411–420 of 823 posts
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From my person experience, religious people have scammed/hurt me to the most in life and business.
I don't know what happened, but did religion make them do it, or did bad people use religion as an excuse?
Just to note that preistocracy tends to be corrupt in almost all religions.
Becoming more religious has helped me identify religious tendencies in the secular world. Ideology doesn’t imply supernatural deities, and some worldly phenomenon can be elevated to a supernatural level. Secular belief contains rituals, origin stories, deities, saints, priesthood, blasphemy, vice & virtue just as religion does. One aspect of religion I appreciate is that these aspects are well codified and debated –…
And that's where so called 'atheism is just a religion' got it wrong. No, it's not about getting a result. Scientific method is a way of processing information. It's about the process, not the result. It's not about believe the god exist or not(the result). It's about find out a way to prove (process). And it's perfectly fine if u can't produce a solid proof(provability). 'I don't know' is perfectly fine. You don't even have to believe, use the scientific method to analyze, do you best to deduce, and move on to the next topic. 'Religion' is just a topic to study. If people can't really grasp how scientific method and critical thinking works, they would never move past 'to believe' or 'not to believe'.
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As a non-religious person, certainly I understand many of my beliefs come from convention or intuition or whatever non-rational source, sure. But I don't have any meta-belief telling me to hold onto given beliefs-that-seem-implausible-or-unverifiable because I'll be rewarded in the end or because it's a test or whatever. I don't continually change whatever belief I know is arbitrary but that's because consistency has…
What is rational? Is not rationality subjective? What you might deem irrational others might deem perfectly rational, and vice-versa, what you might deem rational others might deem quite obviously irrational. Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experienc…
>The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system. Just as the religious world contains Christians, Jews, Scientologists, Muslims, Hindus, et cetc" with sometimes radically different ideas, the secular world too has a great many different people with different belief systems. >If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to rec…
> This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system". Not OP, but I think this is a pretty narrow reading of their statement. Personally, I read it to be more about value and community dynamics. Institutionalized religions often are very explicit about their (supposed) terminal values and arrange social situations to explicitly work toward o…
I read it like that as well. I've seen this idea illustrated this way: a kid raised in a religious community gets drilled from an early age about morals as an umbrella abstraction (in the form of allegories from religious texts), so they don't need to be micromanaged about the moral implications of every individual scenario under the sun ("don't run in the supermarket!", "don't push your sister!", "don't yell in the hallway!", etc etc) because they are explicitly exposed to an underlying set of values to govern every scenario.
That's is an obviously religious leaning take (I heard it from a jewish person, though I'm not jewish myself), but I think there's a certain grain of truth in the sense that non-religious people don't have a standardized way of talking to kids about morals as an umbrella abstraction on a weekly basis, in a way that church goers do.
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Atheism is actually polytheistic. The Gods can be identified by answering these questions: “why am I here?”, “who am i?”, “what should I do?”, “what is true?”, “why should I suffer & die?”, “what will happen tomorrow?”, “who matters more: myself or others?”. The deities of the secular religion would be “the self”, your parents, “the government/state and its figureheads“ , money (and the institutions controlling it),…
This is a standard argument most Christians make. It is not really true. You do not have to believe anything. You do not have to have answers. Let me give you an analogy. Imagine growing up in a militaristic society, and the expectation is that you join the military and fight in whatever wars your imperialistic country engages in. Now suppose you do not feel like doing that. Then your community starts asking you, "bu…
But you’re missing the larger point he’s making and the point the article is making, many ppl who claim to be atheist do have a belief system, it’s simply ill-defined. Most atheists arguing in this thread will give answers and do think they know the truth (it’s that there is no god and life is a hedonistic pursuit). And those beliefs build on others and are built on by other beliefs/ideas as well.
You’re making the same argument many make when trying to build on wedge issues: take a tiny portion of a group that is in no way representative of the larger group and then make generalizations to prove your point.
Aside from you (I’m taking you at your word), I’ve yet to meet an atheist who really had no beliefs.
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The "truth" you see is the designed outcome of soft diplomacy through the export of US culture via movies, television and the internet. I know lots of non-US folk who love the values and opportunities they experience in America. But I also know lots of others who don't. I see my own country adopting more and more aspects from America: individualism over community, the excessive consumerism, the Starbuck-ification of…
I am curious how being "individualists" had them end up with something like Homeowners Associations. I am an individualist myself to a relatively high degree and I do not understand how something like that can be tolerated at all.
HOAs seems to be more about using bureaucracy to control others and force them to do what the person with power wants. There is a classic quote “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
I think the dark side of individualism is that it can create the mindset that other's success comes at your expense, which pitches people and groups against each other, and makes differences a threat and not a strength. It also also discourages people from acknowledging their own limitations, because if someone is smarter or better than you then they will be more successful, and that means you lose.
It always makes me grin how much secular political issue adherents act like religious people. You can just listen to the language (“climate deniers” etc., “the end is near in 12 years”, etc.) to tell that they are in the throes of religious fervor. I truly believe there’s something by wired into our brains to support this mode of belief, and that rationality is the exception in humans.
The problem is that religious people (including the secular ones) are not open to rational discussion critical of their beliefs. They may be polite enough to hear you out but they’re just waiting for you to take a breath so they can butt in and correct your apostasy. They already KNOW the one TRUTH and if you don’t agree on all points, you’re a heretic and nonbeliever.
You see articles from time to time how “climate deniers” should be shunned and shamed and punished for their heresy[1] (just search for “climate deniers list” or “should climate deniers be punished” or pick your issue). Same thing for lots of other issues like abortion rights[2], or gun control[3].
Christianity has had 2000 years and reformations to knock off the rough, anti-social edges. Religious doctrine has been tempered with social controls and moral codes that largely (though not completely) prevent demonizing your enemies.
Far left ideologies have a century of murdering tens of millions of people that didn’t agree with them or in some cases just didn’t cheer loudly enough.
When it comes to not murdering me or putting me in re-education camps, I trust devout Christians way more than I trust climate activists or gun control advocates or (insert advocate for secular left position here).
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/should-climate-change-deniers-be-pr... [2] https://www.liveaction.org/news/slate-hopes-watching-jessica... [3] https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/09/la-times-writer-real-es...
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Let’s be honest, most people don’t have the time to weigh the evidence of say 90% of their beliefs. They go to school & watch television, and generally adopt the beliefs of their surroundings. And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.
> believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding. I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs. What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as…
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What is rational? Is not rationality subjective? What you might deem irrational others might deem perfectly rational, and vice-versa, what you might deem rational others might deem quite obviously irrational. Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experienc…
Rational means you'll make choices that benefit yourself. It's one of the core assumptions of game theory, economics, and policymaking. All the math breaks as soon as that's not the case because irrational is unpredictable. What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible so it's been known to rustle the jimmies of the first estate.
In the context of discussions about the rationality of religious belief, we are primarily talking about epistemic/theoretical rationality, although non-epistemic rationality does sometimes come up (for example, Pascal's wager).
Some people think epistemic rationality can be reduced to instrumental rationality, but the philosopher Thomas Kelly wrote what is (to me at least) a pretty convincing refutation of that viewpoint: https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/epistemicasinstrume...