Flaming religious people on TSR

your sig!

Like it?

I was thinking the same actually.. it's plastic right?

No, it's a hundred percent real

Why would it be fake?

Before I start, Im atheist.

Irrelevant.

I've been seeing a lot of threads recently where if anyone even mentions religion, it just descends into a God-bashing session. This just seems so hypocrtical, to flame religious people for being "arrogant" and "closed-minded" when we atheists literally tear anyone to shreds for mentioning spirituality.

Perhaps you don't know the meaning of the word 'hypocrisy', but what you are describing is not hypocrisy. It would be hypocritical of an Atheist to tell a religious person not to insult an Atheist, and then for an Atheist to insult a religious person. However, that's not what I do. What I do, is I say that if you think my ideas are ridiculous, unfeasible, totally off the wall and illegitimate, based on fallicious premises or completely illogical, then you may insult my idea and tear it to shreds. And I, in turn, do the same with religious people when I find their ideas to carry those attributes. Most religious ideas DO have those attributes, hence I rip them to shreds, and I'm perfectly able to do that without hypocrisy - my practice is what I preach. To quote Jefferson:

"Ridicule is he only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."

That goes for both religious and atheist propositions. But as it turns out, rational atheist propositions are rarely unintelligible, and religious propositions are. That's why the ridicule is one-sided.

No, you cannot prove that a god exists, and to try so is stupid. But it is equally stupid to try to prove that god doesnt exist. We can disprove fundamentalist beliefs, such as a young earth or creationism, but anything supernatural, by definition, exists beyond the natural world and beyond what we can measure. Belief in god is a matter of faith, an irrational assumption where rationality cannot apply.

You want to talk about irrational assumptions? You want to talk about jumping to conclusions? You want to talk about arbitrary premises? Okay. Here's quite an fallicious premise with no basis whatsoever:

The outside of the universe is different from the inside of the universe. The 'natural world' is confined to the inside of the universe, and the outside of the universe does not follow the same 'natural law' of the inside of the universe.

Do you have ANY evidence AT ALL that the universe even HAS a boundary? Do you? Do you have any evidence at ALL that there is an 'inside' and 'outside' of the universe? Do you have ANY evidence at all that the 'natural law' of the 'inside' of the universe is different to the 'natural law' of the 'outside' of the universe? No, you don't. Therefore you have no basis on which to write off any attempt to prove or disprove God. Until you can prove that the outside of the universe is any different from the inside (whatever inside and outside actually practically MEANS), then you have absolutely no reason to assume that it is, in principle, impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God.

You can question the need for such an assumption, fine, it may seem needless or improbable. But I know from experience that liberal religion does a great deal of good for some people, giving them hope, motivation to be better and do good things, and generally helps them to be happy. What's the point in insulting that?

I would love for there to be a form of religion which was liberal and tolerant, and without any by-products. I would love for religious people not to be oppressive and dismissive of progress at every turn. I would love for a religious person to be able to keep their 'personal relationship with God' very personal indeed. So personal in fact, that it doesn't have massively detrimental effects on the rest of humanity. However, there is no such form of religion. Ever since the dawn of man there has never been a form of purely good religion. I cannot imagine how a religion could exist and be completely good. And I have no idea what 'liberal religion' even means, because religion, by definition, is a set of beliefs that people hold to be true. The truth is not liberal, the truth is the truth. So if you state something to be true, as a religious person, there's no 'liberal' about it.

In anycase, this form of religion which does nothing but give people hope and motivation without causing harm does not exist. And btw, as an atheist, do you not find that you don't NEED religion to draw hope and motivation? I certainly don't. I'm one of the most motivated people I know, very optimistic, cheerful, productive, and not in any way 'down in the dumps' or cynical. The fact of the matter is that, even if religion can be motivational, there are alternative sources of motivation (such that atheists use) which do not have the same harmful by-products that religion does. That is why it must be questioned.

Before I start, Im atheist.

I've been seeing a lot of threads recently where if anyone even mentions religion, it just descends into a God-bashing session. This just seems so hypocrtical, to flame religious people for being "arrogant" and "closed-minded" when we atheists literally tear anyone to shreds for mentioning spirituality.

