How about a respectful religious vs non-religious discussion?

[Locutus of Bored]

WTF does any of that have to do with this topic?

As opposed to your last two mini-modding posts which have added nothing new or relevant to the discussion? A lot.

Taylirious said the phrase "God has a plan" has never given him comfort since the horrible frequently triumph while the good suffer, and he used Donald Trump as an example of that, asking if we all agreed that Trump was horrible. TwoJakes did not agree about Trump, and when asked for clarification, he provided it. All perfectly on-topic and brief, if a little bit strange. But then, this has been a very strange topic and a very strange election right from the start of both, so that's kind of fitting.

 

[JWPlatt]

Religion -> Hell

Religious irony: Some Christians who believe in hell accuse Wiccans of devil worship, yet the Wiccans have no devil while Christians do.

 

[Kemaiku]

Yes, having spent time with quite a few followers of both I know that.

 

[TrickyDickie]

Religious irony: Some Christians who believe in hell accuse Wiccans of devil worship, yet the Wiccans have no devil while Christians do.

Very true. Satan was an invention of Christianity, although with heavy 'borrowing' and twisting/mischaracterization of Pan from the Old Religion.

It was easy for the Salem witch hunters to accuse people of devil worship and run with the whole thing from there. Truth was out the window.

Wicca today is not the same animal as it was many years ago. A lot has been warped with the money spells, love spells, etc to appeal to the 'me generation'. Wicca in its more original and purer form is still out there but not practiced by all that many.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

"Satan" was in the OT, so probably NOT cribbed from the "Old Religion" Of course, OT Satan is very little like modern-day "The Devil," which does contain additions from other mythologies.

I prefer stories where they are seen as different beings.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Very true. Satan was an invention of Christianity, although with heavy 'borrowing' and twisting/mischaracterization of Pan from the Old Religion.
.

Eh. Satan existed in Jewish tradition as an angel of YHWH who tried the faithful, presenting them with temptation and adversity so that they might prevail against them. He wasn't a rebel, though by the first century A.D. some Jews seem to have developed a monstrous conception of him, presumably the influence of Zoroastrian-inspired apocalypticisim. That worldview saw global history as a battle between a good god and an evil god, one which would eventually be won when a righteous messiah appeared to deliver the final blow against evil. Satan seems to have been promoted to evil opponent, if not quite a god. The only influence of Pan -- if any at all -- would be the silly visual people have of him in the west.

 

[HaventGotALife]

I suggest, for faithful and non-faithful alike, reading Frans De Waal's "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates." He postulates that genetics have something to do with morality, and that our primate cousins, as he's been a primatologist for 28 years when this book was published, are capable of great deeds of altruism and of sacrifice for the group. He argues against a "top-down" morality in favor of a "bottom-up." God doesn't create morality, we created God to serve our own morality. Still, he critiques the current atheist movement, led by Hitchens and Dawkins, as neo-atheists. He allows me to be an atheist without bashing the faithful in some display of pain and payback. Morality is still needed, and Eugenics proved, that science cannot rule the moral sphere, alone. This is important to understand, from all sides.

Personally, I believe, there has been at least 2,000 years of defining atheists as akin to Satan worshipers. Offer a moral alternative. Open a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, then, after the conversation has changed because people know good atheists in their lives, make the Ten Commandments banned from the courthouse a priority, when there is some will, outside of the community, to do so. By attacking religion, we feed the narrative we are driving people away from moral behavior. I refuse to believe that human morality and sacrifice is 2,000 years old, only.

So, that's my belief. Feel free to add your own thoughts.

 

[Amaris]

I suggest, for faithful and non-faithful alike, reading Frans De Waal's "The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates." He postulates that genetics have something to do with morality, and that our primate cousins, as he's been a primatologist for 28 years when this book was published, are capable of great deeds of altruism and of sacrifice for the group. He argues against a "top-down" morality in favor of a "bottom-up." God doesn't create morality, we created God to serve our own morality. Still, he critiques the current atheist movement, led by Hitchens and Dawkins, as neo-atheists. He allows me to be an atheist without bashing the faithful in some display of pain and payback. Morality is still needed, and Eugenics proved, that science cannot rule the moral sphere, alone. This is important to understand, from all sides.

Personally, I believe, there has been at least 2,000 years of defining atheists as akin to Satan worshipers. Offer a moral alternative. Open a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, then, after the conversation has changed because people know good atheists in their lives, make the Ten Commandments banned from the courthouse a priority, when there is some will, outside of the community, to do so. By attacking religion, we feed the narrative we are driving people away from moral behavior. I refuse to believe that human morality and sacrifice is 2,000 years old, only.

