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Attitude to Religion and its believers.

What is your general attitude towards those who believe in religion whether they are jewish, Muslim, Christian etc etc.

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

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

If you do not like the faiths, why?

If you DO, also why? Does this come from your family? Maybe something went bad during your life?

I get that Lemmy might have the same stereotype in Reddit that there are loads of atheists, but there’s a good reason why despite criticism of religion, it is still here.

P.S. I am not religious or anti religious in any fashion, I am agnostic.

tiredofsametab ,

Keep it to yourself and don't hurt others. So long as that's the case, what someone else believes is generally not my business.

I was raised in various evangelical protestant denominations of Christianity, went through a Neopagan period, and landed in atheist-leaning agnostic.

CaptainBasculin ,

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 ,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

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 , (edited )
@aleph@lemm.ee avatar

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.

Tarquinn2049 ,

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 ,
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

Aceticon ,

Don’t say, don’t ask.

kenkenken ,
@kenkenken@sh.itjust.works avatar

If a person is smart an has personal opinions about everything or if they are a person of power I won’t trust them. Because how can I prove they are a true believer and not a liar or sociopath?

If a person is average human who thinks what the crowd thinks then I won’t care.

zxqwas ,

Attitude: I generally don’t care unless they try to tell me what to do based on their religion. This is generally never a problem, I’ve had more vegans and environmentalists bother me.

Getting along: we have some high faith denomination of Christianity here. I’ve worked with a few and generally don’t notice unless they drop something heavy on their foot and don’t swear.

Thought of believing: not since I was 12 or something.

Do not like faiths: I acknowledge they can create a sense of community and belonging. I have a dim view of the dogma that tends to come with them.

fluffery , (edited )
@fluffery@lemmy.ml avatar

I’m greek orthodox, my family, is greek, and the religion comes with it

I get along with all amd you should too, religious or non-religious shouldn’t be a question, a party is a party. Get messed up and regret it in the morning

The only one’s I don’t really like is protestants but thats because of my racism against british people I think quite a few of the protestant demoninations strangle the meaning of what it means to be a christian.

Although surprisingly, I’ve known anti/atheistic people who gave me meat on several occasions during fasting (where we go basically go vegan) even though i reminded them about it before they even started cooking. We also have some of them in the board with us aswell, the “the religious belong in psychotherapy” types.

One of the biggest mistakes faith has done is try and influence things outside of the church espically in modern day schenanigans like politics. The church should be the peaceful escape from the outside world, not the opposite

From how I see it, my religion is beautiful, provides me an undescribable sense of peace, and I know the people who are at my parish are people i can depend on if i ever need help

menas ,

How do you know that science is not a believe like the other ? My answer is in challenge it with other believe systems to explain reality. Of course some things make a lot more sense with science methodology, but to be faire, te main point of religions is not to explain gravity.

I consider other believes as opportunities, no to explain to others, or to be taught by others, but making both and strengthen us all.

However, we shall to care do not confuse religions and believes. A lot of people took part in religions and do not believes, and others believes and do not took part in a dedicated community. This is a different topic. Communities are generally a good thing, but hierarchy lead to abuses. This true in every organization, religions include

AdNecrias ,

Not sure if I’m taking the bait but here goes.

Science is a set of processes where you take belief out of the equation. You can start with something akin, which when you have informed belief you have an hypothesis which you set out to prove. You don’t hold that as truth and anything not falsifiable is not a valid hypothesis.

Science is not a religion, it’s just a thing. Plenty of people need to belief to function and end up having (even a blind) faith in science, using it as a religion.

On your second point I’m with you on the last part though I think you are calling religions and believes things that are organized religion and religion.

menas ,

In any demonstration, you have to make some unproven statement, taken as true. It could be “1+1 = 2” or “God exists”. So sciences are methodologies based on believes. Lot of religions use logic and reasons, based on science and philosophy, to deduce things from their core believes. This is theology.

