Well, there you go. I don’t know where you’re from, but I’m from a major sports town. And here, arguing whether such and such team is better than ours’ is NOT considered “subjective”.
Catholic vs atheist? Meh, who cares? Boring!
Steelers fan vs Patriots fan? Okay, get out of the way and start making bets.
(Although ain’t nobody more superstitious than athletes and sports fans. No matter if they’re religious or not)
Ok. And?
And may the Force be with you.
So what’s the point of your original post? People will fight wars over all sorts of things and justify them regarding whatever philosophy works. The Iraq war was justified somewhat by spreading liberal democracy in the Arab world.
Well start a thread about that. Or abortion.
At least those would be Great Debates, I guess
Why are religious beliefs separated from every other mythological/paranormal/delusional beliefs?
They’re not. It just depends on your point of view. From my perspective, religion IS mythology and always has been. If a belief in invisible sky man gets you through the dark night, who am I to say you’re wrong?
well that’s fine, just don’t start a war over your sky man.
OP, you’re all over the place in this thread. You’ve spent most of this thread railing about not just wars fought in the name of religion, but people who believe in their sky men expressing that belief in their interactions with you (and the rest of society). But now, you say, “well that’s fine.” So, is that fine, or not?
If you keep to yourself to get yourself through the dark night.
Wow. 
Do you think i’m suggesting all religious people should be round up and put in concentration camps, as some have suggested? Keep it to yourself. Don’t start wars. Don’t impose your belief on society. If you want to believe in the paranormal. have fun with that. its a free country.
So, rather than simply debate one person over the moral framework for discussing abortion, maybe I should address some of the OP’s more general issues.
For me, it’s a bit of 3, a little bit of 4, and quite a lot of some other stuff.
I’m an atheist. No quibbling or hesitancy about it. I was not brought up with religion, I’ve never believed in a deity, and at some general level I guess I think of all religions as, at their core, irrational belief systems. I also grew up in, and spent the first part of my adult life in, a country (Australia) where religion intruded much less dramatically into everyday social, cultural, and political life than it does in the United States. I’ve now lived in the US for 20 years (fuck, time flies!), and I’m also a college instructor in American history, with my key area of specialty being American intellectual history, which (especially before 1900) encompasses a lot of religious texts. I occasionally teach our department’s course in American Religious History.
I agree with the people who have argued “Why be a dick about it?”, and that applies especially for the little things where it costs me literally nothing to just go along with it. My American wife’s family is mainly a bunch of good heathens like me, but there’s one evangelical aunt who always insists on saying grace before dinner when we get together. I get a bit annoyed at the fact that it never even occurs to her to ask whether anyone else wants to participate—she just takes it upon herself to insist that we do it—but I sit there and wait patiently for 20 seconds while she says her prayer. I don’t pray with her; I don’t say amen; and that 20 seconds is no hardship at all, especially as it only happens (for me) once or twice a year.
For me, the main areas where I get exercised about religion is in areas where it actually matters, especially related to public policy. I was, for example, disappointed with the Supreme Court’s broadening of the ministerial exception in the Morrissey-Beru and Biel cases this term. I also don’t like the way that the court seems increasingly willing to let religious organizations escape compliance with generally-applicable discrimination laws, as in the Little Sisters of the Poor Case. I fear that the Fulton case next term, over religious adoption agencies that refuse to serve gay couples, might facilitate further discrimination by religious entities.
In general, though, I really have something of a live-and-let-live attitude towards religion. People can believe what they want. There is no requirement for me to listen to their proselytizing, or to engage them in moral or social or political debates on their terms, so what they believe, in general, does me no real harm. I’m not interested in going around and making myself obnoxious to religious people, although if a religious person asks me what I think about something, then they’ll get the unvarnished truth; I’m not going to be a dick, but I’m also not going to soft-pedal my arguments to make them feel better.
