"Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb.”
Ew, I’m vegan and I don’t have a license nor the money for a lamb, so breaking in, stealing and slaughtering a lamb and doing rituals with its carcass publicly apparently?
Good news! That’s not a commandment, it’s just part of a story, so there isn’t actually anything to follow.
If we’re playing a reenactment game instead of a follow-what-the-Bible-tells-you-to-do game, then in context the alternative is that your first born son dies and all you have to do to prevent it is put a little blood on your door for one night. Seems like a trade anyone would readily take. Also, it’s not illegal and it’s not a ritual. It’s just regular old slaughter of an animal like we do thousands/millions of times a day in society.
Thanks for the context! But why does an omnipotent and omniscient deity need me to slaughter an animal and smear it’s blood on my door to keep him from killing an innocent child? Since he’s omniscient and all, couldn’t he just, ya know, pass over my house anyway since he already knows my child isn’t one of the thousands of innocent children he intended to slaughter on this particular night?
So for the people here who don't know what this is about: Super conservative Christians like to claim that without God, there can be no morals because God told us what's right or wrong. They deny the intrinsic morals we humans have. This image turns that BS argument on it's head.
No it doesn’t. All this image is implying is that Christians can be immoral. It says absolutely nothing about the idea that an objective morality needs an external source. This is claimed (incorrectly I would argue) by many atheist philosophers as well, so it’s not just “Super conservative Christians” that say it.
If the image was intended to do what you said then it utterly failed.
No, what it shows is that people who call themselves Christians can be caught up in evil things, same as everyone else. To your point, humanity has some intrinsic moral understanding, certainly heavily configured by the surrounding society, for the survival of society. It’s not triggered necessarily by faith in some deity. Everyone is capable of good. Everyone is capable of evil.
If you want to take it a step farther and argue with someone pushing the “only Christians have a sense of morals” stupidity on their own turf, just point out that according to the Bible, we are made in God’s image, and since he has a sense of good and evil, therefore so do we. Even an evolution loving, abortion having, pot smoking, illegal immigrant might technically be created in God’s image. They have morals, and can do good or evil things.
just point out that according to the Bible, we are made in God’s image, and since he has a sense of good and evil, therefore so do we.
I think in Christian lore, that’s supposed to be the role of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2–3). It’s fruits are forbidden. Serpent, original sin.
Bottom line it does not change your argument, since all humans after that point in the story have that ability. Just the reason is different.
As long as what someone believes doesn’t affect anyone else, what does it matter? Why try and disprove or find logical flaws in someone else’s beliefs?
I couldn’t think of a single benefit to this idea. It just reeks of self superiority.
Beliefs inform actions, so it’s impossible that a believer never affects someone. Sooner or later the believer will do something damaging.
Procreating and passing on the delusion. Harassing non traditional sexualities or lifestyles. Preaching. Preventing their children from following their own love or their own vocation because it goes contrary to their religious tenets. Supporting “charities” that take the help hostage until the helped listen to the sermon or embrace the faith. Teaching that the only source of morality is religion, and specifically theirs.
Also, leaving someone believe something intrinsically damaging and doing nothing is an asshole move.
Of course it doesn’t benefit you but them. But maybe helping others is against your own beliefs.
You clearly believe you are smarter than anyone who believes in any religion ever? You know there are lots and lots of religious people who also live and appreciate the modern world right? Being religious doesn’t mean you must hate gay people and you must hate people who don’t think like how you think.
You clearly have some very deep prejudice against people who believe in religion and I imagine that you feel very smart and superior to someone who goes to church once a week.
I would rather have a friend that is a christian or a muslim, a hindu or a jew, who also believes in things that are modern and western like acceptance of people of all faiths and sexualities. Than someone like you who judges others based on what you think they must be like.
You have quite literally stereotyped every religious person ever. Although it’s clear you are directing your ridiculous comment at Christianity.
Also I’m not religious, I don’t go to any kind of church, mosque or temple. Yet I do believe it’s right for me yo stand up for the beliefs of others, even if they do not reflect my own.
You clearly believe you are smarter than anyone who believes in any religion ever?
Not a chance. The director of the Human Genome Project is a believer, and he’s undoubtedly more knowledgeable and smart than I’ll ever be. He just happens to have an unjustifiable belief outside of his area of expertise.
