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Should Society Ban The Abrahamic Religions And How?
- Thread starter Lionel Refson
- Start date
usfan
Well-Known Member
Right. Only atheists, IOW, can express their opinions, which they just present as 'scientific fact!', when it is just another philosophical opinion..
Seriously? If nobody could say anything except for empirical fact, the forums would die, and silence would rule..
..actually, that sounds pretty good!
A Vestigial Mote
Well-Known Member
My comment about the empirical within discussions was meant more for public discourse along the lines of legislative bodies, etc. Obviously people would still share opinions, etc. And this would include religious opinions... however what I meant was not that restriction of religious talk be enforced by anything so formal as a law... but that people generally just don't accept others talking about religion when they don't want to hear it, don't want to be proselytized to and basically stigmatize such talk within more public arenas - much like workplaces - where you have to watch what you say, otherwise you're going to be called on it. The same has been happening with sexism/misogyny. Curtailing it started heavily in the workplace, and it has moved to the more public sphere - where it is now mostly a goal to keep people's sordid opinions and words in check.Right. Only atheists, IOW, can express their opinions, which they just present as 'scientific fact!', when it is just another philosophical opinion..
Seriously? If nobody could say anything except for empirical fact, the forums would die, and silence would rule..
..actually, that sounds pretty good!
How do the news media present a distorted view of religion? I'm living in Mexico now, and we see one story after another about religious hypocrisy and criminality. Recently, a local Protestant clergyman that heads a huge, international mega-church was arrested in Los Angeles for pedophilia, a priest made an outrageous comment minimizing rape, and then this : Mexico City priest arrested for murder of student, church deacon
The news reports the stories. The viewer judges their significance. I have a very negative view of Christianity beginning and have since the rise of the so-called Moral Majority in the nineties. Then came the televangelist scandals, and the pedophilia and cover-up scandals, abortion clinic shootings, the public hypocrisies of prominent Christian families like the Palins and Duggars
Are the media responsible for reproducing these comments? :
"The long term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to his Church's public marks of the covenant-baptism and holy communion-must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel." - Gary North
"I hope to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be." - Jerry Falwell
"Our goal must be simple. We must have a Christian nation built on God's law, on the Ten Commandments. No apologies." - Randall Terry
"Whenever the civil government forbids the practice of things that God has commanded us to do, or tells us to do things He has commanded us not to do, then we are on solid ground in disobeying the government and rebelling against it ... There will never be world peace until God's house and God's people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world." - Pat Robertson
These people are enemies of Americanism and the cherished American principles of freedom from religion and church-state separation. They are declaring as much. I hear them and recognize them as enemies of secularism and freedom from religion. This is not the media distorting anything.
Wouldn't those people be expected to be the same without religion? Most of the people I socialize with are secular humanists that are decent, upright people trying to make their community and the lives of others better in various ways. People doing that withing religions is not evidence that the religion is making them better people or that the religion has any value to that society.
- "The fact that [the Catholic church] can do good is a testament to the fact that there are good people who will do good, but the organization is corrupt. It is poisoned to its core and it serves no essential good purpose, no true purpose, it is lie after lie, promoting harm to real people....the Catholic Church is not a force for good."- Matt Dillahunty,
And religion makes their audiences gullible. Religion teaches them to believe by faith, which is promoted as a virtue. I'm pretty sure that a nation of secular humanists would have rejected both Hitler and Trump. Christians were easily duped in both cases. That's societal harm caused by religion.
- "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. For good people to do evil things, it takes religion." - Nobelist Steven Weinberg
This approach isn't going well, and you've got the Christians who feel persecuted saying, "See! I told you so."
Give it time. They're self-destructing in the news, and hemorrhaging numbers in the West.
