It is very difficult to accept mortality if you don’t believe in an afterlife. Religion brings comfort, and comfort improves mental health (at the cost of some delusion).
Not really. Altruism is ultimately self-serving whether an afterlife exists or not. People generally don’t want to spend their life being wronged by others or have their life taken altogether, so we have a pretty good incentive to not do those things.
Dante’s Inferno went into detail that was not biblical, but there’s enough in the bible that writing it off completely is cherry picking.
“They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
"And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
"But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”
“And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.”
I had a friend whose dad was a pastor at a decently sized church. I never believed in religion and he was cool because he would actually listen to what I said rather than plugging his ears and yelling. (you know what I mean). I went to his church one Sunday to humor him and it was Ok. His dad was relating current events to the bible and it wasn’t total horseshit… UNTIL, they passed the plate thing around for donations. “Give your money to GOD” is what was said. I asked my friend what the hell does god need my money for? He made the earth in seven days, he can make his own damn money. My friend said the money goes to the church to put on events for the children and feeding the needy and honestly, good things. I said ok, then tell me to donate my money to the church to support this instead of god.
Many years later he has his own church and when they pass the plate around, he says donate to the church and explains where the money goes. I call it a little victory. Religion is still a load of crap though.
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.
I guess a part is that science seems to meticulously avoid the question “why do we live”, in a non-technical way, in a way that actually gives people a sense of meaning.
That and mental inertia, i.e. some things change very slowly.
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.
Ignoring the inherit assumption that religion is de facto an issue or backwards, and ignoring the fallacy that “progress” is co-liniar with the passage of time, logic is not in of itself a perfect humanistic process of thought, rather it has been developed by humans over the millennia.
There is great comfort in the process of growing into and exploring one’s faith. Growing up in a theologically liberal Christian church, I was invited to find ways to meld the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man is such a way that I find purpose and vocation within my life. Religion also offers a place for community among people committed to a mission, be it good or bad. These communities preserve and honor cultural traditions, again, the good and the bad. These are just a few reasons I think people are now, and will remain well into the future, religious.
How do you account for tolerance found within religion and religious communities throughout the world and throughout history, then? How can intolerance be inherent to religion if it is not universally observed?
And for clarity, I’m not trying to no-true-scotsman out religious communities that harbor hatred and shut off diversity and the like. They totally exist and they are a problem. But to suggest religiosity itself is the issue, to me at least, is missing a sound foundation.
The text they rally behind as a fundamental part of their religion, in no uncertain terms, promotes violence against gay men and tells you women are worth a fraction of men and can’t be trusted to preach. Not to mention the endorsement and regulation of slavery.
It’s not that they’re a monolith of bigotry or anything, it’s that they start from a pretty messed up place and have to mould that out of their understanding of their religion, and plenty of them don’t.
But the real issue is that you can justify just about any sort of prejudice when that is your foundation. There’s no shortage of Christians who cite Leviticus to tell me my sexuality is an abomination, yet they dismiss the parts about slavery because “that’s the old testament.” The Bible also doesn’t say anything about trans people and it doesn’t oppose abortion rights, yet the majority of the Christians in my state are opposed to both.
Firstly, I am assuming that “they” is referring to Christians, which the op did not specify, and my subsequent commentary is interpreted to generalizing to all presentations of religion. While I explicitly pointed to Christianity, that was because I was referencing my personal faith journey.
Secondly, we are in agreement that the Pentateuch, in its literal form, calls for and endorses a society which does not privilege equality for all races, genders, or creeds. I would assume we are also in agreement that the epistles of Paul and Timothy and other early Christian writers have some pretty messed up opinions of who God is and what God wants.
But you yourself drew attention to the agency Christians, and all other faithful people, have. There is choice, and people do choose, to interpret scripture as non-literal. By the virtue of this existence, one cannot simply label all religious expressions as backwards or at issue, as I originally posited.
