What religion are you?

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What religion do you belong to?
Protestant 9%  9%  [ 14 ]
Catholic 8%  8%  [ 12 ]
Mormon 1%  1%  [ 2 ]
Episcopalian/Anglican 1%  1%  [ 2 ]
Orthodox Christian 3%  3%  [ 5 ]
Unitarian 1%  1%  [ 2 ]
Jewish 5%  5%  [ 8 ]
Islamic 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Buddhist 3%  3%  [ 4 ]
Hindu 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Sikh 1%  1%  [ 1 ]
Baha'i 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Pagan 3%  3%  [ 4 ]
Rastafarian 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
LaVeyan Satanist 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
New-age 1%  1%  [ 1 ]
Deist 1%  1%  [ 2 ]
Agnostic 10%  10%  [ 16 ]
Atheist 40%  40%  [ 62 ]
Other 13%  13%  [ 21 ]
Total votes : 156

magz
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26 Apr 2021, 12:52 am

threetoed snail wrote:
Whoa that got dark. I only meant it metaphorically... :)

I mean, removing religion doesn't really change all that much. Not automatically, at least.

It's likely some other cult would jump into the void, not any better than the original one.
The Soviets and Maoists tried to forcefully remove religion. It didn't make people think for themselves. Actually, it didn't even make people allowed to think for themselves.


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26 Apr 2021, 2:30 am

magz wrote:
It's likely some other cult would jump into the void, not any better than the original one.
The Soviets and Maoists tried to forcefully remove religion. It didn't make people think for themselves. Actually, it didn't even make people allowed to think for themselves.

Exactly. People just find things to be fanatic about, and ways to get other people to be fanatic about things.


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kitesandtrainsandcats
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26 Apr 2021, 2:45 pm

Here are some questions:
Are religion and faith the same thing?
What is religion?
What is faith?
What connotative and denotative meanings do you give those words when you use them?
Can a person have faith in Jesus without having a religion?


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threetoed snail
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27 Apr 2021, 2:06 am

kitesandtrainsandcats wrote:
Are religion and faith the same thing?

No I don't think they are. No need to look any further than the dictionary for that:

Faith: Complete trust or confidence in someone or something.
Religion: A particular system of faith and worship.

I don't think someone's trust in something has to be "complete" to qualify as "faith", but anyway, that's the gist.

Quote:
What connotative and denotative meanings do you give those words when you use them?

The word "religion" heavily implies to me a strong social component. People doing or believing something because others do/did or believe/believed the same, or ordered them to.

Faith is trusting or relying on something beyond what reason alone can substantiate, justifiably or not.

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Can a person have faith in Jesus without having a religion?

Jesus or anyone or anything else, why not.


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02 May 2021, 8:19 am

SabbraCadabra wrote:
But a maniac without a gun is still a maniac?


Would you rather fight the unarmed maniac or the maniac with a machine gun, panzerfaust, machete or whatever weapon you can imagine? And which maniac is more and which less dangerous?

All this is saying is that society would improve without religion and be less dangerous. It doesn’t say it would be perfect but better.

Quote:
I have had plenty of religious people in my life, and almost none of them were nutbags.
A lot of them actually do very good things for others.


“I have had plenty of religious peopleNazis/Stalinists in my life, and almost none of them were nutbags.
A lot of them actually do very good things for others.”

Does the existence of these individuals now make the ideologies, ideas and movements of National Socialism and Stalinism less dangerous and less inhuman or even good and desirable on a broad societal scale?

Thing is, your religious friends don’t concern me one bit. I am not talking about individual good and bad people. I am talking about an ideology, its organisations and impact on society and what the implementation of the ideology means or would mean.

