Been seeing this saying trending around on some of the reddit Atheist subs.
It really rings true and calls out Christians for claiming that their religion is a religion of peace and love. No it’s not. Did they not read the old testament or Jude, Malachi, or Revelations from the New Testament?
Anyone not a Christian is getting shafted by their imaginary friend in a fiery torture dungeon whether they were a good or a bad person. That’s a fucked up religion to believe in. Hell, a lot of Christians are so fake that they play friendly with the gay community and then turn around and slam them for shit that they don’t want to understand in church and act all high and mighty.
I can’t tell you how many times that when I was forced to go to one church by my family (they’ve been to several churches around town), that there were members in the church that would stand around and say that god needed to kill off everyone who was gay. I mean… really? That’s a form of Nazism. Killing people for not believing as you do or living a life style that you don’t believe in.
They didn’t like it when Hitler spoke like that. But it’s okay for them to fantasize about genocide and mass murder?
No, I think it’s time that their religion was illegalized. Start shaming Christians for worshipping a bullshit belief system.
Shaming, sure. Making ideas illegal … no, that won’t be contained to just the religious, it will end up moving the Overton window in unseemly ways. Once you make religion illegal, you can just as well make irreligion illegal. Or science.
I think the operative principle is that people are entitled to their own beliefs but not to their own facts. To make that work you need critical thinking skills that most people don’t have. Therein lies the rub.
I believe that religion will organically be pushed to the fringes of irrelevance over time if we re-establish what knowledge is and how you come by it (and don’t come by it). But that takes discipline and practice, even assuming you could get people to see the need.
Sorry, Mr. D., but that is a bad idea. Granted, I totally understand the feelings you may have about it. And, on the surface, one might agree it is a fantastic idea. However, in reality, to make a specific religious belief illegal would open the door to making ANY belief(s) illegal. Remember, their Freedom of Religion is also OUR freedom to NOT believe in their religion. Yes, yes, yes, I know, I know… By not believing in their religion we are subject to unjust discrimination and other “social penalities”. And, No, it is certainly not fair. But - hey - what in this world IS fair? C’est la vie. Personally, I’m a firm believer in Freedom of Religion. Spent 17 years in the military helping to defend that right. Bottom line, the problem is not that they believe in that ancient book and the god therein. The actual problem is the fact they are allowed to influence our “gov’t” with their bass-ackward belief system. If you want to make something illegal, then make it illegal for any specific religion to be allowed to press their belief on others by way of government influence. That is something I would fully endorse and support. Unfortunately, the Church is loaded with as much money as just about any corporation in today’s day and age. Even beyond the money angle, the higher level Church leaders have WAY MORE power than should ever be allowed. Their voices are heard loud and clear by those “officials” that matter, while at the same time drowning out the pip-squeak noises we might make on sites such as this. Meaning, it will still be a very long while before people of religion come around to applying any amount of logic or critical thinking to their beloved Faith. Meanwhile, about all we can do (in reality) is maintain a small hold wherever we are able, and hopefully get through to a couple of religious folks here and there along the way.
Oh, and shaming them for their belief if the absolute WORST way to turn them away from their faith. From my experience, most of them LIVE for such things. Playing the martyr is what they were trained to do from the moment they developed cognitive thought. As such, they will dig in deeper into their faith, because that is what their god told them to do, allowing them to earn a higher spot in their heaven fantasy world. Something to keep in mind: You will never be able to change the mind of a Christian who firmly believes in their god without any questions or doubts. The only ones we have a chance of “retreiving” are the ones who are having doubts and have started asking questions. And even those rare specimens need to be handled carefully.
I agree, the way to fight bad ideas is with better ideas, always.
Never forget the golden rule, “people is dumb”.
If people have what they need, and are able to live reasonably healthy lives, with hope for their futures, religious superstition does not generally fare well. This might be a clue why the brave experiment of democracy seems to go so awry in the US, why the richest country on the planet seems content to keep so many of it’s people in poverty, and its obsession with vast personal wealth.
The idea that anyone can succeed in the US, seems to obscure the idea that everyone ought to be at least lifted out of poverty, yet this idea is viewed by many with outright hostility. Nowhere is this more obvious than with basic health care, in a country with some of the best medical resources in the world, where people can and do die in want of this most basic necessity, or meet financial ruin at the cost of any medical misfortune.
Religion is opportunistic, and evidence suggests it thrives best when people are poor, and uneducated, and the accompanying miseries that these conditions bring all aid superstitions to thrive.
My former religious handlers clearly understood this, but framed it in terms of people losing sight of God because of extended periods of prosperity and ease.
As with all untruths, there’s an element of truth to this. There’s a generational ebb and flow of people fighting for security or justice or whatever, then their children enjoy the fruits of that, it’s all they know, they become complacent and are seduced by various charlatans who steal it from them, then they have to fight for it all over again. The religious have a way of piggy-backing on this and recasting it in theological terms and claiming to explain how this all works and how you can plug into this mechanism they claim to provide. That’s all it is.
Doesn’t the success of the 1% imply the lifting of poverty of the other 99? I mean everytime a person invents the elevator (and makes a fortune off of it) isn’t that one less schmuck who has to climb the stairs. The same could be argued about AI (which is currently fueling the rich and limit their pockets). Once robots become conscious, doesn’t that mean the end of labour for the poor … in Western society at the very least …
No, the figures are also oversimplistic. Basic safe accommodation, nutrition, health care, education and clothing, I would define that as a bare minimum to lift people out of poverty.
No, entirely replacing the labour market with machines would destroy the economies of capitalist countries, and likely global capitalist trade with it.
In theory, sure … but if the end of labor is not accompanied by universal basic income then it means the death of the poor. If the pattern that has held for decades continues, that rich won’t share with “the poors”, enough or probably at all.
No worries though – smarter people than me have written academic papers demonstrating that artificial general intelligence, much less sentience, cannot fall out of the current technology; it’s a category error. Large language models just say words based on statistical probabilities and have zero consciousness. That is why they often hallucinate and why their answers can be completely different based on exactly which words you prompt them with.