Why do some people feel the need to denigrate the religious?

Post Reply New Topic

I admit that I'm not a hater. I guess I must not be a moral person. I admit that I'm not a moralist.

I admit that I don't like it when the door-to-door denominations come to my door, but I don't hate.



Do you love to hate?



If you hate that, then, in this world, you're going to be very busy hating.

Sure, there are things that I don't particularly like.


I said:

[/quote]



So you're saying that everyone who doesn't believe in the same God that you and other Biblical-Literalists believe in, must not see as clearly as you do.



But don't you see that you've swallowed those same lies, just like all the other Biblical-Literalists? You, in your mind, equate God with the Old Testament's God.



You're referring to when Abraham was supposedly ordered to murder his son.

See above. You also believe in the God that, according to the Book of Joshua, ordered and participated in the massacre of thousands of women and children in Canaan.



You're referring to Biblical Literalists.

I'm not singling you out. Your error is a common one. Like other Atheists, you're confusing all religious people with Biblical-Literalists.

You're saying basically the same thing that ClosetGenious is saying. I refer you to my reply to him.

I'd said:



You replied:

[/quote]

...and thereby you become the counterpart, brother, and identical twin of your Biblical-Literalist interlocutor. You become a Biblical-Literalist little different from him.



...by stooping to that level, emulating him, and adopting the God that he believes in.

Michael829

What is the first thing you were taught as a Christian.

Thoughtless obedience to God. Right?

Martin Luther.
“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding.”
“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has.”

Further.

https://imgur.com/IBroXK9

Muslims are taught to submit to Allah. Submission to another authority while giving up your authority over yourself is slavery, just as blind obedience is.

Both dogmas show that there is no free will in heaven and that means perpetual slavery.

Christianity teaches how to beat slaves and Islam teaches male Muslim slave to Allah how to beat their second class slaved women.

You can split hairs all you like but both are slave holding ideologies.

Regards
DL

So you're saying that everyone who doesn't believe in the same God that you and other Biblical-Literalists believe in, must not see as clearly as you do.



But don't you see that you've swallowed those same lies, just like all the other Biblical-Literalists? You, in your mind, equate God with the Old Testament's God.



You're referring to when Abraham was supposedly ordered to murder his son.

See above. You also believe in the God that, according to the Book of Joshua, ordered and participated in the massacre of thousands of women and children in Canaan.



You're referring to Biblical Literalists.

I'm not singling you out. Your error is a common one. Like other Atheists, you're confusing all religious people with Biblical-Literalists.

You're saying basically the same thing that ClosetGenious is saying. I refer you to my reply to him.

I'd said:



You replied:

[/quote]

...and thereby you become the counterpart, brother, and identical twin of your Biblical-Literalist interlocutor. You become a Biblical-Literalist little different from him.



...by stooping to that level, emulating him, and adopting the God that he believes in.

Michael829[/quote]

I am not going to bother correcting all your false presentations here.

If you have a question, ask it. Do not put idiocy into my mouth.

Regards
DL

Incorrect. I didn't say that science is a belief. I said that Science-Worship is a belief.

As a typical Science-Worshipper, you confuse science with Science-Worship.



You're generalizing about all religious people. There have been a lot of religious scientists. Did you know that Isaac Newton was religious?



You haven't heard religious claims from me. You don't know what is believed by all religious people.

Speaking for myself (but there are others like me in that regard), I don't make religious "claims" or assertions. You're the one making the claims. I suggest that you do some reading before making claims.

You're spouting-off about a broad collection of people you don't know anything about, and attributing to them the beliefs and claims of Biblical-Literalists.



You're referring to the claims of Biblical-Literalists. See above.



There are a lot of religious people who don't make religious assertions (but you do). There are a lot of religious people who aren't interested in proving anything to you. For example, I'm not. You're argument with religion is one-sided, unless it's just between Biblical-Literalists and Atheists (who, themselves, are Biblical-Literalists too).

Look, you have no idea what religion is about, other than that of Biblical-Literalists. You might know what Biblical-Literalists mean when they say "God", but you don't know what every religious person means by that.

Speaking for myself, I don't make any assertions about God.

By the way, it has been pointed out that if logic could prove that God exists, then logic would be above God.

Many religious people don't make any claims about provability. Proving something to someone else is completely alien to many religious people.

Again, not having read about the subject, you wouldn't know that either.

Do you think that all that is true is provable? Kurt Goedel proved that, even in arithmetic and algebra, not every true statement can be proved. Did you know that?

There are true but unprovable mathematical theorems, but you expect proof of God?

...without even knowing what every religious person means by that name?

