yeah, in jesus’s image, right. I wonder if jesus gave a fuck about other people…
Literally so hard this. I was raised by christians and they were disappointed when I turned out to not be a christian adult. I tried so hard to point out the hypocrisy of them teaching me to always treat others with respect and to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but being hardcore right-wingers and trump supporters, being racists af and hating trans and queer people. They still don’t seem to get it.
“If Jesus was here, he would join the front lines”, my incredibly Catholic relative that needs to re-read the sermon on the mount.
After decades of arguments, the best I managed was slightly changing the language used. Now around me my dad calls black and brown people Democrats instead of slurs. Thinks he’s damn clever too.
I’ve often wondered if I would have grown up to be as vehemently atheist if I had grown up in a place without american “christians”
Don’t worry. There’s plenty of other diseased religions in other areas!
This was one of the fundamental experiences of whiplash that shot me straight out of the Christian community. Giant pile of child-fucking hypocrites.
Meh for me it was the child fucking.
Social media, that’s why. The brain being cooked in dopamine all the time by algorithm and fake news fries the brain. People forgot how to be nice.
Grew up in the south before social media existed. It’s the cause of a lot of problems, but this one predates it by a wide margin. It definitely made it worse, but there is no greater hate than Christian love.
No one forgot how to be nice. They just dont have to be online, because they know they can get away with being a cunt. Social media has outed a lot of people for being cowards.
There are anecdotes of people changing for the worse. I remember a poster who said his parents became Trump supporting bigots, even though growing up they taught OP not to be racist.
I was “raised Christian.” The top reasons I despise religion is the a) hypocrisy from top to bottom, b) a person can go through life wrecking others others in ways that may be devastating, permanent, and/or traumatic that they have to live with forever and are supposed to just accept it like some mind of lesson from god, yet the person who does all the damage gets to go to heaven if the ask for forgiveness in just the right way.
Yeah, the whole “love each other and forgive everything” lessons of my youth have been replaced by “fuck you, I’m getting mine” christians.
E: also, the victim complex. Constantly fuck with other people, try to force your religious rules and views on them, and then when criticized or those people otherwise defend themselves or their position: “You’re attacking me! You’re attacking our faith! You won’t let us practice our religion!”
Actually American Americans are the “Pharisees”. They just hate to be called to be called out by Jesus.
They act like Pharisees. They talk like Pharisees. I hope they will be judged like Pharisees.
Does anyone actually think these pseudochristians are actually pure in any way?
They do. That’s why they’re so hateful to anyone who contradicts them.
I figured most of them for the “religion is a useful tool to manipulate others” instead of actually believing in any sort of purity - other than rationalizing their shitty treatment of others.
I think the rationalization of shitty behavior is key. Everyone is the hero of their own story, and there is no end to the mental gymnastics or cognitive dissonance people will go through to remain the hero.
It’s almost Occam’s Razor. It’s easier to believe someone is a selfish hypocrite than some kind of moral-less grifter.
That’s not to say there aren’t grifters, just that the vast majority have drunk the kool-aid and keep drinking it because of a warped sunk-cost fallacy scenario. If I stop drinking, I have to admit I was bad and wrong, so I double down and stay the good guy.
Yeah, the whole “love each other and forgive everything” lessons of my youth have been replaced by “fuck you, I’m getting mine” christians.
Ah yes, the Boomer Christians.
point B was my favorite part of The Brothers Karamazov.
Ya you nailed it. Good people are punished and bad people rewarded.
They often operate on the “just-world fallacy” too. I.e. if people are poor, starving, arrested, deported, raped, it’s because they deserve it.
But if something bad happens to them, it’s because God is “testing them.”
‘Its all part of gods plan sweetie’. Had my mom feed me this line when I wanted to help a homeless person
Sometimes I wish I could do that, just ignore all logic and believe what you want.
So those people starving in Africa? Oh no God’s plan.
People getting killed in Gaza? Also God’s plan
That Kirk guy getting shot? Evil left, nothing to do with God.
Immigrants trying to find a better life in a different country? The worst people, nothing to do with God.
Aunt Marget died of cancer? Poor Marget, she was just unlucky,
It did not help she had no health insurance? No thats not it, that’s communism
Helps if you read it as “care about others[parishoners]” not “care about others[foreigners, minorities, and other faiths]”
Ministers love to talk about charity when they’re passing around the collection plate. It never comes up on tax day.
