I’d suggest referencing this 2015 pit thread. Scroll up and down from here:
Basically, we need a couple of mainline equivalents of say, Bill Nye the Science Guy. The fact is that the media loves controversy. A handful of mainline or liberal Christian Reverends need to place themselves on every big reporter’s rolodex and provide standard replies to the bible pounders. Start off bland, more in sadness than in anger. Leave it to another reverend to ramp it up as appropriate.
For two reasons: 1. To vent about some oppressive religious thing that’s happening, 2. To feel superior to other people.
It’s not just social media, it’s also people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and public organizations created for atheists. These people exist and they are actually pretty vocal and really fucking annoying, not to mention misogynistic in many cases. And yes, I have met them in real life.
On a personal note I’m interested in conversations about systems of meaning (or not) and atheism would definitely be a subject I’d be interested in talking about. I really don’t understand how anyone could not think a lot about what they do or don’t believe, I am extremely invested in existential questions and their implications for how I live my life. But I know there are other ways of being. My Aunt is agnostic and she almost never thinks about it. She doesn’t care.
I care a lot about things that exist, I care somewhat about things for which there is some evidence to back them up, I care very little about things for which there is no evidence to back them up, and I get a bit pissed off about things for there is no evidence but are pushed upon me by others wishing to control some aspect of my life.
you forgot 3. To assert equality.
I guess I figured that would be covered by venting about oppression.
One of the reasons atheists congregate is because it’s a lonely life for many who are surrounded by aggressive believers, and also because if you don’t believe in any deities, you probably (but not always) have a healthy respect for science and rational thinking and you’re less likely to be encumbered by regressive social beliefs. I’m not saying that’s a 100% accurate assumption but I can see how some atheists would say, “Hey, these people are more like me than the people in my local community.”
A lot of people also need to process their religious trauma.
Religions do exist, though. The beliefs aren’t true, but the people are real, and often sincere, and have used tenets of faith to endure hardship and find meaning in their lives, and I find that endlessly fascinating.
Of course there is. Which means Religions don’t always get it right. And so?
But this is not the issue of this thread.
The issue of this thread is people trying to convert you.
We can argue whether or not Militant atheism is a religion, but the fact they are trying to convert people is undeniable.
It must be awful being on the receiving end for a change.
What happened to ‘don’t be a jerk’ I wonder.
This is the first time in my life I have ever heard of this conceptualization of Christian faith so I had to look into it. Apparently this was a more popular take a hundred years ago, but is less common now. For me, as a former Christian, I have a hard time understanding how this is at all Biblical. The infamous quote is “whosoever believeth in Him” and I don’t ever recall hearing anything in the Bible that would conceptualize faith as anything other than sincere belief. The story of doubting Thomas comes to mind - he was in communion with God but doubted Jesus was the Son of God and that was pretty clearly pointed out as a problem.
I don’t really care, I guess, if some people who call themselves Christians don’t actually believe in God, but the issue for me is it calls into question the definition of religion. Can you have religion without sincere belief? If so, how then do we define religion?
Absolutely. As mentioned before, the focus on belief is a Christian thing. Judaism is much more focused on actions. I don’t think belief is especially important to Shinto or Hinduism, either, although I’m not certain.
Please give some examples. I live in a very secular area, and in my library books on Christianity outnumber books on atheism close to 110 - 1. I don’t consider the authors of Christian books as trying to convert me - I don’t have to read them. Yet people think that Dawkins or Harris having the nerve to publish a book on atheism as some sort of noisy bit of aggression against Christianity. And I’m talking NY Times here, not some Bible Belt rag. No atheist has ever come to my door to try to convert me. I see no atheist signs on buildings, like the signs I walk past on churches.
The examples I’ve seen of fundamentalists saying atheists are doing conversion usually revolve around teach evil atheist evolution in schools.
It reminds me a lot of straight people (of whom I’m one) feeling threatened by gay people coming out, and yelling about any gay teacher who is not hiding their sexuality trying to convert their charges to their “lifestyle.”
Because of my story I came out as atheist to my critique group. The fundamentalist Christian was shocked, no surprise there. But so was the moderate Christian who would never even dream of limiting anyone’s rights based on her beliefs.
For my part, I don’t think the atheist jerks are trying to convert anyone, I think they’re mostly doing some kind of virtue signalling superiority thing. I’m sure some atheist at some point has tried to talk Christians out of their beliefs, but I see it more as an in-group phenomenon, a “Can you believe what other people believe?” sort of sneering. Online, it’s more like bullying.
I don’t claim to have never done any sort of sneering myself, but it’s usually about people who are discriminating against me or otherwise taking away my rights, and it’s not in mixed company.