And yes, there are Literalists who believe in allegorical portrayals of God, angels, etc. There are meanings that language isn't at all good at saying. And so allegorical portrayals and explanations were made, for or by people who want explicit concrete declarative language, even if it's allegorical. Yes, a lot of people believe those allegories. But many of them also have a feel for something past the allegories...what the allegories stand-in for in Literalist belief. It isn't only about the allegories.

...but you, having only heard about the allegories, criticize Literalists for their belief in them. ...as if, for some reason, their belief is your business or your concern, or fully known and understood by you.

So you don't even really understand the Literalists, much less all the other religious people.

You mistakenly believe that all that is valid can be proved. You probably, in the height of presumptuousness, believe that all of Reality is knowable to you, and describable and discussable by you. ...right?

Loosen up.



Read (at google, for instance) about Negative Theology. You have no idea what the positions are.

Some religious people and philosophers distinguish between "is" and "exists". Not everyone believes that saying "God is" means "God exists". That's because, in some people's usage, "exists" means "is an element of metaphysics". Many don't regard God as an element of metaphysics, or as a being.



I don't make religious claims or assertions. To me, it isn't that kind of a subject, or a debate-issue. You're the one who insists on making the assertions. There are others whose position is similar to mine. I don't claim originality.



That's an astounding statement

You actually believe that every religious person's religion is based on that book. You need to do some reading.

Michael829

GnosticBishop:

I started to reply, but decided to delete my unnecessary reply.

It's possible to modify, but not to delete a reply. Hence this reply.

Michael Ossipoff

Alright, Aaron, then tell us, specifically, how religious people are violating logic.

Show us how you use logic to refute religion.

Michael829

I got it from an atheist forum and I do see it the same way. I never believed in god since junior high and saw it as made up and the bible as stories.


I think you missed these in my post:







Please read my whole post first next time before responding, thank you.

halfquoting me is creating the lie you need to prove your point



so... your "supernatural" has been pushed to the boundaries of scale- to biggest things, like the expanding of the universe, and the smallest, as I jokingly implied with the notion that god is a flavour of quark.
so ... no god between galaxies and quarks.

yes, real is not metaphysically meaningful, yes, our description of the universe is just that- a description. Our descriptions are getting better though, in the sense that they allow us to better and better manipulate those entities that we seek to describe.

ever considered that "meaningfulness" is a meaningless construct? - the german word for meaning is bedeutung, interpretation is deutung - boch are nouns based on the word deuten - pointing towards something.
in religion, this thing pointed at is the supernatural you're describing.
so... meaning is, according to supernaturalism, then, found in quarks and the expansion of galaxies.

but religions don't look for meaning in quarks, that's too abstract. they have stories about father figures or creators who have a personal stake in humanity.

religions can't cope with contingency at all.
and they keep us from finding ways to live in a world in which contingency is very much a thing, and meaninglessness abounds.

and it's a very serious thing- when I see multifaith gatherings in california, where people drive to in their oversized SUVs, to collectively pray to their gods for rain... well.... are they considering that maybe we're down here, alone, and all we have is each other? and that maybe their SUVs are contributing to the problem? - no, because they are god's children. they have meaning.
next thing you tell me is that american exceptionalism proves god's existence. or the chosen people. or whatever anyone wants to call himself, to form fictive kinship.

Last edited by shlaifu on 05 Dec 2017, 6:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I suppose some people aren't happy unless they make other people miserable, especially people with whom they disagree about religion. Either that or they just get off on causing trouble and being royal nuisances.

I can't help but think of Bruce Lee's "Its like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory."



I think in the mid 20th century guys like Carl Jung and Manly P Hall (very different characters) did a lot to separate the wheat from the chaff, Jung gave us the archetypes and the idea of shared symbolic heritage among humans while Manly P Hall did a great job of revealing the soaring prose of people like John the Evangelist and many of the various parts of the bible that really reach into people's core and speak to them being based in various gradients of high-pagan philosophy in development from the time of early Platonism to Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. Really the actualities of the best ideals of Christianity came with the Neoplatonist school which posited the unity as both The One and The Good.

These days I have struggles with the questions and hypotheses that Neoplatonism poses and I suppose that the absurdity that I sense myself living in and the deforming of character and self-abuse needed to make it from day to day reminds me perhaps of Tarot Key 0 - The Fool, ie. that life is a story told by an idiot signifying nothing.

I think this is where the religious lose the plot though. They're sitting on top of what's potentially a treasure trove of open-source software and design tools for their own minds, for society at large, and it's important for us to consider that if we have archetypal thinking hot-wired into us or a tendency to jump onto grand narratives like decade-long mood and intellectual rollercoasters where we become some particular character, or a combination of characters, or try on this outfit or that archetype. Religion, in committing to one book or another as absolute authority and seeming to draw a hard disjunction between the rest of philosophic history and whatever that book of fixation happens to be, they take on not only a measure of wheat but every last bit of the chaff. That typically ends in either a) stagnation or b) hypocrisy.

