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EU states can ban religious symbols in public workplaces
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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You believe that there is no god or gods, and that people shouldn't believe in them either. That is a belief.
Christians don't state there's no evidence for God, no idea where you pulled that one from. You'd have to believe that all of that evidence is invalid, and believing that religion in turn should be destroyed because you so whole-heartedly disagree with the evidence does require belief.
Christian evidence for God amounts to "because someone said so" + a vague sense that some force is working in their life. That's just animism with extra steps.
The "story" aged thousands of years are several historical documents that popped up in the first century, all talking about a man who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, was crucified, died, was buried, then rose again and ascended into heaven over a month later. The earliest was written after at most 30 years of it happening and the latest regarded by all Christians was written at latest 70 years from it happening. Several of those were written by people who knew the guy, the rest were written by people who knew people who knew the guy. They don't contradict and have marks of being an honest account. And then there are accounts which are not even from people who believe the guy. So this "story" which is about God coming down to earth in flesh, and rising from the dead was large enough to cause several of these documents to appear and then only a few hundred of years later have more archaeological evidence appear showing signs of an early church. It was big enough for us to start counting years from roughly when this Guy was born.
Now what about other people? Alexander the Great? Earliest source written 200 years later. Caesar? Two sources from when he was alive, one written by himself, other written by cicero, more sources will come hundreds of years later. Pompeii? Was likely witnessed by a quarter million people, saw many elite die in the Roman empire, has one source written by Pliny 30 years after the fact. We have archaeological evidence for these people and events, of course, like coinage and such. But what archaeological trace would Jesus leave personally? He lived a life in the same land, didn't own an army, wasn't a king, possibly didn't even have a house. So the writings we have are obviously the best evidence for Him.
Isn't that the kind of argument someone would make in year 4023 to justify the existence of Harry potter though?
No, because people weren't claiming harry potter was real, nor setting up churches.
Not an HP reader but I'm pretty sure people meet up regularly all over the world dressed up to celebrate stuff from the books. If that's not the beginning of a cult I don't know what it is, if not kept in line give it 2000 years to snowball and by year 4023 it will be full of delusional people swearing their imaginary friend is the one and only god, same as Jesus's, Mohamed and Santa
No, you'd need to give it 30 years, by your logic. By 2027, people are going to be thinking Harry Potter is real.
Sounds like we are in agreement then, hurray to a new made up cult that no one needed.
The "evidence" is a story in writings aged thousands of years... it is not something we can observe or have physical or visual proof of, all we have is words that go against all scientific evidence, so it's not "evidence". You have to actually believe in magic to believe in that kind of stuff, it holds as much salt as any other pseudoscientific garbage.
It's laughable to say that you must respect the beliefs of people into astrology or flat earth or electric universe or anything of the sorts, and it's just as laughable to say you have to respect the beliefs of people who believe in supranatural/divine beings. Because false beliefs actually cause harm, and religion especially has caused far more harm than any other pseudoscience (and the amount of good it may have done is extraordinarily outweighed), it is currently causing a lot of harm, and it will likely continue to cause great harm in the future.
I personally value the lives of hundreds of millions to billions of people more than appeasing some long outdated beliefs (and especially the people who exploit those beliefs for personal gain), but that's just me. I'm agnostic, I don't choose a belief, there might be some divine being or afterlife but I see that it's completely insane to propogate any of said beliefs, it causes suffering and has set us back potentially hundreds of years progress-wise.
Honestly all of humanity would probably have much less suffering if it weren't for organized religion and its consequences, including but not limited to either directly causing or being the biggest contributor to the far-right and fascism & corporatism, and a large amount of general imperialism/authoritarianism (divine right anybody?). Guys banging other guys was the norm in most of the world until Abrahamic religions came along and brainwashed the entirety of the west lol, then it became a heinous crime and caused a over a thousand years of suffering and oppression for gays, people of "heretic" religious beliefs, anyone that opposed the authorities of an organized religion, those who faced the wrath of most imperialism/conquest – which was generally propogated by religion (and would have been a lot less strong without religion scaring people with eternal damnation) in Europe and the Americas and even in Asia, and often in Africa, etc. etc. And now modern religion is once again making society try to regress.
