Oft times the claim is that other faiths are merely devil worship in disguise, either knowingly or unknowingly. Other times the claim is that the other religion is worshiping the same god with a different name…without saying out loud that the other religion isn’t quite doing it right.
Speaking as a lifelong atheist myself, I think you’re overreacting here. Of course an all-powerful, all-benevolent supreme creator deity is supposed to be policing your thoughts and feelings as well as your actions.
Not coveting, in the sense of consciously resisting temptations to wallow in feelings of deprivation and envy because other people have more or better stuff than I do, is good spiritual practice. It makes life better for everybody when people are actively trying not to engage in useless resentment of other people’s good fortune that involves no injustice to themselves. If there were in fact a deity who had a right to issue divine commandments to human beings, “do not covet” would be a good candidate for the list.
(ISTM that this illustrates another potential disadvantage of losing shared societal awareness of traditional religious perspectives, and having nothing to replace them with but the mindset of secular legal frameworks. It encourages very simplistic notions of clear binary divisions between actions on the one hand, and feelings and thoughts on the other. The former are considered completely voluntary events that the individual is automatically totally responsible for, while the latter are considered completely uncontrollable phenomena that by definition are none of anybody else’s business. Traditional theological doctrine, despite its numerous and often horrific inadequacies in many respects, at least tends to be a little more sophisticated about the complexities of interaction between cognition, emotion and behavior.)
As a religious teen with abusive parents, that one absolutely destroyed me. I blamed myself for everything happening because obviously I wasn’t honoring them hard enough. Every conversation with God was about how I could do better, when it should have been about how to get the hell out of an abusive situation. That guilt stayed with me for much of my life.
Fuck that commandment.
I asked my friend about it, who is a Presbyterian Minister, and he said sometimes the best thing to do to honor your parents is to go no contact. I’m not sure I follow the logic but I appreciate him recognizing some parents are not good for you.
I assure you that is not my objection here. I don’t think YOU understand them. If they thought you were a Christian, they wouldn’t think you were going to hell. They think that you are because they think you’re not a Christian.
They don’t know I’m not a Christian. We’re discussing evolution, not religion (well, they should be different) and plenty of Christians of course accept evolution.
Now I may grant that they think I’m not a Christian in the No True Scotsman way of claiming that Catholics, say, are not really Christian, but I have no evidence of this.
So the only think they know about me is that I argue for evolution and I’m not a Biblical literalist.
That is how it was with my dad. The divorce from my mother was pretty upsetting to me, especially when I heard her side of it, which I take for what actually happened. And her divorce from the church helped facilitate mine. In the end, after about age 20, I never discussed religion with him at all, and he (the man who had the 20-volume-5-language biblical concordance on the living room bookshelf) never tried to drag me into it. I stood beside him at his wife’s funeral and “sang” from the hymnal per program, because that is not the day to be a dick (even though for the sake of being with this woman he emotionally traumatized my mother in bible study class to drive her out of his house).
So generally, my attitude is that discussions about religion are exactly like discussions about taking a crap or sexual activities. It is a deeply personal matter. Sorry, my new friend, not interested in talking about it.
Weird. Sorry, it showed up for me. Anyhow, it was a list of the IQs of the Nuremberg Nazi defendants and most were Mensan/Intertel levels. Although unsurprising given that you don’t rise to the top ranks of a government apparatus like that without a high IQ.
Getting back to the OP topic: I’d say there is a huge difference in what kind of atheist one is.
If you were always atheist, raised atheist, you probably find it totally unremarkable.
But if you were raised highly religious, then become atheist, it’s terrifying. You’re having your safety net ripped away from you. It’s almost like jumping out of a plane but finding out mid-fall that you didn’t actually have a parachute after all.
Maybe not the best analogy, but it’s like someone being born an orphan and thinks it’s unremarkable to have no parents, versus someone raised with parents who suddenly die.
Given that IQ testing and Nazi dogma alike were grounded in racist pseudoscience, I agree: I don’t find it the least bit surprising that someone rising to the top ranks of a government apparatus like that would score well on a circa-1940s IQ test. But perhaps not for the same reasons you find it unsurprising.
Hehe. I was raised by Presbyterian parents who encouraged you to question things. My current wife thought a fight was going to break out at the dinner table the first time she had dinner with us (long after I had become an atheist). Nope, that was just dinner table conversation. It developed into that over the years.