Being religious doesn’t mean you must hate gay people
No, but being a member of a religious organization that does is being an accomplice.
and you must hate people who don’t think like how you think.
Nice non-sequitur you got there.
You clearly have some very deep prejudice against people who believe in religion
If thinking they’re mistaken and deluded about their god is a prejudice, then I do.
I imagine that you feel very smart and superior to someone who goes to church once a week
Only about my better use of time.
I would rather have a friend that is a christian or a muslim, a hindu or a jew, who also believes in things that are modern and western like acceptance of people of all faiths and sexualities.
Wait until you cross one of their internal, religiously imposed “uncrossable” limits. Let’s see how much the friendship lasts.
You have quite literally stereotyped every religious person ever.
Most of them make it very easy.
Yet I do believe it’s right for me yo stand up for the beliefs of others, even if they do not reflect my own.
Congratulations. You’re an accomplice of religions destroying many countries in the world.
Every point in my comment holds true, no matter what snarky replies you make. Because the fact of the matter is, you are prejudiced against people who follow a religion. And that is an unbelievably bad trait to have.
But who am I to say, maybe you have a degree in theology? But for some reason, I seriously doubt it.
Having a degree in theology means you understand religion and where it comes from, what the differences between religions and beliefs are and how they affect the world. Studying theology is like studying anthropology. You may learn to read ancient languages in order to be able to understand texts that are thousands of years old.
It’s difficult to comprehend that you can’t see the problem with your ‘points’, that being that you are extremely biased against any other belief that isn’t your own. Pretty hypocritical if you ask me.
Just gonna say, as a Catholic, He never sends anyone to Hell, they send themeselves to Hell. Furthermore, the whole “Hell is the worst pain you can imagine” immediately makes one think Of a torture chamber. That isn’t neccessarily what Hell is. Hell is simply a separation from God. It is being alone and miserable that is thgreatest pain.
The whole idea of God sending people to infinite torture because man is a depraved, wicked thing is a very harmful calvinistic idea.
Not trying to be a troll. I just want to set the records straight.
Hey, you gotta understand religion if you want to effectively argue against it, so thanks! Clarification is always welcome! I don’t see any trolling here.
The clarification is fairly stupid, that being said. “He doesn’t send you there, you send yourself there” is a distinction without a difference when the all powerful god not only is the only reason hell exists, but supposedly created this world and the people in it knowing ahead of time specifically which people would go to the hell he created. It’s like saying I didn’t stab you, you just didn’t get out of the way of my knife.
Their clarification is basically just a modern white-washing of their jealous, vengeful, and petty god’s holy doctrine, since the traditional “god hates you if you’re not just so” is working on less and less of the population
If God created everything, he created evil. He created the possibility for separation and he is the one that made us fallible. What value is free will if the price is eternal misery?
Not only that, but if he is truly all powerful, he should be able to rebuild reality in a way of which a person could have free will completely, while never be at risk of hellfire. Either he chooses not to do this which makes him not all loving, or he cannot do this which makes him not all powerful. Either way, this just makes him a giant wad of holy fuck juice in my eyes with an ego issue, undeserving of my praise.
There’s a work of fiction called UNSONG which posits an answer for this - essentially that God’s purpose is to maximize the amount of good that exists, but at the level of abstraction he functions two identical things are really just one thing, one template. So he creates a perfect world, then ones with a single imperceptible flaw, then ones with two such flaws, etc. Eventually you reach ones whose potential for good is only a slight net positive, and that’s more the neighborhood we’re in.
That’s just moving around minutia of details and ignoring the skeleton of the argument, then re-stating a similar enough version of what the meme ridicules.
If god alone can fill the hole in your heart, why did he leave such vague instructions in a world full of grifters, with availability limited by geographical and cultural lottery, and expect us to believe this religion of others at face value?
I gotta say, ignorance being bliss is a true thing. All you have to do is look to “spiritual” (often just non-denominational pagan) people to see the same patterns of feeding themselves simple platitudes with a supernatural basis to fill the certainty and self-esteem needs they have.