No, you cannot prove that a god exists, and to try so is stupid. But it is equally stupid to try to prove that god doesnt exist. We can disprove fundamentalist beliefs, such as a young earth or creationism, but anything supernatural, by definition, exists beyond the natural world and beyond what we can measure.Belief in god is a matter of faith, an irrational assumption where rationality cannot apply.

You can question the need for such an assumption, fine, it may seem needless or improbable. But I know from experience that liberal religion does a great deal of good for some people, giving them hope, motivation to be better and do good things, and generally helps them to be happy. What's the point in insulting that?

Before I start, Im atheist.

I've been seeing a lot of threads recently where if anyone even mentions religion, it just descends into a God-bashing session. This just seems so hypocrtical, to flame religious people for being "arrogant" and "closed-minded" when we atheists literally tear anyone to shreds for mentioning spirituality.

No, you cannot prove that a god exists, and to try so is stupid. But it is equally stupid to try to prove that god doesnt exist.

Phugoid.

Before I start, Im atheist.

I've been seeing a lot of threads recently where if anyone even mentions religion, it just descends into a God-bashing session. This just seems so hypocrtical, to flame religious people for being "arrogant" and "closed-minded" when we atheists literally tear anyone to shreds for mentioning spirituality.

No, you cannot prove that a god exists, and to try so is stupid. But it is equally stupid to try to prove that god doesnt exist. We can disprove fundamentalist beliefs, such as a young earth or creationism, but anything supernatural, by definition, exists beyond the natural world and beyond what we can measure. Belief in god is a matter of faith, an irrational assumption where rationality cannot apply.

You can question the need for such an assumption, fine, it may seem needless or improbable. But I know from experience that liberal religion does a great deal of good for some people, giving them hope, motivation to be better and do good things, and generally helps them to be happy. What's the point in insulting that?

You can question the need for such an assumption, fine, it may seem needless or improbable. But I know from experience that liberal religion does a great deal of good for some people, giving them hope, motivation to be better and do good things, and generally helps them to be happy. What's the point in insulting that?

What! Relgious people have been around long before people started questioning religion, then why do religious people deserve ridicule?

What! Relgious people have been around long before people started questioning religion, then why do religious people deserve ridicule?

Before I start, Im atheist.

I've been seeing a lot of threads recently where if anyone even mentions religion, it just descends into a God-bashing session. This just seems so hypocrtical, to flame religious people for being "arrogant" and "closed-minded" when we atheists literally tear anyone to shreds for mentioning spirituality.
...

wow. ok.

Firstly, a lot of people have mentioned that Im criticising any debate about religion. Thats not what Im saying, all I mean is that I dont think people should just have abuse hurled at them for even mentioning their beliefs, no matter what those beliefs are. Definitely, debate with them, engage with them, but dont just go "lmao religion noobzor gtfo tsr", which is what seems to go on a lot around here.

Ah, I see. Well I must say I very rarely see any of that in the theology subforum. I, an Atheist, always do my best to construct logical, rational and intellectually satisfying arguments against religious beliefs when a question is raised. If somebody comes on and states their beliefs, I ask them to justify them. When they justify them, I reply to them and point out the fallicies in their premises, or conclusions. I provide them with alternative-context parallels, and I invite them to read about philosophical arguments against their points. I only ever resort to the ad hominem after maybe 2/3 days has gone by, and a single user is still failing to grasp my point, still failing to do further reading in areas they are not read-up on, still using their fallicious premises to derive the same fallicious conclusions, etc. I don't fully agree with Jefferson. I think a lot of people who make unintelligible propositions are simply unaware that they are unintelligible, and why. So I think the first response to an unintelligible proposition is to flag it as unintelligible, and explain why. If, after that point, the person persists to use the same argument over and over again despite it's unintelligibility, then it becomes clear that the reason they have belief A is not because they didn't realise it was unintelligible, but that they refuse to accept what they KNOW to be true - that it IS unintelligible. At that point you can no longer reason, or use logic or rationality to make your point, because they don't respond to that. And it's at that point at which I think Jefferson's advice of ridicule comes into play. And I do hope my ridicule is a tad more sophisticated and witty than "lmao religion noobzor gtfo tsr".

