The day you are saved - from religion

[quadraginta]

<snip>

And you're totally ignoring those religious people who do oppose religious extremism and intolerance. There are more of them than you think.

I didn't ignore them. I explicitly acknowledged them by pointing out that that alternative exists.

I cannot hold the majority guilty for the sins of the few. I think that's just wrong, and a form of intolerance in itself.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (Burke)

 

[aleCcowaN]

I tend to agree ... with truethat.

So the op complains about prostylyzing theists only to be met with prostylyzing anti-theists.

I remember when I found religion. Some guy was ranting in and on about the "Buybull" and I realized that those arguments were so terrible that maybe there is something to this whole religion thing.

hwats dat? proselytizing from men with prostate adenome? But I agree this is becoming more a tour de force for anti-theism than the collection of spiritual "coming of age"*** stories it was intended to be.

(*** when you stopped believing in Santa, not when you started)

 

[Leumas]

I am sympathetic to the point you are trying to make, and agree (somewhat) ... when those of the "majority" are taken individually.

However, I cannot absolve them of the responsibility they bear for standing silent when opportunists use religious extremism and intolerance as a populist, demagogic tool to incite. Their silence within their faith makes them accessories.

This is an "If you are not part of the solution ..." issue. If they do not bear witness against the misuse of their religions to their fellow believers, and stand out among them in opposition to such abuse then from my point of view they are just as complicit as if they had lent their wholehearted support.

In this sense, yes ... they are bad people.

Religions will continue to be used to harm others as long as the members of those religions do nothing to stop it.

Exactly!!!

Those are the people who constitute the sugary nourishment in the Petri Dish (see The Petri Dish Effect)

These are the people who contribute to and vote villains like George Bush into positions of power.

Their religions and prejudices are not a harmless sports team support nor an inconsequential affectation.

Their decisions and actions FACILITATE and SUPPORT the people who pass laws which make the lives of people a misery whether in America or around the world.

They might be sweet simpletons who are as passive as sheep.

But these sheep form the backbone of the WOLVES who RAVISH the WORLD.

While those people are demanding to be just left alone to enjoy living their blissfully benighted lives, the people they helped bring into power because of their religions and prejudices make life hell for the rest of the world.

 

[truethat]

I am sympathetic to the point you are trying to make, and agree (somewhat) ... when those of the "majority" are taken individually.

However, I cannot absolve them of the responsibility they bear for standing silent when opportunists use religious extremism and intolerance as a populist, demagogic tool to incite. Their silence within their faith makes them accessories.

This is an "If you are not part of the solution ..." issue. If they do not bear witness against the misuse of their religions to their fellow believers, and stand out among them in opposition to such abuse then from my point of view they are just as complicit as if they had lent their wholehearted support.

In this sense, yes ... they are bad people.

Religions will continue to be used to harm others as long as the members of those religions do nothing to stop it.

This is a thoughtful comment.

But it's easy to point fingers and say "they" are "accessories." I used to think the same thing about the Muslim community for not really speaking out against extremists. Then I realized how hard many of them had struggled to come to this country and how fearful they may be about speaking out and targeting family members still at home.

Let's look at reality. We all have our "accessory laziness" where the realities of our daily life take our attention.

Are we as Americans not "accessories" to the deaths in Iraq? Are we not to the strife in some war torn countries in Africa?

When we walk into a store and buy something "Made in China" knowing full well that a child probably worked 80 hours a week making it, are we not "complicit" in their suffering?

It is easy to point the finger at how others fail.

Elie Wiesel once famously said that opposite of love is not hate but indifference. I find myself, deeply deeply saddened to realize how impossibly naive his words seem today. I used to live by these words. They motivated me for years. But that was until I realized that the definition of my humanity didn't rely on what I was willing to see as much as it did on what I was desperately needing to ignore. Sensitive people often have to push things out of their mind in order to go on in their own living. It's not a matter of not caring. It is a matter of being so exhausted by the utter helplessness that overwhelms you at times when you look at the legacy of our own human creation in the world and the immense amount of pain that is beyond our control to solve. In those moments we push off in our mind to escape it all. It is a necessity, not a cruelty, not a complicity.

 

[fishbob]

Firmly wedged in the closet, lol. Discussing it with any of them would only cause problems which would be pointless, as they are not resolvable - as stanfr points out. I HAVE told my 20-something children that I will stand by them if they decide to leave the church or switch to some other religion.

I'm endlessly amazed by my sister-in-law's remarkable ability to hold beliefs which are utterly at odds with one another. And with logic.

That's a lot of children.

 

[Leumas]

... But I agree this is becoming more a tour de force for anti-theism than the collection of spiritual "coming of age"*** stories it was intended to be.