Just gotta say, also as a person raised Catholic and who has studied it’s history a lot, your understanding of the teachings of Catholicism are very modern, heavily debated even today within the Catholic Church, and would not be supported by the church’s teachings even 70 years ago. Just go look at the art in a Catholic church from more than 70 years ago, and you will find people being judged and sent to torture.
There are so many to choose from, which one is the worst is very hard to determine. From completely insane nonsense like the ontological argument to those that just ignore that they would apply to every other religion equally like Pascal’s Wager there is a lot of competition.
I guess that is bound to happen when all arguments are far from good, they have to cluster around the ‘bad to worst’ part of the spectrum.
When little baby mindbleach still figured the religious hypothesis deserved a fair shake, I bought and skimmed an apologetics book. I think the moment I gave up was reading ‘the argument from magic’ that said you can control matter with your mind. Namely: your hand.
There is a subtle but crucial difference between “come the fuck on” and “you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
Fuck this propaganda bullshit. Dad is always trying to duck the blame for his shitty behavior. The whole "get crucified and save the world thing" was his idea - you think I wanted to get nails driven through my damn hands?
And another thing - everyone is always misquoting me and thinking I'm him. For the last fucking time, I'M NOT MY DAD. I have nothing to do with anything that asshole spits out, or how reporters spun my quotes after the whole cross situation. I mean, for fuck's sake, platypuses? What kind of sick mind comes up with that? Who looks at a duck and thinks hey, that's not badass enough - lets make it venomous and furry!
ONE SICK MOTHERFUCKER, that's who, and I'm tired of taking responsibility for his weird ass decisions and proclamations.
For the record, since everyone wants to misquote me on these things: no one needs saving they can't provide to themselves. Fuck who you like. Love who you like. Do what you like, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone... or causes changes to duck genetics. Ducks are cool as-is, bro.
Also, I effing love atheists. You guys are fucking hilarious, and I love seeing you piss off the old man. So y'all get an upvote for letting me rant, and if your soul engine ever needs a tune-up, hit me up in the garage.
Lol dude, don’t act as if you didn’t mislead a rebel group against the Roman occupation with false promises of heaven on earth being right around the corner. You worked for your dad, consciously and willingly spreading his bullshit and now you want us to believe you are the victim? You split the whole Jewish resistance against the Romans, effectively helping them keeping their grip on Israel and after Judas saw through your garbage you suffered the consequences. You obviously didn’t learn anything from all of that, even trying to shit on platypuses which might be the only good thing your dad ever created.
First off, that whole revolution thing was Judas' deal, and the fucker sold me out the moment it was clear that it had failed. Secondly, it's kinda hard to stand up to your Dad when you're a kid, especially when he happens to put you on blast with the holy visions and angels and whatnot - plus there's that whole "I created the entire universe when I was your age" trip that no kid should ever be subjected to. Third, I didn't spread my Dad's bullshit - that Old Testament crap is definitely not me. Shouldn't even be included in the same library, much less the same book as my biography.
Which, I should point out, most of which wasn't written by anyone who actually listened to me. Fuck Paul in particular on that front, by the way - fucking homophobic con-man. "Oh Jesus made me blind! Oh Jesus made me see!" goddamn load of bullshit - never met the guy in my life or afterlife. Besides, everyone knows I went to Mexico for a vacation after being crucified, before I headed out to Japan to settle down. There was no way I was gonna stay in Roman territory and give them a second chance to finish the job.
Finally, have you ever talked to a platypus? Vicious, angry little creatures, rapacious predators, and masters of the deadly arts, particularly poisonings. Many are hitmen in the Maori mafia - no one suspects a platypus, despite Perry's reputation.
Yeah yeah, it’s always someone else’s fault with you guys. At some point in life you need to grow up and take responsibility.
Also, my wife is a platypus, so I take that personal. Yeah there are some shady types and the Tasmanian platypus Mafia doesn’t really do the community a favour, but you probably never even met one, or else you’d know most of them despise that group.
Hope you signed a pre-nup, and that there's no life insurance in play... all joking aside, though, I wish your family the best, especially little Johnny Strychnine.
But serious question - how do you take responsibility for the suffering of millions when it's based on people misquoting you when you were partying in the desert with a bunch of hippies? I mean, we were definitely burning the bush, if you get my drift - things were wild down by the shores of the Dead Sea in the BC. I mean, when you cut loose at a rave, are you responsible for the deaths of future millions because someone filmed you when you were high and used it as a basis for a religion?
