Yup. Even ‘tolerant’ religions go batshit when they encounter unbelievers. It’s like you can root for any team, but if you decline the entire sportsball thing, YOU GOTTA FUCKIN DIE

Yeah, it’s not like you’re changing anyone’s mind anyway, so why waste the energy and social capital? I’ll sometimes ask follow-up questions to get them thinking, but no reason to poke the bear by announcing that you’re the devil.

It’s a bit sad that “coming out” as an Atheist is even a thing. Where I’m from it’s basically the assumption. I’ve met a few people that mention that they’re religious before and my reaction is always an astonished “but they seemed so normal.”

there are totally people who dont want to be found out, cause of familial or work repercussions.

Its not uncommon for people to have to hide things like lack of faith, sexuality, “wrong” thought, etc for a variety of reasons.

It’s like disliking avocado and telling everyone you meet that you don’t like avocado. Telling someone something you’re not isn’t a character trait, so there’s no reason to bring it up.

Unless of course it’s a defense against people pushing their beliefs on you.

“You should eat this avocado”

“No thanks, I don’t like avocado”

“You’re going to go to hell for that.”

One of the things that makes people dislike atheists is the tendency of atheists to mock other people’s beliefs. Things like the flying spaghetti monster, noodley appendages, etc, are atheist inventions designed to make fun of other people’s beliefs.

You have the right to make these kinds of jokes, but other people have the right to not like you for making jokes that are mocking them. But without the mean spirited memes, there’s nothing else that atheists have going on and communities like this wouldn’t exist.

If I ever say it I specifically say “I don’t believe in any gods.” It’s not that I don’t believe in theirs specifically. They don’t believe in any others, so what’s the difference?

Not many Polytheistic Greeks trying to outlaw medicine in my neck of the world tho.

While they’re both similarly lacking evidence and therefore irrelevant, christianity is unfortunately still relevant, as it is being used as a justification for religious based laws nonstop.

Whether you like it or not, your reproductive rights (regardless of sex/gender) are on the line thanks in large part to christianity. Therefore it’s almodt certainly relevant to you. Same goes for a myriad of other social issues.

If the Orange Man becomes dictator in November, shit is going to get bad quickly.

I’m ethnically Jewish. My daughter is half-Jewish and queer. My wife is a librarian. We’re all atheists.

Needless to say, we’re making contingency plans.

Which is quite fascinating since he’s made it very obvious that he himself doesn’t know jack shit about Christianity and that he’s not a believer. I’m an atheist myself and I’ve never seen a person more lost and uninterested when speaking about Christianity than him.

deleted by creator

Hmm.

One group uses the threat of eternal damnation to compel moral behaviour, the other has no external compulsion*.

Which group is likely to have more “good” members?

* Yeah, laws? Social etiquette?

i think this probably has more to do with serial killers having disregard for shit in general, than atheists having disregard for religion.

Statistically it checks out that someone who doesn’t care about torture, murder, and violence, probably gives even less of a shit about religion lol.

@ChunkMcHorkle @Lanky_Pomegranate530
35 years of faith must have been brutal mentally.
I’m Aussie so religion is not much of an issue here but I deal with it by separating the person from the faith if possible.
Belief is not a choice & I’m not convinced by biblical evidence. Feigning belief would not fool God if he exists.
My christian friends agree to disagree & we move on to other topics. I will not be the angry atheist they need me to be to reinforce their negative opinion of atheists.

You were a christian scholar? Mind if I ask what sort of things you were interested in, when you were researching? I’m always curious about what the real intellectual types are pondering in their beliefs or church history.

This was my thing. I’m not a atheist, but the moment I talk about religion, it becomes “the thing”. I imagine this is what vegans have to deal with, like the moment they share… It becomes a shit show of people questioning everything. And like bruh, let them eat vegan marshmellows and pray to Cthulhu.

I didn’t meant to type a long wall of text but here goes anyway.

Yeah, people here are dismissive of the news headline, but I have a similar experience coming out as agnostic atheist. Luckily, I did not get as much as negative experience as you have, but when I came out, I was tried to be invited twice on separate occasions into Christian prayer meetings. Naive me didn’t realise that both invitations are more like trying to get me “back into the flock”.

On the second invitation, I went along just to see how it was. After the second prayer session I attended, I said don’t want to go anymore. I had a long “debate” with the pastor on the phone to try to make me at least a believer in any religions. There was a bit of condescension in the conversation and kind of implied I am going to hell. The thing is, or rather problem for him, is that I don’t feel or see whatever religious folks see even when I was going to church. So, I don’t feel at least bit intimadated by threat of hell. The OG Judaism and Old Testament don’t even believe in hell so why should Christians and Muslims do as well?

Not to mention, religions across the world have conflicting claims of historical and scientific realities. If they all conflict with each other and could not agree which is the correct one, then religions themselves are false. If there are universal scientific truth to each of their claims and basis, then one religion in one part of the world should have the same or similar accounts to another religious belief on the other side of the world. But that is not the case.