So, that's my belief. Feel free to add your own thoughts.

I have my own issues with Hitchens and Dawkins, to the point where while I can admire some of their work, I do not approve of their methods, nor their misogyny (which is another story). The only time I become frustrated with any sort of religiosity is when it's being used to either curtail my rights and the rights of others, or is being used to prevent genuine help from reaching those in desperate need. As a humanist, I cannot allow for such things. Otherwise, the religious, non-religious, and so on, can have discussions and while they will most assuredly disagree on any number of points, there's always the opportunity for civility and understanding.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Personally, I believe, there has been at least 2,000 years of defining atheists as akin to Satan worshipers. Offer a moral alternative. Open a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter, then, after the conversation has changed because people know good atheists in their lives, make the Ten Commandments banned from the courthouse a priority, when there is some will, outside of the community, to do so. By attacking religion, we feed the narrative we are driving people away from moral behavior. I refuse to believe that human morality and sacrifice is 2,000 years old, only.

- It's not atheist's responsibility to "offer a moral alternative" to anyone, since it's not a religion.
- Atheists already do open soup kitchens and homeless shelters and do many other charitable and altruistic things every day, just like everyone else.
- People already do know good atheists in their lives, but it's not incumbent on any group to "prove their goodness" to anyone else in order to receive basic dignity and respect from them in return. That should just be the default setting.
- The world is not an all or nothing zero sum game where you can only do one thing at a time and you can't start working on one thing until this other really difficult to overcome problem is solved first. That's how things don't get done, because there's always another obstacle someone will throw up and say we should solve first.
- Also, it's different people doing different things at different times, and not all working in concert with each other. Atheists are not a hive mind.
- Asking for religious representations to be removed from courthouses and other government facilities, or to be opened up to all belief systems and groups, is not "attacking religion" in any way. It's upholding the Constitution of this country. No atheists are taking away anyone's house of worship or telling them they can not practice their faith. There are religious people who wish to deny Muslims from opening houses of worship in certain areas or bar them from immigrating to this country, however. There is also discrimination in the fact that atheists are de facto barred from holding higher elected office because religious people refuse to vote for them because they are baselessly considered the least trusted group in America, largely because of unfortunate stereotypes like the ones in your well meaning but flawed post.
- The false narrative (not one you subscribe to, I know) that atheists are driving people away from moral behavior assumes that atheists don't have moral behavior themselves, when they have largely the same moral behavior as most other people in their region. Most atheists were raised by religious parents in religious families in religious neighborhoods in religious majority countries.
- Of course morality is more than 2,000 years old. The New Testament is derived from religious and moral teachings that proceeded it, and not just Judaism. The most fundamental morals are shared by and transcend religion and ideology. They're the basic building blocks of living in a functional civilization, and have existed before and would exist without organized religion, which is not to say religion has not contributed to the development and refinement of those morals over the centuries.

 

[Pingfah]

Err yeah, can anybody give me an estimate of how many soup kitchens the Atheist Collective will need to open before they will have sufficiently redeemed themselves in the eyes of the religious to to dare to ask for equal representation (equal being none hopefully) in the symbolisms of our political and legal systems?

And what sort of timescale are we talking here? A month of opening Soup Kitchens, a year, a decade? How will they know when they are redeemed? Will the Christians send them all a thank you card?

 

[HaventGotALife]

Err yeah, can anybody give me an estimate of how many soup kitchens the Atheist Collective will need to open before they will have sufficiently redeemed themselves in the eyes of the religious to to dare to ask for equal representation (equal being none hopefully) in the symbolisms of our political and legal systems?

And what sort of timescale are we talking here? A month of opening Soup Kitchens, a year, a decade? How will they know when they are redeemed? Will the Christians send them all a thank you card?

I am a member of the LGBT community. The tide turned rather quickly, when we changed the public perception from a gay man hooking up in a gay bar, spreading disease and being promiscuous, to families. Committed, long-term relationships, that are homes for children, and love was equal. I am not talking in absolutes, here. But the reality is, in 2004, George W. Bush, with one state with marriage equality, won a election by putting anti-gay initiatives up-and-down the ballot, in key states. 8 years later, 6-in-10 Americans, believed in Marriage Equality. That's a 30-point swing in 8 years. We are pretty evenly split--50-50--by Conservative and Liberal labels (I say those words, and not Democrat and Republican, because most of the country claims to be an Independent right now), so that's AT LEAST 10 percent of Conservatives that support marriage equality.