Reminds me of being a pastor’s son at ~5 and asking the Sunday School teacher if Satan could be saved, since God wants everyone saved. I was sincere–it troubled me that there was a creature that was without hope. Now I understand I should be happy that fucker is burning eternally. He should’ve never messed with God! That’s just normal adult stuff! You live and learn!
Holy shit, I’m not religious at all, but 5 year old u/potoooooooo is the CUTEST fucking thing.
Ugh, children really are innocent/wholesome, and its the adults around them that inject poisonous ass ideas into their minds.
Lucifer/Satan never even actually kills anyone in the Bible, whereas Yahweh commits literal genocide on multiple occasions.
It should also be noted that the serpent never even told Eve that she should eat the fruit, just that she COULD.
Side note that always puzzled me… 1) why would God create a tree that has fruit that teaches you the difference between good and evil? 2) why would god put this tree in the garden in the first place? 3) why would anyone (particularly an omniscient) ever think that the people who have no concept of right and wrong (before eating the fruit) are going to be able to resist it? And finally, 4) WHY IS KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL A BAD THING??
It’s all just so fucking idiotic that it hurts my brain.
If we believe that the various Satans (in the original Hebrew, literally “adversary,” and rendered without the definite article so there are probably multiples of them) are in fact one and the same with the Devil (singular), this link-up doesn’t even occur until the Book of Revelation which is firmly a new testament thing and wholly unsupported by any of the old testament or ancient Hebrew sources from which it’s derived. Making all the assumptions required on basis that this is so, then whoever he was killed a lot of people in Revelation. But not until then.
In old Hebrew tradition, the Satans are sort of the prosecuting attorneys for god. They work for him in order to tempt the faith and righteousness of various people. Several mortal people are also given the moniker of “Satans” when they’re working against the interests of god or various other individuals.
Meanwhile, the notion that Lucifer is also one and the same with the Devil or any kind of Satan is a much later interpolation made when the church(es) of the era wanted to insert a bogeyman into their religion and they needed a justification for it, some time in the AD 200s. Lucifer is identified as the king of Babylon, a mortal, when he has attracted god’s ire in his sole appearance in Isaiah 14. The situation has become so warped that his name was finally removed in the New International Version of the bible and he’s simply referred to as the “morning star, son of the dawn.” (Isaiah 14:12, if you want to go have a look.)
Modern pontificates will also insist that the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28 is also somehow the Devil, which is dubious. Even if he were, and god were speaking allegorically for precisely half of his rant as we are thus demanded to believe, god smokes him at the end of the passage anyway so it’s a moot point.
Maybe.
On the other hand, there’s no actual evidence that any of this is real in any way. So there’s that…
The biggest one for me was, “Why doesn’t he want them to know they’re naked?”
He gets all pissy because Satan ruins his perverted, non-consensual peep-fest and decides to curse literally everything for all time. Fucking gross.
Yeah. He loves you so much. But also, if you don’t do exactly as he says, you will literally burn in a lake of fire for all eternity. Why? Because a couple people ate some fruit that I tempted them with and, let’s be real, always knew they were going to eat anyway.
That’s an abusive relationship if I’ve ever seen one.
Don’t even get me started on how stupid it is that he had to send himself to earth, as his son, to die painfully, in order to save humanity? Like what dude? Do you not literally make the rules? Why would you make it so you have to do such bizarre convoluted shit? Just wave your hand.
Also weirdly into the importance of being willing to sacrifice your children as an act of necessity sometimes (literally both Abraham and Jesus, plus the plagues, David, etc…).
“The plagues will continue until morale improves” kind of vibe, hey?
Yeah… If you start looking at the Bible with Yahweh as the bad guy, and Lucifer as, maybe chaotic good or just chaotic neutral, it starts to make a little bit more sense.
Edit: To be clear, it’s still all bullshit lol
Buddhism has a more Christian example of Christ-like behavior concerning a “living being Satan”. That is to say, if “living being Jesus” was real, he would be a Bodhisattva, perhaps akin to Kṣitigarbha.
In the story, Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha vowed:
“Until the hells are empty, I will not become a Buddha.
Only when all sentient beings are saved will I attain enlightenment.”
It is a vow to never abandon any being regardless of their state.
I like that idea. Boundless love and compassion doesn’t stop at the bounds of some hell. It is boundless. It has boundless time, so it will spend an eternity reaching out to even cyclic hells.