(*** when you stopped believing in Santa, not when you started)

I do not think that was at all the intent of the OP.

....
The utter absurdity of the whole thing crashed down like a **** load of bricks. I've always thought religions were, in general, innocuous, and I've attended the Catholic church (to pacify others) for decades. Now I suddenly get why some atheists are so militant.

I don't know where I go from here, since keeping the peace is ostensibly more important than trying to change anything

Venting here in the safest place I actually belong to.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I do not think that was at all the intent of the OP.

Certainly a spiritual "coming of age" story includes all the struggle and adaptation needed, an ongoing process, even a life-long process.

It depends on how you interpret sylvan8798's request, either how to conciliate social and family needs with the new atheist/agnostic/anti-theist/postheist reality, including what evolution to expect in a new-born non-theist, or why atheism (more probably anti-theism) rocks and why we can "talk dirty" in this safe, sanitized environment.

I concede it may have been too easy for me. Deities weren't a possibility once Santa was snatched from me, ruled a fake by my older sister when I was 5. The very verb "believe" stop making sense -in Spanish it's worse than in English- attached to the word god or anything the like. When I was 8 my Catholic mother saved the local priest the shame of trying to answer my questions in Church school, so I was spared from first communion. And that's pretty it, my only involvement with religion has been verbally roasting evangelic missionaries at my doorstep during two or three hours, and that just once in a blue moon (because animals are protected by law, here), besides being godfather of my eldest nephew just for social communitarian purposes.

 

[The Big Dog]

"Prostylyzing [sic] theists" peddle and proselytize ignorance and superstition and stupidity and irrationality. They oppose progress and enlightenment while advocating backwardness and benightedness.

"Prostylyzing [sic] anti-theists" are trying to stop the above vitiation and retardation.

The former is akin to a virus invading a body while the latter is akin to the physician trying to medicate the body.

Thanks for making it clear which side you prefer.

Curious, you cut off my post about the terrible arguments fanatical anti-theists make.

Curious.

The side I prefer is reasonable discussion.

 

[Cainkane1]

My deconversion was more subtle. I'm an asthmatic and when I prayed for the asthma to go away it stayed. I had not hit puberty when I apparently lost faith and quit believing.

 

[pharphis]

Purposeful harm is not the only driving force for my antitheism. The entire faith-based ideology and "us vs them" mentality I see is enough for me to want to challenge religious beliefs from the view of a scientific skeptic. My original reasons are probably more rooted in poor treatment of people but nowadays it's a little bit of everything. I don't have to see people as bad people, or as accessories. I need only see them as misinformed/indoctrinated and thus likely to continue spreading misinformation to the next generation

 

[aleCcowaN]

Antitheism isn't finding theism inconvenient, it's campaigning to achieve the more theist to drop their religious beliefs. It's like some chap voting Democrats just for that "nasty Republicans" not to be elected, not because of any conviction.

If you're a non-theist and you feel anguish, it's not good to retaliate by trying others to drop their religious beliefs when they're not interfering with civil society. A creationist is a deeply immoral dude who should drop creationism, not religion. Don't buy the whole crap of religion being inherently bad because of creationism and intifada.

 

[pharphis]

Antitheism isn't finding theism inconvenient, it's campaigning to achieve the more theist to drop their religious beliefs. It's like some chap voting Democrats just for that "nasty Republicans" not to be elected, not because of any conviction.

If you're a non-theist and you feel anguish, it's not good to retaliate by trying others to drop their religious beliefs when they're not interfering with civil society. A creationist is a deeply immoral dude who should drop creationism, not religion. Don't buy the whole crap of religion being inherently bad because of creationism and intifada.

People make decisions in every aspect of life based on their beliefs. If these beliefs are unreasonable based on the evidence (creationism) or the antithesis of reason (faith) I think it is well worth our time to counter it and try to convince people that their beliefs are wrong and that they should amend them. I want this because I want people to spread these unreasonable (harmful) beliefs as little as possible because harmful beliefs = harmful actions, whether the intent is harm or not.

Even simple identification as a believer influences politicians and others in positions of power and people are indoctrinated from early childhood into believing that non-believers are evil/less moral/ignorant once again whether on purpose or not. It's "us vs them" from birth to church to birth and the cycle will continue if unchallenged

 

[Leumas]

... Don't buy the whole crap of religion being inherently bad because of creationism and intifada.

Have you forgotten HISTORY altogether? Do you follow current affairs? See the video below for a refresher.

Also have a look here and here and here for a more serious review.