Sure you can state that religious people are delusional. Who’s going to stop you? The question you probably need to ask yourself is what good it will do, for anyone else, and especially for you. Is a religious person ever going to convince you to become religious by ridiculing your worldview? Probably not, right? Then it seems pretty unlikely that insulting them will have much effect on their worldview either.
If a religious person got in my face and kept insisting that I listen to them about the word of god, or whatever, I might, if they refused to leave me alone, let fly with some choice words about how delusional they are. But I’ve been in the US for 20 years, and that’s never happened, at least not to the extent that I felt anything more than mild annoyance.
As for your last sentence, I’m going to put on my history prof hat here. If you don’t understand how belief in the supernatural might be considered normal, I would submit that you must not be familiar with the vast majority of recorded human history. Atheists like you and me are in the historical minority, my friend. In purely numerical terms, some sort of religious or supernatural belief is historically quite normal for human beings as a species.
No, I don’t think that in the slightest (and please don’t put words in my mouth). From what you’ve said in this thread, I think that you think that any sort of religious or supernatural belief is bullshit, and you can’t understand how any sane person would believe such things.
But, as most people in this society (I assume you’re in the U.S.) are religious (at least nominally so), and as religion has wound up being a facet of public life in this society, it makes you unhappy that you continually have to hear about it. Further, you feel like society won’t let you “tell it like it is,” and you don’t like the fact that, if you tell religious people that they’re delusional, they’ll take offense.
Does that sum it up?
[quote=“kenobi_65, post:338, topic:917474”]
Understand that an awful lot of people feel that telling them that they’re delusional about their deeply-held beliefs .,.[/quote]
Not sure why you say that. Maya or Delusion is one of the core teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. Life or existence itself is considered an delusion by many.
Not that Hinduism or Buddhism don’t have problems, but this ain’t one.
I admit that I know very little about either of those religions; I named them specifically in response to the OP, who had named them specifically (along with Christians and Muslims).
Thanks for a well articulated response. My only quibble would be we may be using the word “normal” differently. Yes, humans have historically, and currently, been religious, and as such believing in mythological beings is the “norm” or normal. I was using the word “normal” more as “not-crazy”
Enough with the bad-mouthing of small towns where atheists would be ostracized or have their tires slashed because no one is tolerant of differences in religious beliefs or the lack there of. I live in a small city in the middle of god-forsaken plains (yep, I can say that right out loud here) in a dark red state and I am not shunned or bullied because I am an atheist nor do I have to hide it. My son started a Secular Humanist Club on campus at the state university and the student association gave the funds to sustain it and continue to. So, please don’t assume the worst about small or middle America without experiencing us.
That’s not what I said. I said that I cannot be harmed by it being aborted. Nor can you, nor can the pro-life activist.
When I was a zygote, I didn’t really care, and aborting me at that time would have caused me no harm. No more harm than had my parents not had intercourse that particular night.
Now, had I been miscarried or otherwise unwillingly terminated, my parents may have certainly been harmed, but me, not at all.
My highlight on your “But”, because it is doing some seriously heavy lifting here.
Any moral system must have a foundation, at least an axiom upon which to build. If you feel that enlightened self interest is not a good foundation upon which to build, may I ask what you found your moral system upon?
Building a moral system upon arbitrary beliefs allows one to come to any conclusion one wants, leaving the justification up to a higher power, rather than accepting responsibility for them.
The reason that your “But” is working so hard there is that I have not seen a pro-life argument that didn’t start from a position of belief, rather than secularism.
When you say based on a “secular position” that’s pretty vague. I’ve been very specific about how I derive my position. What is the starting point of a “secular position”?
You’ve not poked any holes in the logic of my moral system, only pointed out that it doesn’t take beliefs into account, which I see as a feature, not a bug.
I do feel that it is inherently consistent, but I do not have any claim that it is exclusive.
All systems need to start with axioms. Math wouldn’t work if you didn’t just accept a few axioms that cannot be proven within the system that they define. A moral system is the same. Most moral systems use religion as the axioms upon which they are based. If you remove religion, then what is left but self interest? What are the axioms upon which you build your secular moral system?