We don’t know right from wrong because we don’t fear retribution from an almighty.
I’m an atheist, so I get to rape and murder as much as I want. It just happens that that amount is zero.
I’m also kind to others, purely because doing so makes me feel good. If it also builds up “karma credits” with others, that’s just a nice fringe benefit.
I had a coworker a few years ago who was seriously confused how I maintained morality without an imaginary friend threatening to fuck me up for all eternity. Like, he genuinely struggled to compute how it was possible for me to go around not raping and killing people as an atheist, to the extent that the guy was clearly wary around me going forward from that point. Very strange dude. Also weirdly enthusiastic about competitive pistol shooting.
God doesn’t want him to shoot people, yet.
I think that’s the sum of it all
Ah, this one always makes me smile. I store it right next to the assumption we haven’t read their holy book, and the assumption we didn’t learn anything good from doing so that we can share as common ground.
If those are the only assumptions I have to get past, we can friends shortly!
No morality. Eat children. Sleep with your partner when you’re stuck in traffic. The source of all evil. Can’t be trusted. Are always miserable.
Basically everything religious folks really are under the mask they wear.
As a religious person, I will absolutely sleep with your partner while you’re stuck in traffic.
I love a nap. I’m always sleepy, and if you’re stuck in traffic and I’m bored, imma be sleepin.
This is something we can all get behind. Just like OPs partner. Because we’re all stuck in traffic and they’re sleeping at the front.
I sure do love me a sleep train
It’s not under the mask. Some of them, they just cannot apprehend the fact that a human being can live respectfully without the permanent menace of being sent to hell or get some holy wrath or something
I hadn’t thought that could be a stuck in traffic activity but I might just go out at rush hour and see what’s up.
Hey wifey, I’m stuck
If we just hear “the gospel” enough, we’ll come around. In reality, I hear street preachers, and see “Jesus loves you” stickers on street corners, and it turns me off even more.
Honestly, as an honestly pretty unspiritual Christian, Street preachers make me unnecessarily angry. Because it feels like they’re just bible bashing and aren’t actually doing anything to further Christianity’s goals, despite the fact they think they are. Individuals can’t win people over by shoving their beliefs down people’s throats.
I feel like the only people who listen to these guys are people who agree with them. Most people ignore them in my city.
I quite like them. And I don’t mind Jehovah’s witnesses. I can ignore or politely send them away without much hassle. But I think it’s nice that they believe they can save people and actively try to do so. If I believed, I hope I would be a good enough person to try to save everyone else, too.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to people who are trying to force people or demand poor treatment of people with different beliefs. It really depends where it comes from.
That anyone outside of the US or the middle east even gives a fuck whether you’re an atheist or not
That’s weird guys come on
That because we are free from god or gods that we have no moral compass. I consider myself a good person and I have good moral standards. I don’t need fear from punishment after death to do so.
Also that we have no spirituality… Spirituality and religion kinda go hand in hand but aren’t mutually exclusive. That being said, I have no desire for either religion or spirituality. Maybe when I’m closer to the later chapters
From my experience many religious people have questionable moral standards.
That because we are free from god or gods that we have no moral compass.
The scariest thing is someone claiming that only religion imparts morals and ethics.
Because if the only thing stopping a person from raping and killing and causing pain and anguish is the religion they have… dude, THEY ARE the monster everyone needs to be afraid of.
My own morals and ethics aren’t forcibly imposed on me by an outside force like a religion, ready to snap apart and break off with the smallest of stresses.
No, it is built up inside of me via empathy and understanding and personal experiences, and is therefore a core part of my being and far more immune to corruption or breakage.
The “no spirituality” really resonates with me. I didn’t believe in spirituality for a long time, in the same way I don’t believe in the supernatural (Gods etc).
It was only recently that I realized that you can be spiritual and still have a more logical view of how the world works. The mind is a very powerful thing, and things like ritual and meditation can absolutely manifest things simply through its effect on our thoughts and behaviors.
For instance, lately I’ve been learning Tarot. Just a few years ago I would’ve thought Tarot is a complete waste of time, but it’s actually an incredible way to explore problems from different perspectives and get a better sense for how you feel about things in a more abstract way.
Perhaps not exactly what you’re asking but one thing many religious people don’t seem to get is that they’re “atheists” aswell when it comes to all the other gods out there. The difference to atheism is that we just don’t believe in their god either.
I don’t know how many gods there are but for the sake of an argument, lets say 500. A Christian believes in 1 out of 500 gods and an atheist believes in 0 out of 500. We’re not that different from each other after all.
Atheism means you believe in no god whatsoever, not that you don’t believe in a particular set of gods.
That’s what they’re saying. An atheist believes in 0 of the total options for gods and religions that you get if you add them all up. A believer believes in 1 or a few of them. So really, the religious are also non-believers when it comes to most gods and religions.
Not sure about that. It takes a pretty big leap to go from believing in 0 gods to 1. I think the line dividing atheists from theists is a pretty huge rift because they hold opposing views on very fundamental matters like the concept of God itself, how the world came to be, our purpose in life, what happens after we die… I don’t think it’s something you can quite reduce down to a matter of numbers.
Yeah, I agree. I was just trying to clarify the intent of the comment.
But also I think that’s the point of that line of debate. It is an attempt to show a religious stance from an atheist perspective in which belief is a while load of possible strange things accepted as true. It’s not really much use other than when you’re faced with someone who things your lack of theism is the opposite of their particular brand of religion and frames the discussion around which bits you have issue with, as if they might prove to you that you’re wrong. Or to show that their belief that their religion is correct and all the others, including atheism, are the wrong ones, isn’t really the other side of what an atheist thinks.
