Thats why I don’t do that shit to people.
Who am I to question someone’s spirituality if it makes them happpy and they practice in a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them?
Oops, now abortion is illegal and gay people can’t marry!
Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences…
He said doesn’t negatively impact others
it never negatively impacts others until suddenly it does. It’s insidious.
Also it can affect people in ways they aren’t even aware themselves.
Fortune telling for example.
My friends mum sold her house because the fortune teller told her some vague nonsense she interpreted to mean the end of the world was approaching.
In my experience, people like that will be terrible with or without religion.
The difference of “external man in the sky” vs “internal concept of my own rightness” for how they feel ok about their own actions doesn’t make a difference when they’re still a bigoted asshat at their core.
I think you missed the bit of the above post that specified that spiritual belief was fine WHEN it’s expressed in “a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them” - restricting abortion and marriage prohibitions both are violations of their actual premise.
I think they’re saying there is no such thing as harmless belief in the unreal.
These people vote, raise children, form relationships and live life in general, interpreting reality with a fundamental distortion. I would agree that it’s hard to claim they won’t end up harming someone.
See that I just can’t abide. So many people just want to cut other people’s grass that they can’t frame anything they don’t like as a fundamental problem to be addressed and rooted out of society as a whole. Everybody has “distortions”. You are stuck living your life through a fixed lense perspective. Your distortion might be privilege, it might be status it might be health or ability. Even the most idiotic person out there is not invalid and undeserving of happiness. What level of acuity you have is less important than whether or not you are kind. Why should belief in the unreal be any different if they still subscribe to the modern standard of what is kind?
My time in the atheist community was very short lived because I was never atheist “enough” for not actually caring if other people believed in fairies. The gatekeeping and lack of tolerance for the legitimately harmless always felt like supremacist thinking where the rubric for acceptable to be afforded basic human respect was a coin slot’s width.
None of us live our lives doing zero damage. We aren’t omnipotent, and as such, we will hurt others during our lives. We can merely hope it will be an amount too small to matter.
I would suggest that being raised atheist leaves you better equipped to understand the world in a way that more closely matches reality, and thereby enables you to more consistently avoid causing harm during your life.
Does that mean every person needs to deconvert tomorrow? No. The process in itself can end up doing more damage than it’d be preventing.
But it does mean religion can’t continue to be the default world view, if we are to improve as a society. For a better tomorrow, it does need to be phased out as quickly as it can harmlessly be achieved.
That’s why we do have to care. Deconverting grandma doesn’t matter too much, but if a relative or friend is raising a kid to be religious, preventing that is worth attempting. Another zealot in a coming generation will do more harm than good.
No kind person means to do harm, but unless you get as close to knowing reality as you can, that won’t always be enough. And even then, you’ll probably break some hearts and say things that cause someone somewhere to need more time in therapy.
But you’ll certainly be more effective in realising the things you mean to do and say, if you don’t live life thinking prayers affect reality.
As for you experience with atheists, you’re describing anti-theists. People who hold an actual stance against religion. It sound like you found some especially virtue signaling ones, bad luck.
But an atheist is just someone who doesn’t believe, not some given type of person, ideology, or the nature of your relationship with the rest of humanity.
Exactly. Atheists don’t like missionaries, so why should we become those ourselves?
As long as nobody tries to impose their beliefs on me, I don’t care about their religion.
From the same author:
Funny, but Simpsons did it.
simpsons is going for so long i think they might have done literally every joke in existence by now
I’m an athiest, and I generally believe that religion can be easily used to be shitty towards others and push them to being the worst type of people in life (more generally this happens with all ideologies). But for many religious people they aren’t too different compared to an athiest. They might go to church only on the holidays, or maybe they go weekly. They probably have many religious values. But at the end of the day they often make similar decisions for different reasons.
But I genuinely believe that trying to convince people that god isn’t real is super shitty and counter-productive. Show some compassion you fucking deodorant-free 🤓-brained reddit moderator. Take a shower.
I occasionally hear people say something like “We should be making people atheists. Religion is a scourge that uses ideology to harm others.” I can’t help to laugh when I hear this, because someone who takes this seriously (perhaps the person in the comic) is doing the literal thing they are decrying.
So what if someone is a christian because it comforts them? I don’t care if you think it lacks logic when your alternative lacks compassion.
Instead of opposing religion unilaterally, oppose the harmful ideas laundered by religion. Shame the politicians and the charlatans. Don’t shame mary-sue who goes to church weekly for being the a Christian, even though the shitbags at NIFB hate church are also Christians.
It’s certainly possible for people to be good to each other due to their religious beliefs. The local pro-palestine protests near me are primarilly organized by christians, and they are often led by a local group of leftist christian pacifists. They organize anti-war protests, support palestinian freedom, and do many smaller actions to alleviate suffering such as volunteering at the local food bank or other similar orgs. Compared to other groups that organize near me, I vastly prefer them over my local PSL chapter, or almost every ML group I’ve ever come across. Unlike many atheists I’ve worked with, that christian group will happily work with a local mosque, or synagogue when it doesn’t help them materially. This is because they don’t oppose people based on simple reasons like religion, but instead have deep solidarity with everyone else suffering through life on this terrible world.
Instead of opposing religion because you think it’s cringe how about you show solidarity and compassion for your fellow human beings.
I disagree pretty strongly on especially the “don’t shame someone for who is essentially a good person for sharing the same religion as a bad person.”
Community is everything, and there’s strength in names. If you say you are of the same religion as a bigot, you’re telling the bigots that you agree with them, even if you don’t. If you want to follow the teachings of the character known as Christ, you ironically have to call yourself something other than Christian, because that label is synonymous with all kinds of bigotry to a dangerous number of people. The bigotry isn’t going to die out as long as they can claim to be a majority.
We’re not talking about sports teams here. These labels matter, and have dangerous effects. I’d rather everyone drop religions labels entirely and just say how they claim to be a good person, because as it stands there are good people and bad people who share the same label, which makes the bad people stronger.
But whenever we do say that those evil people aren’t Christians and push them away, we get accused of “no true Scotsman fallacy” or some BS and “you are part of the problem not taking responsibility”.
As for coming up with a new label, the thing with the label “Christian” is that it’s prescribed in the Bible. Even other religions far removed from Nicene Christianity that respect the Bible or some form of it use the label, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons. So the productive thing to do is calling them out on not being one for not following the teachings of the Bible
LMAO are you fucking joking? Jesus straight up tells people to not stop being Jews in the Bible.
Where?
the Bible
I’m not about to reread the whole New Testament just to find which passage it is.
Or you could just admit that you’re wrong and that He never said that.
Are you stupid?
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