While there are those on here that share my abhorrence for Christianity, what are some other religions that disgust you?
I personally am not a fan of Judaism or Islam. Both are used as excuses to murder people. Nor am I a fan of multiple sects of Christianity such as Jehova’s Witness, Seventh Day Adventists, and worst of all Baptists.
I don’t abhor religions. I do, however, abhor some (certainly not all) of the religious.
I’m still combating my prejudice issues towards Christians. I’m single because of it. I still won’t even go out with any woman who is Christian. Most of the girls (where I live) are Jesus freaks. I’ve been getting better about it. I work with people who are devout, but we don’t talk about it.
My mom has put up boundaries that we don’t talk about it, because she finds my debates to be very insulting and offensive to her indoctrination. She mentioned a while back that she was having a “crisis of faith”, but I never took her seriously because the next day, she’s back to believing in her imaginary friend and getting bible quotes on her phone from some religious app.
I understand that she wants me to come to Christianity. We have that thought in common, while it’s the exact opposite for me. I want her to realize that her god is fake and to de-convert to Atheism instead.
In the past, when people bring up religion around me, my mind goes to a very angry and dark place. I’ve discussed it with my therapist and he thinks it’s because of my forced indoctrination growing up.
I suspect it depends on individual personality, that of parents and mentors, and the exact nature of the indoctrination (and of your expectations of the faith, and how they were violated).
My family converted to fundamentalism from a sort of indifferent non-practicing form of Chrstianity when I was five. I converted that year through a “good news club” run out of the Baptist lady’s house next door to ours.
My wild guess is that I did not chafe at the indoctrination like you did. I liked the idea that if I was a Good Boy™ that God would protect and help me in life. I bought in, assuming (reasonably, IMO) that the adults in my life must know what they’re on about.
OTOH when the abstraction unravelled big time starting in my 30s, I wasn’t particularly angry then, either. Except at myself, for being such a chump for so long.
I think a big protection for me was my parents converted at about age 40 – they had already been socialized to be decent human beings and never completely absorbed the controlling, authoritarian aspect of our sect. I never felt their love was conditional, and never felt judged. The judgmentalism around me I just kind of assumed didn’t apply to me, because I was compliant and also of course forgiven. It probably helped that I didn’t have anxiety or guilt issues of any kind. My world was small enough that I was not exposed to a lot of different ideas and ways of being or had to actually reject certain kinds of people in order not to incur the disapproval of my handlers (be they my parents, pastor, sunday school teacher, whatever). I was “lucky” enough to be a white cishet male so didn’t have to pretend to be other than I was to get by.
I can only imagine the pain and anger if all these fortunate circumstances hadn’t been in place.
I regard as abhorrent, any creed containing the assertion that I am unfit to be treated as a decent human being, and must necessarily be subject to misery, suffering, a painful death, and eternal torture in an imaginary “afterlife”, just because I refuse to be gullible and swallow ridiculous mythological assertions. A pox on all of them.
All of them. 20 20 20 20
My wife has me going to Tai Chi class with her.
Approached on the level of gentle stretching exercises for the elderly, plus something my wife and I can do together, it works.
Of course the Taoist Society is behind it and some of the instructors speak of “feeling a ground force” coming up from the earth through your bones when they show you how to stand and move, but I just translate that to “be aware of where your weight is and what your sense of proprioception is telling you as you go through the movements”. They aren’t trying to recruit us or anything. We do pay an annual fee (an optional “donation” but tax deductible as they deny there’s any “in kind” service in exchange – probably based on it being optional).
The founder of this Taoist sect died at age 67 so my sorry ass has outlived him by a year already, and the two older instructors clearly suffer from the reduced processing speed and more easily befuddled brains of the older – so I also ignore any of their implied claims of good health or longer life from the practice. It is just an exercise class to me.
I don’t see any reason to be “disgusted” by this. Honestly I find Buddhism (in its Western form anyway, apart from its florid cosmology and its, er, “monkery”) and Taoism to be quite palatable as there is no deity on offer and like the Jewish faith they do not proselytize. Of course people who long for simplicity and certitude and structure might approach those kinds of belief systems uncritically, but I don’t mind dipping into them for things of value so long as no one tries to control me.