 

[Leumas]

People make decisions in every aspect of life based on their beliefs. If these beliefs are unreasonable based on the evidence (creationism) or the antithesis of reason (faith) I think it is well worth our time to counter it and try to convince people that their beliefs are wrong and that they should amend them. I want this because I want people to spread these unreasonable (harmful) beliefs as little as possible because harmful beliefs = harmful actions, whether the intent is harm or not.

Even simple identification as a believer influences politicians and others in positions of power and people are indoctrinated from early childhood into believing that non-believers are evil/less moral/ignorant once again whether on purpose or not. It's "us vs them" from birth to church to birth and the cycle will continue if unchallenged

[imgw=400]http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w194/orphia/Religion/CrazyPerson_zpsc89875d9.jpg[/imgw]

 

[aleCcowaN]

As I thought, this thread is degenerating in antitheist propaganda (no merit in spotting the obvious in the forum where everything repeats).

Leumas, I suppose you're keeping the champion of body count, the witch hunting in Great Britain and the Germanic world, for a future post. I wonder if people is to be convicted because of crime they didn't commit yet.

phargis, I think it is you who is here trying to indoctrinate people into the notion believers are evil/ignorant/less moral. That itself identifies antitheism as what it is, another form of belief. I only want antitheists to acknowledge their religious nature and stop poisoning the group of non-theist.

 

[pharphis]

As I thought, this thread is degenerating in antitheist propaganda (no merit in spotting the obvious in the forum where everything repeats).

Leumas, I suppose you're keeping the champion of body count, the witch hunting in Great Britain and the Germanic world, for a future post. I wonder if people is to be convicted because of crime they didn't commit yet.

phargis, I think it is you who is here trying to indoctrinate people into the notion believers are eevil/ignorant/less moral. That itself identifies antitheism as what it is, another form of belief. I only want antitheists to acknowledge their religious nature and stop poisoning the group of non-theist.

I said no such thing or even implied it, other than ignorance which I fully expect to be true of indoctrinated people. I don't treat ignorance as a fatal character flaw, however, and see it as something which can be easily remedied. . . the entire point of my antitheism is to correct misinformation and promote reason rather than faith, and therefore not put ignorance on a pedestal like many people do)

Antitheism is no more religious than liberalism, libertarianism, etc. If you're going to use the term "religious" to apply to any belief system then I'm going to respectfully disagree and say that it needlessly waters down the term to the point of being meaningless. I believe (quite reasonably, I think) what I mentioned in my previous post and I think I made myself pretty clear (bad ideas lead to bad actions, etc.)

edit: and just to be clear, antitheism is only a subset of my skepticism. The point is that I don't put beliefs on a pedestal, religious or not. It's as simple as wanting people to be reasonable and my seeing that skepticism even at the most basic level makes a huge difference in how easily people are duped by just about anything, including religion.

 

[CORed]

Nor do other forms of idiocy necessarily equal stupid. Many highly intelligent people believe extremely stupid stuff. Religion, conspiracy theories, racism, etc. At least two current presidential candidates right now qualify.

For me, there was no epiphany, but it came pretty early. I was confirmed in my (liberal protestant) church being pretty sure in my heart there was no god.

Very similar to my own story. I also was confirmed in a liberal protestant church. At the time, I was still telling myself I believed, though my doubts were growing. In retrospect, I don't think I ever completely bought it, but it took me until my late teens to quit feeling guilty about it, and to realize that my lack of belief was due not to some deficiency in myself but in the nonsense that I was being asked to believe.

As I became aware of the wide variety of religious beliefs among people of the world, the question that kept nagging me was, why is the particular church selected by my parents right about everything when everybody else -- different varieties of Christianity, not to mention Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. -- wrong? Also, when I asked difficult questions of Sunday school teachers or ministers, I always seemed to get the answer that it came down to faith. Why must I substitute faith for evidence and logic? If all this stuff is true, shouldn't it be supported by evidence? It was a fairly gradual process. I can't really remember now a specific time when I finally acknowledged my non-belief, but by the time I started college, I had started to identify as agnostic rather than Christian.

 

[aleCcowaN]

I said no such thing or even implied it, other than ignorance which I fully expect to be true of indoctrinated people. I don't treat ignorance as a fatal character flaw, however, and see it as something which can be easily remedied. . . the entire point of my antitheism is to correct misinformation and promote reason rather than faith, and therefore not put ignorance on a pedestal like many people do)

You're just concealing it with a disguise. What does that "ignorance" mean, that they have a void you have something to fill with? You are meant to elevate them, just that? I only see behind these apparently elevated antitheists people who were harmed by religious beliefs and want them to pay for that. What about the promotion of reason? What if they learn to play chess, prove theorems and gut the arguments of crackpots denying global warming, but they don't renounce to their religious beliefs? Is that your intention? Are you willing to work for that?

