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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Never trust someone religious. By definition they are ruled by fairy tales, and that's not a rational approach to living.
I meannnnn…I'm an atheist, but how is this any better or more productive than a religious person saying never to trust one of us?
It's not, confrontational comments like that come from a place of pain. When you see smug assholery about religion and coming from an American, 99% of the time it's coming from someone who got treated like shit by their evangelical parents. Comments like the one you responding to aren't really an expression of opinion; if you could translate it into its most basic form, all it actually says is "fuck you, dad".
I was once a fundamentalist Christian. After a long and difficult process I deconverted and became a very vocal atheist. One of the "all religion is horrible" types. But at some point I realized that I had never abandoned my fundamentalism. I had only changed the flavor of it from religious to nonreligious. I still dealt in extreme beliefs with very little room for questioning and nuance.
It was when I introduced that nuance into my thought process that my worldview genuinely changed. I've come to understand that most lines you can divide people on will have well intentioned people and sinister people on both sides. I have met so many delightfully kind and welcoming religious people in addition to all the terrible ones I've known. They're generally in different circles, but not always. It does us a mental disservice to think in such black and white ways.
The same can be applied to arguments. It is possible for two sides of an argument to have genuinely good points. It's possible for an argument to not have a "good" side. And of course it's possible for an argument to have a completely good side or a completely bad side. The point there is that I think we should think critically and dissect arguments and look for good faith arguments and bad faith arguments. We should understand that things aren't always going to be easy to make decisions on and that's okay. It's okay to struggle with an issue and admit that you don't have an answer to every question.
Religion is a great example. Nobody can prove something that isn't provable. You can think that religion is sinister for that reason, but I think that does a disservice to religious people. I don't believe in God. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to believe in God if I'm being honest with myself. But I haven't forgotten what it was like to believe and I don't blame people for finding comfort in it. Who can blame people for searching for a little bit of hope? I don't think it matters to many religious people whether they can prove their beliefs in God because for them it's not really about believing in the "objective truth" but rather clinging to hope for a bright future in a very dark world. And those hopes don't need to be attached to bigotry like so many religious people have unfortunately done.
The same is true for ideologies. It's the same irrational approach imo.
Depends on the ideology.
also depends on the religion.
I honestly can't think of a single organised religion that hasn't had atrocities committed in its name (or encouraged adherents to commit atrocities). A lot of unorganised religions and spiritualities also encourage/require some abhorrent shit too, such as genital mutilation or the use of human body parts in certain folk magics.
it's just flatly true of religions and ideologies. there are bad people who adhere to everything—you can't avoid that, so it just doesn't make sense to really analyze it from this dimension. if you want to make a useful critique of either i think you have to actually weigh the scope and scale of the atrocities somehow.
Unitarian Universalists. Quakers. Zen Buddhists probably?
Quakers invented solitary confinement which isn't quite a war crime but it's not exactly great.
By this logic, it only takes one bad apple to spoil the name of a group, but that bad apple isn't necessarily representative of or indicative of the whole group.
sure, we could argue about who's bad apples are more rotten, but what's the point? humans are fallen and imperfect, so it's no surprise that groups of humans are also imperfect.
I guess the next question to ask, is the group defined by the actions of it's bad apples, or by the principles it claims to stand for?
The distinction is meaningless. A zealot is a zealot.
It's especially difficult to argue against supernaturall beliefs. It means they don't even have to pretend to care about reality.
You have too much faith in humanity. Blind, irrational devotion to your beliefs with no regard for reality is not exclusive to religion. Browse a conservative forum for a few minutes and you'll come across plenty of atheists who also have fundy-esque devotion to nonsensical right-wing concepts like trickle-down. Not even cults have to be religious: just ask people who believe in the Jason Fung Diet or chronic lime disease why they think the scientists are wrong. Religion is just a means to an end for most dogmatists, their real god is the dogma itself.