Literally none of you really understand what you are mocking, and 95% of your ‘knowledge’ comes from memes and corporate news.
It is impossible to have a decent discussion with any of you, and I have been trying for YEARS.
Every circumstance is filled with ‘gotcha’ intellectual dishonesty parroted from whatever spike haired edgelad streamer you watched this week with ZERO of your own ideas in the mix.
HOW the FUCK can you hold a position that you can’t even defend without devolving into strawmanning and meme repetition? It staggers me how casually all of you just slip into this comforting ignorance that is immune to any discourse.
To be clear, I am NOT a conservative evangelical and I probably hate them more than you do, but none of you will care because ALL theists are the same to you as those ‘God hates fags’ protesters.
Oh I fucking hate every one of you but I still hate conservative evangelicals worse.
At least most of you edgelad ratheists aren’t trying to bring fascism to American.
What makes you angry specifically? Trying to figure out where your beef is. I am happy to discuss.
The religious impulse is a fundamental part of human identity, it was the glue that allowed civilization to begin, uniting people in shared values and goals.
To deny this impulse is to cut ourselves away from one of the more successful survival behaviors that we have developed.
You people get SO CLOSE when you make the little ‘Well I see how it can bring people some comfort believing in a nonexistent afterlife, so good for them even if it is childish’, the fear of death and the loss of loved ones ARE NOT ADDRESSED by our modern secular society other than ‘There is no afterlife, suck it up, they’re worm food’ which is so ridiculously detrimental to our well being as a species but you can no more see it than a fish can see water for being fully immersed in it for your entire life.
I argue that even if no god or afterlife exists, that believing in such and using that as a framework to ease the pain of lost loved ones LITERALLY COSTS NOTHING, HARMS NOTHING, AND CAN BE SUPREMELY THERAPEUTIC.
When irrationally exuberant atheists, fresh off the feeling of freedom that ‘throwing off the shackles’ brings, flood the forums with dumbass shit like “Tax the churches” (churces aren’t tax exempt because they are churches, they are tax exempt because they are charities like any other with the only difference being churches are not required to submit a balance sheet (though many do nowadays in the interest of transparency), “Sepuhration of da churches and stateseses” (Congress shall make no law respecting a religion doesn’t and never has meant what you internet raised atheist thinks it means) or PedoPriest Bad so all Bad! (Hollywood producers rape children at a significantly higher rate than clergy but I don’t see ANY of you calling them out)
I have heard every single argument for atheism and in my day have crafted a few of my own with significantly more nuance than I have ever found online and I am so fucking willing to go into every one of them with ANY of you that can maintain at least some form of intellectual honestly.
Problem of Evil? SURE! I can go on about that for hours and none of my arguments will be found online until I type them.
Biblical ‘contradictions’? FUCK YEAH! I love doing this one because unless you and your ilk actively misunderstand, like go out of your way to do so, you’ll be forced to learn just how historically accurate, multiply attested, and applicable the Bible actually is. Protip: There isn’t a single core tenant of Christianity that is contradicted anywhere. Most ‘contradictions’ come from cultural animal names, or misunderstood cultural context as the cultures written of in the Bible are a lot more diverse than you imagine. And no, the Bible isn’t a ‘copy of a copy of a copy’. Unless it is a transliteration, all Bibles start with as close to the oldest texts as we have access to, and thanks to the Vatican that’s within 100 years of Jesus’s death and there is NO ancient document SO WELL attested by literally an order of magnitude.
Evil in the name of the Church? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY because this is not an inherently church issue, it is an issue with ALL hierarchies of power where abusers can shield themselves from scrutiny with power and authority. But since you edgelads focus on pretty much exclusively the church, you ignore that the most brutal dictators on the planet were atheists, with atheist regimes. And don’t you FUCKING START about the nazis being Christian, they openly mocked Christianity and had their own pagan symbolism that wore the trappings of Christianity for protection just like conservative evangelicals do today.
I can literally go on for hours, pick the topic
You had me up to here: “LITERALLY COSTS NOTHING, HARMS NOTHING, AND CAN BE SUPREMELY THERAPEUTIC.”
Religion has historically been extremely damaging to many groups of people including religious people themselves. Religion has caused wars, the persecution of: gay people, trans people, polygamous people, people of other religions, atheists and agnostics, scientists, and so on. It’s also been used as a justification for monarchy, slavery, caste societies, and fascism. It leads to all kinds of crackpot conspiracies including modern flat earthers. It’s caused more harm than pretty much any other idea in human history, other than perhaps money.
From my perspective religion is a kind of mass delusion. Delusions aren’t always harmful, and provided they are benign it might be better to just let them be. This stops the moment those delusions become harmful to either the person having the delusion or the people around them. If your religion harms no one including yourself then that’s a-okay by me. Otherwise we need to disabuse you of it as quickly as possible, or at least try and replace it with a harmless delusion if reality is too painful to bare.
Comparing religion to celebrity worship isn’t a good argument to make. Celebrity worship isn’t a positive thing either, and imo needs to happen a lot less. It’s a bit like saying thing b is bad so why care about bad thing a? I dislike harmful religions and harmful celebrities.
Also I don’t care about Christianity in particular. I don’t consider islam or Judaism to be good either. Nazis were not atheists, and any religion that causes harm is a problem.
Not sure where you want to focus here. I have to speak only for myself, although you must think we are all the same by referring to me as “you people”. For me, the issue as a churchgoer from childhood into adulthood was that of hypocrisy. It hit me on the head one day, like someone took a hammer and seriously whacked me on the side of the head. It was most disconcerting, but over time I realized what I had been “believing “ in was only something that was taught to me, and began to no longer serve its purpose in reality. I got sober 15 years ago and one of the things allowed me to get sober was brutal honesty. I had to look at all persons, places, things and institutions and reflect on them all. One of the institutions was the church. Later, as religion became politics among many people I knew, it appeared to me to be dividing people into tribes, and these tribes were not based on love. My survival therefore depended on my need to not believe these things any longer. It is that important.
I don’t think you understand how many atheists I have spoken with and how fuckdamn similar every one of you are in your retreat to intellectual dishonesty when the conversation gets even slightly tough.
I’m not sure what your little tribal daydream has to do with the world as it is now but I think you are making fantasies that don’t exactly match up with the anthropological record and basing assumptions on that fantasy for your worldview.
At least I have a fucking book to tell me my made up history. You just decided to go and make one up on your own.