No. The problem comes from the religions. Their negative PR problems are of their own making, and cheering the fading away of Christianity and pernicious influences is fully justified. Opinions like these are not in reaction to nothing:
- "I am absolutely convinced that the main source of hatred in the world is religion. And I think it should be treated with ridicule and hatred and contempt, and I claim that right.-- Christopher Hitchens
- "My conscience knows that there's no earthly reason for anybody on this planet to respect religion in any way. Indeed, purely on the evidence religion itself provides in such regular abundance, there's every reason to actively disrespect it to the point of outright abuse. And quite frankly, the fact that religion gets so little abuse compared to what it really deserves, I can only attribute to the unbelievable tolerance, restraint, and plain good manners of atheists and secularists everywhere. So, if you are a religious person, and if you're thinking of demanding more respect for your beliefs, please try to bear in mind that you and your religion are already getting way more respect than you've have ever deserved. Your faith is a joke. Your god is a joke. He's so absurd he's an embarrassment even to people who don't believe in him." - Pat Condell
- "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God."- American President George H. W. Bush
Agreed. The American church is stealing from the tax payers, who are underwriting the promotion of Christianity. Germany collected $13.2 billion in taxes from churches in 2013. In America, people like you and me would have to either make up the $13 billion shortfall or do without an equivalent amount of government services.
- "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." -Thomas Jefferson
Secular humanists feel the same about brutal, totalitarian regimes as they feel feel about religions like Christianity. Remember this? :
- "The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion. The problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship." - Sam Harris
- "We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others."
I ask again : What respect do I as an atheist owe the religion that teaches this filth to its adherents? Why shouldn't I applaud its evaporation? It's declared itself my enemy, and you are a willing vector of its loathsome, hateful, atheophobic calumnies.
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Goal? Christianity gives lip service to lofty principles, but is an ineffective program for instilling those values into its adherents and generating good people. This applies to Protestantism as well :
- "The fact that [the Catholic church] can do good is a testament to the fact that there are good people who will do good, but the organization is corrupt. It is poisoned to its core and it serves no essential good purpose, no true purpose, it is lie after lie, promoting harm to real people....the Catholic Church is not a force for good."- Matt Dillahunty,
Agreed. The brutal cults of personality to which these mendacious Christians refer when trying to condemn atheism by association are just religions with human gods behaving like the god of the Christian Bible barking commandments, insisting on being worshiped, forbidding dissent, threatening disobedience with death and destruction, and ordering genocides.
We don't need religions for that. Governments do it better. Christian hospitals are businesses. I am a retired physician, and did my internship and residency at a Catholic hospital. We did not admit the uninsured or underinsured. They were stabilized if initially unstable, then transferred to the county hospital built by the government and supported by the taxpayer. The church only admitted profitable patients. It was the government administering to the indigent sick.
Not in my opinion. The most virtuous people I know are not religious. Believing by faith is not a virtue. It's a logical error.
Disagree again. I don't consider the moral codes of the Abrahamic religions to be adequate for 21st century life..
Where do either the Old Testament, the New Testament, or the Qur'an the proclaim that democracy is a more moral system of government than monarchy, or that people be viewed as citizens with guaranteed personal rights, including freedom from religion, than subjects at the mercy of the whims of a despot, that society should be structured to facilitate the most opportunity for the most people to pursue happiness as they envision it, that women should be seen an men's equal rather than their property, and more. These are the values that define modern life, which is why a book that commands men to submit to gods, subjects to kings, slaves to masters, and wives to husbands simply isn't relevant today.
What is being judged are not the adherents but the ideologies they adhere to. I look at the spectrum of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and secular humanists I encounter on religious message boards, something I've been doing for more than ten years and 90,000 posts (I'm relatively new on this site), and judge the effectiveness of each system by the relative numbers of each kind that I find morally and intellectually excellent, good, fair, or poor. Yes, the adherents have to be evaluated to determine how effective their belief systems are at people building - character, disposition, quality of thought, etc. - but it's the abstraction that is of interest and is the target of criticism, not the failed people per se. They are victims of a failed ideology.