I am not talking in absolutes that atheists don't do such things. At my register, twice yesterday, someone overpaid me and I returned the money. I have taken 6 people into my home, some friends and family, that were homeless. I have volunteered at homeless shelters and handed out gift cards to those important to me, thrown 5 or 10 bucks at someone I know is poor, paid his cellphone bill this past month, stocked shelves at a food bank for 5 months, two days a week. I don't need to be told there are good atheists out there. I try to be one, and I am not perfect, but when I volunteer at a homeless shelter, it's in the basement of a church. It's not because American Atheists, opened a homeless shelter. I am talking about the community at-large, making a concentrated effort to establish institutions in society.

Why do we need this? Because, one, I wouldn't have to go to the basement of a church to make people's lives better. Secondly, nonbelievers make up 5-10% of the population. The perception right now, is angry atheists spouting rhetoric online in hateful chat-rooms. Just ask Carrie Underwood, who said that she was getting threats from atheists over her single, "Something in the Water," released in the waning days of 2014. Or the Pew Research studies that have found, consistently, people would rather vote for a Muslim Elected Official, than an atheist one. We are at the bottom of the list. The points have dropped by about 13 over the last 15 years, but that has more to do with people becoming a part of the community--agnostics and atheists--rather than anything the community has done to change public perception.

I want to help people, but the purpose of this is to sway people to apathy, or to be on our side, simply by doing good in the community. If a community denies and atheist organization the right to feed the poor, then you can explain to your community why we aren't helping the poor. Or you can let us into the community, and the perception changes, the association with needing God to have morality, will change. Suing in Federal Court has gotten us the same thing. Attacking the faithful in online communities, has gotten us the same--marginalized and mistrusted--and the Country will have to de-convert for their to be a change in perception. That takes a LOT longer to do.

 

[Pingfah]

I think your entire starting point is faulty. Atheists, by and large, do not identify as a collective, they don't do things in the name of Atheism, many of them don't even see what they have as any sort of belief system, but a lack of one. Why should they open Soup Kitchens in the name of nothing? Why would they identify themselves as Atheist Soup Kitchens, when there is no larger Atheist movement to serve? These Atheist organisations are largely doomed to insignificance because of the very nature of Atheism. I have no interest in taking on the trappings of religion to help religious people identify with me, it's not my job to change myself for their benefit. I think a lot of non believers feel the same.

And the idea that Atheists are feared and disliked because of the actions of Atheists is ridiculous nonsense, Atheists are feared because people can't comprehend their ability to function without religious structures, tribalism and belief in a higher power, not because they go around being mean to people on the internet.

 

[Miss Chicken]

In the Western world this distrust of atheists is not universal. Australia, New Zealand and several other countries have had or do have atheist Prime Ministers or Presidents.

If I tell people I am an atheist most of them don't even raise an eyebrow.

 

[Pingfah]

Agreed. Personally I have never felt any sort of negative feeling towards me because I don't believe in anything. But then, it rarely comes up, because I don't feel the need to announce my lack of beliefs, or identify myself by that, because it means nothing to me.

 

[{ Emilia }]

Nobody ever talks about their religion in Germany. Being atheist is a non-issue for me.
Even if it does come up, nobody cares.

 

[Pingfah]

Well, I think the problem is with the dogmatically religious, and my impression is that the USA has a higher proportion of those who are religious that would fall into that category.

I think the whole fight to make people trust atheists is a bit of a waste of time though. Atheism will always be a threat to the dogmatically religious, there is no convincing them otherwise. They look at atheists, and they see people who exist without the structures and the props that they consider integral and essential not just to their existence, but to the existence of people in general. The idea that somebody can actually happily live without these things, and be a moral decent person simply by their own strength is a threat to their entire worldview and personal belief system.

So the answer is not to make reasonably minded people of any religious stripe like atheists more, they are already fine with atheists, but to break down dogmatic religious belief itself, and for the sake of future generations, free politics and law and our shared institutions from its grip. If this upsets people, and makes them feel like their beliefs are under attack, well, it's because they are. Tough luck.

 

[suarezguy]

I think your entire starting point is faulty. Atheists, by and large, do not identify as a collective, they don't do things in the name of Atheism, many of them don't even see what they have as any sort of belief system, but a lack of one.

These Atheist organisations are largely doomed to insignificance because of the very nature of Atheism.