So if both science and religions are based on believes, and could have the same methods, how to distinguish one of the other ? We could argue that science try to reduce believes as possible. Personally I’m not good enough in sciences to argue with religious people, and demonstrate that point. In trying to challenge my believes in scientific models, I have to stay tolerant with religious people (I’m not sure I would otherwise); which is a most productive approach. Furthermore, it helps to have a critical point on view on science (as you’ve said, and to taking it as a blind faith)

Honytawk ,

If you need unproven statements to prove something, then it isn’t science.

AdNecrias ,

You do have start somewhere. Complex numbers have an impossible assumption at its core. But it needs to be falsifiable. You need to be able to prove it isn’t true and fail at it.

AdNecrias , (edited )

God exists and God is all powerful are a blanket check to solve everything, because it just does whatever you want it to and you don’t even try to prove it. 1+1 = 2 is a semantic axiom, not really equivalent to wilder assumptions you can do where those wouldn’t be comparable to there’s an all powerful something in existent in our reality that affects it at will.

It’s like believing there’s a multiverse, it’s not a useful axiom as it’s not measurable and specially not falsifiable.

It’s useful to keep an open mind and not discard people based on irrational beliefs, but God is something you can only accept in the scientific method if you bend or break the method.

Imo, That’s not even looking at the fact that any type of religious organization ends up being someone taking advantage of the faithful. It irks me to no end, and it’s rare to find faithful in a vacuum.

Katrisia ,

Contemporary philosophy and sciences are different from religion in some aspects. One important aspect is that these academic fields rely on rational arguments, while religion today mostly relies on traditional beliefs and faith.

Let’s say a philosopher is pondering the idea that direct experience is not necessary for knowledge. The only way to go and declare this publicly is to elaborate why, how, in a rational and rigorous manner. Most scientists work with objects that admit replicated experimentation, so they must do that, let’s say in their case, to demonstrate that a rain frog only comes out with heavy rain, but not with light rain. In contrast to these two, a religious or spiritual person might give “arguments”, but this argumentation is never to see if their belief resists examination, it is only to convince others of this belief that has been established as truth before everything else. In other words, philosophy and sciences examine their thesis (hypothesis, theory, etc.) and never assume they have the ultimate truth; on the contrary, they keep searching and exploring possibilities. Talking here about the disciplines and not the individuals who can be different from this from time to time (e.g., a dogmatic professor). Meanwhile, religion and spirituality do not have thesis or any beliefs that are susceptible to drastic change. They establish core beliefs or dogmas, and only later might try to prove them or not, depending if they find this exercise important.

Are they all ultimately unprovable statements? I guess so, but we should care how these statements come to be and how we justify them. To me, it makes an enormous difference.
I rather believe in climate change in which human action is definitely affecting the Earth (source: sciences) and the importance of stopping it as we seem to have a responsibility to others and to ourselves (source: ethics, a branch of philosophy), than to believe that there is a conspiracy to make us believe about climate change (source: perhaps imagination) and that we shouldn’t do anything anyway because there is no reason to (source: ignorance or dogmatism, honestly).

I try to remain critical of rational disciplines too, but that’s ironically done with more rationality. And here I do not mean “cold” and rigid pseudo logical analysis, but something that admits different approaches as long as they are solidly justified.

I guess it comes down to who we are. I simply cannot be convinced without this I explained. I cannot believe in religion or spiritual beliefs. I sometimes get short videos about people telling many different stories, about ghosts, ayahuasca trips where they talked to superior entities, gods and the way they know they’re real, etc. How can I believe what they perceive is real? Mere “leap of faith”? And why choose one over the other? Just because I like a particular system or because it benefits me in some way? Sorry, too arbitrary even for me that I sometimes act impulsively and capriciously. As I said, I guess the way we are allows us to accept or to deny different ways to approach existence. This is me.

Thank you for reading my stupidly long comment.

magnetosphere ,
@magnetosphere@fedia.io avatar

As long as they’re not an intolerant dick about believing or not believing, whatever they go with is fine. It’s none of my business.

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