We don’t know right from wrong because we don’t fear retribution from an almighty.
I’m an atheist, so I get to rape and murder as much as I want. It just happens that that amount is zero.
I’m also kind to others, purely because doing so makes me feel good. If it also builds up “karma credits” with others, that’s just a nice fringe benefit.
That actually makes me boil, cause i remember the live interview with a religious dude around 2008. In which he said and i quote “i don’t fear the law of man, i only fear god”, the bastard said it after killing someone in the name of jehova (i don’t even remember if it was only one victim or more, my monkey brain was just baffled at his response to the question).
They don’t play with the same social rules at all, and then they rage because “us” r the crazy ones.
I think that’s the sum of it all
Ah, this one always makes me smile. I store it right next to the assumption we haven’t read their holy book, and the assumption we didn’t learn anything good from doing so that we can share as common ground.
If those are the only assumptions I have to get past, we can friends shortly!
I had a coworker a few years ago who was seriously confused how I maintained morality without an imaginary friend threatening to fuck me up for all eternity. Like, he genuinely struggled to compute how it was possible for me to go around not raping and killing people as an atheist, to the extent that the guy was clearly wary around me going forward from that point. Very strange dude. Also weirdly enthusiastic about competitive pistol shooting.
No morality. Eat children. Sleep with your partner when you’re stuck in traffic. The source of all evil. Can’t be trusted. Are always miserable.
Basically everything religious folks really are under the mask they wear.
As a religious person, I will absolutely sleep with your partner while you’re stuck in traffic.
I love a nap. I’m always sleepy, and if you’re stuck in traffic and I’m bored, imma be sleepin.
This is something we can all get behind. Just like OPs partner. Because we’re all stuck in traffic and they’re sleeping at the front.
I sure do love me a sleep train
It’s not under the mask. Some of them, they just cannot apprehend the fact that a human being can live respectfully without the permanent menace of being sent to hell or get some holy wrath or something
I hadn’t thought that could be a stuck in traffic activity but I might just go out at rush hour and see what’s up.
Hey wifey, I’m stuck
That anyone outside of the US or the middle east even gives a fuck whether you’re an atheist or not
That’s weird guys come on
Perhaps not exactly what you’re asking but one thing many religious people don’t seem to get is that they’re “atheists” aswell when it comes to all the other gods out there. The difference to atheism is that we just don’t believe in their god either.
I don’t know how many gods there are but for the sake of an argument, lets say 500. A Christian believes in 1 out of 500 gods and an atheist believes in 0 out of 500. We’re not that different from each other after all.
Atheism means you believe in no god whatsoever, not that you don’t believe in a particular set of gods.
That’s what they’re saying. An atheist believes in 0 of the total options for gods and religions that you get if you add them all up. A believer believes in 1 or a few of them. So really, the religious are also non-believers when it comes to most gods and religions.
Not sure about that. It takes a pretty big leap to go from believing in 0 gods to 1. I think the line dividing atheists from theists is a pretty huge rift because they hold opposing views on very fundamental matters like the concept of God itself, how the world came to be, our purpose in life, what happens after we die… I don’t think it’s something you can quite reduce down to a matter of numbers.
Do they? I know plenty of people who follow the Christian faith but still believe in science.
Sure, but only as far as science doesn’t contradict their religious beliefs. For example, there are many Creationist Christians who reject Evolution, Natural Selection and the Big Bang.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Richard “eugenics is good, actually” Dawkins
Keep it classy, liberal-fascist beehaw.
That I can’t do religious stuff! I don’t have to believe in the religious components to participate in an event that holds meaning to you. To me it’s not sacred – all just normal words being said and ordinary matter being handled according to some rules. I do that every day at work at the direction of a different kind of “higher power” (clients) without anger or discomfort, it’s really not a big deal!
I’m not angry at god for not existing, nor am I angry at all the people who believe otherwise. If the invitation to your religious event is in good faith, I’m honored to attend, and will just keep to myself or make small talk. Plus I’ve studied enough faiths I can probably fake it, if keeping the situation under control requires it ;)
I’ve discovered that in practice, many people of different faiths are not sure what to think about this position. Most are OK with it, some not (I just give them their space). With the interesting exception of Buddhists! They’ve always been super excited to bring me along to the pagoda somehow. No one ever tried to convert me, and the monks often speak a surprising number of languages and are interesting and well traveled. It’s become a set of surprisingly wholesome memories (I immigrated to a primarily Buddhist country)!
That we do abortions for fun.
I mean, I do do abortions for fun. But not because I’m an atheist.
I miss the awards only for this kind of things.
Thanks for the laugh good sir.
I rarely eat babies
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Ham Sarris has no problem with it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That’s the best way. Well done is a sacrilege
That it’s a religion. Except for a few groups, which I find kind of strange, being an atheist is the lack of religion and belief in a god. It’s not a religion or anything like a religion and so often I see atheism discussed by the religious in religious terms l, as a monolith, and other ways that just totally miss the mark.
It’s easier to group it up as a religion for information purposes, the amount of atheists are relevant if someone’s researching which religions people believe in.
Not parent poster, but I don’t think that’s what they were getting at.
Atheists are often generalized in the same way one might make generalizations about Catholics; the problem is that, while Catholics share a common set of beliefs and values (generally) based on doctrine and scripture, atheists don’t necessarily have anything in common about their beliefs or values, aside from an absence of theistic belief.
I don’t hate religion or religious people. I just don’t believe. I do find religions really interesting, though, historically and culturally.
Where I am in Australia, if as a group (say of coworkers) talking about a new person, we might be like ‘maybe don’t say “Jesus fucking Christ” in front of Lisa, I’m pretty sure she’s extremely Christian’ or ‘let’s do lunch instead of drinks to celebrate the milestone, I’m pretty sure Vish is Muslim so we don’t want him to feel left out’.
