From the same author:
That’s pretty funny.
Funny, but Simpsons did it.
simpsons is going for so long i think they might have done literally every joke in existence by now
Thats why I don’t do that shit to people.
Who am I to question someone’s spirituality if it makes them happpy and they practice in a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them?
Oops, now abortion is illegal and gay people can’t marry!
Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences…
He said doesn’t negatively impact others
it never negatively impacts others until suddenly it does. It’s insidious.
Also it can affect people in ways they aren’t even aware themselves.
Fortune telling for example.
My friends mum sold her house because the fortune teller told her some vague nonsense she interpreted to mean the end of the world was approaching.
Erroneously.
Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences
Considering how many edgelord atheists I’ve seen uncritically embrace the tenets of white supremacism I’m inclined to agree with you…
Just for fun, you should take a map of religious belief in the US by region, and overlay a map of racist beliefs and policies in the US, and note the overlap. I think you’ll discover that large coastal urban centers (where religious belief is lowest) are not hotbeds of white supremacism.
I think you’re confusing a bunch of online trolls who pick opinions specifically to get a rise, with real, actual people in the wild.
Closest I saw. Can you find a map? Heck would be cool to see if you wanted to make one, just if you’re really fast with that kind of thing.
overlay a map of racist beliefs and policies in the US
There are places in the US unaffected by “racist beliefs and policies?” Seems to me that white supremacist ideology is pretty uniform across the US - the only difference is that certain types and classes of white people pretend not to be. Is this what you are referring to?
Imagine the privilege, to think everywhere is equally racist
Imagine the privilege required to believe that white supremacism is only limited to those who expresses it overtly.
As a POC, I would rather live in a place where racists are a little more afraid to be open about it, than a place where the KKK and Nazis are visible and tolerated. It turns out that many of the places where racists are most tolerated are places in the Bible Belt.
Yea, white supremacism is everywhere, but there are definitely levels to it.
Uniform? Brother never been to the South
Sure… the South hasn’t learned to hide it as well as their Northern peers.
Since you’re able to work a computer, I assume you’re competent enough to understand that two things can be bad, but one can be MORE bad. The South is currently more bad.
Even if the North is “hiding it”, as you say from under the tinfoil hat, the fact that it’s hidden means the oppression is less bad.
Yeah we call those Nazis and generally try to distance ourselves from them and call them out when they show themselves.
try to distance ourselves from them
Why do you have to distance yourself from them? Are the differences between “you” and “them” not obvious?
This is giving the same energy as “atheists can’t have morals because morals come from god”
This is giving the same energy as
Lol! No it isn’t.
Yup.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking that we are more modern than we actually are, that we have already moved past these issues. It’s important to remember that civil rights, feminism, and LGBTQ rights are not topics to be relegated to the history books. They are as alive now as they were in the 60s for today, like yesterday and tomorrow, is a constant fight for our rights.
In my experience, people like that will be terrible with or without religion.
The difference of “external man in the sky” vs “internal concept of my own rightness” for how they feel ok about their own actions doesn’t make a difference when they’re still a bigoted asshat at their core.
You think that something like 40% of the population of the US is voting for cruel and regressive laws just for the lulz, and it has nothing to do with their stated belief system?
Yes. The cruelty is the point. Belief systems are a nice excuse for later. They would do that either way
There’s a pretty big difference though: when you’re absolutely convinced that your own inner voice that distinguishes right from wrong is inspired by, or at least approved by, the ultimate judge of the Universe, it’s going to be incomparably harder for you to accept that you are, indeed, being an unreasonably smug asshole.
I think you missed the bit of the above post that specified that spiritual belief was fine WHEN it’s expressed in “a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them” - restricting abortion and marriage prohibitions both are violations of their actual premise.
I think they’re saying there is no such thing as harmless belief in the unreal.
These people vote, raise children, form relationships and live life in general, interpreting reality with a fundamental distortion. I would agree that it’s hard to claim they won’t end up harming someone.
