I’ve seen LGBTQ hate in atheist groups and servers. It’s not just the theists.
And it’s fine if you are against something, but to advocate for them being beat up on the streets is where I draw the line.
So I called that atheist a psycho after he started praising that idea and I saw other people agree with his insane takes.
- “They need to be cured”
No they don’t, they are not sick. I don’t understand why people’s sexual preferences or people’s identity bother other people so much.
- “Here in Greece we beat them up to heal them”
So to them it’s better to commit crimes and assault random people that just try to live their life rather than acknowledge that they are just extremely insecure and brainwashed into thinking that gay and trans people are bad or sick.
There have been incidents in Greece where psychos have broken into trans people’s apartments and took their lives. The murderer was being praised on social media. It makes me sick.
So my question to you is, how do we stop that? I know that most of the theists are gonna hate anyway because religion. But it feels kind of odd to see it among atheists. If it doesn’t come from religion, where does it come from?
Lack of self-love? Getting preached to by their parents?
I genuinely wanna know your opinions on this, there must be a way that people can understand that we are all humans. Because I’m starting to give up any hopes for this.
I got called autistic for calling this psycho out.
I am not saying the above is BS, but my experience is that atheists just aren’t into LGBTQ hate and actively discourage it.
But how do we solve it?
I think this is all about fear and the way to combat fear is knowledge. The more familiar you are with whatever it is that is scary, the less scary it is.
What needs to happen is for LGBTQ things to show up on a regular basis. Like TV shows, music, things that people regularly engage with. This strategy has worked in the past and will work in the future.
People fear what they don’t understand, and as we evolved from relatively small groups of hunter gatherers, quickly recognising people who looked and sounded very different to our own group, would likely have added a survival benefit.
The problem is such fears are pernicious now, in a post industrialised world, where we can travel anywhere on the planet in a single day.
You defeat bad ideas, with better ones, so yes education is key. And yes, the more familiar something becomes, the less fearful we’d likely be of it.
I didn’t mean one to one, it has to happen as part of a child’s formal education. Ideas implanted as a child will be absorbed more easily, and likely stick for longer, sadly this is as true for bad ideas as good ones. This is why religions have stressed the importance of indoctrinating children as young as possible.
Some never will. But the more folks who call out bigotry as unacceptable, the more it will recede. Progress has been made (I.e. it’s no longer illegal in many countries), but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Here (.no), kids start learning about puberty, sexuality (including LGBT), and bodily autonomy at school from around 4th or 5th grade(*). Although there has been a HUGE shift over the past few decades in the legal recognition, the public acceptance and the public exposure through the media regarding what is acceptable behaviour in these matters, there are still stalwart haters out there that spew out hate and intolerance. Especially in religious circles, and in particular among muslims. And also from the political right wing. Haters gonna hate, no matter what
(*) actually, they start learning about bodily autonomy already in kindergarten.
The issue though is a majority of Christians still dismiss Evolution even tho it’s been proven by the fossil record, virology, and biology. They will even dismiss scientific facts about homosexuality. They behave as though theories have no substance and are made up. That is how bad religious belief has gotten. People just don’t listen. They’re gonna do what appeals to their confirmation bias before they will listen & consider the facts.
My subjective analysis:
It seems to me that a core part of the problem you have over there in the US is due to your education system. Or rather, your decentralised education system and lack of federal education standards. This means that the religious lobby can use a divide and conquer strategy, going from school district to school district forcing their religious agenda into the local curriculum, and removing subjects and topics they take umbrage at. Then, after reaching a certain threshold they do their shit on a state level. This leads to a severe angst for letting schools touch subjects that the religious mafia might object to. Now you are unfortunately reaping all the disadvantages from what has been sowed regarding appeasement.
It’s clear that education is a problem solver here, but the divide is clearly between rural and urban. Besides, the people who resist are anti-education. The fact that they are religious is just part of their poiltics.
I don’t know what the problem really is, but I think it has something to do with fear - that drives their politics. I suspect the rural/urban divide is the result of self selection.
Hence the point @Get_off_my_lawn was making about a single federal standard.
Again a federal standard would help, and children aren’t anti anything, they follow examples, so giving them better examples, would help fight those examples who are anti education.
Well it needn’t be just one factor of course, and fear might form part of it.
Oh I imagine there are a whole host of factors that influence rural societies and urban societies in very different ways, though there is likely an overlap in political views. Again, while people might have a predisposition to either urban or rural life, children are not born with any such preferences, they learn what they are taught. Until such time as they are able to start thinking for themselves, by then certain ideas can be so ingrained into them, they might be very hard to shake, and of course we all differ in our capacity to think critically and objectively, these are skills that have to be nurtured, either when we are young, or we have to make that choice later as adults.
Just found out that the leading cause of deaths, among pregnant women in the US, is homicide, it was a statement by a lawyer at the end of a Netflix documentary about a man killing his pregnant wife. My first reaction was “what the actual fuck” that can’t be right, so I checked, and it’s true.
This is beyond fucked up, especially as many states are busy trying to pass laws, to take away women’s bodily autonomy, by denying them the right to choose how their bodies are used, and if they want to remain pregnant. Maybe it deserves its own thread, but I am not sure what to even say about this, or what there is to debate.
Education quality and quantity more likely all comes down to money.
But it’s not just education that’s a key to lessening bigotry. In the U.S., having the EEOC has helped. Exposure to “others” in normal settings via media, Affirmative Action, calling bigotry out, being “woke”, DEI programs, voting, enacting legislation, wealth equity, travel, and more have all helped and could continue to help reduce bigotry.
Unfortunately, as is most often the case, the pendulum is swinging the other way right now. The folks who are scared of “them” have seized power in many places (not just the U.S.) and are reversing some of the progress made since the 1960s.
Despite an overwhelming sense of doom I have in the immediate, it does seem, when viewed historically, that the human race is maturing (albeit slowly).
I am really struggling to hold onto this long-term hope. Really disappointed in my fellow man right now.
Growing up in Christian fundamentalism i had a pessimistic view of humanity (utter depravity of man, etc). Then after deconverting, I had what I felt was a more objective view and probably went too far with it; after all, as little as 15 years ago you could kid yourself that the “liberal order” had reached some sort of critical mass, that SURELY the genie was out of the bottle and there could be no significant regression. Lol.
Now I guess I’m somewhere in between. On my worse days I see some form of the Great Filter Theory in play … not so much that humanity is doomed to extinction, as to the Sysyphian project of bombing or otherwise oppressing itself back to a 16th century standard of living, slowly recovering from it, rinse and repeat.
There’s an old saying, “God has no grandchildren”, meaning, generically, that everyone has to figure out life for themselves, you can’t reliably pass your hard-earned wisdom down to your descendants. I think that this may be true, or at least more true than not.