In a lot of ways I think religion as an article of absolute faith is really dead (or should be). What we have left might be pinned down to our dealings with what I'll coin 'the grand subjective'. When I say the grand subjective I mean that environment that often times feeds us and impels us far more in our choices and drives than the external world does. The software that works may not always make sense or even sit quite square with what people think of as the laws of physics but at the same time it's a method of coping with a 3 billion year-old stack of hardware and software that wasn't built by rational processes. From that perspective I even consider the question of whether there's anything we've classically considered as ghosts or spirits to be a completely separate question because that fits more into a set of race and/or fauna or flora categories (ie. ultimately falsifiable) and while people seem to find encounters of that sort while fishing around in the subjective - and that shouldn't be too surprising since they're looking where people typically don't look - I still have to think of them as separate issues.

Also from that perspective though yeah, it's really doubtful that there's anything we could validly call 'supernatural'. If a bunch of serious researchers and academics get a hold of the Heptameron, figure out a way to isolate variables in fasting, and are able to bring up beings currently not believed to exist in a triangle of art and verify their answers to particular questions in at least a single-blind manner we have an ancient, a Renaissance, and increasingly very modern body of literature to suggest that such things are not part of some grand salvation/perdition play or even 'agents of God' or a singular unified field of consciousness, that they might know a lot of things that we don't (if only from functioning in an environment little like our own) but can't tell us much more than we already know, and past the thrill of discovering what seemed to be a huge undiscovered (if it turned out that way) it would very soon register as vanilla when we realized that it wasn't anything supernatural but yet just another layer of the natural.

Religious people have gotten on my back about for not believing in god. I don't go around telling people I don't believe in god but it has come up when they would ask or ask me if I have a religion and I am honest about it. I say I don't do religion and then they act shocked and ask me why and I say 'I don't believe in god' and then they start to get on my back about it and criticizing me. That annoys me. I don't get all shocked and start criticizing anyone when they say they have a religion or start talking about god. Why do they do this?

I don't have a problem if they ask me why I don't believe in him and ask if I ever once believed in him before and how I converted to athiesm. Then maybe it will lead into an interesting discussion here just as long as they are open about my answers and not criticize me.

One person has called me narrow minded just because I am not interested in going to church. I never liked it. I have gone before and it was always boring and Sunday school used to be fun but then it got boring because I got older so the classes changed. These are people I am talking about when I say religious nutters because they criticize and put you down for your belief and I don't even do that to them about their belief in god or tell them how they are wasting their time going to church. For me it is a waste for maybe not for them. If you enjoy it, it's not a waste. We stopped going after I was in 6th grade.

Why do religious people feel threatened when someone doesn't do a religion?


Public schools are not supposed to do any religion but this school here is breaking the law by doing a service every morning and this 10 year old boy gets harassed because he doesn't go to it.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/nation ... 59999.html

I don't feel threatened if someone does a religion and believes in god so I am not going to bully them about it like these kids here are doing with the child and the teachers too.

Was there ever a civilization in the past that did not take slaves?

From what I understand, the practice of slavery was at one time pretty much universal. Just about any religion that has been around for a while will likely have something about slavery.

Was there ever a religion in the past that did not have members who took slaves?

To Musings;

I never got this either. Theists follow moral codes that are based on texts sometimes thousands of years old when the world was chaotic. This managed to maintain order and governance in those times. I like to think some of it is still applicable to this day discounting whether or not people want to believe in blue people and beard wizards.

Atheists claim society would be more advanced and peaceful without religion but the modern protesting in the West leads me to believe that without a universal moral code that is concrete many have turned to amorality and degeneracy, while claiming these are the traits of theists.

I think all in all, society benefits from having both theists and atheists and the two need to work together to form a peaceful society.

I think what's even more dangerous with the above is that we live relatively short lives, ie. 80'ish years, have a range of intelligence that leaves only 1/3 of us or less really situated to move things forward, trying to keep a society running is incredibly challenging work that takes a lot of devoted and well-educated hands (who can also clearly see the cracks in their own perceptions and objectivity), and we have a current climate that seems to have been running full speed against standards for quite some time. Not only that but it seems to pray on the youngest, ie. the people with the least capacity to make an educated decision.

I think this is where we really have to get our socially right, and even if we don't necessarily have religion at the center of the public sphere we need at least some type of positive philosophic bearing. That bearing is something that we have roughly 2500 years of history to peruse for both contents and their results. I don't know that we necessarily need full reinstatement of the Greek Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries or anything like that although I can think of a significant portion of the populace who would benefit significantly from such things.

There were even slaves among the Buddhists, but they did kind of lead the rest of the world in coming out against the practice.

From http://www.buddhisma2z.com/content.php?id=384:

Real good answer