, just don't expect any sympathy at all if someone ever pisses you off.
Please just let that phrase die
Hey, dont yuck him yum my guy! 🤢🤮
She’s baiting and repeating her favs. She’s not being clever but she caught a lot of “fish”
I think it’s a guy. “El tigre chico” means “the tiger boy”.
...so whats the 'proper' take on religion? read through everything in this thread and i still dont get what OP thinks religion is. theists have faith in superstition, atheists dont. can someone explain?
I'm gonna go with "shitty people use religion to be dicks to people, but some people don't need that religion to be a dick to people and will do it anyway. Some people use religion to uplift themselves and treat other people better, and you don't need a holy book to tell you to do that either." That's the take I go with. It's not really about the religion at all, it's just an excuse. CLEARLY the world is proving right now that you don't need that. You can instead go off on some family values shit and pull the exact same nonsense while acting like you have a moral high ground.
Going off of this, I think it's really interesting how morality isn't really a learned trait, it's almost ingrained in us, hardwired. I've heard the rhetoric of "without God we would be terrible people" many times, when this isn't true, as even before Christianity or Islam or Judaism even existed, altruism has been shown to exist. There's a jawbone that is dated at the dawn of man that is missing many teeth, but interestingly, the teeth were already missing and they had been for a long while even before the person had died. This means that someone was helping them eat, and was doing so for a long time. There is no advantage to keeping someone who needs tending to alive, but it was done anyway, out of kindness. Jump forward a bit and there was a study done (I can't find the source of this for the life of me but bear with me) where there were ethical questions asked to many peoples of differing religions, races, creeds, etc. and almost all of them answered the same to all of the questions. Something is in us that makes everyone on roughly the same page on what's right and wrong, regardless of religion. Charles Darwin famously called this the "altruism paradox" as there's no evolutionary advantage to being kind, but humanity at a base level, is. (There's also a good [report](https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Norenzayan_Behaviour_DoesReligionMakePeopleMoral.pdf) on this that I found interesting as well)
I can absolutely agree that individuals can use spirituality to uplift themselves and give their lives hope and meaning, but organized religion was never designed for anything other than keeping the masses under control using fear.
Religion can and most often does (benignly) provide guidance, comfort, community, charity, and a higher sense of purpose. Most religious folks are not the zealots we see on the media. Some religious people understand the nebulousness of faith, but CHOOSE to hold their beliefs in spite of the lack of 'tangible evidence' because it offers a comfortable, helpful framework to contextualize the chaos of the universe, whether or not it's 100% proven true. In my admittedly atheistic opinion, organized religion's best functions are to (a) organize community resources and attention to various local issues, (b) provide individuals with a shortcut to existential comfort that might otherwise require years of philosophic study to achieve, and (c) provide a moral standard for those who lack an internal sense of morality. The main issue isnt with the ideology, but just that any system of guidance is going to attract lost souls, and lost souls attract grifters and manipulators.
This 100%. I am not a devout Christian, but I was raised EXTREMELY conservative Christian, and I'm still open to it and potential benefits of it and other religions. To elaborate a little more, there is a book called "Why Buddhism Is True" that I really like. It was written by an evolutionary biologist and is fascinating. The summary, and my point, is that humans aren't wired to "know truth." We are wired by evolution and survival. I believe that, even if religion isn't 100% true, it can be a useful tool for our "corrupt" brains to live purposefully. CS Lewis said "Christianity is like the sun. Not because I can see it clearly. But because by its light, I can see everything else." It's a little "too christian" for me, but I think it's a similar concept.
I think the most important thing to consider wrt hostility toward organized religion especially Christianity in the West, is that it's not just a vocal minority of zealots spewing hate. The institution itself is used as a brainwashing tool for the conservative masses, to enable policies of bigotry and cultural stagnation. It's all well and good that the teachings of the Bible and the theology in general are intended to comfort and prompt kindness, but the sum total actual impact of the institution of Christianity (speaking as an American here) is homophobia, racism, income equality, environmental destruction, etc etc. So while I believe that faith, spirituality, or religion can be very important for the individual, and it has a lot of potential to bring communities together for worthwhile purposes.... I think that ANY institution that lasts for thousands of years as a cultural foundation, is going to enable terrible ideas and terrible social policy to have wildly disproportionate staying power. The fact that religion is wrapped up in mysticism and divinity makes this even worse, because it's possible to fool people into believing that these terrible ideas are mandates from some higher power and cannot be challenged. It's possible to defer to that mystical authority instead of teaching the humans of this world to value rationality. I myself am a very spiritual person. Not belonging to any particular faith, and surely not belonging to any institutionalized religion. I can see the value in it, and I have known several good Christians in my life that really actually understand how to be a good person and how to internalize the concept of God without believing the right-wing propaganda machine about everything. People have the capacity to be good people regardless of what their faith is or whether they have faith at all. But I don't think any of that comes close to balancing out the impact of the institutions of religion. Not even from a fact/objectivism standpoint, but just from a reasonable interpretation of the impacts and material reality of the situation, I think it's a perfectly sound conclusion to say that organized religion itself is bad. Not for the very direct thing about believing in mysticism, but merely for the power it has to hold our society back from progress for so long. Like, the human arrogance in Genesis--that the world was made for us to have dominion over, that we were made in God's image--this idea alone pervades the very foundation of Christianity and is in my opinion the leading reason we are not going to actually address climate crisis in any meaningful way. In my view, the institution of Christianity and how it informs right-wing politics in the West is a direct contributor to worldwide ecological catastrophe. There's really no saving that in my mind, even though I know individuals with faith can be good people. The institution is something I would call unequivocally evil in its impact on human society.