See that I just can’t abide. So many people just want to cut other people’s grass that they can’t frame anything they don’t like as a fundamental problem to be addressed and rooted out of society as a whole. Everybody has “distortions”. You are stuck living your life through a fixed lense perspective. Your distortion might be privilege, it might be status it might be health or ability. Even the most idiotic person out there is not invalid and undeserving of happiness. What level of acuity you have is less important than whether or not you are kind. Why should belief in the unreal be any different if they still subscribe to the modern standard of what is kind?
My time in the atheist community was very short lived because I was never atheist “enough” for not actually caring if other people believed in fairies. The gatekeeping and lack of tolerance for the legitimately harmless always felt like supremacist thinking where the rubric for acceptable to be afforded basic human respect was a coin slot’s width.
None of us live our lives doing zero damage. We aren’t omnipotent, and as such, we will hurt others during our lives. We can merely hope it will be an amount too small to matter.
I would suggest that being raised atheist leaves you better equipped to understand the world in a way that more closely matches reality, and thereby enables you to more consistently avoid causing harm during your life.
Does that mean every person needs to deconvert tomorrow? No. The process in itself can end up doing more damage than it’d be preventing.
But it does mean religion can’t continue to be the default world view, if we are to improve as a society. For a better tomorrow, it does need to be phased out as quickly as it can harmlessly be achieved.
That’s why we do have to care. Deconverting grandma doesn’t matter too much, but if a relative or friend is raising a kid to be religious, preventing that is worth attempting. Another zealot in a coming generation will do more harm than good.
No kind person means to do harm, but unless you get as close to knowing reality as you can, that won’t always be enough. And even then, you’ll probably break some hearts and say things that cause someone somewhere to need more time in therapy.
But you’ll certainly be more effective in realising the things you mean to do and say, if you don’t live life thinking prayers affect reality.
As for you experience with atheists, you’re describing anti-theists. People who hold an actual stance against religion. It sound like you found some especially virtue signaling ones, bad luck.
But an atheist is just someone who doesn’t believe, not some given type of person, ideology, or the nature of your relationship with the rest of humanity.
Oh sure, the religious people out there whose deeply-held beliefs don’t affect the way they think or feel or interact with other people are fine! It’s just those people who read the book they believe was composed by God Almighty Himself as a manual for human behavior and let it actually affect their behavior (and votes) that are the problem.
and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them?
The problem is that most of the time this isn’t true.
I found out not too long ago that my best friend is perfectly willing to vote against my right to love who I want and embrace the identity that I want, and will openly (albeit only when I ask) tell me I deserve to go to hell for it. My family is even worse.
and will openly (albeit only when I ask) tell me I deserve to go to hell for it
Sorry for your loss because that’s not a friend.
You are right that they are no longer a friend, but that’s because they were brainwashed into thinking their friends perfectly normal identity is a result of Satan controlling them, or whatever. Christianity, and most other religions, cause more harm than good in our modern times.
We have outgrown religion’s usefulness as a species, but people are so afraid of death, and the meaningless of life, that they will deny reality to hold on to the hope of a better life after this one. Then, others will use this desperation to their own advantage, and convince their followers that being gay, trans, or just a little different, is an automatic heaven ban.
They’re not your friend
Exactly. Atheists don’t like missionaries, so why should we become those ourselves?
As long as nobody tries to impose their beliefs on me, I don’t care about their religion.
I have friends who are full on religious while I’m an atheist, they know I’m not a fan of their religion but they also know that I only care if it’s making them happier and helping them, which to be fair has helped them become better people, but they were always the ones that needed some external guidance so I suppose gods a better guide than a meth dealer.
They don’t try to convert me and I don’t try to convert them and we still have fun, plus I enjoy hearing the weird AF stories from the bible, like the time Jesus got pissed at an out of season fig tree for not having figs when he wanted, so he cursed to for life, hungover entitled shit Jesus has some funny stories.