On paper religion alone isn't bad, but people can't handle religion, up to this point humans just try to find things to hate each other for and religion is BY FAR the most successful & easy tool to use for that, nothing else comes even close, sure if religion was gone other things may go up in usage as reasons to arbitrarily hate others, but it won't have even near the power of religion, nothing's more effective than threatening people with fiery hell for them or their loved ones, or offering them eternal glory in the afterlife, or whatever, because that's forever and Earth life is temporary!
The "story" aged thousands of years are several historical documents that popped up in the first century, all talking about a man who was born of a virgin, performed miracles, was crucified, died, was buried, then rose again and ascended into heaven over a month later. The earliest was written after at most 30 years of it happening and the latest regarded by all Christians was written at latest 70 years from it happening. Several of those were written by people who knew the guy, the rest were written by people who knew people who knew the guy. They don't contradict and have marks of being an honest account. And then there are accounts which are not even from people who believe the guy. So this "story" which is about God coming down to earth in flesh, and rising from the dead was large enough to cause several of these documents to appear and then only a few hundred of years later have more archaeological evidence appear showing signs of an early church. It was big enough for us to start counting years from roughly when this Guy was born.
Now what about other people? Alexander the Great? Earliest source written 200 years later. Caesar? Two sources from when he was alive, one written by himself, other written by cicero, more sources will come hundreds of years later. Pompeii? Was likely witnessed by a quarter million people, saw many elite die in the Roman empire, has one source written by Pliny 30 years after the fact. We have archaeological evidence for these people and events, of course, like coinage and such. But what archaeological trace would Jesus leave personally? He lived a life in the same land, didn't own an army, wasn't a king, possibly didn't even have a house. So the writings we have are obviously the best evidence for Him.
You refer to pseudoscience. Is this stuff like miracles and Jesus rising from the dead? We don't believe that science can allow someone to rise themselves from the dead, rise others, turn water to wine, etc. Which is why it was kind of a big deal when Jesus did it.
Christianity has not set us back. In fact, quite the opposite. The Catholic church spurred on most early scientific research. Also worth noting that Athiests held back the idea of the big bang happening because the scientific consensus at the time was that the universe always existed and that the idea of a beginning was a Christian belief.
You say religion is the biggest factor relating to the far right fascism and corporatism. But that doesn't make sense. Basically all capitalism goes against what Jesus said and is grounded in a belief in no god and only saying things to be popular, using cheapest labour, exploitation, etc. I fail to see how it has anything to do with religion except lack thereof. In fact, Cadbury's was run by Christians and was known for basically being the start of the "fair-trade" idea with treating employees well. (Unfortunately it's just another product of capitalism nowadays as it has abandoned it's roots.)
I fail to see how Capitalism is any religion but the lack of one, or it's own.
As for fascism, what?
Let's list off the biggest propagators of Fascism:
Hitler - Claimed to be a Christian, but very much wasn't. Was only doing it to try and appease. May have claimed islam was a better religion at one point. Imprisoned clergy for speaking out.
Mussolini - Was a big athiest, brutalised Priests and Catholics who opposed him.
Franco: - Roman Catholic, I'd give you that one. But I doubt it had anything to do with the faith and not power
Other states that caused mass murders?
Soviet Russia - Athiest. Maoist China - Athiest.
If anything, it's quite the opposite.
Imperialism would have happened with or without religion. It's still happening nowadays through capitalism.
So, back to the evidence based argument - How come the belief in these things which are actual ly perfectly reasonable to many should be destroyed. What makes your opinion that all of this didn't happen outweigh that it did. How does your belief in whatever dismisses the evidence away outweigh those who don't?
I could literally make the same argument for Athiesm causing harm. Does that mean that I should respond to you by saying "we should destroy Athiesm?". Or should we realise that both of our religious-based beliefs should be tolerated.
Several conflicting documents that give completely different accounts of the same things, in the same exact book used by the people following this religion.
That is something similar to what a LOT of random dudes did at that time period, Jesus was no different than the others, he was just "lucky" that he blew up.
Yeah that is just verifiably incorrect. You can probably just jump to a random part of the Bible and find contradictions, but the easiest one is the differing accounts of Jesus' ressurection – there is no consistent story, the details are wildly different from each perspective in a way that makes them disagree with each other heavily. It's a testament to how warped rumors like that can get over a short period of time, especially ehen there's no reality to base it off of.