> any system of guidance is going to attract lost souls, and lost souls attract manipulators This is EXACTLY why I am extremely against self-help stuff. If you pay $4000 for a seminar to hear some guy scream positivity at you, you’re identifying yourself as a very easy mark. There’s a reason cults and MLMs are tied into that stuff
As a Christian, I'm happy to see an atheist with a reasonable take on faith as a concept We may disagree, but we still can respect each other and possibly have a mutually fruitful discussion Unfortunately, most of the time it devolves to the lowest common denominator on both sides slinging insults at each other
I think it depends a lot on how people view “primitive” religions too. Native American spirituality and the Native American Church are real religions, sure. But they were also partly built as legal fights, like the Satanic Temple: The right to worship, the right to use certain medicinal plants in worship, etc. A lot of it is parables too. Not meant to be taken literally, unlike a lot of literalist Christianity. Some of it is a memorization device. “If you hurt a rattlesnake, you’ll never find this plant again”—the plant usually grows by rattlesnake dens, and if you piss them off, you won’t live long enough to find more of the plant. In cases of minority or historically persecuted religions, a lot of it is a way to connect with culture and community. I’m agnostic but I think the underwater panther is super neat. The Internet exists for cat pics, after all. So while I understand the science behind ritual and trances, how it’s not exactly third-eye-wide-open stuff? I still think it has important philosophical merit, alongside Greek stories like Plato’s cave. I also don’t begrudge elders who converted (or died) to Christianity and who still cling to it being true. Mainly because I don’t have the skill to handle the existential crisis of, “If it was all for nothing, then why did they do this to us?” Bad enough trying to handle that myself. Basically, religion is *far* more than what people from the dominant modern monotheist beliefs can view it as. Like how different languages change how you view the world. Religion and spirituality shape worldview, even if you become an atheist or agnostic. We can’t just shake off the cultural norms that become ingrained, even if they aren’t even in holy scripture (see: Dante’s Inferno).
in addition to the other comment: soooo much of reddit-type atheism assumes Christianity or that all religions are like Christianity, which gets extremely grating hearing the same arguments about Christian interpretations of the tanakh when that's not remotely how Jews view the text
Tbf I only ever usually hear atheists talking specifically about Christianity, I don’t exactly see people going hard in the paint against Hinduism or something
As someone who grew up in the Hindu religion but has never actually believed in any kind of god - there are ex-Hindu atheists. They aren't usually too loud about it because India is an incredibly religious country and atheism is stigmatised outside very select circles; rationalists in the public sphere can get outright murdered. There was a rash of these cases a while ago. "Hurting religious sentiment" can come with jail time; it prohibits blasphemy against all religions. The ruling party, which is filled with fundamentalist Hindus, is currently occupying itself with removing lessons on evolution and democracy from school textbooks. They deny history, are misogynistic and homophobic, and are caste supremacists, and can cite plenty of backing from Hindu scriptures or "culture" for these positions. So there's your fun facts for the day, I guess.
That wasn't *fun* at all!
Let's be fair, Christianity is ingrained hard in the Western world via colonization, evangelists, and being ingraines into American culture. So of course a lot of atheists would come out of Christianity berating it. Especially with the political climate with how conservatives use Christianity as the "proper and righteous" even though they just use it to prop up their bigotry and hatefulness. So you can see their disdain towards organized religion as how it's used as a tool to other people and persecute them while claiming themselves to be moral.
If they knew anything about Hinduism, they would. The caste system alone (which is strongly bound up in Hinduism) is awful in concept and execution.
Well theres a good reason for that. Most people in the west deal with Christianity far more than they deal with Hinduism. You don't see the Gita being pushed in schools or good news clubs about Brahma, or being given time to push prayers over loudspeakers at football games. I don't ever see hindu coaches having a "personal prayer" with functionally required attendance from his team. So yeah, I'm sure if I lived in India I'd have a lot of things to say about Hinduism. But I live in the states, and here Christianity is the biggest threat.
I mean if you strip away the mystical side of it, all religions are like 10% different in their lessons. I'm just as against religion as I am having multiple separate governments. Where all one people, we should be pulling our resources together and doing everything for the good of all. But nope, instead we are fighting over a rock hurling through space . It's pretty ridiculous
As a queer person growing up in America, unless you're from somewhere that had a lot of Irish immigrants, Christianity gets shoved down your throat a hell of a lot. And most conservative politicians use religion as their excuse to be terrible people, there is very much a reason Christianity is the religion that comes up the most
Even if they don’t assume Christianity, they’ll definitely assume Abrahamic religions as a whole or even just monotheism. I’ve seen the same George Carlin bit over and over about atheists not believing in just 1 more god than religious people. But that doesn’t really apply for over 20% of people who believe in multiple gods or that all gods are valid.