I’d like to think religious people don’t necessarily believe or remember word-for-word what happened to Jesus or Muhammad or whoever but they do learn lessons from the readings that they apply in their lives in a positive way. Or at least their intentions are positive.
It’s a routine group-based literary text analysis that gives people a reason to be together, not unlike a high school first language class.
If you wanna get old school sociological about it, you could say it fulfills a social need for cohesion that non practicing people replace by placing increased importance to other routine activities such as sports watching or working.
It’s a pretty mean angle to take, but why deconvert people by pushing them into a nihilistic crisis?
It’s not like atheists think life is meaningless, kindness to be pointless, or the afterlife something to be anxious about.
I’ve found far less mean-spirited success by explaining how belief isn’t necessary for existence to be worthwhile for us. If they can come to understand how happiness is possible for someone who doesn’t believe, their own belief suddenly become a lot more optional.
Religion is their Candle in the Dark. It’s cruel to blow it out when they don’t have another light.
They use that candle to burn your house down. There are better ways to light your path.
The woman crying in this comic isn’t the religion that’s “burning down your house”
She’s just some schmoe that had her light in the dark removed and now she’s scared.
I agree, there are better ways to light the darkness than religion. Candle in the Dark is a book by Carol Sagan about how science is a candle in the dark.
That women is voting against abortion and for concentration camps for the gays. Because her religion told her so.
The woman crying in this comic isn’t the religion that’s “burning down your house”
Oh… what religion is it?
You can’t get another light until you’re in the dark.
It’s cruel to blow it out when they don’t have another light.
And atheism offers any kind of light?
Atheism doesn’t offer anything. It’s a lack of belief, not a religion or anything like that.
The light has to be something internal, external, or both that makes the suffering of life worth it.
I struggled a lot when I lost my faith. I truly believe I’m better off now but I don’t take other people’s spiritual paths lightly. You go to dark places when you haven’t learned how to cope otherwise.
I had the opposite experience. I was convinced I was going to hell and that there was nothing I could do about it, so I thought I may as well be glutinous and selfish to enjoy my time here before getting tortured for eternity. It caused me some serious trauma, and on top of that it led to me hurting family and friends.
I don’t think I could’ve ever left my self-loathing and selfishness behind if I didn’t let go of my religion.
Yeah, and also I wouldn’t go out of my way to shit on someone who believes we live in a simulation. Simulation theory is sort of plausible with our current understanding of tech—but right now it has just as much evidence as most religions (which is none for both). So yeah, I don’t think it’s good practice to try and dunk on people for their beliefs.
She’s crying because she realized that she could buy a second home if she hadn’t been foolishly donating to the church all this time.
This is why I may never be able to fully repair my relationship with my religious father after my own journey out, because I love him too much to undermine the belief that sustains him as an 87 year old.
My own journey out has been incredibly painful and challenging but that is MY life path, not his. He stuck with my mother for 25 years to the very end after her Parkinsons diagnosis and he got to watch her choke to death on some food at the end.
I really believe my father doesn’t need the religion to be that good and faithful, because he is just basically made of good stuff. But I will never attack his faith even though in my heart of hearts I find the foundations of that faith to be risible. What would be gained? What would it say about me if I did?
Yeah, I have no desire to “change” anyone either. As long as they are decent people, that’s enough for me.
My philosophy is if they are truly happy with what they believe and aren’t harming other people with vitriolic speech or dogmatic beliefs just leave them be. It’s not harming anything for them to comfortable in their little bubble.
But when they put on their “holier than thou … I know better and I am going to push my beliefs on you” hat the gloves are off. Although it’s unlikely you’ll change their mind, you can usually score a few jabs that rock their world just a smidgeon.