You can say the exact same shit about any religion, say Islam. Christianity isn't special, this is typical religion and pseudoscience stuff. I can say the same about ancient world mythology.
Yes, we count years like this because a cult took over the center of the civilized world, we also count the months July and August because a guy was the ruler of an empire that fell over a century ago lol. That doesn't exactly make all the mythologisms about ancient emperors any more true either.
"Because it was/is popular" is not an argument with any substance and it does not help your claims.
That's not exactly a good excuse for bad evidence that goes against science, literal verifiable facts of nature. Any nutjob can just point to stupid things like that as evidence and it'd hold the same amount of value.
Y>ou refer to pseudoscience. Is this stuff like miracles and Jesus rising from the dead? We don't believe that science can allow someone to rise themselves from the dead, rise others, turn water to wine, etc. Which is why it was kind of a big deal when Jesus did it.
Except he never did it. It was a big deal to peasants when random people claimed he did it many decades after the fact, sure, but that goes for any infectious lie.
Sure, but this would have happened in a similar time period regardless – look at e.g. China, which actually became more developed and wealthy than the west some time after Christianity successfully took over the Roman Empire. China only started lagging behind during the increasingly secularizing renaissance, when their own religious philosophy consumed their state and caused them to devolve, and they closed themselves off to the world. Europe could have been much farther ahead if religion didn't slow them down immensely.
"Athiests" are a lot less of a similar, generalizable grouping than "Christians", since Athiesm is the default and there isn't anything that can exactly tie together athiests culturally or even belief wise, "atheism" is about as effective of a religious grouping as "theism". But regardless of religion people can have stupid scientific beliefs.
That doesn't stop people – as I said, religion itself isn't inherently bad, but it really just serves as a tool for people to use to do bad stuff.
A majority of nations that were/are extremely Christian and extremely capitalist disagree with you my friend. Capitalism and corporatism were built on Christianity, then exported to infect the rest of the world.
Again, capitalism was built by religious people, in a religious culture, and thrived because of the regressive beliefs propogated by organized religion. The entire justification for monarchies and conservatism for a large portion of the world was religion, religious justification of hierarchies that put wealthy royals at the top and the majority of the population at the bottom is why anti-peasantry was the norm for so long, it's why we've continued this dynamic of a large poor population that generates all the value against a small rich population, religion has dictated European politics for a millennium and a half, the religious people who controlled the god damn continent would have put an end to this LONG beforehand if it were an actual morally positive thing.
EVERYBODY is a Christian in such cultures, they have to be because Christians label otherwise as a bad trait. In these cultures, being religious is synonymous with being moral, even though it's not true at all. I'm pretty sure the UK has never had a publicly athiest monarch, and no publicly athiest prime ministers until the 20th century, and the US has had no athiest presidents ever.
See above.
As I said, people use religion as a tool to control. This literally corroborates what I said. It doesn't matter what they actually believe, it matters what they spew out to everyone else – religion is fine if you shut up about it. But the entire concept of widespread religion is being like an infectious disease, it's supposed to spread as much as possible and get as much of a hold in society as possible, and those people are brainwashed by the organized religion to believe stupid but extremely harmful shit. It is practically impossible to have a religion like that and it not only be used as a tool for evil.
Roman Catholicism was the state religion of Fascist Italy. The church generally leaned towards tolerating or supporting Italian fascism. Italy is still noticeably fucked up politically today because of this, they are the closest modern example to a religious state in the west due to how much Catholicism has its roots sinked into it, and it causes the country to legally be ass-backwards in many ways.
It's both, it is using religion to consolidate, justify, and project power.
Of course, as I said though – athiesm isn't an entity, it isn't an organized thing like Christianity or whatever. You cannot morally implicate athiesm/agnosticism like you can implicate organized beliefs, it's just illogical. You might be able to make an argument that you can implicate anti-thiesm, though, connecting oppressing religion with authoritarianism. But even that's a stretch, the anti-theism wasn't a massive justification or drive/focus, it was just a side-effect of trying to oppress people to be "non-problematic" to the state. Meanwhile religion is usually the primary justification for authoritarianism/monarchy, from divine right.