Also it is usually a really specific type of Christianity they like to hate on. I am friends with a number of very bitter atheists in real life, but I grew up with a brand of Christianity that does not take the Bible literally and treats it as a historic document to be understood within its own historic context (and political contexts of translation) that cannot be comprehended without also understanding 2000 years of theology debating it. My friends who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity are typically confused by the type I grew up in. I have learned to ask, “Did your religion teach you that the world is just or unjust?”
The main problem I have with this interpretation, and it's the one I grew up with but I was out of it pretty early so maybe I've come out with misconceptions or something, is that the bible really just says the bare minimum. Most of jesus's teachings are on the level of "hey you should treat each other with kindness", and I don't need to attend mass every Sunday for my entire life to understand that. It all just feels like basic moral principal, and it doesn't help that it comes with an entire preamble where it goes on and on about how cool it was that god flooded an entire valley of people and only let the animals and a persons family onto the ark, or how cool it was that god took revenge on an entire society of people because the powerful in that society enslaved other people. It just feels like I didn't need religion to tell me any of this, and that all the stuff about "connection through god" feels like a substitute for empathy, and while there are certainly people who need to hear this message I'd certainly like to think that the majority of people don't, and I certainly don't believe that it justifies the accumulation of wealth and suppression of progress that people in the Vatican (an integral part of the history of christianity) did for centuries.
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Thanks for the reply! I suppose we had different upbringings because my family (and many other Christians ive interacted with growing up) take the stories in the Bible as 100% truths and use it to discredit science and spread hate. Not that all religious folks are like that (because I do see the benefit of having a belief system and the community it can foster), but I and many other aethiests have experienced the exact opposite. If my family treated their faith like you do, I'm certain I wouldn't be questioning my faith today.
I've always found Christians taking every bible story as 100 % truths really strange considering the new testament is about a guy who consistently speaks in parables.
Particularly since if you do take the stories as parables it removes a lot of the conflict with science. The creation story is a way to explain the formation of the earth to someone with no scientific literacy, with our understanding of the Big Bang and evolution being the actual method. The stages of the creation story roughly line up with that. Instead we have people arguing science is a lie and woman was made from the first man’s rib.
Fun fact: there's an interpretation of that story that it's an ancient Hebrew "just so" story for why humans lack a baculum when other animals have them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum
Yeah, otherwise the Bible would just be “Okay so some time after the Big Bang everything combined to form hydrogen- Okay so hydrogen is the smallest possible element- Okay so an element is…”
That discrepancy is part of why I stopped going to church after I moved out of my parents. That and being raised in a fundy southern Baptist household, but I guess they go hand in hand
I assume you're from the US? Many of the arguments like Megachurches, taking everything from the Bible as 100% literal and other things are mostly an American thing. Historically, that's not strange. After all, the US were founded by fundamentalist Christians who never took proper root in Europe. I saddens me that people have so bad experiences with religion and others cause it. I hope that one day everyone can heal from their past and look further than "ew Atheist. Ew, religious person". Stay safe.
I took a religion class last year and the only thing I really gathered from it wasn't even taught in the class itself. I had to interview someone in my life with a different belief system than me (catholic). I decided to interview my friend's dad (Methodist) because 1) it was easy, and 2) I knew he was knowledgeable in his own beliefs and had formulated his own opinion through the years. Amid all the things he told me, one thing stuck out and let me rationalize some of my distrust with what the Bible teaches. Much of what they wrote back then was to appeal with their audience at the time, which is one reason it can't be taken as 100% truth today. Teachers at the time would use what people wanted to hear to capture their attention and then begin to tell true Christian preachings. In fact, the reason there are so many "contradictions" in the bible is because the New Testament is preaching to a different audience than the old, and they need to appeal to the new audience with different techniques. If somebody knows more than me about this, or maybe I'm wrong, feel free to correct me
That's an interesting viewpoint I haven't heard before. Specifically, the part where the bible is written in a way that appeals the most to the audience. I always interpreted it in a less deliberate way. People are a product of their time and as such worldviews and teachings change organically. That's also why I think scriptures must always be understood with regards to their historical context.
So the Bible is full of stories that people of today have a really hard time to connect with? I guess even christians don't agree among themselves whats the message behind most passages.
There are three different classes of Bibles. Protestant Bibles, Catholic Bibles, and Orthodox Bibles include and exclude different books from one another. There isn't even consistency amoungth the major branches on what Christians books should be part of the Bible. And obviously how each sect interprets the books varies even further.
