Attitude to Religion and its believers.

CaptainBasculin , 1 month ago

Religious or not, I don’t care. What matters is their personality. (except for jehova’s witnesses, every time I’ve interacted with them it made me think they’re some sort of cult rather than a religion, so not sure if this counts.)

I do have religious friends that I get well with.

spittingimage , 1 month ago

In New Zealand we’re currently waiting on the release of a report from a parliamentary commission on the state of the Jehovah’s Witnesses following decades of abuse claims. We don’t expect it to be light reading.

aleph , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

As someone married to a JW and who is friends with several others, I will say this: like any group of people, they can be a mixed bag. Some are more closeted and “in the truth” whereas others are more outgoing and “worldly”.

One the things that I actually admire about them (the individuals, mind you, not the Watchtower organization) is that they really seem to try and live by the teachings of the Bible and study it frequently. Much more so than, say, your average evangelical Protestant.

Zier , 1 month ago

All religions are made up.
No one has ever proven that a "god" or supernatural entity exists, no one, ever.
It's all mythology, fiction and "supernatural" nonsense. Ghosts, angels, demons, gods, spirits, pick a name, pick a flavor, none of it is real. It's like insisting that Harry Potter, James Bond, Tinkerbell, Captain Kirk or Superman are actually real living people / spirits / entities, and they have the ability to control you now and after you die.
Just because you, or someone claims it's real does not make it factual.
You are allowed to believe in whatever you want to, but you are NOT allowed to force others to believe that same thing.
If you truly believe in your "religion", you would research it in every way possible, reading pro and con information to get a balanced understanding of what you decided to believe in.
You will learn where all the stories of your religion originate from, and that will actually decide what you choose to believe in.
Religion is a lifestyle choice.

hemko , 1 month ago

Growing up in religious circles I kinda learned that there’s no good in religion. Surely there’s good religious people, but they spread the evil word the same as those who want to bring the oppressive shit onto others.

Religion has never been good for anything but for controlling masses

Nemo , 1 month ago

I myself am Christian and have never had trouble getting along with others no matter their religious beliefs. The only conflict is when someone thinks their religion or religious precepts should be made law; I have no tolerance for that.

Zerlyna , 1 month ago

I’m an ex-Christian, the more I read the Bible, the more it doesn’t make sense. But I respect others choices to believe in their higher power, whatever that may be that makes their life work. Double points if they respect back. They all can’t be right.

Tarquinn2049 , 1 month ago

When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don’t generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn’t really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in “heaven”(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it’s a really nice thought that I don’t want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.

The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don’t want to take that aspect away from anyone.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don’t want to take that aspect away from anyone.

I do, because choosing to believe in a comforting lie is what leads us to despots killing anyone who is different. There’s a direct line between the two.

Donald Trump is a comforting lie that a strong man (like God, the ultimate strongman) can come in and just “fix things” because it’s easier to believe that than do the hard work of understanding how complex and confusing our world is. That’s where we’re at, the comforting lies appeal to humanity more than cold truth and it’s going to fucking kill us all.

Sorry, humans need to get the fuck over themselves with this not being able to handle death shit or wake up to our own extinction. Eternal life, reincarnation, it’s every flavor of stupid.

Haus , 1 month ago

For the don’t-anger-the-sky-daddy religions, roughly the same as having a crazy aunt who gives 10% of her shit to a psychic or Trump. I haven’t experienced the be-one-with-the-universe religions being as exploitative, but I guess those wack Theravadan Wats don’t pay for themselves.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago

www.cnn.com/2023/04/10/india/…/index.html

Buddhism has its own set of worthless freaks, you know.

LarkinDePark , 1 month ago

What is your general attitude towards those

I pity them.

Do you get on well with any religious friends and neighbours?

Yes.

Have you ever thought of believing in a religion at some point?

I was quite religious in my youth.

If you do not like the faiths, why?

I believe that they limit human growth and enable the “evil” that they pretend to protest.

I remember the huge fad of atheism that struck a few years back and led to the psychological liberation of a huge number or subjugated people. It was an inevitable eventuality of the rise of internet usage. It seemed to be mainly impacting Americans, but mass outbreaks of enlightenment also struck other western nations such as Ireland (where I’m from), freeing people from a society dominated by patriarchal oppressive and highly abusive social regimes.

Of course there was then a backlash to the backlash and now forces of liberation are ridiculed on the western internet. Liberalism has held sway and the institutions of oppression still maintain power, particularly in the USA. This continues to enable massive human suffering, for example with America’s latest genocide, enabled in part by apocalyptic Christian death cults.

I’m not very familiar with the details but I understand that the Christians are in cahoots with the Zionists in destroying some Muslim place of worship to bring about the end times. And there’s some cows mentioned in a thousands of years old book that need to have the right colour coat and stuff.

But of course, as usual, they’re not true Scotsmen religious people… etc…

tl;dr Religion is a net negative influence in the world. Trying to suppress it is counterproductive and will never work, meanwhile it’s going to kill us all.

SnotFlickerman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Despite the claimed ostensible “good” Religion can supposedly bring…

We’re literally in the middle of a mass extinction event and facing our own extinction and belief in this religious horseshit precludes people from caring or believing in man-made disaster.

We’re literally facing our own extinction because these people can’t be fucked to face up to reality instead of playing cult games of “but I’ll have everlasting life after death so who cares what happens to the planet!”

I don’t give one flying fuck what “good” it can do for an individual, it’s going to be the downfall of human fucking civilization.

Whatever “good” it brings is destroyed and overshadowed by the cult like behavior that would worship corrupt figures like Donald Trump and who choose to live in a false reality simply because it is more comforting.