When someone says that a lack of religion leads to a lack of morality, what they're necessarily really saying is that they're so deeply sociopathic that they not only can't reason morally, but can't even envision the possibility of doing so. They're effectively stating outright that they can't even imagine arriving at sound moral judgments through the application of reason, empathy and concern for others, and that the only way they can even conceive of morality is as a set of rules laid down and enforced by some enormous daddy figure who's going to punish them if they break them.
It gets worse, because that’s what people use to justify the argument that people being evil is a part of human nature. Because they genuinely believe that being evil is the default state of humans despite centuries of evidence otherwise.
I always say that the idea of civilised society is something we tell ourselves to make us feel better about the fact that we’re living amongst wild animals.
There are a range of people from altruistic to greedy sociopaths. And few if any are so simple that “good” or “bad” is a sufficient descriptor.
Humans evolved to be cooperative, on average, only to such a degree to enable us to survive. On the surface we can mostly not maim and kill each other enough to work together on things.
But we have many competing motivations and instincts. We aren’t far enough removed from our violent ape ancestors to my taste. As one can see by reading the news on any given day.
Wars, capitalism, climate change, rape, murder, torture, religious extremism, mass starvation while we throw out food because someone failed to buy it, etc.
It's also the reason that religious people can contentedly do horrible things - because they have no ability to make moral judgments on their own, so if their religion tells them that something that anyone with even a minimal ability to reason morally would recognize to be obviously wrong is actually right and proper, they just slavishly believe that it's right and proper.
Well… Some cannot make those judgements but some can. Those who can, and some who are told to do or believe things that contradict their sense of morality will refuse to do so. And end up having to question their leader, church, even their entire belief system. I’m speaking from experience here.
I hear this over and over but I don’t think it’s universally true.
For me, when I was still a believer, I thought and said (at one point) that religion was needed for morality only because I didn’t think too hard (as is true for many religious folk) and also because if people could be decent and moral without religion it called into question some fundamental tenets of Christianity.
At some point not long after I said this to someone, who called me out on it, I realized this idea was stupid and was easily disproven by the many good, non-religious people I knew. That was one of many realizations on my path to deconversion.
Another was encountering religious people who seemed not to have any empathy (or who had been brainwashed into having none). So probably some make that claim who are sociopaths. Anyway I was horrified by some of the statements and attitudes and that prompted further thinking.
No, they said that someone could believe that morality without religion is impossible not because they are a sociopath, but rather because they haven’t thought “too hard about it.”.
In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.
Silly Jesus, it’s not about what you like. It’s about symbolism, and using that symbolism to persuade and oppress, and start wars, and justify shitty behavior.
The majority of Christians in the USA think that the Bible is the complete and inerrant word of God, as written by divinely inspired humans. Just Google up the mission statement for a local mega-church and I’ll bet 50DKP it says something to that effect on their About Us page.
Many, many self-proclaimed Christians in the United States have, at best, cursory Biblical knowledge. Insofar as reading, they may have opened the book in their lives. That does NOT equate to critical analysis, or even perfunctory understanding the contents in even a general sense.
The gospels were not written by the people with their names on them. Part of the problem of just reading the Bible is that it’s incredibly inaccurate. It’s authorship is up to a lot of debate.
I’m just saying that if someone claims the Bible has been written by God Himself then they must not have even looked inside, because the Bible itself assigns clear authorship to each book. I’m not talking about historical accuracy here.
Edit: in my country when I was growing up, the common perspective was simple: there are two main religions - Christian Orthodox and Catholic. All other Christian denominations were “sectarians”. Non-Christian religions were not even considered, those were “pagans”.
I was born in Tatarstan. For us, the division was Christian or Muslim. “Christian” was assumed to be Orthodox, but Catholics were considered to just be a kinda weird foreign flavour of Christianity. Pretty much everyone else made their presence known by proselytizing, and thus earned the title of sectarian for being a crazy evangelist (a chill immigrant who happens to be a Buddhist or Anglican doesn’t really talk much about their religion, so thus the only small religions you notice are the ones headed by people who don’t mind their own business).
I think all of them were con-men. Just read about Joseph Smith and Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, people who created two modern religions. The former had dozens criminal charges including banking fraud and treason and the latter was forging bank checks.
The Bible is not just a long list of rules. Any random page probably has less than a 5% chance of containing any particular thing to “follow”. The chance of landing on a page with an illegal commandment is next to none.
Yeah, quite a bit of the Bible would get you landed in jail so let’s not act like the idea of Bible charades roulette isn’t funny as fuck. If nothing else it’s a fresh new way to highlight the hypocrisy of scripture in modern society.
