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.
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
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.
“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’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.
Best of all, I don’t think I am even christian. xD
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:
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…
… 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:
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.
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.