By the way, if any of your religious friends were advocating against such things as women’s right to bodily autonomy, human rights and equality for LGBT people, denied evolution or science in general, were demonising biology/nature and sexuality etc. etc. they were already dangerous nutbags to me.
We might actually have very different ideas of what does and what does not constitute a dangerous nutbag ;)


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02 May 2021, 5:51 pm

Showing that getting rid of religion would solve all our problems is a weird burden that critics of anything else would not be expected to meet. I agree with Skjald's general point but I wouldn't say religion as a whole is analogous to Nazism, more like: cultural/compartmentalized religion = patriotism, devout religion = nationalism, extreme sects = Nazism/other fascism. It's bad overall but the amount of harm varies a lot by the type of religions belief, not just between individuals. Yes, there are progressive religious groups whose devout members are doing good overall but there are also left-wing nationalist groups that are trying to gain independence for marginalized peoples. That doesn't mean that there aren't inherent dangers in nationalism and in divine command theory.



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02 May 2021, 10:32 pm

Skjald wrote:
Would you rather fight the unarmed maniac or the maniac with a machine gun, panzerfaust, machete or whatever weapon you can imagine? And which maniac is more and which less dangerous?

Well, if I fought an unarmed maniac, my death would be slow and painful...
If I fought an armed maniac, my death would likely be a lot quicker...
Either way, I would be dead.

Skjald wrote:
I am not talking about individual good and bad people. I am talking about an ideology, its organisations and impact on society and what the implementation of the ideology means or would mean.

Would it help if I clarified by saying that a lot of these friends are working in the ministry, and thus, leaders of these "organizations" you speak of, spreading a positive impact on society?

Not every religion is WBC.

Skjald wrote:
By the way, if any of your religious friends were advocating against such things as women’s right to bodily autonomy, human rights and equality for LGBT people, denied evolution or science in general, were demonising biology/nature and sexuality etc. etc. they were already dangerous nutbags to me.

Nope.

Again, not every religion is WBC.


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03 May 2021, 2:36 am

Had to go with other, I am a TST satanist.


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03 May 2021, 3:07 am

Sweetleaf wrote:
Had to go with other, I am a TST satanist.
I wasn't quite sure what that was so I briefly looked it up & it sounds interesting & more appealing to me than most other religions. Seems like there is a bit of overlap between that & Secular Humanism or at least the two groups could be allies. The only other religion that seems majorly appealing to me that I know about is The Spock Church

http://free-in-truth.blogspot.com/2006/ ... hurch.html

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A few miles south of Lynchburg in Campbell County sits a large and attractive octagonal building which is home to one of most unique churches in the world. Founded in 1977, “The Spock,” as the church is called, is the world’s only church of Star Trek, a religion centered on the popular 1960’s television series featuring the adventures of a crew of interstellar explorers. “The Spock” promotes beliefs associated with one of the popular characters in the TV series, Mr. Spock, who was from a peace-loving race of aliens known as “Vulcans.”

The ideology of the church is centered on so-called Vulcan philosophy which includes the belief in pure “logic” and which emphasizes a lifestyle devoid of emotion. A huge stained-glass likeness of the church’s namesake is featured in the sanctuary, where churchgoers recite sequences of dialogue from the series and participate in what they call a “Holy Mind Meld.” Many church members wear stick-on pointed ears (mimicking those of the TV character) during services and at other church functions (in one case of excessive dedication to the “faith,” one member attempted to have his ears surgically altered but with disastrous results, requiring extensive corrective surgery).
“The Spock” is not without controversy, as reportedly in the late 1980’s disagreement arose within the church over the lengths to which members should go in emulating the purely logical and emotionless Vulcan approach to life. Some members advocated a reasonable degree of emotion (citing Mr. Spock’s half-human side), but a core group of hard-line members insisted on a rigid adherence to Vulcan ideology. The stricter view won out, and as a result, several members left the church and publicly denounced its practices. One resentful former member went so far as to publish a science fiction story based on his rigid and stifling upbringing in the faith, a story which concludes with the destruction of the Campbell County sanctuary by a “phaser” blast from an orbiting “starship” at his command. Despite the dissent, “The Spock” boasts a membership today of over 120, and actively campaigns for new members at area fan conventions and at Star Trek movie showings in local theatres. Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Mr. Spock in Star Trek, has refused comment on “The Spock.”


