I like how all these answers involving science fail to realize that the scientific method was used exclusively by many scholars and students who had no historical evidence of giving up their religion.
Empirical evidence is as old as humans, and afaik the modern scientific method has been in use since the Islamic golden age if not older.
The key here is that many of these people did not consider religion an empirical issue but a philosophical and ethical one. Particularly with the monotheistic religions, this would make sense because you can easily argue that it would be impractical to test for the existence of God.
I think a better question would be why do people believe in their respective religion if it contains a glaring contradiction(s).
For me, I just do. It’s just who I am and what I feel. I don’t really talk about it outside of my church friends, but I just believe. I don’t think the Bible is terribly accurate and regard it much as I do Arabian Nights, a book of fantastic stories based loosely on events. I also think it has much to offer in teaching you how to treat others and live your life as a good person, and that’s what I take away from it. I find Jesus honestly a touch creepy, but I never stop believing in a higher power of sorts.
Also I honestly have made the best friends I’ve ever made in my church life. Horrible homophobic Christians aside, there’s some really excellent people who genuinely love you and do good things to meet there.
Search Engine is a great podcast and that was a great interview. For me it didn’t really answer the question though, but I guess the answer is very individual.
If both parties achieved mental and physical maturity then what’s wrong.
Ask your grandmother at what she - or people her age - married at.
This is likely to get downvoted, I say this because mentioning downvotes in your posts/comments usually prevents them from being downvoted (a little psychological thing probably)
Then let’s talk facts and logic, why is an older person marrying a younger person bad? because you’re an educated Atheist/Agnostic (I guess), you must’ve questioned what you were taught at childhood, unlike those brainwashed and spoon fed Christians.
“Minimum age of marriage”, who came up with concept? it surely isn’t common sense since it only appeared less than a century ago, so what is it? Some may say that young marriage is a mere relic of the ancients, a result of their underdeveloped logic and science, and that our advanced logic is better and is infallible.
But wait, your people, just mere a century ago saw people 2 centuries a ago the exact same way, and so did those before them, so using our logic, we can deduct that our logic is illogical.
How about statistical data we can speculate, a mere century ago, how did the world look like? there was certainly very little employees, even Christians believed in their book, Javascript did not exist (alhamdulillah), young people were treated as adults, and people older than Israel who to this day live under bombing by your morally superior society were being born; How does something like the depression rate among their youth compare to today? It is reportedly much lower, so how did your generation fail? Surely with all that development of medicine and the like, your people should “logically” be much happier. Are you really strictly superior to the ancients?
“But statistics back then were biased and limited”, I see your point, unlike the “infallible” statistics of today, those statistics were surely awful, so let’s move to broader ideas.
At childhood, you were spoon fed many ideas, like “Slavery is unacceptable”, “The old marrying the young is awful”, and “Humans evolved from monkeys”. By using the fact that our logic is illogical, we can conclude that these aren’t concrete facts. How is slavery involved with almost every product in the average American household? how did the ancients grow up to be healthy adults? Again, ask your grandmother. How is there not, to this day, concrete evidence of humans evolving from anything but slightly taller humans?
How is slavery unacceptable in your eyes, yet you can’t live without it? Is the average McDonalds worker treated better that how Islam treats slaves?
How did the ancients grow up to be healthy individuals? Is insisting that you’re much better than the ancients truly your way of avoiding depression?
Why is anything that goes against the theory of someone named Darwin, of whose book you know nothing, and whose theory’s shortcomings you are ignoring, and whose teachings you were fed in school, and whose ways you never questioned, mere ancient fables?
But there stands, the teachings of Islam, Allah’s divine revelation to us, it never failed, for 14 centuries it stood unchanged, yet who reads it could never tell, that this book wasn’t written by a scholar of today, how could it so accurately describe today? how did our caliphate, only a mere century from today, stand strong? How didn’t we truly fail, until we forgot the words and called it a day?
