Religion is ignorance and refusal to face reality.
As long as people behave, treat others, and vote according to the sacred scriptures written by a crackhead thousands of years ago, and their influence shapes the world around me and puts a limit to my freedom, then there will be no distinction between religion and extremism. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
I’m a pansexual protestant Christian skepticist, who has not once tried to convert anyone and votes for far left parties. Please enlighten me how I’m inherently ignorant and taking your freedom.
Please enlighten me how I’m inherently ignorant
Despite millenia of disproven lies about a non existing almighty being, you still believe this being indeed does exist and indeed is almighty without ever having any measurable effect on the world whatsoever.
How is that not ignorant?
and taking your freedom.
I don’t support the statement that you personally take away anyones freedom.
But organized churches have a long standing tradition of suppression and if you are part of one you support that at least indirectly.
I think you understand neither what a skepticist is, nor how religion or free churches work. And by your logic I assume you have to be an anarchist, since every government that ever existed - or society for that matter - has exercised some form of suppression.
I think your overgeneralizing, intollerant way of thinking is sickening and hardly better than that of a racist or sexist.
And please don’t tell me what my beliefs are. That’s pretty church-y of you.
Despite millenia of disproven lies about a non existing almighty being, you still believe this being indeed does exist
There is a whole area in Philosophy called Philosophy of Religion that would really like your disproof of the existence of such a being. They have atheists and theists alike.
Corporations have been stealing ever since the dawn of time, anyone working under a big company willingly is not the one to blame, and also what’s with this ‘I know everything’ stuff in the comments section? Is your only basis of hating 90% of the world’s population is that they believe in a god? If anyone can tell for a fact that God doesn’t exist, go on, but everyone knows its a matter of choice and you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist
I don’t get what your sexuality has to do with anything, but anyhow.
Why do you have to be {insert cult-membership here} if you believe in something? Don’t dare to believe {whatever} for yourself? Do you need to be told what to believe and how? You don’t make it sound like that, yet you are christian, hence member of said cult? I don’t get the correlation. Why does one rarely hear people say “i believe in some god, but I’m not a member of blahblah”?
Care to back your statement that ‘religion’ is ignorant? No one has any Idea what happens after death or are you enlightened enough to know and which case I would like you to tell us, which religion is taking away your freedom? You have the choice, you can follow any religion or leave it
No one has any Idea what happens after death
What happens after is that brain stops functioning, as a result of that, your body starts to rot. Nothing else happens. Your brain, that I argue is the real you, stops functioning.
which religion is taking away your freedom?
My parents circumcised my penis when I didn’t know what they were doing, they permanently stole a part of me; and as a result of that crap, my sex life is ruined forever. They took away my freedom because of you shitheads who are ruining our world by influencing people into accepting religion. You guys have the audacity to claim that people have a choice after indoctrinating children of religions so that once they are adult they follow your religion.
If you are so about choices, then make sure your kids don’t get to know about superstitious beliefs until they are an adult and only then tell them about your fantasies that you believe that a bearded man is watching us from the sky. I bet your kid is going to think you’ve gone crazy.
We should be fighting religion.
Religion is not a useful tool and it’s not good in general
Are you kidding me? Religion is supremely useful in controlling and exploiting people. It promises all of the wonderment and fantasticnous you can imagine while also promising the absolute worst nightmares you can imagine, and all you have to do is pay and pray, and the prayers are optional.
“Work in service to your masters and you will be rewarded after you’re dead. Defy your masters and you will be punished for eternity” is the perfect tool of control for the uneducated/unintelligent.
Religion is not a useful tool and it’s not good in general
People who are active in religious congregations tend to be happier and more civically engaged than either religiously unaffiliated adults or inactive members of religious groups, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of survey data from the United States and more than two dozen other countries.
That’s just saying “people who are in a social community are happier and more engaged than those that aren’t” because most social communities are currently religious focused.
Sure. Doesn’t change the fact that Religion can be used as a tool for social engagement and can have a measurable, good effect on people’s lives.
When people misuse a hammer to cause harm you don’t blame the hammer.
A distinction without a difference. Religion produces demonstrable harm to many people. To be religious is to be an extremist. The entire idea that a being from your imagination should influence my behavior is whack.
To be religious is to be an extremist.
Over 80% of people in the US believe in one religion or another. The country is not 80% extremists.
Again, can you tell me how if you are not religious, how is religion influencing you? And how is your opinion different than any other religious extremist who also claims that anyone who doesn’t follow x religion is bigot? It’s the same thing where everyone is just hating everyone else who doesn’t share the same belief, except being an atheist somehow gives you a free pass to bash on everyone else’s belief, you all then should not be complaining if anyone starts saying all atheism is extremism
Edit: I am gonna clarify that I personally don’t think atheism itself is extremism, anyone has the right to chose what path they think is correct
Something about my religious leaders wanting to strap electrodes to my junk and torture me for being gay has given me some strong opinions. Don’t you dare dismiss my experiences as invalid, I’m fighting terrorists here.