Nice. I like 99% of what I’ve encountered from Buddhism.
Like so much else, the religion in theory strays from the religion in practice
U Rarzar works for the Ma Ba Tha (Association for the Protection of Race and Religion), a Buddhist organization comprised of both monks and laity. The organization is well-known for its social welfare programs and its advocacy of Buddhism. It is also known for its persecution of the Rohingya Muslims. Buddhist organizations such as the Ma Ba Tha have circulated pamphlets and flyers espousing the dangers of Islam and the imminent Muslim threat. U Rarzar is in charge of the organization’s bi-weekly magazine. In his mind, Muslims, no matter their ethnicity, are a threat to Buddhists. According to U Rarzar, “Muslims and ISIS are the same. It is just the difference of a name."
I said 99% for precisely that reason. Because I haven’t encountered much of it, but know it exists. Now I read another article, so let’s say like 94% now.
I’m a Buddatheist who grew up with both cultural Catholicism and later Christian Evangelicism.
I like how this hints at the nature of the self. If I leave someone behind am I not also leaving myself behind?
For me, ethical acts are those that increase the freedom of the self and others. We all suffer. That’s a fact of life. If we dissolve our concept of the self and acknowledge our link to others and the world itself we can see ourselves more as threads going through human experience. If we are kind to ourselves and “others”, we have a better chance at reducing that suffering.
Imagine the time a stranger forgot their wallet and you paid for their coffee. A version of that experience could still exist in that person’s mind long after you die. It could get blended with other experiences and reinterpreted. It could be told as a story to a friend who was inspired by the act. The cascading effects of that person being properly caffeinated on that day could have world changing effects. In a similar way, I carry the shared experiences of my own ancestors and even strangers who have shared their stories with me. They are still alive as a small part of me because my true self is humanity or even some animating life force of the universe or something like that and the name that people call me just refers to the limited perspective and incomplete view I have of existence. Essentially I see existence as blinders limiting my perspective like a race horse, but the true self is a satellite view of the track. When I act, I do so based not only on my experience, but the collective experience of every perspective and experience that has been conveyed to me in every way, but I am still one human body, in physical space, subject to time. I hope that when I die, those blinders will be lifted and I’ll exist as pure conscious perception of everything that ever was is and will be. Able to see through anyone’s eyes, in any time. To feel any and every feeling felt my an animal or human. To view the entirety of existence as a completed masterpiece from outside time itself.
You can probably see why I like the Buddhists.
I find that when you acknowledge the interconnection of things compassion becomes easier.
I hope that people rediscover that within themselves and others.
I will join the first religion that allows me to re-unite with my beloved cat, after I die. Stupid christianity tells me that my animals don’t have souls, when in fact, they are far better beings than most humans.
Christianity is OK, until it interferes with a billionaire’s interest…
I’m European. My mother tried to get me into Christianity. When I was 7 or 8 I asked “If God created everything, then who created God?” I got no answer, ever since that moment, I didn’t want to be religious. My mother tried until I was 14. It failed.
Also, I find american Christians weird. They twist and contort Christianity into something to suit their ideological needs, racism, homophobia, capitalism, nationalism, unilateralism, etc.
And don’t forget, those are the people who tell us atheists that “without the Bible, where do you get your morals from?”
Well, we can see what these biblical morals are - you mentioned it: homophobia, racism etcetera. It makes people hateful, while claiming it is charity and compassion.
Religion poisons everything.
FFS I hate that. “Religion poisons everything” no! No it doesn’t! Think if christianity wasn’t a thing they wouldn’t find something else to twist? After all it’s not like any other good thing got twisted, no? Communism, patriotism, charity, heck, even local communities?
Christianity says: Do not do to others what you don’t want done upon yourself. No matter if sinner or faithful, treat all with respect (nagging about becoming christian is ok tho, sadly). Do not fall for greed, lust or pride.
American “Christians” aren’t Christians, same like most of the local Patriots are actually Nationalists and Communism is mostly used as a another tool for simply stealing power.
I know I am pretty much shaking my fist at the sky here, sorry, but I really needed to let it out ._.
Edit: I don’t have much time - sorry - so I will say it here.
- Christianity has defined core tenets - the ten commandments. If you routinely not follow them, you’re not chrisitian, you’re a blasphemer/sinner (if you considered yourself christian in the first place), case closed. So stop with the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, because at this point it’s fallacy fallacy.