Interesting, I think even among people not hostile to atheism it is seen as highly connected to a belief system or world view and that most atheists actively online do associate it with secular humanism and rationalism/valuing of science and argue that those beliefs and values should be more widespread and influential in society. I think this is somewhat reflected in how among many online atheists there's a lot of hostility to Ayn Rand, because she was an atheist but not a humanist/of the left against the right and that seems shocking and particularly bothersome.

 

[Pingfah]

That's confirmation bias though isn't it. You have no idea what proportion of atheists are "online atheists" who identify themselves as such. This could easily be a minority of people who generally lack religious or theistic beliefs.

Atheists in the real world have little reason to go around telling people they are atheists.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

I am a member of the LGBT community. The tide turned rather quickly, when we changed the public perception from a gay man hooking up in a gay bar, spreading disease and being promiscuous, to families. Committed, long-term relationships, that are homes for children, and love was equal.

Why shouldn't single LGBT people be allowed to be who they are openly and without shame? I don't accept your "spreading disease" label as if it's an inevitability with a non-monogamous lifestyle. You're saying people should alter behavior that makes them happy in order to receive the acceptance of the majority. Well, that's not accepting you for who you are. That's only accepting you for who they want you to be.

At my register, twice yesterday, someone overpaid me and I returned the money. I have taken 6 people into my home, some friends and family, that were homeless. I have volunteered at homeless shelters and handed out gift cards to those important to me, thrown 5 or 10 bucks at someone I know is poor, paid his cellphone bill this past month, stocked shelves at a food bank for 5 months, two days a week. I don't need to be told there are good atheists out there. I try to be one, and I am not perfect, but when I volunteer at a homeless shelter, it's in the basement of a church. It's not because American Atheists, opened a homeless shelter. I am talking about the community at-large, making a concentrated effort to establish institutions in society.

It's in a church because churches have followers that meet on a regular basis and organizations that have been built up over hundreds of years. Atheists are just individuals for the most part. There are some who like to meet up (I'm not one of them), but the vast majority do not, because once you start holding meetings, organizing events, writing down rules of conduct and shared non-beliefs in a book, holding charity functions, and recruiting new followers you might as well just be a religion.

Because, one, I wouldn't have to go to the basement of a church to make people's lives better.

You make it sound like a big deal to go in the church. I go to Sts. Simon & Jude Catholic Church to donate canned goods and clothes and only one time did my skin start burning once I crossed the threshold, and that was just because someone had sprinkled holy water by the door to cast protection.

If you don't want to go to a church, don't go to a church. There are tons of other charities out there.

Or the Pew Research studies that have found, consistently, people would rather vote for a Muslim Elected Official, than an atheist one. We are at the bottom of the list.

I like the subtle bit of superiority like "Even those damned Muslims are trusted more than us, and you know what they're like!?"

I know it's probably unintentional, but the subtext of all these things you keep saying are not very pleasant, either toward yourself or toward others.

If improving our standing in the eyes of the rest of the country comes at the expense of looking down on another group, I'll pass, thanks. If I don't want people to know I'm an atheist I can just not say anything. A lot of Muslims don't have that luxury, either through their appearance, clothing, expressions of faith, places of worship, etc.

The points have dropped by about 13 over the last 15 years, but that has more to do with people becoming a part of the community--agnostics and atheists--rather than anything the community has done to change public perception.

So, what you're saying is, more and more people are becoming atheists and agnostics already each year without us organizing and fundamentally altering the way we do things, but we should drastically change that policy immediately and become the very thing we didn't want to be when we became atheists and agnostics in the first place? Sounds like a foolproof plan.

Forgive me, but this whole conversation has reminded me of the scenes in Grosse Pointe Blank where Dan Akroyd is trying to recruit John Cusack into his Assassin's Union and Cusack is all like "I'm a lone gunman, get it? I like the lifestyle, the clothes, the attitude."

"This atheist's union, is there gonna be meetings?"
"Of course!"
"No meetings."

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[stardream]

In the fear-based group in which I was raised atheists were all apparently having regular meetings, gathering together in smoke filled rooms in some back alleys plotting...something... in between orgies and killing Christians.

I exagerate of course but yes, it was all a grand conspiracy along with scientists to plot the downfall of Christianity. This is the type of fear that led to the rise of the religious right.

Several things helped me to calm down...one of which was leaving, making friends with atheists in real life who didn't have me on their hit list and realizing there are over a billion Christians in the world so we need to be frightened of what...exactly? We could form our own army if we wanted to...(and we won't. Too much petty bickering between denominations).

So you all don't scare me anymore.