Majority of my peers are atheist. Religion only comes up in our lives when we’re trying to be inclusive or respectful of the religious minority.
It’s funny how some places can’t do the same in reverse.
Edit to say, the thing is, to the majority of us, belief in a god is silly hocus pocus, drummed up by humans when we just didn’t understand how things worked and the scientific method didn’t exist. But as a respectful person living in a society, I live by the rules that you don’t make fun of those silly ideas, and also that religion is intrinsically linked to people’s cultures too. So I have a live and let live attitude to it.
Pity many Christians can’t be that Christian.
There is this strange idea that atheists are just rebellious against God because they don’t want to be responsible for being moral, kinda like disobeying your parents and sneaking out to party.
Also, lots of theists assume atheists used to be religious, they don’t really consider that people are raised without religion sometimes.
Yeah, the first one is really frustrating.
No, I don’t need the threat of everlasting punishment to be moral. I’m a secular humanist, and the idea that the only reason you’re not evil is because of threats of going to hell is way scarier than just being kind because it’s the right thing to do.
That because we are free from god or gods that we have no moral compass. I consider myself a good person and I have good moral standards. I don’t need fear from punishment after death to do so.
Also that we have no spirituality… Spirituality and religion kinda go hand in hand but aren’t mutually exclusive. That being said, I have no desire for either religion or spirituality. Maybe when I’m closer to the later chapters
From my experience many religious people have questionable moral standards.
If we just hear “the gospel” enough, we’ll come around. In reality, I hear street preachers, and see “Jesus loves you” stickers on street corners, and it turns me off even more.
Honestly, as an honestly pretty unspiritual Christian, Street preachers make me unnecessarily angry. Because it feels like they’re just bible bashing and aren’t actually doing anything to further Christianity’s goals, despite the fact they think they are. Individuals can’t win people over by shoving their beliefs down people’s throats.
I feel like the only people who listen to these guys are people who agree with them. Most people ignore them in my city.
I quite like them. And I don’t mind Jehovah’s witnesses. I can ignore or politely send them away without much hassle. But I think it’s nice that they believe they can save people and actively try to do so. If I believed, I hope I would be a good enough person to try to save everyone else, too.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to people who are trying to force people or demand poor treatment of people with different beliefs. It really depends where it comes from.
I think we’re stereotyped often as the militant and belligerent atheists quite a lot. We have been painted as unsympathetic assholes who like to talk down to religious people to make us feel better about ourselves, not to mention a weird overlap with some parts of the far-right, usually by way of transphobia, homophobia, racism, social darwinism and the enforcement of poorly understood or straight up incorrect “science”
Eugenecists inhabit this space, as well as people who might call themselves “race realists”, as well as people who think their middle-school-level understanding of genetics and sex encapsulates the entirety of gender and sexuality. It’s those atheists who claim to love science, hate ignorance, but remain ignorant of science. They give us a bad name, and their loudness makes it seem like they represent us
I’ve ran across a few in real life as well. The main thing they have in common seems to be religious recoil. They used to be religious, but realised that it was false. Unfortunately, losing the nostic part is harder than losing the theistic part. They tend to over shoot, and become quite radical.
On the plus side, they tend to settle down. It takes time (sometimes years) to find their new equilibrium. I wasn’t particularly religious growing up, but even I had a bit of that recoil effect for a while. I’ll still go toe to toe with a religion enthusiast, if required, but try not to instigate the “discussion”. I just step in when their public views need balancing out.
I’ve wondered if most of those atheists were brought up very religious. They seem to take a very religious attitude towards their atheism. It would kind of explain why they’re so obnoxious, too. Kind of like lashing out at their upbringing.
I suspect a whole lot of atheists were brought up religious. The heavy religiosity is the push they need to even think on the subject. I think a lot of people who are what I’d call passively religious (non-practicing, don’t really care, but might say say they believe in god if asked) don’t have to engage with the material critically, so it’s not as much a part of their world. For sure there are atheists out there who have a dogmatic approach to atheism because of their former belief systems
But even beyond that, I think it runs deeper. Christianity, if you’re in the west, is foundational to our culture, even in secular nations. It still informs traditions and morals and perspectives that can trace themselves to a Christian origin, and that underlying religiosity in our cultures does inform the way in which we view the world. I concluded this when a friend pointed out to me the language we use in evolution
We describe evolved adaptations as serving a purpose. We’ll say things like “we evolved opposable digits to better grasp things”, and yeah, we all know that’s not strictly true, but language informs our perspective and reflects it. We didn’t evolve thumbs to hold things; We just got thumbs, and were able to hold things with them. These are not the same, and the former still has that kernel of creationism in it, some subconscious belief in a greater purpose
That said, I generally agree that an atheist might be made more militant if he had a particularly religious upbringing. Really, though, I suspect it’s also a lot to do with insecurities. I grew up in a passively religious household, and was sent to a catholic extracurricular just so that I could choose for myself what to believe, and in that brief time, I actually became easily the most religious person in my house. Religion spoke to my insecurities and fears. I was bullied a lot at the time, and the thought that my righteousness would be rewarded and my bullies wickedness would be punished was wonderful. In turning atheist after that, it didn’t undo the bullying. Instead, the self-righteous idea of “I’m smarter than you dumb Christians” was the new salve for insecurties
I’m way more tolerant now. Maybe the issue is just age. Maybe most of those awful ones are just obnoxious teens and young adults who would be obnoxious either way, and they’ll grow out of it. If they don’t, they get to become Ricky Gervais without the money or fame. Kinda rambled more than I meant to, but yeah, just throwing out some perspectives
That we’re smug knowitalls that just goes around looking for logical debates.