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03 May 2021, 7:45 am

Udinaas wrote:
I agree with Skjald's general point but I wouldn't say religion as a whole is analogous to Nazism, more like: cultural/compartmentalized religion = patriotism, devout religion = nationalism, extreme sects = Nazism/other fascism.

Well, the monotheistic Abrahamic religions are in and of themselves (what certain people or communities do or not do in their name aside) totalitarian, authoritarian ideologies and are thus absolutely comparable to other totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies. I actually am in favour of treating religious ideologies the same as we treat NS-ideology/fascism in our society.

How much harm a religion is capable of actively doing also in part depends heavily on how much power it has in society and culture.
In certain parts of Africa Christians can burn gay people in a car tyre and nothing happens to them, in Western Europe, even if many of them would like to do it and quite some openly say that they deem gay people as criminals who should get the death penalty, they wouldn't get away with it and thus decide to rather not do it for their own sake.

Religion ingrained in a culture can be specifically harmful by the way and continues to be harmful even if most people in a society aren’t even actively religious anymore but are still indoctrinated with those factually inaccurate, harmful ideological views through culture. Those things do even become more complex to dismantle.


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03 May 2021, 7:55 am

SabbraCadabra wrote:
Well, if I fought an unarmed maniac, my death would be slow and painful...
If I fought an armed maniac, my death would likely be a lot quicker...
Either way, I would be dead.


Well, I would have argued that the unarmed maniac was easier to defeat and neutralise than the armed one and the chances of survival drastically increased but apparently you don’t trust your fighting skills much at all or the maniac does look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator or he's batman on your mind, I don’t know x’D

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Would it help if I clarified by saying that a lot of these friends are working in the ministry, and thus, leaders of these "organizations" you speak of, spreading a positive impact on society?


Yes, that definitely helps a lot. And I would disagree that they are spreading positive impact on society then.
If that’s how it is then your religious friends strengthen an organisation that does incredible harm all across the globe in various societies by working for it and spreading the ideology (even if they themselves may or may not alter it to make it less gruesome and inhumane) and are thus contributing to harm and impacting society negatively over all.

If an NSDAP member had said that he interpreted his National Socialism differently and didn’t think of certain people as subhumans/degenrates/whatever who stained the national corpus and had to be eliminated for the greater good of the race’s gene-pool and the nation but he was still an NSDAP member, campaigning for the party and spreading their propaganda he would have still contributed to the crimes done by the NSDAP nonetheless by enabling them.

I’m still very curious if you would find your own arguments still legit if someone told you about their Nazi/Stalinist friends and tried to paint those ideologies as harmless and good for society.


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Not every religion is WBC.

Sorry, I don’t know what WBC stands for and thus can’t engage with this part.

Quote:
Nope.

Again, not every religion is WBC.


Then they might actually not be nutbags but only hypocrites if they still work for those organisations and spread these ideologies.


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“The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.”
- Mikhail Bakunin


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03 May 2021, 11:59 pm

Skjald wrote:
Sorry, I don’t know what WBC stands for and thus can’t engage with this part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church


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05 Jun 2021, 5:28 pm

I am also a apostolic communalist aka Christian communitarian.



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01 Jul 2021, 2:04 pm

Other: Animist



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02 Jul 2021, 6:41 am

I checked "other" because I don't belong (joined) ANY religion. I take religion (deities) to be an emergent property of human beings. They are human group think. Like money, language, law, corporations, government. All based on what humans, not deities, do in groups. Even the many religions are not based on the "same" deity. So human. We must have an evolutionary need for deities somehow, otherwise we wouldn't have created them in every culture.

I very much like the idea of Secular Humanism. I think Unitarians practice that. But I don't belong.
Any human group is going to give me the heebie-jeebies. Most are fraught with cultural land mines and booby traps that autistics like me will trip over.



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02 Jul 2021, 9:34 am

(•) Other


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