I told the last paragraph to the pastor and we were pushing back each other. I do not like to de-convert people from religion but he was trying to re-convert me so I laid down all the heavy stuff to him, despite signalling that I don’t want to continue the conversation in the first twenty minutes.

I admit that I have had cognitive dissonance the following day and think “what if I’m wrong?” I simply re-think back that religious accounts conflict with each other and therefore not real. Also, it dawned on me that my emotions is probably more that I feel offended trying to be re-converted and being condescended. Conversely, the pastor must have thought I am a devil tempting him away from religion, lol.

Since then, I don’t tell people I’m agnostic atheist. Christians (and Islam) feel religious obligations to convert as many people as possible. That’s how they survive. I didn’t think much about proselytising before but I realised that the practice is rather condescending and gives them superiority complex. This is not to say that there aren’t militant atheist, but the religious zealots are more adamant from what I observed.

Where in the hell do you live?

Same. There’s no benefit and everything to loose causally coming out. Most people will just assume you’re part of their religion, so it’s not like you even have to lie about it most places.

And forward in others, a extremely dynamic mix of cultures.

Yes. Meanwhile in SOVIET RUSSIA… Even Soviet Russia was not so backwards as USSA.

It’s not 50/50, though. Religions have repeatedly proven to have 0 predictive power, which skews the probabilities drastically in favour of atheism.

This is called agnosticism. It’s great. If there is a god or God or gods it’s not really “my” place to concern myself with them. There is no way to prove whether or not they exist. I was baptized as a child and i do not actually deny God (according to Christianity this is a cardinal sin) so by the tenants of Christianity if they are correct I’m eligible to go to heaven. Besides that I generally just aim to be an alright person doing outlandish things like treating others how I wish to be treated, and not stealing while sometimes volunteering at the local animal or homeless shelter.

If some pearl clutching Christian who pays lip service to God is going to get into heaven over me, I kinda don’t want to go there anyway. I think I mostly stopped being a Christian because the sheer cognitive dissidence other Christians were causing for me with their actions was just too much for me to handle.

We do know. In order for the question of “does X exist in the real world” to even be relevant you’d need to coherently define X as a concept, and God fails even that test. Ask ten people what God is and you’ll get fifteen different answers.

Nobody but mathematicians speak in proofs. Not X just means I have sufficient reason to Believe X is either explicitly false or insupportable such that I am confident in my position.

I could dish out an encyclopedia of fabrications that you couldn’t prove or disprove mad libs style without sense or sanity and you could still confidently call me full of shit.

With every other position maybe X doesnt mean I cannot write a math proof that X is false it means there is a reasonable chance of X and yet when someone says not God 12 people discover an entire different standard.

When I say not god I don’t mean maybe god nor do I regard this as an extraordinary position.

your yearly PSA on the TST and COS:

some clarification here. The satanic temple, or the TST as it’s known is actually really based, while it is “satanic” that’s mostly a funny haha thing, the majority of it is mostly based around being a religion that isn’t awful. I.E. being nice to people, because you should do that.

A lot of flak they’ve gotten is for things like putting a satanic club into a school (that school had a bible study club) and various other shenanigans, notably the one satan con thing they had, where people protested, but inside it was pretty chill. It’s performance art and statement pieces primarily, which are perfectly apt, i feel. Freedom of religion and all. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Anyway, the point i came here to make was that the TST is the good one, and the church of satan, or COS, is the less based one, for instance, they believe that consuming blue cheese makes you gay. That’s like the religion religion one. Nobody likes that one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_atheism

secular humanism is seriously needed as a mainstream social movement everywhere, locally and globally.

Don’t you realise you basically sound the same as someone saying

Chrisrian Nationalism is seriously needed as a mainstream social movement everywhere, locally and globally.

Islamic Sharia is seriously needed as a mainstream social movement everywhere, locally and globally.

In general, I hope it becomes taboo and outlawed to base rules or laws around mythology-based scripture.

In a democracy, if there is a sizable Christian population, it makes sense for them to base laws around Christian values. Same if there was a sizable amount of Muslims, Hindus, etc. It doesn’t make sense to give Atheism a special status above all of them as some form of “arbiter of morality”

As a quasi-religious person I do agree that public policy and moral imperatives should have a secular basis. For example, when people look back at this point in history they’re going to see a particularly nasty stain in the way that 99% of the human population is responsible for a sort of perpetual holocaust of many other species of animal, all for nothing more than a little gluttonous sensory pleasure. That kind of morality is easily argued on a secular basis for all the substantial harms those lifestyles cause, and the sheer amount of tangible benefits for choosing a better way.

But secular policy is dangerous if it does not also support religious plurality. When one or two belief systems dominate, they invariably oppress smaller groups. Diversity of belief is a natural buffer against that.

That said, a religion does not necessarily need to base its exegesis on interpretation of arbitrarily chosen writings. One of the best things religious groups can do for themselves now days, if they want to adapt to the times and survive into the future, is embrace the scientific method in their own ways. Evolution shows us that the things that aren’t willing to change and adapt die.

Strange times in strange places.

In the American “Bible belt” being known as an atheist is becoming a social pariah.

It can put your employment at risk.

bOtH SiDeS?!