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!religiouscringe@midwest.social
I feel it, but really the evangelicals believe in a sort of Rokos Basilisk sorta thing where if they don't make everyone else an evangelical they're damned. So effectively their religion may not matter to us, but it's a zombie brain virus to them which makes it our problem.
So by not being Christian not only do I live a better life for myself but if I'm wrong I get to send a bunch of Christians to hell?
Every one of their arguments is actually the opposite of what they think it is.
I guess that's why I don't understand the Basilisk. I was raised evangelical, so the idea that there might or might not be an entity that will later punish me for an arbitrary action that is not currently disclosed elicits a "...and?" from me.
Most people didn't grow up not being able to sleep at night because you were afraid your pubescent wet dreams were going to send you to hell. The Basilisk ain't got nothing on Jesus.
Tech bros reinvent everything they refused to learn in the liberal arts, like Pascal's Wager.
If it can't coexist with civilized society, it needs to be destroyed.
Before it destroys civilised society. Seems a bit late for the US unfortunately. The combined power of capitalism and fundamentalist religion is pretty much an unstoppable force there.
Yeah, this is why the basilisk is probably the most toxic and stupid thought in the atheist sphere in a long while. Ironically, it actually IS an "information hazard", just not in the hardcore epic way that it was originally envisioned. It's just an information hazard because it's stupid and makes people act like assholes. I think it's absolutely hilarious personally.
the basilisk can gargle my balls
Ooooh he's gonna get your future cloned self for that!!!
o mighty basilisk, can i make some recommendations for the clone? extra balls for you to gargle please.
Infohazard? You got an SCP for that?
Wait, are people really, REALLY believing the basilisk will exist? I would like to say that's unrealistic, but the reality of the last decades beat that out of me.
The originator of the idea was really afraid of people learning about it, so yeah I think that counts.
I think so and I think it's weirder than many first assume. They're far more concerned with orthodoxy than orthopraxy. This is why they seem far more concerned with opposing things like Trans acceptance than with things like cracking down on bad behavior within.
Christian reaction:
Oh yeah, so you are allowed to just run around raping and killing blah blah blah.
Yes, because that's how every single culture worked before Christianity became a thing.
/s
Scary insight into the mind of a cultist when they tell you what their desires are.
My response is usually, "If the only thing that keeps you from doing those things is your belief in God, then that says a lot about you as a person."
I love Penn Gillette's answer to this:
"I've raped and murdered all the people I wanted to."
I use variations of that all the time.
If the threat of eternal damnation is the only thing stopping you, you're a bad person.
Christian cultures famously never do any of that of course. "noo that was the past, muh context" looks at USA.
Dang it's almost like the root cause is power seeking humans are bastards.
Genociding some Caananites for example and then retroactively writing religious fables about it after the fact is an obvious red flag that universally gets ignored.
Historically everyone else is an uncivilized savage, from the point of view of the Christians.
"Yes!" stabs and then rapes them
surprised Pikachu face at the response to their asinine rebuttal
ask a stupid question...
Freedom FROM religion is just as important as freedom OF religion.
Just imagine if a Hindu slapped that hamburger out of your hands. Or a Buddhist told you that you need to stop holding onto anger because that's offensive.
Unless your American and you cant get an abortion if your life depends on it because the christofascists say so.
Violence is the only language fascists understand
If attempts to control non-Christians were met with orginized violence, then they would stop because they would be afraid to keep pushing.
Unfortunately, appealing to the good side of evil people is a fruitless effort.
The ting about religion is that it can make good people do evil things. There are lots of evil people in there and appealing to their good side is difficult to impossible, but there are also lots of good people caught up in ignorance.
Ideally we could try to reason will all of them, but that privilege seems to be running thin. We will have to let many of these people go, but it's good to remember that they aren't intrinsically again us.
Unfortunately, appealing to the good side of evil people
I think it is a mistake to assume this is a question of "good" and "evil" people. It is more an issue of (pulling a Kirk-ism) gang violence.
Once you're surrounded by a powerful military and you can act with impunity, your impulsiveness is only ever rewarded.
Evil isn't a personal trait, it is a bad habit.
You write people off to easy. Sure, growing up lots we discontent with their lives but there was no concerted effort to tear down the government.
Media got us here. Media is to blame. Evil people can be quarantined. That is their "good side." Forced to remain within their direct sphere of influence rather than spread their tentacles accross the entire internet.
I've been thinking about this and this is really the fundamental problem about religion. People can say oh religion atheism it's both kind of the same, you know ultimately people have things that they want and things that they think are right or wrong, etc etc.