I still think Presbyterianism is an odd faith, but it does allow one to question things. If nothing else, my parents differentiated between honoring them and agreeing with everything they said. I loved them and honored them, but they were just people when it came to logically thinking about something they said. Their attitude seemed to be “Challenge me. If I can’t out-logic a child, they may be right.” Though, my mother seemed to regret that I had no faith in her old age. But she seemed to see that as her own failing, not mine.
I was raised pretty religiously. I was confirmed Presbyterian, and got an A+ in Catholic Communicant’s class (I attended a Catholic Jr. High). But fact is, when I finally realized I could understand all of that but I still didn’t believe in a bit of it, it was actually a small relief because it was hard to make any sense of it. I understood the rules and how to apply them, but didn’t really understand why any of them were actually important. When I finally figured out that any clam had to be backed by hard evidence that had to be reproducible, it was a giant relief. by the time I was in my mid-20s, I understood that any religious story had the same value to me as a well written comic book. I might learn a lot about people by reading it, but god wasn’t really entering into it.
But the fact was, I lost my religiousness during my formative years (heck, I’d hadn’t even gotten past heavy petting). I can’t imagine what it’s like for a 30 year old to go through the same experience, even though I was “into it” enough to get certified before I lit out for the territories.
Yeah, I was in my mid-30s when it finally started hitting me that this Christianity thing was chock-full of red flags everywhere. It was, and is, a big fright.
It’s like as if I were an airplane taking off from Los Angeles, thinking I was supposed to fly to New York, only finding out halfway that I was supposed to go to Vancouver (or in fact that I wasn’t even given the destination name at all and had to figure out what the destination is - at 600 miles per hour.)
For me, it was a fairly gradual process that played out over six or eight years, mostly mid-to-late teens. As though there were these things attached to me that would atrophy and fall off, and I would just keep walking. There was a particularly difficult moment when I was watching the Burton/Taylor Doctor Faustus and some of the images started to rouse old demons, but I think I have gotten most of them killed off by now. Finally.
I was brought up in the Lutheran church (Rocky Mountain synod, not Missouri - it’s a big difference) and joined the Methodist church as an adult with young children. These are some of the boring, garden-variety religions that don’t take the Bible literally and go easy on the hellfire. My pastor taught us that heaven was the presence of God and hell was His absence, for instance, and the message of love for one’s neighbor and service to others was paramount. It was incumbent upon us to do the right thing not for fear of punishment, but because it pleases God.
When I realized that I don’t actually believe in God, it was a lot like the conversion experiences I’ve heard new Christians talk about. One day, I just realized that I was just talking to myself when I was praying. It wasn’t really traumatic in any way, except when I stopped being involved in the community aspects of church. It’s not like my moral compass has changed. Because I learned that it’s my duty to do the right thing and to care for others just because it’s the right thing, I don’t feel the need for any other belief system.
I also don’t look down on people who do believe, except for those who treat others badly. I can respect someone’s beliefs without sharing them. This is assuming, of course, that they’re not trying to force me to live by their religion.
This is a pretty good analogy. I was about 18 when I became an atheist after a very traumatic year, and I turned hard into Nietzsche. He had the perfect words for what I was feeling.
Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?
I thought it was like falling out of a plane without a parachute, certain to hit the ground…and then finding out you did have a parachute. 
I think a more accurate analogy is jumping out of the plane without a parachute, then realizing gravity doesn’t exist.
It’s an analogy.
I have acrophobia and arachnophobia, so for me it’s like being pushed out of an airplane without a parachute and falling into a pit of spiders.
I didn’t have that experience. When I was religious (say, under about 13 years of age) I did get that feeling of being embraced by God, of feeling his presence, of feeling sorry for those who weren’t ‘saved’. I thought I was a lucky kid for being born into a Christian family.
But when I started questioning, it wasn’t scary at all. It was more like an elightenment. If I felt any emotions about it, it was annoyance that I had been indoctrinated for so long. And of course everyone around me was still religious and I had to go to church, but I enjoyed that anyway by focusing on the historical aspects of the faith, critical thinking about the religious parts, the singing, and the social connections.
I did have an aunt force me to sit while she prayed for my immortal soul after I asked one too many penetrating questions. That wasn’t scary though - just annoying.
Perhaps if I had lost my faith later in life I would have felt differently.
I’d say it’s more like realizing that there is no plane, and you’ve been flying under your own power all along.
I’m Batman!
No, wait, he didn’t fly either…
I’m Superman!