Yes, but so is Christianity - if we change non-Muslims to non-Christians such as Muslims and secular humanists.
Disagree. Comparing the two is very instructive. The winner is - wait for it - secular humanism. Why? Because Christianity and Islam look pretty similar on paper. The differences are in the rendering, which reflects the history and the culture of the areas in which each is administered. The Christian West has been under the influence of the secular democracies that emerged from the rise of Enlightenment values and secular humanism and has been dramatically influenced by its rational ethics.
Hence, Christians no longer execute people for homosexuality, adultery, witchcraft, fornication, apostasy, impiety, blasphemy, and other crimes against Yahweh, whereas Muslims are still free to kill such people.
But the very fact that they share all of those values even if they don't act on them the same way is evidence of their ideological similarity. The fact that they are not free to indulge those values in the West is not a result of Christian values or its church, but of the secular humanist influence in the West, which is why Christians in the West aren't performing honor killings, pushing homosexuals off of towers, throwing acid into peoples' faces, cutting off hands, or burning people alive in cages, performing clitoridectomies, although that's a good description of the brutality of pre-Enlightenment, Middle Ages Christianity with its witch hunts and inquisitions..
Getting back to the similarities on paper, if you compare Christianity and Islam, they appear very similar, and both radically different from post-Enlightenment humanism..
Christians and Muslims each revere a Semitic desert god, Yahweh and Allah, that is an angry, petty, vengeful, jealous, judgmental, capricious, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadistic, prudish, strongman that requires worship and submission. You probably don't see Yahweh that way, but from from a humanist perspective, that is what is described. Humanists have no equivalent, nor any equivalent to any of the following:.
Believers of both attend temples (Mosques or churches) and obey paternalistic, misogynisitic clergy.
Both religions embrace magical thinking, mythology, dogma, the supernatural, and ritual.
Each feature demons angels, prayer, an afterlife, a judgment, and a system of reward and punishment after death.
Each has its now centuries old holy book of internal contradictions, failed prophecies, unkept promises, and errors of history and science. I'm not as sure about the Qur'an, but it likely also contain vengeance, hatred, tribalism, violence, and failed morals that endorse slavery, rape, infanticide, and incest.
They each think they have the right to determine who should be allowed to have sex with whom how, who should be able to marry whom, and what women must do regarding their bodies.
Both are patriarchal, authoritarian, misogynistic, sexually repressive, anhedonisitic, atheophobic, homophobic, antiscientiific, use psychological terrorism on their children, have violent histories featuring torture, genocide and terrorism, and demand obedience and submission.
Each consider faith a virtue and reason the enemy of faith.
Each has a history of opposing human rights and science.
Each advocates theocracy over democracy.
Humanism rejects all of this.
With all of these similarities - and that is a lot of parallels, most not found elsewhere - why should these two appear so differently in their rendering if not for the reason I just gave? The difference between America and Saudi Arabia is not due to the differences in the holy books of Christianity and Islam, but that America had the benefit of centuries of humanistic influence, and the Arabs didn't.
If you traded the ideologies out, and put Christianity in Saudi Arabia and Islam in America, the results would be the same: Christian Arabs doing the suicide bombings and flying airplanes into buildings, and Americans going door to door asking if you know Mohammed. America would still be a secular state with a Muslim majority forced to tolerate "infidels" thanks to humanist values, and Saudi would still be a brutal, intolerant theocracy, but a Christian one instead. The Muslim majority in America would embrace humanist values such as religious freedom and democracy.
If you or anybody else disagrees, please explain where that argument goes wrong in your opinion. If you think Christianity deserve credit for civilizing the West, please show me the scriptures that support church-state separation and guaranteed personal freedoms such as freedom of and from religion. Show me where the Bible forbids those barbaric practices characteristic of many Muslim states forbidden after the advent of the modern, liberal, secular state. You can't, because those ideas don't come from scripture.