All I want is an apology for forcing their religion onto me so aggressively as a child. I don’t think that is too much to ask, but they sure seem to think it is.
not even an apology. I don’t need anyone to be sorry. The nuns who beat me will never be sorry, they think that they’re doing it for God and nothing can be wrong when you’re doing it for God. But if one of the other adults that I trust could at least say ‘Hey, they shouldn’t have beat you with sticks. They were wrong for that.’ it would make me feel like maybe I wasn’t a fucking crazy person for not wanting to get beat with sticks. But they won’t. Everyone pretends it didn’t happen, or that it was some sort of misunderstanding, because everyone needs to maintain the delusion that everything the church does is good just because it’s the church doing it. For years I was essentially told “that didn’t happen because the church wouldn’t do that but if they did it’s because you deserved it”. What can a six year old do to deserve being beaten with a yardstick by a grown woman?
Belief only becomes a problem when someone weaponizes it. If you want to become a better person to appease the space rock, go for it, but if you tell me the space rock says no abortions for anyone, no it doesn’t.
Belief is a problem because it normalizes magical thinking and pushes blame away from the self. Belief paves the way for snake oil, anti-intellectualism, and learned helplessness. Belief is comforting shackle but there are other ways to be comforted that do not leave one vulnerable to predation.
Nah, it really isn’t a problem. At all actually. It doesn’t matter if every single person believes in a different gemstone and that the gemstone will bestow upon them magical blessings for being a good person. If that is what they need to be good people, to motivate them, to inspire them to be better - who gives a fuck if it ‘normalizes magic’?
I’m not so concerned with being right that I’d let us live in misery to be closer to ‘intellectualism’. Not everyone will find other methods to cope and their belief doesn’t harm anyone. I think you have to be a genuinely dank and dreary person to want to rob people of something like Santa Claus because it ‘normalizes magic’ while I’m sitting here hoping people just try to be better with the vague promise of presents.
Religious people vote. That’s why it matters.
As long as they don’t use the magic gemstones to decide how they vote, it doesn’t matter.
Their preachers tell them how to vote, and their preachers tell them to take rights away from women and minorities. To not worry about climate change because the Rapture is coming. To give all their money to Trump. They hurt our society.
Everything has grifters. Elon Musk hasn’t whispered a word of religion yet people will vote the way he tells them to. Magic has nothing to do with stupidity.
It’s orders of magnitude more common among religious people.
Score one for atheism!
Eh doing that isn’t really worth the headache. Blind faith is, IMO, a socially acceptable mental illness. You can’t cure a mental illness by brute force; all your gonna do is tire yourself out.
It’s not even that, the comic really does get right to the point. It would absolutely crush some people. My grandmother finds strength to deal with such bullshit by her beliefs so I wouldn’t dare take that away from her. It’s harmless as long as they aren’t the type to push their beliefs on you and hurt you for it.
Your grandma is not (necessarily - I don’t know her, she could be trafficking people) a bad person, but her beliefs and that of so many others who also are good (at least they might be) people provide the fertile ground for the growth of an agressive weed. It’s not the grounds fault, it could be growing strawberries instead, but right now its existence nourishes a strangling vine that bears poisonous fruit.
We definetly should not poison the ground to kill the weed, though that certainly is a way to get rid of it. But we absolutely need to prevent it from spreading, new fields should not be infected by it and with the exhaution of the old places of growth, we might manage to extinct it.
That’s why it is important to keep in mind that your grandma is (most likely) okay to just exist as a believer, but that the beliefs she holds are roots of something, that must not spread.
Your grandma is not (necessarily - I don’t know her, she could be trafficking people) a bad person,
She’s actually the head of the #2 highest volume child trafficking organization! I’m so proud! Lol
I do agree with what you said though, I just couldn’t help making the joke. :P
Also imo a church directory is a con-man’s gold mine. Especially elderly church members, they’ve been taught all their lives to Believe anyone exuding confidence and claiming to have answers and solutions.
So wouldn’t that mean actively going around telling newbies why church is bad? Which is what we don’t want religious folks doing?
Okay but as a kid, I got crushed because my family was religious and threw me out like literal fucking trash. This shit never stays harmless, and it keeps people susceptible to the worst instincts to do shit like fascism. Its always the most vulnerable who this shit hurts, so nobody cares.
