We’re in the 21st century, and the vast majority of us still believe in an utterly and obviously fictional creator deity. Plenty of people, even in developed countries with decent educational systems, still believe in ghosts or magic (e.g. voodoo). And I–an atheist and a skeptic–am told I need to respect these patently false beliefs as cultural traditions.
Fuck that. They’re bad cultural traditions, undeserving of respect. Child-proofing society for these intellectually stunted people doesn’t help them; it is in fact a disservice to them to pretend it’s okay to go through life believing these things. We should demand that people contend with reality on a factual basis by the time they reach adulthood (even earlier, if I’m being completely honest). We shouldn’t be coddling people who profess beliefs that are demonstrably false, simply because their feelings might get hurt.
You’re technically right, but the vast majority of religious people fit OPs description and you know it. They’re not talking about people like you.
I actually disagree on the majority. As someone who grew up in the Christian south I’m well aware of the misguided beliefs people can have but a majority of religious practitioners are not extremists and are much more malleable on individual topics and beliefs than many in the atheist community would care to accept - I say this as someone who considered themselves an atheist for a time but stopped when I realized religion has many benefits when used as a tool and any community, including atheists, is prone to having toxic extremism that makes the whole seem worse than it is. Take Islam for example, there are two major divisions of Islam, Sunni and Shia, and most people in the west think the extremist views of the Shia are what most Muslims believe but in all actuality they only make up about 15% of Muslims. The extremists are what get attention, not the majority of folks that use their religion and culture as a tool for living lives they think are good, beneficial or fruitful.
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You’d be surprised how many religious people are also skeptics and scientifically minded, open to changing their minds with new evidence.
Those skeptical religious people need to clean their house then.
What makes you think they aren’t? They aren’t the ones you’re noticing.
“Religion is constantly used…”
Just religion people nothing else…
How do you construct a moral framework with science and statistics? I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I would like to hear how you think it is possible to do so, and how you think we ought to go about it. I have thought about it a little, but I don’t see an obvious way to go about it. That is to say that how you would go about it is not obvious to me. I don’t very well understand what you are imagining.
The following are just ideas you might use as a jumping off point or an example. I don’t expect you to answer all of the questions or anything like that, that would be unreasonable. I don’t have a problem if you don’t touch any of these examples. Just explain how you think we ought to approach this. How would you change the law with respect to murder or assault? How would you change the tax code? How would you change law with respect to financial institutions? How would you resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Why is religion impeding us from making these changes?
I’m concerned you seem to imply here that we require some abstract deity to determine what our moral guidelines should be. Take the following hypothetical: if it was proven tomorrow beyond any reasonable doubt that no deity exists or has ever existed and all religious texts were hogwash written by crazed lunatics, would it be ok then to go out and do whatever you felt like, whether that was murder, robbery, or something else?
In other words, is it solely a belief in a deity that is keeping you from going out and committing extremely immoral acts?
To answer your question though, you would use philosophy, of which science and statistics play a role, and common sense. It doesn’t take a genius philosopher to figure out that maybe we shouldn’t randomly kill other people.
No. That was not my intention. I’m trying to better understand where and why you (or anyone) think religion is holding us back and how we can move forward.
“How do you construct a moral framework with science and statistics?”
How do you construct a moral framework with essentially a book comprised of a roughly translated 2000-year-old telephone game that originated with goat herders in the Middle East? What a total bullshit argument.
Very easily, because the Bible does make moral claims, based on having an external source of morality. Empirical observations cannot. Essentially all moral philosophers agree that an external source of morality (or an embedded source, like naturalistic evolution) is far stronger than trying to shoehorn empiricism into ethics.
It isn’t an argument or a rhetorical question.
It’s not just about being an extremist, it’s about applying fairy tale logic to your very real life. I agree with OP, these people need to be shunned.
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Should we apply that logic to Nazi beliefs? I’m not taking sides here, but it’s not so black and white.
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Lots really aren’t
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Moral philosophy actually. Opposition to abortion is derived not from the Bible, but from opposition to killing, a sense of duty via effective altruism, and the definition of a human. In fact most “Christian ethics” is not literally derived from the Bible (it’s a wildly ethically inconsistent composition), it’s derived from Aristotelian virtue ethics.
Just because religion has been used to justify bad things doesn’t mean all religion is bad, or even that all bad things are excused by religion. The reasons people do bad things are legion.
Also, just because they use that excuse doesn’t mean it’s the actual reason.
Name one good thing that people could not have done without religion?
Matrix probably would have been a lot different I guess
That’s a somewhat backwards question. What good has religion motivated people to do that they would not have otherwise done?
Not relevant.
Taoists have never been accused of cramming their beliefs down other people’s throats. They are obviously not included in the discussion of religions that do do that.
Sure it’s a generalization. That’s the point of memes.
Based on the definition of Taoism given in this thread, it’s not even a religion.
This is just silly. Your group of people has never done anything bad so it’s all okay is never a good argument since people are all pretty much the same (I mean it’s wrong to treat people differently depending on the actions of people within the same wider group)
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