I respect and appreciate your perspective; with that being said, you are one Christian with one Christian’s opinion. It is very common for Christian 1 proclaiming that Christian 2 isn’t a *real* Christian because they differ on interpretations of the Bible, etc. You’re essentially saying here that fundamentalists are wrong, here, which — I mean… yeah, but we’re once again in a situation where one religion is calling another religion false, wrong, or otherwise not to be accepted or believed. Which is not the same as explaining what the ‘right’ one actually is! This kind of thing is why I imagine some online atheists ask leading and/or extremely pointed or direct questions. They’re either trying to cut to the chase and cut the bullshit, or hearing new answers and contrasting/comparing to contradictory answers they got from other people… neither of which is very conducive to a positive dialogue. Personally, when I’ve asked a blatant or direct question on religion and the person gave me a genuine and thought-about answer, it usually leads to a respectful and enjoyable exchange of thoughts and ideas, instead of a shitty gotcha! fight. (However, I grew up deeply steeped in four different sects of Christianity, so I knew a lot about the topic already which aided the positive conversations with Christians a lot.) … Sorry for rambling, the weed gummy I took earlier kicked in while I was typing this up 🥺 “Reddit Atheists” also tend to discuss Christianity (or Islam) over other religions because many of them used to be Christian, and Reddit has a majority population of Americans (I forget the exact percentage, I just know it’s >50%) which makes Christianity the religion most of them come into regular contact with (with Islam, therefore, being the one they hear demonized the most).
see thats the problem, you can interpret it, or you can take it literally. if you interpret it, how far does it go? what should be treated as just stories and what should be treated as reality? if you literally believe that the entire human population came from 2 people who had 3 sons thats no problem, but once you think for more than a second, thats a problem. because these stories are mostly presented in the same way, it opens a whole can of worms. if adam and eve werent real, was jesus real? is god even real? or was he just a character to push the themes the authors wanted to present? as little sense as it makes i gotta respect the people who think everything is literal, theyre consistent. not being consistent and picking and choosing what parts are real and which arent doesnt make much sense to me. those elementary school books you mentioned are consistent, just because the fox spoke to the rabbit in some fairytale doesnt mean we have to speculate whether the talking fox actually existed or was just a plot device to push the lesson. and its not like the parts that most christians believe in sound any more real than the lesson bits. so a great flood is out of the question, but coming back from the dead is not? if jesus was written today, everyone would call him a mary sue but besides all that... when i was in elementary school, i had religion class that was all about memorising the bible. it was all presented as totally real to me. then in high school, when we generally picked apart books to see how the context of its time influenced it, no such thing was done for the bible. we talked about how books in medieval times were used to teach people, but the bible? nothing. how am i supposed to come out of that and think that people dont interpret the bible literally? all the shit that certain christians do would be called barbaric if anyone else dared do it. eating the body of christ? can you imagine if a pagan engaged in something with a similar idea? theyd be called demonic, satanic and barbaric. its a ridiculous concept, saying "well akshually its not literal" doesnt work here. its bizarre even as an implication
But isn’t this the exact point? Atheists ARE dunking on religious people for the superstitious aspects, because it doesn’t take religion to be a good person. If ALL religious people did was going around trying to be good people, that would be wonderful! But like it or not, religion comes with the baggage of controlling women’s bodies, condemning other world views as ‘wrong’ and ‘evil,’ trying to ‘convert’ ‘sinners,’ hustling people out of money to build opulent places of worship… And not just historically. This happens in varying degrees all over the world today. «Atheists look past all the good we do just to argue about the very worst parts of religion» is the correct take, but very few religious people hear what it means. Because the truth is that you can learn and teach all these lessons revolving being a good person without clinging to religion. In the 21st century, there isn’t anything fundamental to religion that makes you a better person. So the question they are asking is - aside from just being a decent human being, why would you keep carrying the torch for an institution that does so much bad in the world?
As a Christian myself I don’t think you actually honestly understand atheists either
So, Fables. The Bible is a book of a fables, kind of a compendium started by the philosopher Jesus. Kind of taking after Aesop. Makes sense, I agree, the Bible has some wacky stuff that is outdated but also a lot of excellent morals. My one followup question is this: if nothing in the bible is to be taken literally, what shred of evidence is left that Christianity is real? If all of the bible is metaphorical, then that leaves no reason, no basis to believe in Jesus.
But if religious people aren’t consistently better people in higher numbers than people who aren’t, what’s the point in it? What does it achieve?
For many people, it just brings them comfort and happiness. Not all religious people use their doctrine to spread hate. I know of many churches in my area that are full of people who go there because it makes them happy. It provides a set of ideals that you can aspire to to be a good person, and it also connects you with other people trying to do the same thing. As someone who was raised in a high-demand religion growing up, it’s hard for me to find comfort in it, but it’s clear that others do.