So I don’t give a shit how good your delusion makes you feel. If you want to hurt people to feel good, keep it between you and yourself and just put a needle in your arm. Plus, if something goes wrong there, you have narcan.
I’m sorry you went through that but I literally said “It’s harmless as long as they aren’t the type to push their beliefs on you and hurt you for it.”
My family has always been live and let live. They’re religious but you wouldn’t know it unless you spent enough time with them to hear them mention going to mass or whatever.
But they always do. Its like the mythical ‘good cop’, they act as cover for the rest, and (almost) never take real action to compensate for the damage the majority do. Its one if those circumstances where being individually harmless is not systemically harmless.
I think I can agree with that. They may not like what the church has to say about LGBT+ people, but they also don’t actively fight for their rights either.
I do have a gay cousin though and they all love him, but yeah how they act within their own family doesn’t change how society at large deals with those issues.
I’d absofuckinglutley love to see religion eventually go by the wayside, too much pain and suffer caused by it, but to “forcefully” remove someone from within it can also be really damaging to that individual who may not be hurting anyone. I don’t really know what the answer is there though. Hopefully in time we move away from these magical stories. :/
The solution isnt shallow stripping if shit or reeducation camps that basically amount to bullying, but actually fixing the core problems. I know I tend to talk about a lot of American atheists as ‘Christianity as directed by Christopher Nolan’; all the explicit magic and camp stripped out, but otherwise the exact same ways of thinking they were raised with.
But the most anyone can do anything here is halfway, so…
In my eyes that’s just being a hypocrite.
You’re either following the rules completely or you’re cherry picking and a hypocrite.
That can absolutely be true, but the context here is just the comic where some guys got a “win” and totally crushed a person we don’t know anything about.
My initial comment was replying to someone saying it’s not worth it because of how difficult it can be with no payout. I just wanted to remind them that the outcome can be really bad for some people.
On a related topic: my mother isn’t religious, but she believes in “karma” and “reiki healing,” all that new age b.s. It helps her cope with life and i’d never want to take that from her just because it isnt real unless she starts using that as a way to cure cancer or something that will actually hurt her.
The thing I always feel the need to remind people: they would be that kind of person without religion.
Not my grandma, she always says it’s God that helps her through her troubles and that her faith in his support is what helps her cope with bad times.
There are other ways that I totally agree, she says God helped her survive, but in those cases I remind her it’s her own intelligence and resourcefulness that got her through those situations.
What I mean, which I didn’t make clear in my original post, was: If religion was erased before she was born, she’d still find something to place her faith in and power up her innate resourcefulness. And the people who force their views on others would find another authoritative vehicle for that. But you’re right, if you rip that foundation out now, you risk more harm than good.
I think that depends on the person. Some would be completely lost without their god.
I think if you don’t tear out the roots that’s true, but we live in a culture where anyone does anything any way but half.
As long as there are billionaires, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
I’m an athiest, and I generally believe that religion can be easily used to be shitty towards others and push them to being the worst type of people in life (more generally this happens with all ideologies). But for many religious people they aren’t too different compared to an athiest. They might go to church only on the holidays, or maybe they go weekly. They probably have many religious values. But at the end of the day they often make similar decisions for different reasons.
But I genuinely believe that trying to convince people that god isn’t real is super shitty and counter-productive. Show some compassion you fucking deodorant-free 🤓-brained reddit moderator. Take a shower.
I occasionally hear people say something like “We should be making people atheists. Religion is a scourge that uses ideology to harm others.” I can’t help to laugh when I hear this, because someone who takes this seriously (perhaps the person in the comic) is doing the literal thing they are decrying.
So what if someone is a christian because it comforts them? I don’t care if you think it lacks logic when your alternative lacks compassion.
Instead of opposing religion unilaterally, oppose the harmful ideas laundered by religion. Shame the politicians and the charlatans. Don’t shame mary-sue who goes to church weekly for being the a Christian, even though the shitbags at NIFB hate church are also Christians.