- Another thing - some of you all mentioned that Christianity has various differences and all that. True. And honestly good catch. If Americans didn’t break the core tenets.
- And last thing, someone mentioned pedo priests. Yes, I believe they shouldn’t be considered christians and in the spirit of the faith they should, at best, be considered lost lambs. But there’s a difference between Church as in Community and Church as in Institution, and the latter one likes to shield it’s buddies, which is disgusting.
Best of all, I don’t think I am even christian. xD
American “Christians” aren’t Christians
Classic defense by religious apologists and still a fallacy. You don’t wish to associate all the bad Christians with Christianity, so you pull the old “they aren’t real Christians” card. No, only you, a good and righteous and kindhearted person, you are the only one who is a true Christian. Of course. We’ve heard it countless times.
Of course they’re Christians. You don’t get to whitewash Christianity by simply declaring they aren’t.
Which fallacy is this? It’s not the “No true Scotsman” one as explained here: https://lemmy.world/post/37452533/19987098
For example, let’s turn that argument around:
- Person A: “No true atheist believes in God”
- Person B: “But I call myself an Atheist and I strongly believe in God”
- Person A: “Then you aren’t a true Atheist”
Did person A argue fallaciously to you? Or is person B just an idiot who took on a wrong label?
“No atheist believes in God” is a factually correct statement. It’s like saying “One does not equal two” - a verifiable, objective truth that does not rely on anyone’s opinion.
Therefore, person B made a contradictory statement, and person A would be correct in responding “Then you aren’t an atheist”, because person B stated a verifiable falsehood. Same as saying “One equals two”. We all know it’s wrong.
Christianity has a much looser definition. You quoted it yourself:
A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
So anyone who follows this religion and calls himself a Christian is a Christian. Nothing in the definition says “You must follow the Bible to the exact letter” in order to be one. There wouldn’t be ANY Christians if that were true.
So that leaves us with a whole bunch of people who all claim to be Christian, but have different opinions on…
- how strictly you have to follow the Bible,
- whether racism is condoned or forbidden by the Bible,
- whether slavery is forbidden by the Bible,
- who you can fuck,
- what kind of funny hat you have to wear,
- what food you can or can’t eat,
- whether you have to kill any non-believers,
… et cetera, et cetera.
And all of these people claim the others aren’t the true believers.
Now here’s a very simple question: What gives you the confidence, why should we believe you that it’s YOU, out of all these people, who follows the correct interpretation of the Bible?
That’s why the No True Scotsman fallacy applies to the whole bunch, including you, when you claim the others are no true Christians. Not a single Christian can objectively, verifiably prove that their individual view of Christianity is the correct one.
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
And that is not an objective statement that’s verifiably and objectively true. It DOES depend on personal opinion and interpretation. Other Christians might say other stuff in the Bible is more important. Like killing homosexuals. Or burning witches.
There is no clear definition of an ideal Christian. Never was. Never will be. Every century has its own view on what Christianity has to be like, we just happen to live in one which tends to agree with your views.
In other words, according to your statement, there were almost no Christians a few centuries ago, which is verifiably untrue.
The answer that any person who has thought about it and not rejected the idea is: If a being that has created and shaped our universe exists, it exists (at least partly) outside of our universe. Like a programmer doesn’t have to follow in his life the limitations of his code in programming, such an entity’s existence would be so far outside our modes of thinking that “who created him?” would simply fall flat as a question.
To begin to answer such a question one would have to have some knowledge of the plane of existence where the divine resides, and as that is outside the realm of what we can understand through physics and the natural world we live in, the question becomes unanswerable.
The question then becomes, can something exist on another plane of existence? The answer is of course, we can’t examine anything outside our universe, so, the answer must be, we don’t or can’t know.
I suppose then, the next question becomes, do you want to believe that there is something /someone outside the natural universe that gives meaning to our existence?
The question itself doesn’t really make sense, because it just boils down to “Why don’t we know everything?”.
The same question would lead to the same answer (“We don’t know”) if we ask it about e.g. the Big Bang. “If everything was created by the big bang, what created the big bang?”
It also applies literally in every field where we don’t know something yet (“What’s beyond the stars/beyond the universe?”, “What are quarks made of?”, “What’s past infinity?”). We don’t even know what’s in the dark at the edge of the solar system. Judging by orbits and gravitational patterns, there’s likely an entire large planet that we don’t know of because it’s too far from the sun and thus too dark.
