this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Thats why I don’t do that shit to people.
Who am I to question someone’s spirituality if it makes them happpy and they practice in a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them?
I have friends who are full on religious while I'm an atheist, they know I'm not a fan of their religion but they also know that I only care if it's making them happier and helping them, which to be fair has helped them become better people, but they were always the ones that needed some external guidance so I suppose gods a better guide than a meth dealer.
They don't try to convert me and I don't try to convert them and we still have fun, plus I enjoy hearing the weird AF stories from the bible, like the time Jesus got pissed at an out of season fig tree for not having figs when he wanted, so he cursed to for life, hungover entitled shit Jesus has some funny stories.
Exactly. Atheists don't like missionaries, so why should we become those ourselves?
As long as nobody tries to impose their beliefs on me, I don't care about their religion.
Oops, now abortion is illegal and gay people can't marry!
Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences...
He said doesn’t negatively impact others
In my experience, people like that will be terrible with or without religion.
The difference of "external man in the sky" vs "internal concept of my own rightness" for how they feel ok about their own actions doesn't make a difference when they're still a bigoted asshat at their core.
I think you missed the bit of the above post that specified that spiritual belief was fine WHEN it's expressed in "a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them" - restricting abortion and marriage prohibitions both are violations of their actual premise.
I think they're saying there is no such thing as harmless belief in the unreal.
These people vote, raise children, form relationships and live life in general, interpreting reality with a fundamental distortion. I would agree that it's hard to claim they won't end up harming someone.
See that I just can't abide. So many people just want to cut other people's grass that they can't frame anything they don't like as a fundamental problem to be addressed and rooted out of society as a whole. Everybody has "distortions". You are stuck living your life through a fixed lense perspective. Your distortion might be privilege, it might be status it might be health or ability. Even the most idiotic person out there is not invalid and undeserving of happiness. What level of acuity you have is less important than whether or not you are kind. Why should belief in the unreal be any different if they still subscribe to the modern standard of what is kind?
My time in the atheist community was very short lived because I was never atheist "enough" for not actually caring if other people believed in fairies. The gatekeeping and lack of tolerance for the legitimately harmless always felt like supremacist thinking where the rubric for acceptable to be afforded basic human respect was a coin slot's width.
None of us live our lives doing zero damage. We aren't omnipotent, and as such, we will hurt others during our lives. We can merely hope it will be an amount too small to matter.
I would suggest that being raised atheist leaves you better equipped to understand the world in a way that more closely matches reality, and thereby enables you to more consistently avoid causing harm during your life.
Does that mean every person needs to deconvert tomorrow? No. The process in itself can end up doing more damage than it'd be preventing.
But it does mean religion can't continue to be the default world view, if we are to improve as a society. For a better tomorrow, it does need to be phased out as quickly as it can harmlessly be achieved.
That's why we do have to care. Deconverting grandma doesn't matter too much, but if a relative or friend is raising a kid to be religious, preventing that is worth attempting. Another zealot in a coming generation will do more harm than good.
No kind person means to do harm, but unless you get as close to knowing reality as you can, that won't always be enough. And even then, you'll probably break some hearts and say things that cause someone somewhere to need more time in therapy.
But you'll certainly be more effective in realising the things you mean to do and say, if you don't live life thinking prayers affect reality.
As for you experience with atheists, you're describing anti-theists. People who hold an actual stance against religion. It sound like you found some especially virtue signaling ones, bad luck.
But an atheist is just someone who doesn't believe, not some given type of person, ideology, or the nature of your relationship with the rest of humanity.
Religion is their Candle in the Dark. It's cruel to blow it out when they don't have another light.
They use that candle to burn your house down. There are better ways to light your path.
And atheism offers any kind of light?
Atheism doesn't offer anything. It's a lack of belief, not a religion or anything like that.
The light has to be something internal, external, or both that makes the suffering of life worth it.