How do you think that the American Indians would describe the spread of Christianity in North America? How do you think the Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan feel about the spread of Christianity into their nations?
The spread of Christianity was brutal, from Roman armies to crusades to the conquistadores to the inquisitions. Christians have decimated multiple indiginous populations.
How could it be any other way? Isn't that true for you?
It doesn't do much for me either, but then again, none of the Abrahamic religions do.
Do you also hate all Muslims? Probably not.
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I'd say that it is you that has bought the lie, and judging from your avatar, more than just the religious one. I can do a comparison of Christianity and Americanism similar to the one I just did comparing Islam and Christianity. Patriotism is just a secular religion, complete with its own myths (cherry tree and log splitting presidents instead of babes in the reeds and virgin births), symbols (flags, eagles and Uncle Sam instead of Jesus, Mary and the cross), precious documents (original parchments/papyri for each). Patriotism or faith. Traitor or infidel. The Ten Commandments and The Bill of Rights. Manifest destiny and American exceptionalism vs. the Chosen People. The Pilgrims and the Exodus. Godless Communists and suicide bombers. "I pledge allegiance" and "Our Father who art in heaven." "Communism is my enemy" and "Islam is my enemy." Honor vs righteousness. Lapel flags and crosses. He died for your rights or he died for your salvation.
Serving God and serving country: It's all fantasy and tribalism, and it exists to convince you and me to underwrite and/or die for somebody else's agenda.
I see Christianity as the aggressor. It certainly has been in the case of atheists. It has successfully demonized and marginalizied atheists and atheism for millennia, although lately, we are breaking through, finding our voice, fighting back, and defining ourselves. Christianity isn't too happy about it.
When I was born, atheists were considered morally unfit to teach, coach, adopt, hold public office, or serve on juries or as expert witnesses. That's due to nothing but millennia of biblical hate speech rendered as Christian bigotry. The Christian Bible teaches that unbelievers arelying, corrupt, vile, wicked, abominable, decadent, debauched, godless vessels of darkness in the service of evil, not one of whom does any good, fit to be shunned and to be burned alive forever as enemies of a good god, and the moral equivalent of murderers and whoremongers. If you are unfamiliar with the specific scriptures, I'd be glad to provide them upon request, but I'm pretty sure you don't want me reproducing those scriptures here.
Isn't it about time for Christians to accept responsibility for their plight? My opinion of Christianity stems from having been a Christian, and from observing Christians in the news and in venues like this one. It is people like you that "indoctrinate" me. I'm not really interested in anybody else's opinion of Christianity, and I can't be indoctrinated. Nobody has any chance of inserting an idea into my head through repetition, which is probably the case with most people trained in critical thinking. They're rational skeptics, meaning they question all claims, rejecting those that are insufficiently supported by reason applied to evidence.
If we could be reached that way, you'd have indoctrinated us all by now with your repetitious memes such as this persecution meme, or your progressive indoctrinee meme. You simply repeat these claims over and over and over again, never noticing that your non-Christian audience is unaffected by your efforts. Save those for Sunday school, where you get people to sing "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so" over and over, offering no evidence that this Jesus exists, that he loves anybody, or that the Bible should be believed. Indoctrination occurs if the target eventually receives the implanted meme uncritically. Intellectual plankton, floating in the current of the thoughts of others.
My tradition, academic-style teaching and learning, is nothing like that and rejects that kind of thinking. The professor doesn't mindlessly repeat an unsupported meme like creationism. He'll show you the evidence that Darwin had at his disposal, for instance, and what he concluded from that. It won't be repeated again, and you won't be asked if you believe it, just do you remember what was taught. Intellectual nekton.
Agreed, but we're referring to different things. I'm referring to the decline in America caused by conservatism and the willingness of the American electorate to vote for criinals..
The Jews don't want you hitchhiking onto them, either. You're the first spin-off from from Judaism's Happy Days. You're Laverne and Shirley, Islam is Mork and Mindy, and Mormonism is Joannie Loves Chahchi.