I do think my atheism is relevant to this, I'm talking about my perspecitve on religion, that even though I dont believe god exists, I think other people should be allowed to, as long as they dont enforce hardline beliefs on people around them.

Well this is my fundamental belief too. Absolutely. I couldn't agree and I wouldn't change this statement one bit. Where we probably differ is how we categorise religious intervention. For example, I'm equally as harsh as those who directly impose their religion as those who do it indirectly. Some people, for example, with the same fundamental perspective as us, find no harm in a child being brought up in the religion of their parents. Afterall, as long as they aren't trying to bring up other people's children, and they aren't physically harming the child, and they're still fundamentally good people, then what can be arguable about that? Well I think the indoctrination of children is unseparable from mental child abuse. I think the argument of 'it's their child, they can bring it up as they see fit' is a nonsense argument. I don't believe it IS 'their' child. I don't believe anybody can claim ownership and rights to another person in such a way that they can freely chose what beliefs to feed them as facts. If I were to attribute ownership of a child to anybody, I would have to be quite allegorical about it, and personify the Earth and say, this child belongs to the Earth. And by that I would mean that this child's beliefs and future actions are going to have direct consequences on the rest of humanity, on the earth as a whole. Their beliefs will contribute to the desctruction or rehabilitation of the earth. Their beliefs will be passed on to the next generation, to the next generation to the next generation, almost ad infinitum, and the unnecessary lies and tales will never be stamped out. It's obviously necessary to teach your child to be a moral person, but as we have seen countless times with secular families, religion is not a prerequisite to morality. You are a perfectly moral Atheist, so am I, so are millions of other people, and in the future, when these atheists have children, there will be even more perfectly moral non-religious people on earth. So WHY o WHY does the teaching of morality need to be coupled with fantastical stories, myths and fairy-tales which are asserted as truth? Somewhere down the line, maybe not in this generation, somebody will take these myths seriously. Somebody will attempt to fulfill prophecies, get into heaven via martyrdom, try to convert others, attempt to murder infidels, force their beliefs on others, etc. Now, childhood indoctrination is just on example of how a MORAL religious family can indirectly bring about great harm. But there are many examples which I could cite of such indirect harm. My point, on the whole, is this: Even though there are perfectly moral religious people out there who don't enforce their views on others, or try to put a halt to the progress of morality/intellectualism/technology/science, and are generally good people - they still have many many routes of indirect harm. Although they may not actively employ religion for evil deeds, they are still keeping the tales alive, and generations later they WILL be used for evil deeds. Many generations later they WILL be forced upon other people, they WILL be used to justify murder and oppression, they WILL be used. When you teach people morality through religion, they pretty much are presented with a choice of two things:

1) Taking the morality, and treating the stories as no more then allegorical examples.
2) Taking the stories, and treating the morality as a changeable by-product of the stories - morality can be changed and twisted, as long as it is justified by scripture.

Quite clearly, we want 1), but 2) undoubtedly happens more often than we'd like to admit. That is why religion is indirectly harmful. There IS a way to teach morality without the stories such that option 2) is utterly unavailable. If option 2) is unavailable, then the twisting of scripture to justify evil is unavailable.

I would say its' hypocrisy for an atheist to have a blanket ban on any form of religion, to refuse to engage with it, or even consider it0 . That itself is a form of fundamentalism, which atheists (including myself) criticise.

Well, yes. I agree with you. I don't know if you'll have read The God Delusion, but in it, Dawkins introduces a kind of 7-point scale. Something like the political compass for religious belief, or lack thereof. It goes as follows:

1) 100% theist. I know there is a god.
2) There probably is a God, nearly 100% sure.
3) I'm practically agnostic, leaning towards theist. About 51% in favour of God.
4) I'm 50/50, totally agnostic.
5) I'm practically agnostic, leaning towards atheist. About 51% in favour of no God.
6) There probably is no God, nearly 100% sure.
7) 100% atheist. I know there is no god.

