Over yonder, at the top of the second page of the “Why was Ammonius Saccus banned?” thread, **Jayjay ** pauses in the middle of his intemperate attack on me (and his resignation from the PRR fan club) to pose the question to me:
“But how is it hurting you that Polycarp, Siege, tomndebb, etc., believe in a god and that his son was sent to incarnate in human form to redeem their souls? How is that hurting you, and why is it necessary to fight it?”
This is a good question, one that I’ve asked myself. (Somewhere I asked if atheists aren’t being served by all these religious folks running off to waste hours of their day and years of their lives on pointless superstitious acts, in that this gives atheists relatively more hours and years in which to actually accomplish their goals here on earth.) But I do believe it is a positive virtue to fight it, and will begin to enumerate the ways. Other atheists, please feel free to join in. I’m expecting quite a pile-up:
Fighting ignorance of any kind is a virtue in itself. Even if I accomplish nothing for the believers on this website today, I’m helping to set a tone in which advocating atheism isn’t perceived as anything exceptional, and someday kids will grow up in a climate where people just assume that a random person may or may not believe in God, exactly as he chooses, instead of assuming that random person is a weirdo.
Christianity is a species of ignorance. It is no more and no less ignorant than belief in Zeus or Baal or worship of the sun. I believe we are all descended from sun-worshippers, and we are all better off for the eradication of the ignorant belief that a giant ball of flaming gas millions of miles away is a sentient being wishing good and ill on the human race. I think the descendents of Christians, and maybe even their children, will regard their beliefs in the same way, and the human race as a whole will be enlightened.
I believe much human effort goes into the maintenance of various Christian churches, which I would just as soon see torn to the ground, burnt to bits and the ashes distributed to the winds. But that’s just fantasizing–I’ll gladly settle for their doors being shut and the churches turned over to actual charitable work that will help people in need without yammering nonsense into their skulls. Hungry? Here, eat. Homeless? Come inside this nice safe building and sleep.
To say nothing of the education, maintenence, feeding etc. of ministers and priests who live off the people’s subsidy and tax-relief–these are obviously capable people who could easily turn their energies to more useful skills that would help society a damn sight better than wasting their days crafting ingeniously redundant sermons that pretty well accomplish nothing. You want an education? Go to school, for Chrissakes. Don’t listen to these saps blowing smoke up your buttcheeks.
There. That’s four ways that Christianity hurts me.
Hell, I’ll take a run at it. 1) I fail to see how you are sustaining any damage here. All I get is that you are fighting the good fight and being virtuous. Where are you being harmed, exactly?
No, actually you’re not. By being so vociferous and vehement, you are actually hurting your cause more than helping it. You are reinforcing the opinion that “atheist” = “jerk.”
In your opinion. That is the crux of the matter. You would do just as well arguing that people who prefer blue over green are ignorant.
Again, IYO. I see much human effort going into the playing of soccer around the world, when I would just as soon see the stadiums razed and the money used to better the Human Condition. But I don’t go around attacking people who enjoy and/or play soccer willy-nilly.
As long as there is a perceived human need for something, there will be people there to meet that need. I will agree on the tax-exempt stuff, to some extent. There is no reason society should subsidize religion.
I holld no position on whether blue or green is better. It’s simply an irrational, personal, aesthetic choice. If people who wore Green sweaters were widely considered to be good people while people with Blue Sweaters were considered to be immoral or evil, then it would be something worth fighting. If a Christian loses his faith, he’s still as good or bad a human being as he was the day before.
Whilst I tend to agree that the OP’s points 1-4 are correct in principle, the way he goes about it aren’t any help. You don’t convince people of something by telling them they’re stupid.
I’ve seen the point raised that there’s a higher tolerance for Christianity on these boards than other religions, to the point where bashing Scientology and its ilk are acceptable while bashing Christianity is not. What’s being overlooked is that when people point out how batshit insane some of these religions are, they’re not actually trying to convert people away from it; they’re just having fun mocking. You, on the other hand, are actually trying to convert, and insulting language (even if such language is deserved) gets you and them nowhere.
Dude, you need to get over yourself. I’m an atheist and I’ve never in my whole life had anyone give me any grief about that. Get out more and smell the roses-- you are not a victim. Oh, and Merry Christmas!