It’s certainly possible for people to be good to each other due to their religious beliefs. The local pro-palestine protests near me are primarilly organized by christians, and they are often led by a local group of leftist christian pacifists. They organize anti-war protests, support palestinian freedom, and do many smaller actions to alleviate suffering such as volunteering at the local food bank or other similar orgs. Compared to other groups that organize near me, I vastly prefer them over my local PSL chapter, or almost every ML group I’ve ever come across. Unlike many atheists I’ve worked with, that christian group will happily work with a local mosque, or synagogue when it doesn’t help them materially. This is because they don’t oppose people based on simple reasons like religion, but instead have deep solidarity with everyone else suffering through life on this terrible world.
Instead of opposing religion because you think it’s cringe how about you show solidarity and compassion for your fellow human beings.
I disagree pretty strongly on especially the “don’t shame someone for who is essentially a good person for sharing the same religion as a bad person.”
Community is everything, and there’s strength in names. If you say you are of the same religion as a bigot, you’re telling the bigots that you agree with them, even if you don’t. If you want to follow the teachings of the character known as Christ, you ironically have to call yourself something other than Christian, because that label is synonymous with all kinds of bigotry to a dangerous number of people. The bigotry isn’t going to die out as long as they can claim to be a majority.
We’re not talking about sports teams here. These labels matter, and have dangerous effects. I’d rather everyone drop religions labels entirely and just say how they claim to be a good person, because as it stands there are good people and bad people who share the same label, which makes the bad people stronger.
If you say you are of the same religion as a bigot, you’re telling the bigots that you agree with them, even if you don’t.
Hitler and I may have agreed that the sky is blue, but if someone uses this to say we agree in general, they are simply being unreasonable. There are countless denominations of Christianity as a result of people disagreeing with each other about history and values. The Christian label is not synonymous with bigotry, and we could use more counterexamples if people seem to think otherwise.
Christianity is a big tent term that encompasses a lot of differing groups of thought. You’ve got Catholics and Protestants, being the largest groups that come to mind. Below that you have everything from Lutherans to Presbyterians to Christian Scientists to Westboro Baptists. Admittedly, I don’t think I made it clear enough in my comment I was speaking more big-tent Christianity when referring to mary-sue rather than a specific denomination (or a specific church), as I was speaking about religion as a whole, using Christianity as an example, hence why I was saying “Oppose harmful ideas laundered by religion” rather than opposing religion unilaterally. For example, we should oppose the colonialist ideology smuggled through religion, such as forced religious conversions (in order to save their soul!) or the necessity to colonize to do said conversions. We should oppose genocidal rhetoric smuggled through religion. Heck, we should even oppose the shitty bits of text in a religious text like when or when not to stone someone or the punishment for whatever crime.
However, you are implying that you should simply give up your label when bad actors take up your label. While I don’t dispute that labels matter, because they do, I think it’s silly to just give it up once another person/group tries to coopt your label. If you don’t want bigots using your label, you’ve gotta kick them out. If you change your label to something else, and the bigots come to hide in the crowd, what are you supposed to do, change it for the 5th time?
As far as dropping labels goes, while I like the idea (I hate labels though I find them useful), I think it’s impractical. As you said, “there’s strength in names,” and I think it would be crazy to ask someone to entirely drop a label that they hold dearly, such as their religious affiliation. It would also be crazy to ask them to just say “I believe in Jesus Christ…” and then list out 95 theses to indicate that they oppose aspects of the catholic church, then a good 95 more when they need to indicate their church had a schism in 1893, and another in 1913.
But whenever we do say that those evil people aren’t Christians and push them away, we get accused of “no true Scotsman fallacy” or some BS and “you are part of the problem not taking responsibility”.
As for coming up with a new label, the thing with the label “Christian” is that it’s prescribed in the Bible. Even other religions far removed from Nicene Christianity that respect the Bible or some form of it use the label, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. So the productive thing to do is calling them out on not being one for not following the teachings of the Bible
LMAO are you fucking joking? Jesus straight up tells people to not stop being Jews in the Bible.