One of the difficult things about atheism is it’s hard to talk sincerely about non-belief without some critique of religion. A lot of what laid the foundation of my atheism was how I experienced religion. People don’t like to hear ways in which their religion might be bad, so they take it as a personal attack. Or even worse, they try to explain how my experience was not the real experience and I just haven’t experienced it the right way. I have no idea how to avoid that dynamic.
As for who is more rational, I have come to understand humans as fundamentally irrational creatures and all evidence that we have indicates that emotion is critical for reason to function, and moral judgements are about gut instinct rationalized after the fact. Even consciousness itself may not be the primary decision making network in the brain. Atheist jerks annoy me in part because I’m annoyed by people who think they are above being motivated by anything other than reason. We are animals. We are very smart animals, but we are animals. We believe in love, we have flowery ideas about our children, we create music and poetry, we fail to save for retirement, we see patterns where none exist, and we’re not objective at all. Not at all. So I think, to believe (or practice belief) is human, and not everything human has to make sense on paper. That’s why I don’t connect with these “positive” atheists.
And for that matter, no one has inserted atheist slogans into the national anthem or plastered them on the currency.
A friend who was born in the Soviet Union, moved to Israel as a teen, and immigrated to the US as an adult used to complain that the US is very gung ho about “freedom of religion” but really fails if you are looking for freedom from religion.
I think you’re conflating two separate questions, one trivial and one complex.
The simple question is “Is belief in a credo essential to a religion?”, and the answer is clearly “No”. Judaism, some schools of Buddhism, some variants of Hinduism, Shintoism, are more concerned with proper action than proper belief, whether that mean living according to certain rules, or performing certain ceremonies. (The fancy-dan ten-dollar word for this is “orthopraxis”). Even some variants of Christian faith hold this idea; the Unitarian Universalist Association comes to mind. Whether or not you consider them Christian - and there are plenty of people in the UUA itself who don’t - you can’t deny that it is a religious institution.
The more profound question of “what is religion?” has been wrangled over by scholars for decades; I don’t think we’ll be able to answer that here. I suspect that if I did a deep dive into the literature, I’d find plenty of discussion of that Bible verse and what “believe” means, in that context. But some of the liberal Christians I know - my mother and father, for example, or my sister’s college friend who’s about to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church - would say that it’s more important to guide your conduct like an all-loving God exists than to prove one does.
Yeah. ‘Why don’t you believe?’ ‘What is this evidence that you claim to have’? An occasional person asking such questions really wants to hear the answers. Most of them, um, very much don’t.
Ayup.
It’s not a thing that all humans do. But it is a thing that humans do. It’s part of functioning as a human, for very many humans. That isn’t foolish, even if it’s incorrect.
Interesting response. I’ve never heard an atheist deny that we are animals, but I’ve heard a lot of theists do so. (WRT evolution, which many consider equivalent to atheism.) I’ve never heard an atheist deny the existence of emotions. I have heard theists who equate materialism with atheism claim that atheists can’t believe in love, which is just silly.
Now I have heard atheists say that we should try to do things based on rational reasons. Which should not be too controversial. The conversation often goes like this:
Theist: I believe in god and I do things based on faith alone.
Atheist or rationalist: What other things do you do only based on faith? Make investments? Take a job? Buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
Most atheist YouTube creators I watch respond to religious attacks on atheism, and do not publish a link to the attack to discourage their viewers going there to bully someone. Now, responses to stupid theist comments (of the “how can we have evolved from monkeys if there are still monkeys” type, so yes, stupid) can be aggressive, but it is very frustrating.
I try to stay polite when showing how someone has quote mined a scientist and responding to scientific misinformation. I’ve never had a creationist yet admit they were wrong - or even respond with more evidence they were right. And it usually winds up with them telling me that I’ll find out when I’m dead, with the implication God will toss me into hell. If I had grown up with hell that could be a problem, but since I was Jewish it has no impact.
I’m fortunate in that I’ve never been isolated. Most of my friends were secular Jews, and a majority of the people I knew in college were atheists, not selected for, that’s how MIT was even 50 years ago. But I can imagine someone growing ujp surrounded by Bible believing Christians, a bit fearful of hell if they are wring and very isolated reaching out online to atheist communities to feel they are not alone. That’s the testimony I’ve heard online.
Now, atheists do “attack” Baptists and JWs, but I’ve never yet heard an atheist attack a Unitarian or a deist. But those people don’t attack us.
I think you mean pledge. I’ve never heard that anyone added god to the Star Spangled Banner.
Especially ironic since the person who wrote the Pledge was a minister, who deliberately kept God out of it.
Making decisions based on irrational reasons is something all humans do. This is my daughter’s field of research. It does not apply only to God believers - we demonstrated it on an audience of hard boiled engineers.
Mr. Spock is a character. I’ve never met an atheist yet who has claimed to be totally rational.
True. I meant religion specifically is a thing not all humans do, not that acting arationally is.