No objections… Germany doesn’t have secularization written in the constitution. And it’s common knowledge that both aren’t properly separated by law. Or anything else.
Nope. Opinion is simply the wrong word. The best English term for what a religion is, is probably belief system. Belief and opinion aren’t entirely synonymous - opinions have a much stronger notion of personal judgement (i.e. how tings should be) - but more importantly a religion isn’t just a belief, it’s a huge set including many beliefs that do - more or less - fit together. Hence it’s a system.
In German we also also use the word “Weltanschauung” (literally translates to worldview but fits a religion better than the English word).
So you can’t just compare the entire religion to an opinon about, let’s say whether or not school lunches should include bacon. But you can compare individual opinions and beliefs held by religious people to those of people without imaginary friends. A Christian’s opinion on abortion may be influenced by their religion but there’s a lot of denominations that are pro choice. Hence a Christian being against abortion is indeed just voicing a opinion.
On the other side, there definitely are non-religious belief systems. Humanism for example.
My local FB group has this horrendous edgelord troll that uses “Weltan schauung” as their name. I’m not convinced that it’s not a paid troll. I’ve seen multiple accounts using the exact same picture for their profile. It’s a picture of a sunset.
I agree that ‘opinion’ is a bad term, but ‘belief system’, while wildly used, is hiding its true nature, which believers do not want to and often cannot confront because of the high cognitive dissonance it would cause. I think there is no one word to accurately describe it. My attempt to put it in one sentence is: a shared delusion by indoctrination that fills a mental space that people have varying degrees of natural predisposition for.
All of the parts are important and all of them contradict the ‘just another opinion’ stance.
Shared: because religion and/or belief is inherently irrational, it helps if a lot of people or at least a significant portion of a person’s community have the ‘same’ beliefs because it gives them perceived validity.
Indoctrination: to achieve the previous point, it is important to instill the beliefs in children, so ‘optimally’ they are perceived as natural and not questioned.
Natural predisposition: there’s plenty of evidence, that there are specific regions in the brain which are active in believers, when they pray or partake in rituals. No matter the religion. This can also be true for people who are not part of any formal religion, but ‘tap into’ this spiritual part of the brain by meditation or other personal means. Then again, there are people where these regions are ‘dead’/not there. And as always with humans: it is a spectrum.
Delusional: the ‘core tenet’ of belief is the acceptance of certain statements at face value against any amount of contradicting information, which is enabled by all the previous points.
So, how does this contrast with opinions? Anybody can have or form an opinion on anything. For any given subject there is a set of information for which a subset is available to an individual. This subset gets sorted, weighted, and filtered based on individual acquired discriminators. Those discriminators can come from all sorts of stuff, including education and religion. The available information as well as the sorting, weighting, and filtering can change over time and lead an individual to drastically reform their opinions. That is less likely (figuratively impossible) with a belief.
So, while it is possible to have religiously ‘informed’ opinions, they are very different in their nature from beliefs. And the word ‘belief system’ does not deny, but hides the mechanics that diferentiates opinions from beliefs.
Yeah, “an opinion” is poorly chosen phrasing. Obviously, it’s lots and lots of opinions. Should’ve chosen my words better.
Next time the topic comes up, do you think it would be better if I said that religious beliefs are a huge set of opinions that form a person’s core beliefs and that these opinions and as a result the beliefs should be subject to scrutiny and criticism, just like non-religious opinions and beliefs? Is that phrased better or still “wrong” but put into different words?
Next time the topic comes up, do you think it would be better if I said that religious beliefs are a huge set of opinions that form a person’s core beliefs and that these opinions and as a result the beliefs should be subject to scrutiny and criticism, just like non-religious opinions and beliefs? Is that phrased better or still “wrong” but put into different words?
Absolutely. That makes much easier to find fair comparisions. After all not all religous beliefs are held deeply and many non religious people have beliefs that are incredibly important to them. E.g. the no alcohol ruls in Islam isn’t especially well adhered to among Muslism in Western countries wheras your average atheist vegan will go ballistic if you try to make them eat pork.
atheism
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.