the mix of worlds
In my last post, I basically talked about why I don't think atheists should shirk away from any debate about religion they can, if they think religion is dangerous or wasteful. The central point here that most people get upset about is the idea that you can think your beliefs are right and other people's beliefs are wrong.
I don't get the problem with that. Some people are right, and some people are wrong. What universe do you think we are living in? We make the best judgments we can about the world around us and act on them. I also don't get the bullshit people spew about how 'well, the real answer in the world is always shades of grey, not black or white.'
This is a problem where there is no shades of grey answer. A particular religion can't be 'kind of true'. Religions make hard pronouncements about the nature of reality, the existence of god, and all kinds of facts about the world we live in. Either god is as he is in the bible and christianity is right or god isn't or doesn't exist and christianity is wrong; There's no 'halfway' or 'shades of grey' there.
Of course, the 'shades of grey' exist in the myriad religions that exist -- millions, truth be told, most of which totally dead with us not even knowing the names of the parties involved -- and most of these are exclusionary; you can't believe in this religion and other religions still be true. On top of that, some people believe this preposterous notion that 'all religions are true'... despite being wholly incompatible.
This is such mindless pandering prattle that its tantamount to saying like, 'Well, all theories about the age of the earth are true' back in the early 1900s. 'Let's all be friends... all theories about quantum mechanics are true.' 'Come on, let's not pick a fight... spontaneous generation and evolution can (insert that awful 'COEXIST' bumper sticker)'.
This is *total* bullshit people. Facts, truth, reality; These aren't things that bend and sway to fit our opinions. In a world of millions of religions, not a single one of them has displayed any distinguishing piece of evidence beyond second hand stories, hearsay, and personal revelations that have been shown repeatedly to be amenable to deception. Given that deception has been proven to exist many, many times and gods, zero, it seems the most probable conclusion is that gods aren't real and our endeavors with them are a waste of time. If any god, with generally near infinite power, could produce even one piece of evidence they could easily get most of the people on the planet to believe in them... but they don't. No god even has a 50% majority in people on the planet.
Especially for a god whose stated goal is saving humanity, this seems weird. With a couple quick demonstrations, bingo, everybody on the planet can be saved. But they don't. I don't think these gods are supposed to be morons, so it just seems to be as patently ridiculous.
These aren't like simple superstitions with relatively little cost per person -- these are huge sweeping beliefs, some of which even impose taxes on every person within the organization. Maybe churches do good works -- but I can't think of a single church that couldn't have done even more good works by building hospitals instead of churches. Every giant religious organization has a huge overhead in just maintaining that organization, and this, if all the beliefs are false, is a tremendous waste of money and effort.
Individually, if all these beliefs are false, these people are laboring under false pretenses; On a quest to reach the edge of the flat world. I think to write them off as valid members of humanity is wrong; These aren't dumb people, just misled. I think like starting fights is wrong, too, you don't want to just scream at people, stress them out more.
But honest discussion -- now there's something interesting. Almost everytime, you get down to the theist just saying to you, 'Well, I don't know, at that point I just believe. It's just a matter of faith.' When pushed as to what faith is, you get to, 'Well, belief in something for no reason at all.'.
Saying something out loud like that must have a weird effect on people. If you are going to be theistic, you should at least understand how unreasonable your beliefs are: faith is by its very definition entirely unreasonable. It's kind of like the exact antithesis of science: No experimentation, no control, no history, no evidence, just FACTS.
Essentially, despite how annoying it might be, I want christians (and other religionists) to try to convert me. From their point of view, it's the logical thing to do; If they were right, then I'm in incredible peril. An eternity of torture is an awful fate that they've invented up, and if any of my loved ones would rather just see me head off to their god's torture room instead of trying to argue with me, I would be shocked. And I will talk with them -- not necessarily trying to 'convert' them to atheism (you don't convert to atheism, you just abandon your beliefs), but I just like to get to the bottom of why they do what they do. The more the merrier -- I love the debate.
I don't get the problem with that. Some people are right, and some people are wrong. What universe do you think we are living in? We make the best judgments we can about the world around us and act on them. I also don't get the bullshit people spew about how 'well, the real answer in the world is always shades of grey, not black or white.'
This is a problem where there is no shades of grey answer. A particular religion can't be 'kind of true'. Religions make hard pronouncements about the nature of reality, the existence of god, and all kinds of facts about the world we live in. Either god is as he is in the bible and christianity is right or god isn't or doesn't exist and christianity is wrong; There's no 'halfway' or 'shades of grey' there.
Of course, the 'shades of grey' exist in the myriad religions that exist -- millions, truth be told, most of which totally dead with us not even knowing the names of the parties involved -- and most of these are exclusionary; you can't believe in this religion and other religions still be true. On top of that, some people believe this preposterous notion that 'all religions are true'... despite being wholly incompatible.
This is such mindless pandering prattle that its tantamount to saying like, 'Well, all theories about the age of the earth are true' back in the early 1900s. 'Let's all be friends... all theories about quantum mechanics are true.' 'Come on, let's not pick a fight... spontaneous generation and evolution can (insert that awful 'COEXIST' bumper sticker)'.
This is *total* bullshit people. Facts, truth, reality; These aren't things that bend and sway to fit our opinions. In a world of millions of religions, not a single one of them has displayed any distinguishing piece of evidence beyond second hand stories, hearsay, and personal revelations that have been shown repeatedly to be amenable to deception. Given that deception has been proven to exist many, many times and gods, zero, it seems the most probable conclusion is that gods aren't real and our endeavors with them are a waste of time. If any god, with generally near infinite power, could produce even one piece of evidence they could easily get most of the people on the planet to believe in them... but they don't. No god even has a 50% majority in people on the planet.
Especially for a god whose stated goal is saving humanity, this seems weird. With a couple quick demonstrations, bingo, everybody on the planet can be saved. But they don't. I don't think these gods are supposed to be morons, so it just seems to be as patently ridiculous.
These aren't like simple superstitions with relatively little cost per person -- these are huge sweeping beliefs, some of which even impose taxes on every person within the organization. Maybe churches do good works -- but I can't think of a single church that couldn't have done even more good works by building hospitals instead of churches. Every giant religious organization has a huge overhead in just maintaining that organization, and this, if all the beliefs are false, is a tremendous waste of money and effort.
Individually, if all these beliefs are false, these people are laboring under false pretenses; On a quest to reach the edge of the flat world. I think to write them off as valid members of humanity is wrong; These aren't dumb people, just misled. I think like starting fights is wrong, too, you don't want to just scream at people, stress them out more.
But honest discussion -- now there's something interesting. Almost everytime, you get down to the theist just saying to you, 'Well, I don't know, at that point I just believe. It's just a matter of faith.' When pushed as to what faith is, you get to, 'Well, belief in something for no reason at all.'.
Saying something out loud like that must have a weird effect on people. If you are going to be theistic, you should at least understand how unreasonable your beliefs are: faith is by its very definition entirely unreasonable. It's kind of like the exact antithesis of science: No experimentation, no control, no history, no evidence, just FACTS.
Essentially, despite how annoying it might be, I want christians (and other religionists) to try to convert me. From their point of view, it's the logical thing to do; If they were right, then I'm in incredible peril. An eternity of torture is an awful fate that they've invented up, and if any of my loved ones would rather just see me head off to their god's torture room instead of trying to argue with me, I would be shocked. And I will talk with them -- not necessarily trying to 'convert' them to atheism (you don't convert to atheism, you just abandon your beliefs), but I just like to get to the bottom of why they do what they do. The more the merrier -- I love the debate.