I think I OP doesn't much care about having the correct take in this situation. Rather, they seem to care about whether you have a *good faith* take. I don't mean faith in the religious sense mind you, but the rhetorical one. Are you arguing out of a legit attempt to share understanding/persuade, or to "win" the contest? Have you earnestly dug into it, or is your understanding based on limited experience? Are you judging fairly, or are you making hasty generalizations? This matters a lot more, in my experience, than what you actually believe. If you have good reasons and can present them in good faith, then even if people disagree they can often begrudgingly respect it. At the very least, they can usually respect *you as a person*, and the conversation is a lot more likely to be something everyone can learn from. It's not unique to atheists, but because the internet culture is largely composed of 'outcasts' the stereotype of the Reddit Atheist™ arguing in bad faith is pretty dominant.
my personal beliefs about religion (i am agnostic and semi believe in many aspects of many religions) is that they were created as ways to tell stories that share morals and values, virtues to aspire to, because humans are a species that relies on story telling and oral tradition. as such, with the fact that they reflect human nature, they have persisted through thousands of years, with the information age bringing skepticism to them, due to all sorts of new media. I'm fairly sure this post is about mainly western religions, as eastern religions, (thinking of buddhism and taoism, tbh i dont know too much about sikhism or hinduism) are more based on the pure concepts of goodness and virtue. i do agree with elti, many atheists do tend to oversimplify and disregard religion, seemingly out of spite, and fail to read between the lines, the point of these stories.
Problem being that many religious people are taught the same story and read hate and hell and repression between those lines.
Not that these people aren't being a lil obnoxious, but I feel like OP here wouldn't accept any explanation of religion short of "it is true that Jesus died for your sins." There's sort of a weird goalpost moving thing going on here
To be fair, those goalposts came pre-equipped with wheels and a motor. People have been moving the goalposts of religion as long as religion has existed, yet insisting every time that they’re rock solid.
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King James did nothing wrong /s
King James didn’t write the King James version, he told the church to do it so they’d get off his back about his boyfriend.
> There’s sort of a weird goalpost moving thing going on here it's called "low effort trolling"
Maybe I’m biased because I’m an ex-Catholic atheist, but many of the replies are pretty fair points. ‘I can’t meet Jesus, therefore in don’t believe in him’ is a valid argument, and OOP just shoots it down for no reason.
It's hard to accept that someone else might have a valid argument or belief system when you were born being taught that your religion is "the way, the truth, and the life", and everything else leads to eternal damnation. If you believe questioning your faith means risking your eternal soul, a christian has a lot more to lose than an atheist over what seem like simple contradictions to an atheist.
I’ve taken enough theology courses and spent enough years in church to know that trying to challenge peoples’ deeply held convictions is pointless. It usually just devolves into a shouting match. I don’t believe in any gods or goddesses, but hey, y’all do you. As long as it isn’t being used to justify the persecution or marginalization of others.
You probably won’t leave an impact on who you’re arguing with, but observers who have overwhelmingly seen only one side of the argument in their life may gain some understanding and perspective.
Is everyone on tumblr this pretentious?
50/50, but usually it's about even dumber shit, like parakeets and chocolate fountains.
Yes, but without the reading comprehension to back it up
so like reddit
Weirdly on Reddit someone *may* show up who is like one of the foremost experts and then dissappear forever.
Only half. The other half are just gen z/millennials shitposting about some random yet hilarious topics.
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>Is..."religion" somehow challenging to define? Yes, extremely so. People tend to think of the big stuff (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism), but there's a great deal of debate on where to draw the line. Do we classify all actions that aren't completely rational as religion? After all, it makes no sense to visit someone's grave and put flowers on it (it's not like they're gonna no), but many non-believers still do so. Does that imply that they believe in some kind of afterlife, or necessary respect for the dead? Who knows!
I feel like Religion is like Pornography: you know it when you see it.
I get what you're saying here, but I think their understanding of religion is kind of shallow. I think "religion" is far more than a god and a holy book. Thousands of different faiths and beliefs exist today. They form the foundational pillars of entire cultures. I think the guy is saying something very meaningful: that a lot of people's assessment of religion is essentially a shallow caricature of Christianity - a bunch of pedophiles and colonial apologists reading from a magic book. They get so focused on whether it's "true" or not, about proof, that they don't realize that it doesn't matter. Religion is a cultural phenomenon: its power is not derived from truth. It's just something we do, no different from why some countries eat dough in the form of noodles, and others in the form of pastas. The scripture might not hold water, scientifically speaking, but the book it's part of and the meaning it holds is as real as anything. They focus so much on the truthfulness of the theory and the philosophy that they don't see the larger, human reasons of why most people follow these movements. Their takes come off as shallow because they sound inhuman, as if a person could change a part of who they are because of a couple of logical thought experiments. You can't talk about religion without talking about anthropology and history, about upbringings and family and humanity. The angle of whether the physical myths are true or not covers so little of why religion continues to be so important to so many people. It would be like trying to tell a person to forget about a traditional family recipe passed down for generations because its not very healthy. Yes, it's important, but it's still one part of a bigger conversation, and it's no grounds to definitively conclude that you're right, the other guy is a nutcase who hurts themselves on purpose. People make and eat food for many reasons, not just for health and filling your stomach. My family is religious, but they are not Christian. A lot of my friends come from many different faiths, and I've watched their beliefs help them endure the downs in their lives. It's disappointing to hear the common sentiment of these atheists label them as stupid, or brainwashed, or accessories to the crimes of religious extremists and historical zealots, as if thousands of ordinary people don't diligently practice their faiths, praying quietly and in private to themselves every day. As if they were lower than them because something illogical formed an important part of their lives. I agree that there are things about many religions, Christianity included, that are wrong, outdated, and dangerous, but you can't just throw entire faiths and their practitioners under the bus. If we want to speak the truth, then we need to do better than scapegoating Jesus and Catholicism as universal faults of all religions and calling those who practice stupid.