Well, no, that’s actually three claims of injury preceded by one claim of virtue on your own part. Let’s examine them.
Here you claim that you’ve been advocating atheism in these discussions somehow. It seems to me rather that you’ve been opposing faith and insulting the faithful. Different things entirely. If you now plan to begin instead listing the benefits to society of adapting wide adherence to a philosophy which involves no deity/ies, I will applaud you for that and heartily encourage your efforts.
You repeat your oft stated claim that Christianity = ignorance, but you still offer no evidence of this. Of what, exactly, are Christians as a group ignorant? To take your two main targets on this board as examples, where precisely do tomndebb or Polycarp exhibit ignorance of or disdain for science, logic, reason or any of the ideals for which you claim to be fighting? I see plenty of ignorance exhibited in your battles against religion on the SDMB, but it’s mostly on the part of those who don’t know and don’t care to know how faith is practiced by those who have it.
Here you appear to argue that economies are zero sum games. That’s just stupid, and you should know better.
Fallacy of excluded middle. You seem to be claiming that religious clerics can serve no “useful” functions to society while engaged in their religious occupations.
That message is stunningly noble and eloquent. It is (I hope) just as valid for theists as for atheists, and everyone in between.
The message of most religions is something like, “God loves you. Be a good person, and don’t be a jerk. Go forth, and be happy.” If that’s all you heard every week at church, though, you’d wonder why you should come back next week. A preacher can’t make a living if nobody comes back, so they pad out the message with a whole arkload of unnecessary rules and a generous scoop of “we’re good, and they’re bad.” :eek:
Nope, I’m claiming that every second of their well-paid, well-fed existences devoted to finetuning this week’s drivel could be devoted instead to something of utilitarian purposes, counseling pregnant teenagers how to get okay with aborting their fetuses if that what the teenagers choose, scrubbing the streets with a toothbrush, wiping the asses of sick people in 3rd world clinics–useful stuff like that.
OK, my Christmas present to myself; a nice, ranting atheist flame :
The religious, as a group, hate atheists. Nothing I or any other atheist does will get any response but hatred and fear from the majority of them, including being polite. I don’t bother being polite because it’s not worth the effort. Besides, religion is stupid, destructive and vile. It deserves no respect, and neither do it’s proponents.
No, blue vrs green is purely a matter of opinion. Religion is about how people behave and about what the religious claim to be real, and they have no evidence. And as I’m pointed out many times, the burden of proof is on the believers.
And it’s not just a harmless dispute over color. The behavior and beliefs promoted by religion are, as a rule, stupid, crazy and evil; survivals from ancient and vile societies. Therefore those who follow it are archaic, stupid, crazy, and/or evil. As far as I’m concerned, religion is the enemy of all that is good and sane, and so are those who promote it, whether they want to be or not.
But there is no need for it. People function just fine without religion.
I’d add #5 : Religion promotes behaviors that are destructive to millions. Opposition to condoms, hatred towards gays, contempt for women, opposition to stem cell research; wherever I look, I see religion inflicting evil.
I don’t think Xians are stupid in the least. I mostly think they’re intellectually lazy, maybe, and partly brainwashed, but they’re quite capable of performing some demanding functions well. Even the ministers with Ph.Ds in religious studies could certainly teach high school if they studied some subject as demanding as religious studies, like philosophy or history.
Same could be said about time spent composing posts on internet message boards. But it’s my wager that, even if all the rest of us were all to stop composing posts, we’d find that we wouldn’t and couldn’t spend “every second” of that time on Stuff pseudotriton ruber ruber Considers Useful[sup]TM[/sup]. Conversely, posting this reply tonight doesn’t preclude me from feeding hungry people tomorrow.
My apologies. I’ll amend it; you don’t convince people of something by telling them they’re intellectually lazy and partly brainwashed. No matter how right you might be or how wrong they might be, trying to convince them while insulting them just isn’t going to work.
Pure sophistry. If every future hour spent composing homilies by every cleric in the country were devoted to actually serving the poor and needy directly, that would be a lot of man-hours of doing actual good. You can try to confuse this simple issue by dwelling on “An hour spent Thursday doesn’t mean that the same hour wasted the next Tuesday couldn’t be converted to a different hour on alternate Sundays…” but it’s a simple point I’m making, well within your grasp.
I think I like it better that way.