Now. I am a 6. I'd probably hazard a guess that you are 6. I've yet to meet a rational atheist who made his decision philosophically via thought who isn't a 6. The only people I meet who are a 7 are these people whose first response to religion is 'lulz, thtz stupid, n00b, gtfo'. Usually people at 7 haven't thought about the issues, and their default turn to 7 is usually a result of anarchy against religious oppression, or anarchy against nothing in general, or because they have been indoctrinated by parents who are also point 7 Atheists. It's invalid. As you said, we currently have no proof for the non-existence of God, so higher than a 6 or lower than a 2 would be arrogant, unfounded, unreasonable, and completely arbitrary.

My point is this: This hypocrisy you speak of is only applicable between people in category 7 and category 1. It is completely hypocritical of somebody who absolutely KNOWS God isn't true, and isn't open to that less than 0.00000001% chance that there is a God, to suggest that level 7 theists are idiots for using the exact same unfounded process to reach a different conclusion.

But like I said, I'm not a 7, and barely any Atheist worth debating with is any more than a 6. So it's not hypocritical for me to ridicule the processes of a level 7 theist, because I myself do not use these processes to reach my conclusions. I even think it's not hypocritical for me to ridicule the processes of a level 2/3 theist. Most of the time they go via gut feeling rather than philsophical/logical/rational means. And that is why it's not hypocritical for me to ridicule their processes - after I have attempted to reason with them, and enlighten them as to their fallicies, of course.


You say that we have absolutely no reason to make irrational assumptions about God, (i guess this is an extenstion of Occam's razor). I think god's existence is improbable, so I dont make that assumption either. If all you care about is the empirical truth, there isn't. There's no reason for a liberal belief in god, take liberal christians who dont attack gays or evolution but believe in charity and an afterlife, hence the irrationality. But that belief does some people a lot of good, and if it doesnt enfringe on what we logically know, I see no reason to attack it.

It wasn't an irrational assumption about God you were making. What you were doing is drawing the conclusion of NOMA (non-overlapping magisterium), which states that Science and Religion do not overlap, and hence Science is in no way suited to uncovering or disproving religious 'truthes' which are based on faith. That's a perfectly logical conclusion, based on your premise - but unfortunately the premise is where the problem lies. There is no logical reason to believe that outside the boundary of the universe, is a region of space (maybe not even space?) which is ungoverned by the natural laws which govern the regions of space inside the boundary of the universe. Now, if this was a true premise, and we also were careful to add that God lay outside the universe, then NOMA would be a correct conclusion to make (except it wouldn't explain the Godly events that happen inside the universe, something that religious people often cite as a regular occurence, but are unable to justify NOMA aswell as hold the belief that he operates INSIDE the universe). However, like I pointed out, there is nothing to suggest that the boundary of the universe is a divide between two different versions of natural law, and that is why that argument falls down. Not only is it something that hasn't been evidenced, I don't think it's something that could be evidenced, because it relies on the existence of a 'boundary' of the universe, which is quite a meaningless concept if you ask me, or most physicists.

In response to your part about liberal religion being a good thing for good people without infringing on other people, I return to you to my argument that no religion is unharmful because religion uses indirect routes stemming from good liberal people, and via these routes it finds itself becoming harmful and oppressive.

I think to say that there is "no such" form of liberal religion, that all religion is radical and oppressive and opposed to science, represents exactly the narrow mindedness at the root of the problem.

Well I think that you are limiting your considerations to people in this generation who use religion for good, are liberal and do not infringe. And as I have pointed out, even from here religion can sprout and do its evil. As I said, as long as the stories of religion as kept alive and handed down as truth, generations will always have the option of taking the morality from the metaphorical stories, or changing morality and justifying it via the metaphorical stories. I propose that your view is narrow-minded because it is far too focussed on the 'here and now' of good religious people, rather than how their teachings will evolve through the generations (as we have seen before) into a beast of unstoppable tyranny.

A lot of atheists and a lot of theists have a very polarised view of the debate, that there are only hardcore atheists who hate god and hate religion, and only hardline religious nutheads who marry their cousins and burn atheists at the stake. This black and white picture of the world only does harm.

