Just as many people call themselves Christians when they do not believe the basis tenets of Christianity, there are many who call themselves atheists when they are really anti-theists who do really care what I believe in. They are the ones who spend most interactions trying to convince me I am wrong or stupid for not agreeing with them, and like evangelicals, feel called to spread the news of their superior wisdom. My point was that they do the same things that they condemn Christians for.
There are no tenets to atheism. One can be an atheist without even knowing it, having no concept of god or gods to believe in or disbelieve in. One can also be an atheist and an anti-theist.
And, for that matter, I’m hard pressed to identify any universal tenets of Christianity, particularly when one throws in fringe sects. Even when one limits the scope to mainline Protestants and Catholics, it’s hard to come up with a universal set of beliefs beyond just “there is a god” and “Jesus was in some way this god’s son.” The nature of the god, the thrust of Jesus’ ministry, and perhaps most important of all to mere mortals like you and me, the question of how (or if) salvation can be obtained is all up in the air and in dispute.
The thing is, though, you probably won’t catch an atheist citing atheist scripture from The Man as absolute, irrefutable justification for their beliefs. Unless they’re doing it ironically, as with pastafarians and indeed many Satanists. So it is possible to condemn a Christian who seems to reject certain aspects of scripture which other Christians (albeit not universally) have taken to suggest a message of love first and foremost as a hypocrite.
Now, atheists too can be hypocrites, but not simply by virtue of being atheists and then going on to be hateful jerks. For instance, if one professes to being a “secular humanist” in addition to being an atheist, and they then go on to endorse racism and genocide, you could say they’re just as bad as Christians who do the same, and equally hypocritical. The hypocrisy, though, is not in relation to their atheist view, but their secular humanist view. Atheism takes no position on racism and genocide, but secular humanism would tend to condemn such things. Stalin may have been an atheist, I’ll grant you, but he was not a secular humanist.
I can experience gravity, even measure it. There is lots of evidence. As far as I am concerned, evolution is a conclusive fact.
In medical school, we learned to tell people not to give peanut butter to babies. This was the best advice from thousands of allergists and pediatricians. Like many things we learned, this advice was probably wrong. It probably resulted in many more peanut allergies. I can have faith in a process that re-examines longstanding beliefs and uses scientific evidence to change what parents are told. But a surprising amount of medicine is inconclusive and based on personal opinions, however learned.
Religious faith is more complex. I’m not sure if in the long run it is fundamentally as different a form of faith as supposed.
Well, to be fair, if you’re an anti-theist, you’re also an atheist, so anyone that called them self an atheist wouldn’t be lying if they were also an anti-thiest.
Here’s my original response to that post, but deleted it when I noticed that you were speaking about anti-theists. Since it appears that you’re talking more broadly about atheists, I’ll post it now. Again, this is in response to your previous post.
There’s militant atheists and militant theists. They exist on both sides. I can assure you, as an atheist, there’s plenty of religious people that feel exactly that same way towards those of us that aren’t religious.
There’s a reason most atheists already have a handful of canned answers ready to go for the inevitable ‘what church do you go to?’/‘what religion are you?’/‘Isn’t what god can do amazing?’ questions that we get all the time.
For some reason, when religious people find out you’re an atheist, they tend to respond in one of two ways. Either by taking it as a personal insult and firing back at you or deciding you’re going to be their new project and it’s going to be their personal mission to bring you back into the fold.
Yes, I’m quite sure religious people hear it too, but don’t act like it atheists don’t get an earful every time someone finds out.
I firmly believe that these days it’s still much easier to be “religious” than not. And I put that in quotes only because many atheists, myself included, have gotten vary good at pretending to be religious just to avoid arguments. I went to catholic grade school and church twice a week growing up so I’ve got a good working knowledge of the basics and I’m familiar enough with the church that I’m not going to be ‘found out’ during a casual conversation.