//////////end
I got a little peotic at the end.
You guys just look at Christians and decide that religion is dumb.
I thought of finishing with some miracles like the 360 joints, the beating of alcoholics and adulterers, and camel milk+urine, but the article south_park_remark reply got too long.
I realize these miracles can be individually dismissed, it is not their individual traits that will persuade, it is their collected wight. It is the fact that the prophet, peace be upon him, never claimed anything that is wrong, unlike scientists of a mere decade ago, and that his medicines did nothing but heal, unlike scientists of a mere decade ago.
This is likely to get downvoted, I say this because mentioning downvotes in your posts/comments usually prevents them from being downvoted (a little psychological thing probably)
I look at religion and decided it’s silly…wish you’d stop putting words in my mouth. And you can stop defending slavery/pedophilia or whatever, I’m not having that convo with you troll
Here’s the problem with English: I can not use the word “you”, and still have people know whether I am talking to them, or to people like them in general. Some of my "you"s were plural, some were singular. I need some way of coping with this language.
You replied to only 1 paragraph of mine, and decided I am a troll just for suggesting pushing that slavery/“pedophilia” might not be bad, unlike what you were taught.
Although you’ve been lied to, it’s not the lies that’s the problem. As an adult, you can a lot of the times tell when the media is manipulating you, especially in the last past decade it’s gotten so obvious even a Boomer could see it. But what you don’t see is how when you were lied to (or told selective truths) as a child, you didn’t have the same BS-detector, and that allowed a lot of deep-seated impressions about the world to be formed. So a lot of people who don’t believe anything the media says now (rightly) are still mind-cucked. They accept the programming and differ on the details.
I will give you this hint. Basically all of your programmed emotional responses are your enemies. There was an old Moldbug blog post where he talked about even far after “awaking from his dogmatic slumber,” he still was surprised that if he saw a group of Nazi LARPers, he would reflexively have a pang of emotional stress, but if he saw Stalinist LARPers, he wouldn’t have the same kind of emotional reaction. I think everyone raised in the West has that same programmed reaction. You might know with your head that the communist death count is supposed to be higher and the suppression wider, but it doesn’t click because you weren’t made sensitive to it.
Edit: no, actually, English isn’t the problem, since I appended “guys” to my statement about looking at religion and deciding it’s silly, you should know that I wasn’t talking about you personally.
I think the biggest flaw is assuming you’re among the atheist/agnostic crowd, but even then, I appended that claim with “(I guess)” to indicate that I am indeed putting words in someone’s mouth. Maybe you’re among the Christian crowd, or maybe you’re a… Zionist Jew? Hindu?
For any passing people, the original reply isn’t edited, so I am safe from that side of accusations.
I see, English isn’t your first language. You made (and continue to make) false assumptions. The media has had no influence on my viewpoints on religion (Christianity in particular), my personal experiences are more than sufficient. My first comment was based on Mohammeds youngest wife and how it’s accepted/ignored by Muslims. We have (somewhat?) similar action in the US, there was a republican GOP member in New Hampshire that was pushing to keep legal marriage set at 16 rather than 18, described the 16 year-olds as “ripe”…super creepy
We have (somewhat?) similar action in the US, there was a republican GOP member in New Hampshire that was pushing to keep legal marriage set at 16 rather than 18, described the 16 year-olds as “ripe”…super creepy
I am pretty sure he’s an awful person just because he’s an American politician.
But you’re missing the point though, you still think of young marriage as an absolutely-no-questions-asked obscene thing, which is understandable, seeing that most western teenagers are brainwashed into thinking they’re kids, and are therefore immature and aren’t ready for marriage. (Which creates some other problems because that’s the natural age for marriage)
Where I live, we have 16-year-old men marrying 14-year-old women, and they have a child a year or two later, and they’re really fine, except for maybe being less educated that they could have otherwise been. Speed of maturity actually depends mainly on two factors: difficulty of life (maturity of the mind and body), and heat of the climate (sexual maturity), and considering how high both were at the time of prophet PbUH, marrying at 9 is absolutely normal.