Jesus has nothing to do with Abraham. Nobody is opposed to Jesus. The Muslims simply don't believe in that myth. Nor do I.
Still with this false narrative? You're the only one saying so. Your approach is to try to excuse the 22% (or whatever the correct number is) of the world's ills caused by religion by claiming that others are saying 100%, then calling your straw man ridiculous. It's Christiana pologetics that is ridiculous, and like Hitchens, I claim the right to criticize it.
Fantasy. The most anti-Christian institute is the Christian church. We watch it and judge what it does.
Please. I'm an atheist who has been the victim of your religion. I wish to see it disappear, and I am unapologetic about it. I expect the LGBTQ+ community to have the same opinion. Just go away.
People want Christianity to shut up and butt out of the lives of non-Christians. Learn how to be good neighbors, and that might change.
Christianity teaches people to view people like me as immoral. How should I view it? It's an enemy, and I don't love enemies - a foolish idea in the first place. I will fight back, and encourage others to do so by example.
There you go again. Poor you. So persecuted. The most persecuted majority that the world has ever known. Just leave the planet and let the rest of us make progress without Christianity's impediments.
Only on your people, not mine. The religious believe by faith. Just repeat your meme to them over and over, and you can capture them.
I have no reason to believe that such a person existed, or that if he did, his promises mean anything.
It is religion that teaches that animals are inferior to human beings. Secular humanism teaches that they are our fellow pilgrims in this adventure called life. I reject that ethic.
We don't need religion for that, nor is it as good as secular humanism in promoting such qualities.
Why not. It's as valid as Christianity. It has as much evidentiary support - none.
Sinners? There is no reason to believe that sin or sinners exists.
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Just let it die out of its own accord. It's already dead in Western Europe and other places.
False. Muslims trace their religion back to Abraham and Jesus is one of the greatest prophets in Islam. A whole chapter in the Qur'an is named after Mary. Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples, and are almost the same in terms of cultural and religious views. Sad there's some bitterness between them.
dybmh
דניאל יוסף בן מאיר הירש
@Lionel Refson,
lot's of negative feedback for your idea here... but it seems like you're taking it well.
before adding my opinion to the pile, i'm going to read your "revising..." thread.
best wishes,
lot's of negative feedback for your idea here... but it seems like you're taking it well.
before adding my opinion to the pile, i'm going to read your "revising..." thread.
best wishes,
Which ethic do you reject? That animals are inferior to humans or that they're our fellow pilgrims?
Chill, I was merely using the terminology as shorthand. I tend to do that when speaking of or to Christians.
Notanumber
A Free Man
Religions are becoming too powerful - Asda sacks worker 'for sharing Billy Connolly video on Facebook'
Sorry. I was ambiguous.
I reject that animals are our inferiors. They don't have language or civilization, but those are nor how I determine the relative value of living things. I value my dogs like I do myself. Whatever ideology teaches otherwise has lost my attention, concern, and respect.
whirlingmerc
Well-Known Member
Clearly, germs are less valuable than humans
in the end humans were made in the image of God and animals were not
Being made in the image of God gives people more value
However it also makes the wrong things people do worse. Animals may be 'less value; but neither do they sin.
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I don't think those would count since they're not sentient or at least don't appear to be as sentient as other animals.
I agree, I find it disgusting the way animals are viewed and treated by certain religions.
whirlingmerc
Well-Known Member
I guess not.
As far as I can see that's just your belief, I have no idea if that's true or not but even if it was true, I don't think that gives humans the right to just do whatever they want with animals... it doesn't automatically give us special authority over them.
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Sand Dancer
Crazy Cat Lady
Judaism isn't that bad. No heaven nor hell, no proselytizing. Compared to Christianity or Islam, it's preferable, IMO.
Notanumber
A Free Man
People are supposedly made in the image of god because people say so. Those people have no evidence to back up their arrogant claim.