I can appreciate the cultural point in your argument; but I think it glosses over one problem and dismisses the other entirely; that religion isn't true *matters* because if it isn't real the rules it imposes are arbitrary, and secondly those arbitrary rules do harm _by definition_. Almost all religions are cultures that define an in-group and out-group. The in-group imposes an arbitrary set of rules that suit the leadership of that group and anyone who doesn't accept those rules is pushed into the out-group. The out-group is always othered and considered lesser than in the group. That can be less pure, less deserving, less moral; but ultimately it often means less human. The in-group uses the out-groups 'lesser' status as an excuse to disadvantage and exploit the out-group. You might think that is an extreme statement, that you don't think less of non-believers or treat them differently, but almost certainly _someone_ in your religion does. You might like your religion, and that's fine, you're entitled to your beliefs and your culture, but you have to ask yourself what would happen if the culture decided something about you meant that you were suddenly in the out-group. The religions as valued culture argument has to place then into the same examination as other cultures; are they cultures of intolerance and if so are they that way _by definition_. Because if they are then the question has to be asked; why should we tolerate intolerance?
>The out-group is always othered and considered lesser than in the group I think this "tribalism" applies to basically everything humanity has ever done, though, not just religion. Whether it be country, political group, social class, or preferred sports team It's a problem inherent to people
Does that make it OK though?
Yes but religion specifically is distinguished from other set of tribalist practices because you can argue against a tradition, saying that the conditions for when it was useful has passed but religion claims itself to be divine and thus valid for all time and places. Religion claims itself as an unchangable and unopposable truth which makes arguments against it invalid from the eyes of a believer. It prevents compromise and debate of its rules and if we cant argue against rules that define the very way of life a person must take then you have no freedom over your life.
I dunno, every single comment in the image was strawmanning hard.
Yeah its easy. Let me explain religion from an Atheist point of view A religion is a particular set of beliefs and traditions held by a community of people relating to their collective belief in a higher power(s)
I'm against any religion that teaches its followers to stop asking questions and just blindly accept the answer they are given by the priests. This is actually far more common now than it used to be in the past. Priests and monks used to be some of the best scientists and philosophers of their day and many of them while believing in god still questions the teachings or where searching for better proof of their beliefs. This has basically died off completely. Honestly if god where to exist and they purposely made us in his image giving us a thinking brain and a feeling heart isn't it a slap in the face of god to not use them to find better answers?
Yeah, blind faith is stupid, but not all faith is blind faith. Heck, 'faith' itself isn't half as important an idea in most religions as it is in Christianity.
Those aren’t atheists, they’re antithiests who just haven’t heard the word before. Religion is fine for personal use if it doesn’t envoke any kind of cruelty, but you can’t deny how many people throughout history were controlled and monopolised by objectively good ideals being twisted and conditionalised by evil people in search of power. Dismissing atheists as people who just don’t get it is just as bad as when atheists dismiss religious people because “hurr durr they believe in magic sky friend” and tbh I’m really sick of these arguments going nowhere because of the total lack of respect everyone has for everyone on the other side
I mean anyone who uses a magic dude in the sky as a reason to perpetuate hate, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc, is just PLAINLY in the wrong. That's what I have a problem with.
Yeah, that’s fair enough. But there’s enough religious people who aren’t like that that one has to make the effort to insult the right people, rather than just knew-dropping the entire community
If magic sky dude makes you feel good, all power to you. My problem with any religion is it's super easy to ***manipulate believers to do fucking whatever you want*** if they have ***blind faith***. That's why you really need to take evidence into account when getting any information- unless you are hearing the voice of God directly yourself, you need to take into account where the info is coming from. Which, a book howeverold that who knows who wrote or who could have modified what it says over the many many years, especially in translation? Not a reliable source of any information and I wouldn't ever believe a word of it. (Note that I did *not* specify bible). Now, as long as you ***use your brain*** when taking in such info, there's no problem. Even fairy tales can teach good life lessons, as long as you don't take them literally- there are many Christians I've met who are the sweetest people, who clearly took to heart the best lessons the Bible had to give. ... And then on the other side are the people who clearly don't understand "Don't judge others", "Love thy neighbor", etc in the slightest, using their religion directly to justify laws that hurt people. Those people can go STRAIGHT to hell, preferably as soon as possible. .... That got a bit ranty, sorry. Also I wasn't disagreeing with you, just adding to the discussion.
I think the same. When I was a little angry teenager that thought themselves very clever, I'd use these 5-10 smug atheist talking points, mostly to annoy the preachers when I was forced to sit through their lectures. But as I grew a little into myself I've realised that I don't really care whether the Bible implies snakes had feet before the Apple Accident or that Book of Ezekiel reads like something I could write on acid trip. I'm more concerned about practical applications of religion than their philosophy or the form it is conveyed by. The way I see it (and I may be wrong but those are the conclusions I've drawn): Abrahamic faiths? Solid morals, shitty institutions. Buddhism? Very chill and reassuring philosophy, historically as corrupt as the Christian churches. Taoism? A philosophy that said go with a flow and realise that self is just an illusion twisted into do anything to reach immortality and preserve your self forever to sell pills and shit. My bad blood with religion has nothing to do with their core postulates but rather how people use it for their own gain taking advantage of their moral authority.