Hi! All of them do.except for Raelism.
I concur, and if I was to narrow it down to a single grievance, it would be the pernicious idea that people owe their loyalty to one of countless deities, that they can’t even demonstrate are possible let alone exist, over other human beings. This notion, and not just in religions, but in countless ideologies humans create, has and will continue to cause unnecessary suffering, in a world where suffering is already ubiquitous.
Nor of course is this limited just to humans, but extends to other sentient living things.
Buddhism is at least in theory supposed to acknowledge that life is difficult and full of suffering, and as what some have termed the original self-help system, it promotes (mostly non-theistic) ways to reduce that suffering that are effective enough that they’ve been used / adapted by secular organizations.
On the other hand, in Burma for example the Buddhists have been inflicting suffering on religious minorities, so … we are back doubtless to No True Scotsman fallacies to explain that, much like Christians resort to. It is probably fair to say that all religions, because they assert things without evidence, have authoritarian tendencies inherent in them.
Whilst it may be less pernicious on the whole, it does espouse the morally repugnant (to me) notion of karma. Imagine for a moment the suffering of being born severely disabled, or the suffering of having a loved one born to such a life, now imagine the religion that holds sway tries to claim that they, and you have “earned” that suffering in actions from previous lives.
I concur, and ultimately any ideology or religion that places adherence to its doctrine and dogma ahead of the need to prevent unnecessary suffering, is in my view pernicious, and for that very reason.
The fact they all come up holding an empty bag, when scrutinised, is just adding a layer of irony.
Understood as simply cause and effect it is fine. Just as some Buddhist sects are theistic and most are not, some Buddhists have more … freighted concepts of karma. It does not have to be applied to misfortune across multiple lives. Also of note, Buddhists believe in “rebirth” which is not the same as “reincarnation”. But at the end of the day these can be arguably seen as distinctions without a difference, from the perspective of us skeptics.
I find reincarnation a ghastly concept. The notion that you exist in some context you aren’t allowed to remember so that you can learn from past mistakes and successes strikes me as its own hell, just as psychologically awful as the Christian hell is physically awful. Any negatives from past lives are not seen so much as punishments, as just cause and effect – but they are not things “you as you” caused, so therefore are even worse than unwanted random happenstance or the bad consequences of bad actions within your own life. It’s not a closed feedback loop even.
Rebirth is more the notion that when you die you are subsumed in some oceanic universal consciousness like a drop of water falling back into the ocean – you don’t cease to exist per se but cease to exist as a distinct entity. Rebirth as I (dimly) understand it is the reverse of dying, some aspects of what was once “you” may inform some aspects of some new being but it is not “you” in any meaningful sense. Buddhism doesn’t really promise immortality in the way Christians would understand it. But some Buddhists believe that in unusual circumstances (e.g. the birth of a Dali Lama) that there will be various signs, including physical ones, identifying such a person with a special mission. I think it reflects a fairly universal default human aversion to mortality. I am acquainted with a Burmese woman who says that in their culture they make rather more of it than this, though, seeing a birthmark in a spot similar to that of an uncle or grandparent as auspicious, etc.
Ultimately it just is more turgid nonsense that I don’t want to deal with so to the extent I have any respect for Eastern teachings it is what I can borrow from them what seems useful or insightful into human nature or helpful in my own life. For some people (not at all me) that’s meditation practices, but for me it’s just notions like de-emphasizing / detaching from ego and striving, understanding what’s really important in life, etc. These have been useful counterbalances to my natural idealism which was greatly amplified by the triumphalist nonsense of Christian fundamentalism.
I’m not really disgusted by religions as such. I’m more baffled, and interested in what makes people believe in them. What I can be disgusted by, is religious ideology, religious practice, and how these mostly get a free pass from society to do their shit – even when it comes to outright hostile and dangerous ideologies and practices. Normally, it would go like this:
– “Hey, that’s some fucked up shit, stop doing that!”
– “OK. Sorry.”
but with religion it’s more like this:
– “Hey, that’s some fucked up shit, stop doing that!”
– “But, but, my religious freedumb”
– “OK. Sorry. Here’s some money so you can keep doing your fucked up shit.”
– “K THNX. Now fuck off.”