Religion teaches and reinforces bigoted and anti-science views, generally. Yes, there are good people that reject this basis of their religion, but religion itself has done far more harm than good.
How do you qualify “more harm than good”? You’re making a pretty broad claim about 85% of the world’s population, according to Pew Research.
Please provide sources for your claims, what religion you want to believe in is a different topic, read the books of all the major religions and see how many and which one of them is ‘bigoted’ and ‘Anti-Scientific’
If you are not gonna do that, atleast not fire such claims because you yourself don’t have the knowledge.
Institutionalized religion is bad, religion for yourself isn’t imho. I can understand the need for answers, although I don’t necessarily need them. I think that is part of tolerance, to accept the believes of others.
“Religion for yourself” in the age of internet of called “personal belief”. So, the term “religion” now only means, like it or not, “institutionalized religion”.
This is 100% caused by the fact that people “identify” as Y (not using X as a variable, as it is now a fucking confusing buzzword), and are subsequently grouped together in “echo rooms” by various platforms algorithms. This happened so overwhelmingly that in less than a decade, it redefined the default behavior of people, online, and you will now see people automatically seeking those echo rooms. Even on Lemmy, where people are literally seeking instances that will validate their own beliefs, and block those they do not share.
Thats … Just your believes man
If you keep away from social media as much as possible (as anyone should) its not so bad. I know a few people, that don’t go to church but believe in god.
No one feels great by being critiqued, but its necessary imho.
I can understand the need for answers, although I don’t necessarily need them.
Btw do you think atheists always need answers for everything? I think atheists can be okay without knowing the answer. The religious people are the ones who always wants an answer(wrong answer counts) and they always explain thinks they can’t explain as “god’s creation/mystery/whatever”
No I certainly don’t have have all the answers, the people that think they do are a huge problem.
I can understand the need for an explanation, but I simply don’t have that need, although I like to know how things work. But if we as humantiy don’t know I don’t think its so bad.
Yeah, if you try to change the facts because of your believe we have a problem. If your religion can adapt to new facts (or live besides them) I don’t really care.
People created god as an explaination of how the world is created and maintained. People who do science really knows that we can’t know everything for sure, and are familiar and okay with not knowing that thing.
I said we cant know everything but we must be okay with that. Religion just takes something they see and put the “god made this” label and refuses to question god.
If religious people don’t have that need for explaination, would they belive god created everything? Aren’t they okay with saying “we don’t really know how everything was created”?
I can understand the need for an explanation
Religion usually explains with something wrong and the followers simply take it as real truth. Don’t say atheists are the ones who need explaination for everything
An adult that still believes in Santa might not lead to anything bad, but it leads to them indoctrinating their children to also believe in Santa into adulthood,
And if some dude can live on the north pole and travel to every home on earth in one night, then other equally ludicrous ideas might not sound so far fetched
And before you know it you’re wearing radioactive stickers to rebalance your chakras, sticking jade eggs up your ass to bring luck and you’re blowing up a shopping mall because your imaginary friend hates gay people
This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. Millions of religious people exist from all sorts of ideological spectrums. The vast, vast majority are not evil and don’t do bad things.
The extremism present in religious people is also apparent and present in atheists, agnostics, or whatever generic belief system you can think of. Religion by itself doesn’t cause extremism: ad hominems, whataboutisms, and disinformation causes extremism. Constantly comparing yourself to an enemy and convincing yourself you are in the absolute right causes extremism. Sure, you see some ‘religious’ people going crazy and shooting up places. They also have manifestos that are completely detached from reality in a way that reeks of far-right propaganda and disinformation, and never any real coherence or thought given to the religious teachings they supposedly follow (if they mention their religious texts at all, it’s often cherry-picking or outright incorrect).
We should not try to fix the issues of mental health that plague a lot of countries by going after religion. If anything, that would only backfire by virtue of validating any persecution complex religious people might have. We should instead focus on providing affordable mental healthcare that is easily, immediately accessible and normalized for the wider population, as well as providing clear sources of valid information and having any questionable sources that construe facts and claim to not be news sources in lawsuits or elsewhere be forced to clearly denote themselves as not news regularly.
That sounds an awful lot like sexual depravity, which makes god sad for some reason so i believe you’ll be cast into a fiery pit to have your skin melted off, regrown, then melted off again, for all eternity. And this will be just, a punishment that fits the crime
And while you’re in excruciating pain for all eternity just remember: god loves you ♥️
You don’t need religion to believe in something, did this occur to you? I don’t have anything against people who believe some even weird shit. Let me hear it, let us discuss it, but do as you please (who am i to judge? I don’t know the truth).
But the moment you enter some cult (or religion if you prefer that term), you’re on my hate-list. They are to control the weak sheeple. Period.
Why do people always take it, that belief equals religion?