If you want to know who hears “You must agree with with me or you’re a horrible, irredeemable scumbag” more often, ask yourself what you see more of…Jesus fish or Darwin fish. Jewelry (necklaces, earrings, broaches/pins) with crosses or jewelry with the flying spaghetti monster. Tattoos that say “Only God Can Judge Me”/WWJD or tattoos with the atheist logo (which I didn’t know existed until just now).
Granted, most atheists don’t show off that their an atheist because they really don’t care. Their lack of belief in a deity isn’t some guiding force in their life by which all decisions are made. They don’t have to remind themselves constantly that there is no deity above us, so that plays into why you don’t see much of it. But, if you’re out in public, you can hardly go five minutes without seeing a cross somewhere.
And with that, I’ve said this before, religious people: When you meet someone new and you’re making small talk, the question shouldn’t be “What church do you go to?” or “What religion are you?”, it should be “Do you go to church?” or “Are you religious?” and if the answer is ‘no’, don’t reply with ‘why not?’ (and especially don’t act like you’re disappointed about it).
Infanticide: Oh, the joy of smashing your enemy’s children against the rocks!
Genocide, Canaanites: You shall not leave alive anything that breathes.
Slavery: Slaves, totally obey your masters, even the cruel ones.
Oh, and children who sass their parents must be killed, while disobedient daughters can be sold into slavery. Biblical texts are filled with rules for believers to exploit. Such fun!
Well, to be clear, it wasn’t MY church, else I’d still be going there. It was made abundantly clear that it was HIS church, and I understand that, he started that particular congregation. Also, you have the convo backward, as to who was counter-arguing who. I don’t think he was really expecting someone to do what he said, learn the bible for themselves and come to their own decisions. I’ve always wondered if that expectation of compliability and ignorance is a holdover from when scriptures were written and mass was spoken in latin and the masses didn’t have access to them.
That leads me to where anti-theists, as we seem to be calling them in this thread, go wrong. Accuse a Christian of cherry picking and ignorance of their own holy book and chances are on your side that you are correct. And guilty of the same. Incest, genocide, slavery, war, its all in there. Part of the historical traditions of a people that tells the story of where they came from, how they formed as a people, the things that happened to them in the process and what they did to survive. Don’t forget the parts that also tell ya to treat the slave and your wife and kids and strangers with dignity and respect.
Personally, I don’t care, be an anti-theist if you like but don’t be the thing you’re accusing me of.
Sorry, bit of a rant, I’ll cut it short here for now
Someone who is “an atheist without even knowing it, having no concept of god or gods to believe in or disbelieve in” is an agnostic, not an atheist.
Many a/anti theists may very well be all those things, but it’s not because of some great unifying teaching. There’s no atheist handbook that tells us what’s right and wrong.
If a Christian says that homosexuality is an abomination, they can be accused of cherry picking because practically right there it also says you can’t mix fabrics. They’re cherry picking because they have an issue with gays but no issue with wearing cotton and wool at the same time.
If an atheist said homosexuality is wrong (or with your example incest/slavery etc is right), how are they cherry picking? There’s no guiding set of rules that they’re picking from.
To me at least, that’s the issue. Religious people tend to fall back on the bible when questioned about things that they have moral issues with. The bible says this, the bible says that. If you’re not religious you can still hate gays or love slavery, but it’s on you and you know that.
And similarly, if you talk to a religious person that knows they’re cherry picking, say, someone that has no problem with something they ‘should’ have a problem with, it turns into a discussion about how the bible isn’t meant to be taken literally, it’s just a bunch of stories.
Yeah, that doesn’t follow. If you have no concept of god, you can’t question whether or not god exists. If you have no concept of god, you’re atheist, by definition. Now, to be fair, if you were to explain to this person what god(s) are, it’s entirely possible for them to become an agnostic or theist, but if you have no concept of them then you don’t believe in them which makes you atheist.
To call someone that has no concept of god an agnostic is like asking a blind person what his favorite color is and getting a response of “I’m not sure”.