The wise saying tells that there is no worse zealot than a convert. New-born antitheists fit well that description.

Antitheism is no more religious than liberalism, libertarianism, etc. If you're going to use the term "religious" to apply to any belief system then I'm going to respectfully disagree and say that it needlessly waters down the term to the point of being meaningless. I believe (quite reasonably, I think) what I mentioned in my previous post and I think I made myself pretty clear (bad ideas lead to bad actions, etc.)

edit: and just to be clear, antitheism is only a subset of my skepticism. The point is that I don't put beliefs on a pedestal, religious or not. It's as simple as wanting people to be reasonable and my seeing that skepticism even at the most basic level makes a huge difference in how easily people are duped by just about anything, including religion.

There's a conceptual problem in that: antitheism is militant and a creed, not rational and an ideology. Antitheists are like white folk in the USA during the eighteenth and nineteenth century: the best theist (Indian) is that who doesn't interact with you; if they do, they'll pay for their brutish nature.

 

[quadraginta]

Antitheism isn't finding theism inconvenient, it's campaigning to achieve the more theist to drop their religious beliefs. It's like some chap voting Democrats just for that "nasty Republicans" not to be elected, not because of any conviction.

If you're a non-theist and you feel anguish, it's not good to retaliate by trying others to drop their religious beliefs when they're not interfering with civil society. A creationist is a deeply immoral dude who should drop creationism, not religion. Don't buy the whole crap of religion being inherently bad because of creationism and intifada.

Is some nepotist fundi who refuses to do her job and issue the marriage certificates she is legally obligated to issue interfering with civil society?

Of course she is.

Are the shameless politicians and demagogues who celebrate her intransigence interfering with civil society?

Of course they are.

Should non-theists who think that it is wrong for her to force her religiously founded bigotry on people who don't agree with her supposed to stand silent because "it's not good to retaliate"?

Should non-theists who think that amoral and hypocritical populist demagogues who use such behavior as a plank in their platform seeking political and financial power stand silent because "it's not good to retaliate"?


No. I don't think so.

As long as there are people who use their purported religious beliefs to act out their prejudice then standing silent is bad.

As long as there are power seeking hypocrites who find it simple and convenient to use those believers in their efforts to harvest power then standing silent is bad.

 

[pharphis]

You're just concealing it with a disguise. What does that "ignorance" mean, that they have a void you have something to fill with? You are meant to elevate them, just that? I only see behind these apparently elevated antitheists people who were harmed by religious beliefs and want them to pay for that. What about the promotion of reason? What if they learn to play chess, prove theorems and gut the arguments of crackpots denying global warming, but they don't renounce to their religious beliefs? Is that your intention? Are you willing to work for that?
The wise saying tells that there is no worse zealot than a convert. New-born antitheists fit well that description.



There's a conceptual problem in that: antitheism is militant and a creed, not rational and an ideology. Antitheists are like white folk in the USA during the eighteenth and nineteenth century: the best theist (Indian) is that who doesn't interact with you; if they do, they'll pay for their brutish nature.

I don't know what you expect from me... to define ignorance? I admit I do see informing people (you know, education) to be a means of elevating people. Did I miss the point when we decided that education wasn't universally important?

I don't see myself as harmed by religious beliefs and more than the average atheist - I've never had to deconvert and deal with judgmental family or anything like that. My parents are "deistic" at most and even then they recognize that it's just something they want to believe, but can't justify.

Yes, I am absolutely willing to work for that. I know that people have a hard time renouncing beliefs (especially religious ones) even under intense scrutiny. I want people to at least try to evaluate their beliefs, though, and I think it's evident that in the modern era with great things like the internet and a pretty globalized society in some sense (we're flying people all over the world every hour) that people are becoming less and less religious with time, because their beliefs are finally being challenged.

My only "conversion" was to skepticism, and I'm not even sure how that happened (I think finding out about Randi and Popoff was the first step). Again, antitheism is just a subset of this.

I've tried to briefly explain my rationale for antitheism. Maybe you disagree, I don't know. You haven't challenged my reasoning, though. I want people to be as reasonable as possible and for this to happen, religious beliefs need to be scrutinized. The reason I want people to be as reasonable as possible is because our beliefs inform our actions. It's really that simple. Actually, I'm amazed I could summarize this in just two short sentences because I'm not very good with English (despite it being my only language).

I'd love for you to explain what you mean by "militant" and "creed" in this context, because I 1) don't know and 2) have no idea what it has to do with whether or not antitheism is rational

edit: sorry in advance for highlights. I hate splitting up quotes