Remind me which camp is significantly more popular with devout Christians, Muslims, etc.? The left-leaning/demsoc/socialist camps, or the "I want to decintigrate gay/trans rights, workers rights, and want more conservative corporatism" camp? Sure, a fraction of serious Christians might support human rights, but a majority lean towards or strongly enable the people who want to strip you or your neighbours of their freedom.
Flat Earth is perfectly reasonable to many. Scientology is too. So is the belief that modern medicine is bad and essential oils will cure all your ailments!
As I said, it didn't happen – you've been gooled into a lie. There is no viable scientific evidence. Simple as, it goes against science and cannot be proven. Anti-scientific beliefs are only acceptable when you can eventually back them up with observation/precise consistent predictions, which in that case would make it science. The only "predictions" Christians have is "life sucks now, all these natural disasters which are totally not triggered by our destruction of the environment are happening, also the gays have rights, this must be the prophecy coming true!"
Please enlighten me on these apparent contradictions in the resurrection narratives, I'm intrigued.
As for the Bible, it's not a scientific textbook and doesn't contradict science at all, unless you read Genesis 1 and the whole earth flood as literal, for some reason (which people only really started doing in the 1930s).
If religion isn't inherently bad, then why destroy it?
As I said, athiesm isn't an organized belief. People are born athiest (seeing as how your usage of "athiest" also encompasses agnostics). You only get brainwashed later. It's just illogical to group them like you can group a certain religion or sect.
I tolerate religious beliefs that don't believe in the concept of eternal punishment, or don't promote the idea that some groups are in any way "lower" (including "more sinful" or "less holy") than others. Most kinds of Judaism, for example, they're fine, they don't have eternal damnation, the entire idea is to be good in your Earthly life. But even that kind of religion eventually branches off into e.g. maniacs that believe the same type of garbage that Christians do, or a theocratic Israeli government subjugating others...
A religion based on a benevolent God kind of falls apart when you consider it chooses to let the majority of people suffer, or it chooses to let the majority of people burn in Hell because they were born into and lived their life in an environment without that religion, or chooses to let people burn in Hell at all. And you save yourself by... believing in one specific random thing that happened before your entire traceable family tree even existed that is just one of many and could easily be the "wrong" one? In the case of Christianity the only thing you can bring in is the "Satan" argument or the "but he gave us free will and then Adam and Eve ate the apple so he makes us all suffer now!". That is just absurd, and it inherently promotes the idea of punishment as a core of the religion – the religion is based around punishment.
Otherwise – I'll tolerate religion about as much as I tolerate an Anti-Vaxxer's beliefs or a Scientologist's beliefs or a Flat Earther's beliefs or the beliefs of someone who follows Greek Mythology. Just infectious, harmful brainwashing that shouldn't be promoted or enabled by the jurisdiction as it is now.
Athiesm also promotes eternal damnation in the form of being damned to not existing and existential loneliness.
People aren't born athiest. Humanity has always been predisposed to believe in a higher power. People are born agnostic.
As for not tolerating the benevolent God part, just because you don't like something, doesn't mean it's not true.
Of course it is, and it's an irrational belief if you're unable to define God.
I'm a theist but i'm probably an atheist with your definition of the Creator/Light/Highness/'absolute Existence'/.., which is probably some long-bearded man with superpowers that you can touch like in Marvel movies, or something like that, yes ?
There is literally an infinite number of things that do not exist. We do not need to define them to not believe in their existence.
In fact it is up to theists to define what they mean by God but conveniently it means a different thing every time it comes up, depending on what is needed to make the lunatic arguments that religious people come up with for God's existence (e.g. ontological argument, Pascal's Wager,...) work and to explain why there is never any evidence of God's intervention in anything and to explain why somehow people should still care and structure their entire lives around the belief. Classic Motte and Bailey arguments by changing the definition around depending on how strongly their belief is being attacked.
"Everything that was/is/'will be'" is the evidence of God's intervention. There're many definitions because the "First Cause" implies many other things, like the Past/Present/Future/End, the Existence/Reality, but also the Maximum/Perfection/Guide/Light, and at least a dozen of other things that i haven't perceived and/or am too lazy to add to the list, negative theology is also very interesting.