Where?
the Bible
I’m not about to reread the whole New Testament just to find which passage it is.
Or you could just admit that you’re wrong and that He never said that.
Are you stupid?
Score one for atheism!
I 100% agree. I think most anti-relious atheist are still living in reaction to their religious up bringing or unable to recognize where power resides to be able to hold it to account or both.
Agreed, except for proselytizers. If they came to my door, bus stop, or campus to try to “convert” me, I’m gonna use their own “holy book” against them.
Numbers 5: 11-21 is one of the more effective passages, since it’s the only time The Bible mentions abortion, and it tells you how to perform a questionable method.
I mean, I haven’t dealt with proselytizers in so long I kinda forgot about them. I used to get the odd mormon or Jehovah’s witness but they stopped coming a long while ago, and I don’t miss em.
Numbers 5: 11-21 is pretty good imho. But I rarely debate religious people since I’ve gotten in a position where I really don’t see people like that anymore between the online algorithms which don’t show that shit and the fact that there aren’t too many religious people near me who are fascistic.
“Hurr durr, fighting fascism is just as bad as being fascist”
That’s you
Idk how the fuck you got that but pop off sis
The woman on the floor is thinking about all the gay people she screamed at about God’s wrath, and all the beatings she took from her husband because he was the Head of her, and all of the time and money she wasted on the church, and all of the beatings she let her husband give to her kids lest she “spoil the child,” and all of the bs she swallowed from Republicans, and all of the shame she carried for masturbating, and all of the abuse she hurled at women outside abortion clinics, and all.of the children she’d terrified at Sunday School, and all of the things she never tried because someone had told her not to.
I kid you not, all that kind of personal history creates a massive sunk cost fallacy that will make it impossible for them to admit that they may possibly be wrong.
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It’s a shit lifestyle that needs to die.
Could you elaborate on that?
The person who replied to you went on a rant about voting. Which I agree, religious people tend to vote against their interests. But spending 3 paragraphs talking about voting and nothing else doesn’t really elaborate on why it’s a shit lifestyle does it? I’ll add what I think are the worst aspects of a religious lifestyle.
The biggest issue with a religious lifestyle, in my opinion, is the fact that truly believing in a religion, especially a deity means you have been convinced, and are able to convince yourself to believe in something for which there is no evidence (ive heard religious arguments that faith is a “radical” belief in something that defies logic). The concept of God, for the most part, isn’t that bad. The issue is, if you’ve let in one truth about your life that you believe is true despite any supporting evidence and no logical reason, that opens the door for more random beliefs that aren’t founded on evidence. Or more accurately, they may believe new things (good or bad) for one reason or another but the idea that something needs evidence or solid reasoning to be believed doesn’t factor into their calculations nearly as much.
This means that a religious lifestyle is random, based on where and how they were raised with an ethos of not questioning their foundational beliefs. This means many religious communities grow up fine, and it means many grow up in the bizarre bigoted looney-tunes world I’m sure you’ve seen if you know religious people from disparate backgrounds.
Idk exactly what that person necessarily meant, but to me, a lifestyle based on beliefs that the person has been trained not to question and doesn’t need evidence to be true is kind of shit.
And in before people say that not all (or even most) religious people are like that. I agree that a religious person could easily be raised as someone who engages in logical reasoning and only accepts new beliefs if they think they have sufficient evidence etc. That’s probably true. I’m explaining why I think religion opens the door to a shit lifestyle because of religion.
Religious people might be polite, might even do good things, but they vote for people who do terrible things. Ideally, the whole thing would be done away with. Convincing people to reject facts and vote their feelings is never a gpod combo.
If religious people recused themselves from voting, I wouldn’t care much. But they’re dragging our country down. They’re gullible tools of awful rich men. They fight any forms of progress.
And yeah yeah you’re about to tell me about your aunt Maple who isn’t like that, she’s really lovely and doesn’t preach at you and just likes going to church for the social element. But who does she vote for??