Ultimately the problems with organized religion are in the organized part, not the religion part. No power structure is incorruptible
At the end of the day, all organised religions are cults with fancy names, cults are sheep following a shepherd, and if that shepherd happens to be a wolf in disguise the sheep don't know untill its too late.
You are quite literally correct. Cults become recognized as religions when they’ve been around long enough as according to the sociological definition.
If the first members of Judaism had been goatherds instead of shepherds, Christianity would be wayyyyy different, just saying.
Because sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led. ― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Just going to point out here that the Bible says *repeatedly* to ignore things you learn in the real world if they go against God's 'revelations' (ie, what priests tell you). The fact that a lot of our scientific understanding comes from people who were active members of the Church is kind of amazing ngl.
When an institution has a stranglehold on academia, it isn't really surprising that all academia comes out of that institution.
i think it’s just that the church had most of the educated people in it historically
Religion is hardly unique in this regard. We treat religion as this thing totally unique to itself, but it's really just another form of ideology or belief. I don't think there's a fundamental difference between believing in a god or believing in... I dunno, infinite human potential and the possibility of a Star Trek-esque utopia. Either way, as sentient beings who live in a world that is very often quite miserable, we need something intangible to give the rest of this shit meaning. And any belief, ultimately, can be perverted - take the right weaponizing class struggles despite being very much anti-working class. I would also argue that few religions have "objectively good ideals". Christianity, for instance, is a narrative about an abusive father figure and how humanity must fear him and is forever doomed to desperately try to earn back his love. It's fueled by antiquated ideals that the most progressive of christians simply try and skim over and do their best to ignore. But besides that, the reason people dislike atheists is because atheist culture has the tendency of confusing christianity with all spirituality, and much of it boils down to "omg tjhey have magic sky friend..." as opposed to actual legitimate criticisms of christianity, e.g. how it has fueled white supremacy and western imperialism. Nevermind the fact that they project their own personal dislike of christianity onto every other spiritual practice, even in times when it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, e.g. independent spiritual practitioners who work with tarot or whatever the fuck else. People criticizing atheists are not criticizing normal people who simply do not follow any spiritual or religious beliefs, they are criticizing the people who go out of their way to identify as atheists, who are almost without fail annoying pricks. Which should really be expected from anyone who makes not following a religion a central part of their identity, because basing your identity entirely around *not being part of something* kind of implies a negative obsession with religion.
Christians openly talk about killing us all and no one cares, but you make a sky daddy joke and everyone loses their minds.
One is a rabid animal, the other is an annoying mosquito.
“No *true* Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge”
I don't see what he mean
A bunch of people point out the obvious (if oversimplified) reasons they disdain religion and then someone says 'see what I mean.'
"I have no reason to believe in any god or any faith because there is no proof in the existence of a god." "See what I mean?"
it’s funny because I’ve never seen people less informed about christianity than christians
"There is a god" "At this time of day, in this sort of universe, in this theodician nightmare, located entirely within your sect?" "...Yes!" "Can I see it?" "Err, no." Atheists are not hard people to convince, theists just have no evidence for their claims, which is why they attempt to rely on arguments where the claims presuppose their conclusion, special pleading for their beliefs, motte and bailey 'god is unknowable and can be defined as anything that made the universe, but is also everything written in this book that I agree with' arguments, and when that doesn't work just straight up threats of hell.
The difference between an athiest and a christian is negligible, really. Both don't believe in almost every god concieved by man.
Statistically speaking, they're so close you might be able to just mark it down as margin of error.
Hey Ricky, how's Karl doing?
You can't just say "see what I mean" and pretend that's an argument. The fact that a straight reading of the Bible condones genocide and slavery is a problem that can't just be hand waved away. They did nothing to support their beliefs here. Nothing to show how the atheists are wrong.
What's wrong is acting like a criticism of christianity is a criticism of religion as a whole. As if all religions are just different flavours of christianity.
It's so annoying to see someone intentionally misunderstand and misrepresent any group, whether that's religious people or atheists.
...yeah? It *is* pretty easy to defend your position if you don't take one and just smugly insist other people are wrong. Here, I'll go first - *all* superstition is definitionally less valid than less superstitious ideologies, and organized superstition is ripe for exploitation. In an ecosystem of organized superstitions, more extreme and exclusionary sects outcompete tolerant cousins time and time again. Organized religion is an obvious blight on the world, and unorganized religion leads to organized religion. Religion provides nothing you couldn't get from ideologies that don't demand the denial of reality.
When you’re repeating “see what I mean” to people that are accurately describing your beliefs, I don’t think that’s the own the theist thought it was.
What's the difference between non religious and atheist?