There are multiple definitions of “atheist,” “agnostic,” and related words—and somehow all SDMB threads on religion eventually devolve into arguments over these definitions.
Which quickly turns into someone claiming that atheist is a faith in and of itself and suddenly people are wearing colanders on their head.
It’s your city only – Catholics are the most populous group of Christians in the US. Southern Baptists are next though I think.
I am not really sure you followed my point. It sounds like what you’re arguing is what Christianity should be, not what it is. I was simply talking about what it actually is, for many people, right or wrong. I am not in any way saying “it has nothing to with faith”. Of course it does. But faith and religious literacy are two quite different things. This is something people without faith don’t seem to be able to grasp very well.
I was trying to say that knowing what is actually in the Bible, or understanding the meaning of the Nicene Creed, is not very important to a lot of church goers, and that is one reason why religious literacy is low.
So is literacy, period, you know. People aren’t very well-educated, by and large.
I have not, in fact, noticed this. Can you please point to a post in this thread where someone called Christians “Horrible irredeemable scumbags?”
Is that Rule 38? 
I may as well whip out my definitions.
Agnostic: I don’t know about deities. (a-gnosis, without knowledge)
Atheist: I don’t care about deities. (a-theos, without deities)
Anti-theist: No deities exist outside human imagination.
Theist: [del]Revelation[/del] Magic proves the existence of some god(s).
Deist: I think I can rationalize the existence of a popular deity.
Polytheist: Trinities and other deities and godheads exist nearby.
Monotheist: Only one deity exists, without multiple personas.
Analtheist: No, I won’t go there…
Back to topic. IMHO religious literacy must include belief systems beside the biggies. Coyote, Garelamaisana, Osiris, and Kukulkan deserve notice, too.
Human cultures have evolved widely varying belief systems, from nil to baroque. Some cultures don’t even bother with deities, spirits, magic, et al. Cite: The Birth of the Gods by GE Swanson, covering how social structures shape beliefs. Societies with multiple power centers tend toward polytheism. Adjacent peoples lacking conflict-resolution mechanisms tend to blame witchcraft. Debt inheritance links to belief in souls.
There’s only one way to control deities: Craft your own and burn them when they go bad. But write them up first; contribute to religious literacy.
You can use those definitions if you want, RioRico, but they aren’t the typical ones.
Not in so many words.
That’s for sure. Nothing you quoted even remotely resembles your characterization.
If you covet your neighbor’s wife
Your existence will be one of strife
Burma Shave
It seems you, me, and RioRico all agree that there are some problematic passages in scripture. The difference is, you seem to have a method for distinguishing which passages really matter, and which ones don’t. That doesn’t make you any of those things that you’ve apparently read into my critique, but I am genuinely curious what that method you apply, and how you arrived at it, as a means to drawing truth from scripture. If you really have managed to unlock a foolproof way to discerning god’s will, it seems your duty, if you value your soul and the souls of your fellow humans, to share it. If you are a Christian, I believe there’s an abundance of passages exhorting you to do as much.
Because literacy is nothing if the true meaning must be divined through more than just a literal reading of the text. There has to be a way to decipher it, right?
Lifelong atheist and longtime church choir member here, and AFAICT you have an unrealistically asocial and text-based perception of how religious doctrine is formed and disseminated. Beliefs about what “really matters” in religious scripture are not constructed ex nihilo from simply reading and “deciphering” “the passages” as an individual.
It’s about which parts of scripture get identified as the focus of traditional prayers, about what parts of scripture (and religious history and theology in post-scripture eras) are foregrounded in sermons and institutional activity and whatnot. All of these things contribute to believers’ perspectives on what aspects of their scripture “really matter”.
I mean, surely you can see how the fact that, say, church groups devote a lot of effort and time to running soup kitchens for the homeless, but very little time recruiting volunteers to go around smashing the children of unbelievers against rocks, would naturally tend to give church members the impression that caring for the destitute is a much more important part of their religion than rock-smashing infidel kids is.