Being religious doesn’t mean you vote for Trump. Thinking that way just encourages them.
Plenty of religious people actually vote for the person more likely to feed the hungry, liberate the captive, take care of the earth, etc. You know, the way the Bible teaches.
Not most of em.
Only if your view of “religious” is limited to white Evangelical Protestants.
But most people have a broader worldview than that.
I’ve decided that I can’t change my mother’s beliefs nor should I. I told her that we have a no-politics rule as of summer 2020. It saved our relationship.
I wish mine did that. I said one thing about Trump not having as much money as he claims, and my mom got all insulted. She said that maybe we shouldn’t talk about politics, etc, and I agreed to be nice. I don’t like to talk politics at all, even with like-minded people. But she’ll blame a company getting hacked and losing my personal info on democrats, and tell me that she can’t wait until all democrats die off.
But now she just spouts of any shit that comes to her mind without a care, while I’m keeping to our dealt and shutting up. I doubt she even remembers our promise, because the moment it wasn’t convenient for her, she dropped it.
the moment it wasn’t convenient for her, she dropped it.
Sticking to the (lack of) principles of the Republican Party, I see!
Instead of having faith in God, I have faith in the next generation to do slightly better each time. I can’t really bring it to myself to tell my grandma there’s no heaven or hell and her entire life has been a lie. Ignorance is truly bliss sometimes.
Slightly being the key word. I used to think we’d be fine after boomers die and millenials take over (sorry Gen X yes we always forget you) but then realized there are plenty of terrible Gen Y and then for a moment Gen Z was going to change labor politics gun control environment gender/sexuality and be super accepting but there’s still a huge proportion who still want to MAGA… we’ll see how bad alpha is
like my nephews say the same racist shit on their discord and valorant as I saw on 4chan 20 years ago and it’s just sad
Doesn’t mean people can’t change. Kids just wanna feel powerful/invincible. I used to say and hear the craziest of slurs in cod lobbies back in the day. My friends and I who have said those things have just grown up when we learned their real impact and we’ve stopped.
Part of this was what finally got me off Facebook. People I liked, family members, posting dumb shit, and me letting it trigger me. It was literally only on Facebook, family gatherings were fun times. And honestly, since Trump, and despite the dichotomy that exists in my family and probably every other family, we seem to speak less about politics.
I’ve been off Facebook for somewhere between 10 and 15 years. I quit it because I didn’t care about what friends and family posted because they were all very religious, and I couldn’t post what I really wanted without offending said friends and family.
Ragebait doesn’t deserve all this spilled ink.
Cool cool, now do the one where the mother was previously being a transphobic piece of shit because “her god told her so”.
Be pragmatic in your atheism advocacy. Lay out your arguments why supernatural thinking is bad, both from an epistemological and pragmatic sense, poke at contradictions of the other person’s religion with reality, and warn about the dangers of organized religion specifically, just don’t cross the line of actually engaging in nuclear warfare.
If they haven’t been brainwashed enough, they’ll bite, even if it takes them months. If they have been brainwashed enough but they have intellectual honesty and curiosity, they may begin a self-questioning process themselves that will eventually make them crash, and it will be painful, but once they get recovered they’ll be grateful. If they don’t have that intellectual honesty, you’ve at least planted the potential seeds for them to decide at some later point that superstition was indeed bullshit, which may or may not come into fruition in the future. If the person you’re talking with is an intellectual donkey (in terms of unwillingness to reason), you have nothing to gain from that conversation.
When it comes to old religious people, though, I limit myself to relentlessly attacking the church. Due to their material conditions, they have the lowest chance to ever leaving their beliefs anyway, so my goal is just to make them wary of any dumbfuck hate preacher they may find.
Meh. All reasoning is grounded in emotion. Even atheistic reasoning. That’s why argumentation does zip. It’s like trying to fix a warped floor by moving the rug around.
A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.
Pretty good yoko geri for a neckbeard to be throwin
Idk that knee on the planted leg looks locked.
- for a neckbeard :D
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