In fact, I am sure there are many marriage-ready 9-year-old women at places like Uganda and the poor African nations.
Actually, the idea of setting a minimum age only came to us with the french when they decided to colonize us, so of course we won’t look positively at ideas brought by people who came to rape and pillage, and it still doesn’t seem so bright considering they’re still pillaging us implicitly through corrupt political affairs.
Isn’t it weird that some resource-rich nations are dead-poor, while something like London can look like science fiction, and that a system as inefficient as democracy continues to function, and that every citizen somehow has human rights, and that the electricity doesn’t get cut daily. To this day I have a hard time believing that flat asphalt roads exist, and that driving on them doesn’t feel like riding a roller coaster of some sort; NO IT MUST BE FICTION, I WON’T BELIEVE IT TILL I SEE IT WITH MY OWN EYES!!!
Note to Americans: you guys might say: “Oh, but our medical system is a scam and colleges cause students to drown in debt because we normalized the disgusting act of usury!”, it’s just because your government’s is spending a third-of-the-world’s-military-budget worth of money on bombing Iraq and Yemen and Palestine and Cuba and Afghanistan and some other things in the name of “War On Terrorism” against those they pillaged. (No wait they made it back when they built a dock in Gaza to steal all their oil, so your government actually has no excuse, it must be corruption/falling into usury)
On the topic of American wastage, I read an article long ago where Americans were concerned that a 2000$ houthi drone was usually dealt with using a 2m$ missile, so the Pentagon spokesman or something replied with what was essentially: “Don’t worry, Americans! the houthi’s “terrorism” is already causing much more economic harm, so that’s a negligible efficiency loss”, like, how is telling people that the situation is much worse than they imagine supposed to calm them down?
Edit: I forgot Russia, almost the only nation America has any right to actually fight.
Ah yes, how childish of OP to wonder why the majority of English speaking countries believe in answers to life’s greatest questions with little to no evidence. What a naive little question, that one.
To each their own, but personally that sounds like a bad reason to stop pursuing life’s greatest questions. Plenty of my family has passed away, but that doesn’t make faith seem like a reliable pathway to truth.
I’d love to believe they’re in an eternal paradise, but I’d also love to believe my next paycheck will be $1,000,000. The time to believe I’m a millionaire is when I have evidence for it, not when I’d be heartbroken otherwise.
Because (Christian) “Faith” is a unique, arguably delusional, cyclical belief system based on feelings. It’s similar to the anti-vaccine mentality of “that’s just your opinion” when it’s not. The biggest difference being that there is no proving or disproving the existence of God.
And Faith is built on this self-referential system of “you gotta have Faith in God because God is real and God is good and strong Faith will help you continue believing in God when you are otherwise challenged, and weak Faith is a sign that you are straying from God and you should strengthen your Faith by believing in God harder because God is real and God is good…”
I used to be more religious and also thought “believe in whatever you want to believe in as long as you don’t be a dick about it,” but that’s really been changing a lot lately.
Christianity has fallen so far and so many self-diagnosed Christians are just the worst type of people that I just couldn’t relate to them anymore and felt the need to distance myself.
There have probably been (speculation because I don’t feel like looking up details right now) more deaths in the name of Christianity and the Christian God than any other religion and that continues to this day.
I contribute modern day deaths from pregnancy complications deprived of needed health care, general lack of other health care for low income families, LGBTQIA2A+ suicides or other deaths, and more to “traditional Christian values”.
Christian Nationalists can go fuck themselves and rot in their own hell they hate so much.
It’s like a parasite, and our mind is the host. It competes with other mind-parasites like other religions, or even scientific ideas. They compete for explanatory niches, for feeling relevant and important, and maybe most of all for attention.