What does this mean though? How does just reading some random story get you put in jail? It’s like you read their comment and them completely ignored everything it said.
Maybe if we read the comment we could find out, but maybe someone else can tell me what it says, and I’ll just blindly believe them instead. Oh and here’s 10% of my paycheck!
So you would read some random story and just act it out as written? Say I turn to the story of Job in the bible, what am I supposed to act out there? Am I supposed to pretend to be Satan and destroy the fuck out of Job? Am I supposed to be God and allow someone else to destroy Job’s life? Or am I supposed to be Job and just hope that everything that happened to him also happens to me?
Ephesians 4:29 (New International Version) Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.
You’re not helping their needs.
Edit: The words of the Teacher,[a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
How is that arguing in bad faith. You just made a rather witty hut ultimately meaningless reply to my comment. You said “Yeah, quite a bit of the Bible would get you landed in jail”, but the comment you were replying to talked about how this point wasn’t true. And your reply to their comment was essentially: Yeah whatever, but here’s what you just disproved but I’ve restated it.
It’s bad faith because you’re willfully ignoring the parameters set forth in the op. Obviously reading the Bible isn’t going to land you in jail (at least in the west). The act of reading anything isn’t going to get you incarcerated. The whole point of this post was “read and act”.
How do you act out a random page in the bible, like the top comment here said, it’s mostly stories and histories wrote down. So when they reply saying that most of the bible would land you in jail, what does that mean? Does that mean if I copied out the stories that are likely false in the bible, most of which happened 2000 years ago or older. My point is, how do you act that out? How do you act out most of the bible because most of it requires a divine interference. You can’t just copy it out because it’s a story, in the same way I can’t wave a magic wand and shout expeliamus and throw magic at them.
How do people reenact famous battles? Recorded history, real or fabricated, can still be instructive. Take Ezekiel 9:
Then the Lord called to the man clothed in linen who had the writing kit at his side 4 and said to him, “Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of those who grieve and lament over all the detestable things that are done in it.” As I listened, he said to the others, “Follow him through the city and kill, without showing pity or compassion. Slaughter the old men, the young men and women, the mothers and children, but do not touch anyone who has the mark. Begin at my sanctuary.” So they began with the old men who were in front of the temple. Then he said to them, “Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain. Go!” So they went out and began killing throughout the city.
An order given by God himself, to slaughter an entire city for the grievous sin of not worshipping him. Not even the children were to be spared. And yes, like most stories in the Bible, it’s likely almost entirely bullshit, but the human cruelty it conveys, and the moral justification it provides, is all too real. And if you’ve ever dealt with any real religious nutjobs, like the snake-handling, tongues-speaking Baptists I grew up around, then you know that the human brain, when fueled by delusion, is more than capable of conjuring a perceived supernatural experience.
If what you wrote there is how their post gets translated in your mind then yeah it doesn’t make sense but for most of us it’s not going through some sort of word blender.
I’m sorry to say that I’m lost on which post you are referring to.
From what I understand, the original post is an image that says, open a random bible page, do exactly what it says and the last person to end up in jail wins.
But as the top comment, under which this reply exists, states, if you turned to a random page in the bible you would be unlikely to land on a page which explicitly gives instruction. Which means to me, that you would not be able to turn to a random page and do exactly as stated because you would likely be reading some random story. And obviously the act of reading the story isn’t what I’m talking about, but to act out this story seems difficult, since quite a few of the stories in the bible talk about God or someone divine interfering. How could you act out a divine intervention? You would end up in jail, but not for committing a crime as is implied, however for being a Don Quixoteesque mad man who is acting out stories from the bible.
I simply don’t understand how this post can be anything other than slander directed at christianity snd the bible, because it’s clear to me that it isn’t possible to act out most stories in the bible. And what’s more, this post, to me, gives off the idea that people who follow christianity must be completely oblivious to the fact that it’s an ancient book and that they must follow everything written in it like it’s their own biological code.
But if this isn’t what you gather from this post, would you please explain your viewpoint because I am rather confused.
Is my point not valid, that ultimately you cannot go into the bible pick a random page and act it out, it’s physically not possible for a large amount of pages.
You didn’t even attempt to correct my view although I asked you to explain it if your viewpoint was any different. I genuinely want to know how you see this post if you understand it differently to how I do. Because to me, my understanding is the only one that can logically be drawn from this post.
If you do not want to explain yourself to me then fine, make your single sentence reply that contains 10-20 words saying nothing at all. I gave you everything that I was seeing and you give me “you bad” in return. There is no point in trying to find out more from someone who acts this way.
You’re mistaking quantity for quality. You were pretending that the scenario was just reading the passage. You were pretending that you didn’t know I was talking about the post I had directly replied to. You are disingenuous and dishonest so as you put it yes “you bad”.