That’s true, they can mould their interpretation however they need to so it conforms to their own morality, but that doesn’t come from the religion.
If you gave an alien any of the abrahamic holy texts and then dropped it on earth it’d probably behave pretty abhorrently. In order to behave more civilly it’d have to learn from the society it was dropped into, not the religion.
Most churches and other theists do a pretty good job of doing that and that’s a great thing, but the way I see it, the religion itself is inherently problematic until people mould it into something resembling secular morality.
Christianity is inherently problematic, or all religions are inherently problematic? You’ve made a case for Christianity (and probably Judaism and Islam), but those are just two (very large) religions. I’m taking about, and I feel the op’s essence was, the idea of religion and people being religious. Not just the Christians. Can you also point to the Taoists, the Universalists, the Zoroastrians (just to name a few) and say that their faiths are all inherently problematic?
Still arguably both. Even if their doctrine isn’t problematic, the sort of standard of evidence you seem to need to believe religious claims is what gets us things like antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists.
It may not be universal but you’re certainly opening the door for it if you believe truth comes from uncritical belief. That by itself is still “problematic” even if the consequences aren’t as blatant.
And I guess this must be closing in on the root of our disagreement: I don’t see that religion requires uncritical belief.
I don’t know what your litmus test is for “standards of evidence.” Can you elaborate on what good standards of evidence looks like to you and how you know they are good?
Lastly, by agreeing that there is not universality in the backwards-ness and issue of religion, it seems to me you can’t argue for religious thought to have inherit nature to that kind. Rather, there are expressions of it, religiosity, being backwards and bad. The part does not account for the whole.
I don’t think there is one single test that could encompass bad standards of evidence, but the whole “just have faith” thing is a dead giveaway. Hostility towards skepticism is another. Circular logic is also a pretty good indicator, like saying your holy text is the truth because your holy text says it’s true. I guess the simplest and most effective test would be to see if the standard of evidence could be used to justify any claim.
And for good standards of evidence, I think it depends on the context and claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. If you told me “I got a pet goldfish” the only evidence I really need is your word. But for claims about how the universe works and why it is the way it is, you might need much more sound reasoning, math that checks out when measurements or numbers are involved, a demonstration or test to serve as proof, etc…
Lastly, by agreeing that there is not universality …
The majority of people who smoke don’t die from it but that doesn’t mean cigarettes aren’t problematic. I’m not saying all religions are bigoted or anything, but I am saying having any sort of doctrine opens the door to outdated beliefs overriding what we’d normally consider moral, and that by itself is problematic.
I’d also just like to say I think this has been the most civil conversation in the whole thread, so cheers to that lol
Yeah, these things all make sense, again, with the implied idea that “all religions” use fallacious logic like circular reasoning, which I think we both agree is a common feature but not a rule of religion.
And sure, there are plenty of things that I trust on faith, like my Creator and my Savior, or the concept of sin. For me, the faith is critical for my psyche, but I’m of the world and in the world, so I am called to work good in this world now, which grace and guidance.
I would be careful with the smoking analogy. The only control someone really has in their outcome from smoking is deciding heavily limit or to quit early enough to not have a high risk of health complications of death. Religious expression is the interface between the divine and the worldly. It’s socially controlled and always has been. There are so many things people of faith can do to prevent allowing their expressions and works from causing harm, alienate “others,” and ultimately do things incongruent with their proclaimed beliefs.
I think of it more like democracy: a social phenomenon many feel confident in being “the best,” but also one that can fall victim to abuses that prevent it’s ideal in such a way as to disenfranchise and deliver results many, if not most, are unhappy with, if not harmed from. But I don’t think either of us would call for a monarchy or autocracy in order to “prevent the ills of democracy.” We, collectively, have to be better at making democracy better.
And yeah! It has been fun to discuss with you. I appreciate hearing your perspectives on this and allowing me to better understand your line of reasoning.
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.