More a thought experiment than meant to characterise the entirety of atheism.
Do they? I know plenty of people who follow the Christian faith but still believe in science.
Sure, but only as far as science doesn’t contradict their religious beliefs. For example, there are many Creationist Christians who reject Evolution, Natural Selection and the Big Bang.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Richard “eugenics is good, actually” Dawkins
Keep it classy, liberal-fascist beehaw.
That was part of the reason I became an atheist, to remove the hypocrisy and believe in all gods equally. I still believe in all gods equally, but am no longer an atheist.
That we despise people who have religious faith. I don’t despise people with religious faith - I despise what religion does to people who have faith.
Where I am in Australia, if as a group (say of coworkers) talking about a new person, we might be like ‘maybe don’t say “Jesus fucking Christ” in front of Lisa, I’m pretty sure she’s extremely Christian’ or ‘let’s do lunch instead of drinks to celebrate the milestone, I’m pretty sure Vish is Muslim so we don’t want him to feel left out’.
Majority of my peers are atheist. Religion only comes up in our lives when we’re trying to be inclusive or respectful of the religious minority.
It’s funny how some places can’t do the same in reverse.
Edit to say, the thing is, to the majority of us, belief in a god is silly hocus pocus, drummed up by humans when we just didn’t understand how things worked and the scientific method didn’t exist. But as a respectful person living in a society, I live by the rules that you don’t make fun of those silly ideas, and also that religion is intrinsically linked to people’s cultures too. So I have a live and let live attitude to it.
Pity many Christians can’t be that Christian.
Most successful religions are highly evangelical. This is how they become religious. They also have the view that their way of worship is the only and correct way to worship. Otherwise, people would not have to follow that religion. These two ideas, crucial to the spread of a religion, are not compatible with tolerance.
In fact, if you genuinely believed that worshipping a God in a specific way was necessary or you would face eternal punishment. Would you not want to save everyone else from this. The do not see it as intolerance. They genuinely think they are helping you. Others just see it as their tribe and have a use Vs them attitude.
For Atheists it is easier to accept and welcome others. There’s no punishment for it. So tolerance comes easy. It’s also necessary for religions to demonise Atheists, to control their flock. So the historical cultural perception of Atheists is not one of kindness and tolerance. That’s why it’s seems novel that reality doesn’t match that.
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I was doing some work on the servers at a Christian college and I must have said ‘God damn it’ or something like that cause they pulled me aside and said we can’t be taking the lords name in vain lol
This is where I’m at. It’s “you do you” so long as it doesn’t harm yourself or others.
That I can’t do religious stuff! I don’t have to believe in the religious components to participate in an event that holds meaning to you. To me it’s not sacred – all just normal words being said and ordinary matter being handled according to some rules. I do that every day at work at the direction of a different kind of “higher power” (clients) without anger or discomfort, it’s really not a big deal!
I’m not angry at god for not existing, nor am I angry at all the people who believe otherwise. If the invitation to your religious event is in good faith, I’m honored to attend, and will just keep to myself or make small talk. Plus I’ve studied enough faiths I can probably fake it, if keeping the situation under control requires it ;)
I’ve discovered that in practice, many people of different faiths are not sure what to think about this position. Most are OK with it, some not (I just give them their space). With the interesting exception of Buddhists! They’ve always been super excited to bring me along to the pagoda somehow. No one ever tried to convert me, and the monks often speak a surprising number of languages and are interesting and well traveled. It’s become a set of surprisingly wholesome memories (I immigrated to a primarily Buddhist country)!
That it’s a religion. Except for a few groups, which I find kind of strange, being an atheist is the lack of religion and belief in a god. It’s not a religion or anything like a religion and so often I see atheism discussed by the religious in religious terms l, as a monolith, and other ways that just totally miss the mark.
If religions and beliefs are like the different broadcast channels you see on TV, you get Atheism when you turn the TV off.
It’s easier to group it up as a religion for information purposes, the amount of atheists are relevant if someone’s researching which religions people believe in.
Not parent poster, but I don’t think that’s what they were getting at.
Atheists are often generalized in the same way one might make generalizations about Catholics; the problem is that, while Catholics share a common set of beliefs and values (generally) based on doctrine and scripture, atheists don’t necessarily have anything in common about their beliefs or values, aside from an absence of theistic belief.
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Most atheists are agnostic. The terms are not mutually exclusive. They describe different concepts.
I don’t hate religion or religious people. I just don’t believe. I do find religions really interesting, though, historically and culturally.
That we do abortions for fun.
I mean, I do do abortions for fun. But not because I’m an atheist.
Were you paraphrasing MiB3 there?
I rarely eat babies
That’s the best way. Well done is a sacrilege
I’m not an asshole to every single religious person that exists. It’s only when someone brings up pushing religious ideologies that I get pissed.
I know that’s a big one.
Or that we’re “godless heathens” because not believing in a god somehow means not having morals.
Or that we’re “godless heathens” because not believing in a god somehow means not having morals
The scariest thing is someone claiming that only religion imparts morals and ethics.
Because if the only thing stopping a person from raping and killing and causing pain and anguish is the religion they have… dude, THEY ARE the monster everyone needs to be afraid of.
My own morals and ethics aren’t forcibly imposed on me by an outside force, ready to snap apart and break off with the smallest of stresses.
No, it is built up inside of me via empathy and understanding and personal experiences, and is therefore a core part of my being and far more immune to corruption or breakage.
And then how many pushy religious people actually follow the good moral lessons from their beliefs, anyway? Like American fundies are so judgmental. Even my quiet, meek Catholic grandmother is so judgmental.
Looking for an argument on every corner. Especially on the stupidest and most inhumane situations. That’s reserved for Christians.