Well I do not justify the actions of these Atheists or Theists, but I don't think that wiping out level 1 and 7 belief would wipe out the evils of religion altogether. Even if we did wipe it out in this generation, I have already shown that this black and white polarisation is an almost necessary by-product of the evolution and passing down of religion, liberal or not.

Yes, there are fundamentalists, and I will always debate with those people and try to talk to them about science. But there definitely are some very nice, normal, religious people out there. I know some first hand, my schools christian union is full of some great people who have exactly the liberal religious belief that I would support (ok, there's one or two nutheads, but im pretty sure they're nutheads about everything). To deny that these people exist is like denying that the earth is round, or denying that we evolved from apes.

Yes, I too know of extremely nice religious people who have liberal viewpoints. But I have a few points to make:

I don't deny the existence of liberal people. That would, as you say, be absurd. However, I do deny the existence of 'liberal christianity'. Christianity is defined by the doctrines it has and the holy book it is based on. There is NO other way to define a religion other than by the doctrines they teach, and the source of these doctrines - scripture. So, Christianity is not a changeable concept. 'Christian' is an adjective which describes a person who ascribes to the doctrines of Christianity, believes them to be true, and trusts the holy book on which they are based. For you to be a 'liberal Christian', you would have to dispose of hundreds of these doctrines. The christian doctrine, and the christian holy book IS anti-gay, it IS anti-abortion, it IS against other religions, it IS against working on Sundays, it IS against thousands of other things which liberal people are not against. For a person to be a 'liberal christian', I'm sure you'll agree they'd have to dispose of these beliefs. If you dispose of these beliefs, you are not ascrinbing to Christian doctrine, therefore you cannot be a Christian. So, the term 'liberal christian' has no more meaning than the political parallel 'Liberal right-winger'.

Allow me to draw the political parallel, as I have done in other parts of the forum.

Let's imagine a man who, in his teens, is a left-wing liberal. He's pro-choice, pro-same sex marriage, pro-legalisation of cannabis, pro everything! He's entirely liberal. In his 40s though, he begins to realise that liberal isn't working for him anymore. He's becoming a bit more of a hardass, he can't stand drugs, he decides abortion is wrong. So, I ask you, what would it be wise for this man to do:

1) Choose a new adjective for himself. The word 'liberal' has a very formal definition which describes the person he used to be, but not the person he is now. Perhaps the word 'conservative' is more up his street now, perhaps he should start using that to describe himself.

2) Re-define the word liberal. Sure, his views have changed, but as long as he is careful to explain what HIS type of liberalism is, then people can't say he's not liberal, because he has redefined the world liberal to suit his new conservative beliefs. Or perhaps, he could call himself a liberal conservative!

We both know option 2) is ludicrous. If adjectives with formal definitions were subject to redefinition by individuals, then those adjectives would lose all meaning, would lose all purpose. Describe yourself as liberal would be meaningless to the person you are describing to, because since the word liberal can be redefined to account for anything, then there's no way this person could know how you could have redefined it for yourself.

So I hope you see my point that the word Christian is an adjective which describes somebody who ascribes to Christianity. And Christianity is a religion which is defined very formally by the doctrines and beliefs it has. So if you deviate from these beliefs (the same way the man in the political parallel did) then it would be an abuse of the adjective to continue to describe yourself as a Christian. The word 'Christian' would lose all meaning. And the oxymoron 'liberal Christian' is, in anycase, nonsensical unless you DO change the meaning of the word 'Christian', and as I've shown, that would be a pointless way to go about things.

So in conclusion, I do not deny that liberal people exist who describe themselves as Christians. But I do deny that these people are accurate in their descriptions of themselves, and I put it to you that the term 'liberal Christian' is a paradoxical oxymoron which cannot make sense without changing the meaning of the word 'liberal' or the meaning of the word 'Christian', and why would you do that when you should just find the proper adjectives which exist to describe you?

Wow, long post. Im gonna go make some tea.

Even longer post! I'm going to put my fingers in an icebag!