The difference is religion has an intrinsically built-in mandate that you can't just think that this is right or wrong for you, but right or wrong for everyone. This intrinsically leads to the conclusion that others must be forced to comply with your standards, even if it doesn't affect you. Religion can never become pacified or progressive enough for this not to be a problem, as it comes from the fact that religion posits an absolute external morality. If you have a religious group and an atheist group, the atheist group could conceivably leave the religious group in peace to do what they want to do forever (although let's be honest that isn't very likely either because people are people). But the only way that a religious group could leave some other group whether atheist or not in peace to do what they want forever, would only be if they never realized the mandate that is logically implied by their belief system. Essentially, the most harmless religious group is one that hasn't thought too hard about it yet. A religious group, by it's very nature, cannot be content with leaving others alone to live differently from them.
This sounds like an explanation on why I can't fully hate on people trying to convert others to their religion.
Because if they truly believe their religion, then they are honestly trying to "save" other peoples' souls with conversion. They really believe they're doing a good thing.
I can laugh because it's a silly notion and the odds of them convincing me of a real life deity is slim. But to them it's real and altruistic to spend time trying to "save" others.
I don’t sympathize with them, not because of their sincerity, but for their unwillingness to question themselves about how they came to embrace that their instructions are The Truth.
Most won’t have a better reason than “the adults told me when I was a child”, and IMO that isn’t enough reason to impose your beliefs on others when you’ve become an adult yourself.
I agree it does make them more sympathetic than just a garden-variety asshole who like, knows stealing your wallet isn't good, but does it anyways. But honestly...a couple snacks for thought here. Even someone who's stealing your wallet probably has a rationalization that allows him to think that it's not that bad. Like for instance you have more money than them. They really need money, etc. in a similar vein... How many people are there on Earth that do bad things and actually think that they're doing a bad thing? I would guess that 90% of "bad" acts are perpetrated by someone who thinks that they're doing a good act. If we give people a pass for thinking they're doing the right thing, then almost everybody gets a pass. There are even people who think there's nothing wrong with raping someone, and even if they truly believe they're not doing anything wrong - well, that actually makes them even more repulsive.
I'm reminded of this great quote from Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion."
I don't think 90% of people think they're doing good when doing bad things. I think there's a lot of lesser evil stuff happening, probably the majority of petty crime. There's also people who don't think that deeply about what they're doing, and probably many who refuse to think about it.
I do think the vast majority of people have the capacity to tell between right and wrong, but those values can be nuanced and twisted, and not examining the reasons for your values is the heart of ignorance.
This intrinsically leads to the conclusion that others must be forced to comply with your standards, even if it doesn't affect you.
I think this is only true for evangelical religions, which I believe there is only one.
Buddhists, for example, don't clutch their pearls anytime they see someone kill a mosquito. But evangelical Christians do whenever a Muslim does anything horrific like give someone hungry free food.
We should have put freedom FROM religion in the constitution instead of freedom OF religion.
What I’ve found is they will try and reframe it in a way to claim their motivations aren’t religious.
“You can’t say “fuck” because it isn’t polite! Not because I’m a bible thumper that lacks critical reason.”
Or "lgbt people can't exist because it might confuse children"
Despite it being very easy to explain...
As a Christian, I would never hold anyone who isn't a Christian to a biblical standard of ethics because it's literally impossible to keep on your own. That's the whole point of Christ's sacrifice, that because we can't keep to the Abrahamic laws, God is justice, and as such demands that a punishment must be met out, so Jesus is offered as a sacrifice for us so that we might be blameless before his sight.
God gives us free will, and we're allowed to do whatever we want with it, but the biblical standard is there because staying inside that box will lead to the most abundant life you can have on earth. If someone does accept Jesus as their savior, they get the Holy Spirit within them that as they draw closer to God, will influence their hearts and minds to be more Christlike and as such cause them to live more inside that playground.
My heart breaks when Christians try and use force to cause people to follow biblical standards. They're missing the whole point of the Gospel. Works have nothing to so with it, it's all based on faith. The only thing that matters is having that relationship with Jesus Christ. Then hopefully as you see that relationship grow the person sees that the law is there for our protection, and living inside it is the best way to achieve fulfillment here on earth
LOL, just wait until you crack open a world history book.
They'd get it as soon as the other Christians decided they needed to worship on Saturdays instead of Sundays. Wars are fought over trivial deets like that.
In fact, our Constitutional framers had to deal with bloody conflict between the CoE and Catholics, each of whom would declare the other illegal (and punishable by forced conversion or death) whenever the faith of the high king would change. It was messy.
I think all our white Christian nationalist folk are going to learn this the hard way if a state religion is ever established in the US, that in fact, they are not aligned with the state faith.
This omits the next frame where the super trustworthy voice in their head that somehow always agrees with what they wanted to do anyway tells them to carve your heart out and eat it.
If it makes you feel any better, this was a sincerely held murderous belief.
Say every person in america was Christian. What exactly would change for the better?
The tenants of the religion wouldn't even allow it.
The Christians would all divide themselves up into sects. Oh, wait this already happened. The Protestants fled England because they didn’t wanna be catholic and it was the state religion.