Religions evolved traits which support their survival. Because all the other variants which didn’t have these beneficial traits went extinct.
Like religions who have the idea of being super-important, and that it’s necessary to spread your belief to others, are ‘somehow’ more spread out than religions who don’t convey that need.
This thread is a nice collection of traits and techniques which religions have collected to support their survival.
This perspective is based on what Dawkins called memetics. It’s funny that this idea is reciprocally just another mind-parasite, which attempted to replicate in this comment.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
Religion dissolves uncertainty. Why does….? Because the sky man said so. How does….? Because the sky man made it that way. What should I do with my life and how should I live it? Here’s a book written by the sky man and it has all the answers. No more thinking… I suppose it’s probably of great comfort to many.
The funny thing is that people believe very specific things about gods, like that there’s only one, or that they’re nice or at least have similar values to us.
Or literally look like a specifically male human. What he does with those two legs when he already exists everywhere, nobody knows. It’s not just the Abrahamic religions either, all the myths of the world have a bit of anthropocentrism to them. That was excusable when we had no better ideas.
My favorite interpretation of that was in Mage: The Ascension. Man being “in God’s image” wasn’t morphological, it was in man’s ability to reshape reality to his whims.
On the subject of fiction, I was thinking about H.P Lovecraft when I wrote this. His whole thing was making a mythology that’s not anthropocentric, and incorporates that character of vast incomprehensibility that our modern science has.
Humans are tribalistic, like leaders who are assertive and charismatic, like simple answers, are easily swayed by emotions, fall victim to logical fallacies, and a plethora of other things that all work just fine if you’re operating on a tribal level as we did for most of human history, or rather prehistory. Now that we are in a different phase of technological growth, which has brought with it massive social change, getting rid of all of that superstitious nonsense is very difficult because of aforementioned characteristics. What were beneficial as it tribal species, and arguably even after that, is now a liability. Or at least more of a hindrance to progress.
Because it’s been the way it always has been, because people also hate change, are lazy, and tended to prefer both avoiding cognitive dissidents and minimizing effort to achieve desired results, getting rid of religion is a nightmare hassle. Even when the evidence is right there in front of them, people don’t care. At least not enough of them. They’d rather listen to their authority figure, or do what all their friends are doing. Which if you’re doing what all your friends are doing it just turns into a circle jerk. But since they’re in that circle jerk, they tend to just stay in it, and because the people in it are their friends or family, they defend it because it’s their tribe. We’re kind of hardwired that way.
A big part of all of this is indoctrination of children. If you didn’t introduce religion to children while they are at a vulnerable state, religion would quickly be relegated to a fringe cult.
The percentage of people that aren’t flooded with this garbage as children that turn to religion once they are adults is miniscule and could easily be ignored.
The problem is that religion is so powerful and ingrained that they are able to sustain bombard children at a steady pace.
Glad to hear this dumb monkey evolved past the tribal stage. You are very smart!
I grew up secular with no religion and my search for truth eventually led me to realize God exists. But after reading your comment I realize I had just been a dumb tribal monkey. I forgot how I must’ve grown up religious and just forgot, and my lazy thinking led me to this convenient falsehood. You’ve really got a deep understanding though- can I buy your book?
The true path to Enlightenment prescribes not to argue with edgy 16 yo kids on the Internet. The New Atheist movement is dead, only edgy kids remain. No need to argue.
It isn’t really about edginess. People tend to continue believing in whatever religious preference (or none) they have unless something convinces them otherwise in whatever direction.
To an atheist’s point of view, it legitimately doesn’t make sense why someone would be religious when what they see is nonsense. It is a genuine confusion and not necessarily meant to be rude.
This isn’t just an atheist thing that happens, religious people can often not understand why someone would ever choose anything other than their religion. It doesn’t make sense to them either.
I suppose it’s better than following a standard of evidence that enables homophobes/transphobes, and opens the door to preachers feeding their politics to you.