Is your only argument the old one of the existence of bad things ? There're many answers but my usual one is that a perfect world gets boring after a while, even if that's the goal, there's no meaningful purpose afterwards if you think about it.
Another old answer is that suffering comes from desire(, hence, i.m.h.o., i prefer to suffer than stop desiring, and can't complain since i 'am responsible for my own suffering'/'can always decide not to desire').
Thanks for your answer though.
Ah yes, a perfect world would be boring so let's add untold suffering to spice it up. Really sells me on this supposedly "good" god.
Untold suffering ? Do you realize how easily everything could be worse ? How lucky you are to live in this place and time ?
How much closer to perfection is enough ? What are the main criticisms you have in mind so that i could explain why they're usually necessary for a greater good, and usually the responsability of humans and not the laws of physics/mathematics/logic/Nature ?
Aren't the laws of physics/mathematics/logic/Nature determined by your god? Are we lucky your god only made the world pretty bad and not completely bad? What an inane argument, why didn't he make it better to begin with?
How much better would be enough ? You'll always have something less good than the Maximum/Perfection, until you have an homogeneous Goodness.
Fortunately we're allowed to improve, that's all i could ask for, unfortunately the trip/improvement/growth is necessarily finite, you're asking to start at the end.
Given the choice between people suffering needlessly or people living without suffering yeah I would pick option two. I don't understand how anyone could pick option one.
But if you were born in option 2, and lived all your life in Paradise, wouldn't you want to experiment something else than this homogeneous unity, if only to know yourself, to distinguish yourself from your equals ?
If you don't follow the thought, that's because you're asking for the disappearance of all evils, a perfect world will have nobody better than someone else, we'll all reach the maximum conceivable potential, every single being would be as absolutely perfect as the laws of the universe allows a being to be.
That's not what you want, you don't want the absolute end/perfection but something in between, we'll get there, and it could realistically be argued that this halfway towards perfection is long behind us, that's the goal but i'm glad we still have stuff to do instead of an aimless/useless existence in a perfect world.
Furthermore suffering is rarely pointless, please pick an example it'd be less theoretical, here's an old comment if you'd like to see a few of them in the first paragraphs.
If carnivores didn't killed vegetarians then they would destroy everything, and if trees didn't die they wouldn't let enough place for new generations, but eating/killing stays a bad thing, which is why it should be avoided whenever possible(, e.g., not to die ourselves). We don't live in the best possible world, but the trip may be more enjoyable than having reached the ultimate destination millenias ago.
(It's out of topic but the universe is so big and it's so easy to spy on planets by building trillions of automated probes that it's weird we're still feeling/being free from external/alien influences, w/e 🤷♂️)
I don't believe there is are gods, or unicorns, or green elephants. "Don't believe" = "no belief".
And personally I couldn't care less what other people believe, as long as they keep it to themselves and don't bother anybody.
I don't believe that a God doesn't exist, so therefore no belief either. Who says you get to be the default?
Occam's Razor.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
What sort of evidence would you want?
Create an experiment where you have a different prediction whether god exists or does not exist, then do the experiment to see whether god exists. If you can't create a situation where the existence of god has a different outcome than the nonexistence, then you have no evidence at all.
And how does that work
You tell me. You make this extraordinary claim, so you figure out how to prove it. That's how it works.
If God is real, then something must exist in our finite universe which is infinite, as infinite can only exist in the mind of an infinite God. So if we can prove that there are numbers which aren't rational numbers and go on forever, then infinite somehow exists in our finite universe, and thus they must exist in the mind of God.
We could also examine historical claims and documents about Jesus and see if they are genuine. See if they have any inconsistencies with that time period (eg, contradict history) or correlate too perfectly or flat-out contradict each other. If they don't then they are likely genuine. We could try and see if there is any other explanation other than Jesus rising from the dead.
If the universe was created by God, then it must have laws that are consistent and rational, so we can examine science and see if elements of this universe follow consistent patterns and have structure to them, showing that there was some form of design.
as Ricky Gervais put it the difference between a Christian or Muslim and an Atheist is to believe in exactly one less god than them, there are over 2000 gods believed in by various people, Christians don't believe in any of them, Atheists don't believe in any of them +1