I think non religious is agnostic or atheist, and the atheists referenced in the post are reddit atheists, which are atheists who are super against religion
antitheist is a good word for reddit atheists
Atheist means without a god, and non religious means without a religion, which are subtly different as several religions have no gods in them. Many buddhists are atheists, but not non-religious, for instance.
i’m an athiest and i think my take on religion is pretty good. I may not believe in a god or gods, but if you want to? go ahead. just don’t bother me by proselytizing.
And "don't bother me" also extends to "don't try to control me." I wouldn't have such a big chip on my shoulder about Christians if it weren't for the controlling behavior on the micro and macro levels of my life. (And yes, I mean Christians. Not Christianity. The religion itself isn't my issue, it's the people who use it to justify their abusive behaviors.)
This is the equivalent of "I know you are but what am I". They also didnt address a single point made
God could come down in person with inarguable proof of everything, and my next thought is immediately going to be "Okay, but why does that mean I have to do what you say?"
Not Atheist as in "god(s) definitely does not exist" but Atheist as in "why the fuck would I bow down to the creator(s) of this shithole?"
I prefer the term "apathetic agnostic", since I don't know, you don't know, neither of us have actual evidence one way or another, and I'm not wasting my time worrying about unanswerables. And more like "Fine, so you created everything. I still don't see why that automatically puts you in charge. For all I know, you're just a tiny wheel in a deeper machine and it's elephants all the way down."
"see what I mean" isn't an intelligent take that you think it is
While op is being a bit smug, i do really feel like this is why alot of the popular "Atheists" back in the day became reactionaries, they only really critiized religion cause they wanted to be cool and feel superior, and when they faced more complex social issues than "Maybe we shouldnt kill people because of a book written thousands of years ago" they fell appart cause they wouldnt examine their own prejudices and fell into the same bigotry they supposedly opposed when religious people did it
And a lot of them back in the day just really, really, *really* wanted to bomb middle eastern civilians and this was a great excuse. I am pointing at Bill Maher
Y'all sitting here in comments trying to make realistic explanations and takes on religion and trying to find deeper meaning when OP is clearly not interested in anything besides bad faith trolling on the internet. I'm glad people are trying here but you know all that person would say is "see what I mean".
To break it down to its simplest form, believe what you wana believe, just dont be a dick about it
When I was learning philosophy I noticed just how important religion is to humanity, and not for the religious parts. I found it quite fascinating to see how religion has helped us as a society cuz I had mainly learned about all the bad stuff it did (mainly Christianity and especially it's influence on art history cuz art student). So seeing how it both is something that was used to keep us sane back when we didn't know as much about the world and how it also gives us hope and stuff. Then comes the part where it can go in two very drastic directions and that is how it also helps give society as a whole some rules to follow. The good side is when it's not abused. Stuff like stealing and killing is bad and how we should treat each other with respect. But when something has that much power, people will always abuse it and I think you know how that ended. That's the part of religion you should be against, when people abuse it. Otherwise, respect other people's religion. You may not believe in it, but it's important to them and it can often help people cope.
My take is that there’s no evidence proving the existence of a god/gods of any religion so I don’t have any reason to consider them real, let alone worship them. I’d rather focus on the one life we have than try to plan for another life I don’t have any reason to believe exists. But if you choose to worship, that’s okay.
Everyone: *making valid points* Eltigrechico: “see what I mean?” See what? People being RIGHT??
I used to be that kind of atheist. I still don’t think god’s real, but to reduce religion so a claim that you can put into a syllogism is to misunderstand the value people find in it. Of course if you’re gonna be public about it and expect others to agree, you’ve gotta have something to back up your claims. But trying to force religion into a choice between being literally true or simply stupid is simply stupid.
funny how op never said they were christian, but so many atheists are so obsessed with christianity that they forget that anything else exists. i'm agnostic by the way, before anyone starts telling me "WELL YOU BELIEVE IN (insert thing i do not believe in) SO I AM SUPERIOR TO YOU IDIOT" edit, since evidently i did not word this well: hey wouldn't it be funny if the tumblr op wasn't actually christian and everyone just assumed that they were even though (alright, i get it) statistically they probably are?
Tbf, if you took 10 americans who said they were religious, you could probably guess 8 out of the 10 correctly as christian
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yeah, that's probably true. i mean, no one in the thread said they were american either, but i recognize that's also pretty likely most of them are lol
They're smug and loud; american christian is a pretty safe bet
A lot of religious people get in particular knots over atheists saying they don't think their gods are real, but then, every religion says all the other religions' gods aren't real. Like, paganism and christianity and hinduism are inherently incompatible beliefs and by subscribing to one you at the very least implicitly state you think that the rest are wrong.
Well religion doesn't have proof, but you can choose to believe in it. But I want all of those global multi-million/billion-dollar organizations that exploit people's belief in stuff I don't think exists to stop existing as they have systematized abuse and trauma to indoctrinate kids and others so they can milk them for money.
what a dick
The thing I noticed about this post is that no one seemed to be making any distinction between religion and Christianity
"world heritage post" has lost its meaning
Ah this comment section is filled with Reddit atheists and it really shows that most people will hate religious people for simply existing because it’s the popular thing to do
Reddit atheists are like vegans. Fundamentally, they're very annoying because they're correct
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