It would be idiotic to summarily dismiss every field where there are things we don’t know, and where there are edges to our knowledge that are so far away that we cannot know or understand them.
My point is not that we don’t know yet, my point is that we can’t know. All our knowledge is based on studying the natural universe, if something is beyond it, then by definition it would not be knowable by studying our universe. Perhaps at some stage we could reach a way of examining and understanding the supernatural, but for our intents and purposes it’s outside the box, while we are inside, and our only way to relate to it is to choose whether we believe in there being something outside the box or not.
I don’t really agree with that. A program could break out of the sandbox and get to know the things around it. In fact, there are many programs that interact with the real world, gathering information about it and acting on it.
If there was something like an actually sentient program, it would be totally conceivable that said program could use cameras, microphones and other sensors to get to know its programmer.
The difference between the science and things considered supernatural is that one is something we have a solid understanding of and the other is speculation.
If there’s an unexplained phenomenon and we find a solid explanation for it, it becomes science. Weather and other natural phenomena used to be in the realm of the supernatural, same as dragon bones, mermaid bones and the kraken. Until we found out what they really were and how they worked.
If magic were to exist in reality, it wouldn’t be magic but instead just a branch of science.
A lot of things we can do nowadays would be called magic a few centuries ago. I mean, we can literally make frogs float in thin air. We can make incredible amounts of power from some magic rocks (nuclear power). We can even inscribe magic patterns into sand to make it think and talk (computers).
So coming back to the beginning: If we talk about something like a Simulation Hypothesis scenario (which is de facto identical to a scenario where God exists outside of our plane of existence, however that is defined), it’s totally in the realm of possibility of that scenario that the simulated could break out of the simulation.
Or in case of the Big Bang Theory, it would be theoretically possible to peek before the big bang.
I’m not saying that it is actually possible, but I’m saying that we can’t summarily dismiss the possibility.
“If God created everything, then who created God?”
There’s a lot of places where one can poke holes into faith/the concept of a God, but I don’t think this is one.
The reason being that God’s existence doesn’t actually change anything about the question or the answer. You can rephrase it as “If everything came from the Big Bang, what came before the Big Bang and what created the preconditions of the Big Bang?”
So you could use the same argument to “disprove” literally any world view, including science, or even hypothetical scenarios like the simulation theory (“If we live in a simulation, who is running the simulation?”).
But you can not only “disprove” every potential answer to “where does everything come from”, but you can also rephrase the question to “If atoms are made of quarks, what are quarks made of, and what are their components made of?” or to “If there’s an end to the universe, what is outside of it?”
If you are smart enough though, you will see that none of that is actually disproving anything, because if you rephrase the question further it becomes “Why don’t we know everything?” and that’s a rather simple-minded question to ask. One befitting of a 7 or 8 year old, but not really of an adult.
Before the circumnavigation and the discovery and charting of all of the world, people also didn’t know what was on the other side of the planet and still it would have been dumb to doubt what we knew (e.g. that the British Isles existed) only because there were large white spots on the map elsewhere.
Christianity (and most religions) always has been a way for people to cope with their fears and guilt. ‘what happens after we die?’ -> ‘its heaven dont worry’. ‘Am I a bad person?’ -> ‘no Jesus died for you dont worry fam’
It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.
My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.
A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.
I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.
I literally told my mom that I was affected by doge spending cuts in multiple ways that make my current life unmaintainable. I can’t afford a 400% in my insurance premium. I use buses and doge cut the grant to my city that kept them fully operational; my city cut routes and reduced buses on the routes they tried to keep on top of freezing the wage for their workers for 4 years of the worst inflation America will see. And she’s just like “I’ll vote for Trump again, at least he is not a woman”
Last night’s Southpark kind of hinted at this topic a little bit. I’m curious to see where they take it, but I won’t post any spoilers here because I don’t know who has seen it.
kind of hinted at this topic a little bit
lol.
I love South Park, but it’s about as subtle as a freight train.
This is almost exactly what brought me out of christianity. I was institutionalised into it from birth. So, I always just glossed over the most obvious problems that people would bring up. If anything, it entrenched me further.
However, I started realising that I had more love and compassion for people than, not just christians, god claims to have, by their own admission.
How can I love a stranger than an all loving God?
It was all downhill from there.
That was a huge plot point in the new South Park.