The Bible rarely tells you specifically what to do. Most of it is more of a history of the Jewish people, writing down things that happened inside of a religious context.
After all, the book of Numbers is almost entirely just a genealogical list ( namat begat numat, etc ) so unless you guys want me to give birth to 15 generations of human beings it's practically impossible to follow as an instruction.
I mean yeah sure, if you blindly copy things that people were reputed to have historically done in a modern context then you are likely to get into some kind of trouble for that.
Maybe only a few odd stares from your neighbors as you put lambs blood on your door or burn only extra virgin olive oil at the stone altar made of stones that were never worked by human tools in your back yard.
And there's nothing illegal about lusting over big old penises or preaching in Galilee, but many people would find it at best difficult to tell dead people to rise and walk or to fast for 40 days and nights in the desert.
It may not be explicitly stated as a rule to follow, but on almost every page there are certainly actions that could be emulated. The OP didn’t specify rules or commandments; they said “open to a page and do what is written on that page”.
Slaughter an entire city of men, women, children and livestock? Yeah, that’s on the list, and was in fact an order given by sky daddy himself.
Fuck your daughters? That’s in there too.
Sacrifice your child to prove your loyalty? Bingo. Another sky daddy special.
During wheat harvest, Reuben went out into the fields and found some mandrake plants, which he brought to his mother Leah. Rachel said to Leah, "Please give me some of your son's mandrakes."
-Gen 30:14
Paul wanted to take him along on the journey, so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.
“You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?”
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">When the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen?
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Joel 3:8 Passage: I will sell your sons and daughters to the people of Judah, and they will sell them to the Sabeans, a nation far away." The LORD has spoken."
So I need to get some slaves and sell them I guess
Joshua 9:24 They answered Joshua, “Your servants were clearly told how the LORD your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you the whole land and to wipe out all its inhabitants from before you. So we feared for our lives because of you, and that is why we did this.”
At that point, does it matter? I’m quite sure there was a Harry Potter born in England matching the year given by the books. But if they match in name only, the book version is not real. Same with Jesus.
That is absolutely a fair point: Jesus, as Christians believe in him, did not exist, even if there was a religious teacher named Jesus (or Yeshu, whatever) who was alive at that time.
But, there's a part B for that point, and I think it's an important one: there is no "book version" of Jesus. The Bible isn't one book, it's a collection of many separate writings, written over many years by many different people, and they didn't even agree on what they were writing about. Christians like to think of the Bible as one consistent work, and it isn't. (The scholarly term for that is "univocality" -- the Bible is not univocal.) So it's not even possible to point to a Jesus figure as described in the Bible, since there is not a singular, consistent Jesus described in the Bible.
The general consensus among historians is that there probably was a real Jesus. Not the walk-on-water Jesus, but some kind of Jewish religious leader, and he was executed. Which means that some of the books of the New Testament describe a real-ish version of him, especially the earlier books. Then, as the messiah narrative starts to take off, the later books in the New Testament get increasingly magical and describe a very unrealistic version of him.
I also recommend looking for podcasts and YouTube videos featuring Bart Ehrman.
What I'm saying here does not at all contradict your comment, I just think it's a good idea if we atheists are always very keen on the fact that the Bible doesn't consistently describe much of anything. That does mean, though, that some parts of the Bible may describe something historically accurate, and that gives no credibility to the more magical parts of the Bible. Seems like the consensus in this thread is to throw away the whole idea of Jesus, and that doesn't match what real historians believe.
The monks who made the calendar where shooting for 2 BC (or AD?) As the birth year. Only issue is they didn’t really have a lot to go on and guessed basically.
Even the earliest writers in the bible wrote about him only decades after his supposed death. Outside the bible the earliest is Josephus 50 years after his death and it is a single sentence which doesn’t quite fit in with its surroundings so it might have been inserted later. Usually you would not consider that convincing evidence of a historical person.
While that’s true that the earliest non-Christian source was Josephus, that doesn’t mean Paul (very contemporary figure) or the Bible aren’t good sources. We can read around the obvious fabrications and their bias doesn’t per se remove all historical value.
The standard for historians (even critical ones) strongly support treating Jesus as a real person.
This isn’t at all a win though for Christians. The Dead Sea scrolls are very indicative of Jesus as a non-unique figure. It was common for there to be Jewish apocalyptic teachers. Jesus was one of those.
The better way of thinking about him in my opinion is that he was a real Jewish teacher who never claimed to be the son of God, that was mythologized by early Christians.
Highly recommend a Marginal Jew by Meier or anything by Bart Erhman for Atheists.
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