Why do some people feel the need to denigrate the religious?

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Start with namecalling.

But, additionally, speaking for myself, I don't criticize the beliefs of Biblical-Literalists, including Atheists. Their beliefs are their business, no mine, and don't interest me.

So, our Atheist friends need to ask themselves why it's so important to them to evaluate other people and their beliefs.

Michael829

Ignore him, he like most of PPR is relying on fallacies to create a binary of good and evil, placing himself by default in the category of the good. The sad truth is good and evil are but constructs by humans, with majorities deciding which is which.

I get where you're going with what you say Musings. You neither condemn nor support the criminals. You simply view them as broken people who you place faith in your saviour fixing as they in your mind have fixed you. It's noble. Unfortunately lost on many of the people you want to apply this to, but its noble all the same.

You show more disrespect to me than to those who adore and promote the ways of a genocidal son murdering prick of a God.

Who is blind again?

Regards
DL

Ask all the victims of Inquisitions and Jihads why religious thinking needs evaluation.

They will give you an earful.

As any gay or woman who, as groups, are discriminated and denigrated even today by the religious who refuse to grant them equal status.

If any here do not see that mainstream religions are immoral constructs with garbage ideologies, they are not too bright.

Regards
DL

Broken might not be the best word, but otherwise yes. But that isn't what this thread is about

Like someone can be athiest, or have a different beleif. It doesn't mean they are broken, or wrong or anything. It just means they are different.

Also, gnostic, Einstein was a pantheist and good freinds with a catholic preist. Do you think Einstein is wrong, or that his choice of freinds is stupid?

You speak about extremists.
Extremists tend to hijack and branch off from mainstream religions, including Christian and Muslim sects.

I don't think you can compare your local vicar to sandwich boarding Westborough Baptist, as much as you cannot compare a Western partygoing Muslim to a civilian beheading, child-marrying jihadist.

Some people come here to LARP. When I see it I generally tend to go quite because it's painfully obvious.

So because you don't criticize the non religious or atheists, that means that every single religious person feels the same way? Are you trying to use this flawed mindset to ignore the other side of the issue? All groups including atheists are subject to the same poor treatment from others. Anyone that insults another person's beliefs is simply wrong for doing so. The real issue is that there are sub groups that have distorted the true essence of their beliefs and have caused the unnecessary accusations and attacks against the religious group as a whole. Again, the same applies to atheists, there are sub groups that choose to attack the religious and cause an overall negative view of atheists. The original question needs to be altered to fit the real world issues that are going on. There may be less bickering among the comments if the original claim is made more objectively. Unfortunately, you will still get people like Gnostic trying to rip apart every religious group and not even try to see the good in their beliefs.

I see him more as an atheist. We might never know, given that atheists were despised in those days and a smart man would try to blend in.

If we go by today, the vast majority of scientists are atheists. Leave it to science to not believe in supernatural garbage, like a supernatural God.

Regards
DL

Yes I can, when they both fly the same flag and contribute to the same inhumane religion.

You have Jihadists branching off, but ignore that it is the root religion that produces them.

Listen, learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drJCC2XXMBo

Regards
DL

I see the good. I just recognize that it is not worth the evil.

"Anyone that insults another person's beliefs is simply wrong for doing so."

How completely stupid.

You would not insult some guy on the corner waving a KKK flag or Isis flag around and preaching white supremacy or Sharia law?

If not, you are not much of a man.

Cultural relativism is garbage and censorship shows a country that does not trust it's own people to do and think the right thing.

Regards
DL

oookay. let's try again from scratch.

religions tella story that the religious identifies with. it allows him to place himself in a transcendent context, i.e. something bigger than this reality, and gives meaning to his life. That has positive effects on the religous persons feeling of belonging and identity. The story of a religion can inspire noble deeds, self sacrifice for others etc.
It creates fictive kinship - where before, one would only sacrifice oneself for immediate tamily members, now one could sacrifice oneself (and I don't exclusively mean physically, but also by taking on the profession of nurse, rather than wall street banker) for the religious community, or even all of mankind.

However, religion is also a narrative based on the terms available at its inception, and as a cultural entity must have a certain "immune system" to defend its ideas and survive - "kill the infidels!" (before they kill us and our way of life).

problems arise whenever the fundamentals of the religious story collide with other narratives, like reason and evolution and atomism. How does the religion defend itself? how tolerant can it be before becoming obsolete as a device to inform identity, create fictive kinship etc. - and how vulnerable is it in the first place?

most religions are pretty vulnerable when a competing narrative can find a way to argue away their god - event tough then one can retreat to describing god as transcendent and supernatural and so on.

but things get really tricky when a narrative argues for the non-existence of a soul. Because then, there will be no transcendent punichment - no hell. and no heaven. that is an attack on the the whole functioning of the supernatural system - if humans have no supernatural "organ".


and this is where we are right now. is there something supernatural to humans or not- if not, all stories that rely on supernatural things, like an immortal soul, become equal to unicorns and dragons, without exception.

but the question of whether you believe in the supernatural or not has consequences, and therefore is not private.
Just as religion has real effects on the behaviour of the believers (positive and negative), non-religion has an effect on non-believers.

with increasing understanding of the neurological substrate of cognition, taste and identity, "the soul" is under siege- and with it, the community and individual identity of any believer.

as a nonbeliever, I think we must start to make moral codes for a world in which a person's identity can be thought of as changeable through brain damage, drugs and microchips. Argueing about which story that relies on the supernatural to work has been become obsolete- which is why in christianity, almost nowhere catholics and protestants still kill each other. Not even they take their religion so serious anymore - as long as its core- the supernatural- is untouched.
And we need new stories to identify with, that create fictive kinship. "the nationstate" was one of those stories that could, for some time, create kinship and identity (and it still does in a lot of places, for a lot of people. "race" was one. but these had horribly aggressive "immune systems".

denigrating the religious is the atheists way of keeping dragons and unicorns at bay. - by not taking them seriously.

edit:
I also denigrate nationalists and racist.

Going back to this I just had a really odd visual - Steve Irwin seeing Bruce Lee in heaven and whispering to an imaginary audience 'You see that? That's Bruce Lee over there! Ima rassl'im to the ground, stick mi fum up is ass an piss im off! Now that's one pissed off Bruce Lee!'.

I’d said:

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--Michael829

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You said:
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You’re the one who likes to use the word “Supernatural”. What does that word mean?
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To a Materialists (some of whom call themselves “Naturalists”), the Supernatural is whatever isn’t included the objectively-existent physical world they believe in, to comprise all of reality.
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To most of us, the supernatural refers to the vampires, werewolves, and animated mummies and skeletons that come after people in scary movies.
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…or, in general, contravention of established physical laws.
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Of course that makes it a useful word for Materialists, because it lets you try to equate non-Materialism with vampires, werewolves and animated mummies and skeletons.
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As for the acceleration of the recession-rate of the more distant galaxies, you’re the only one who referred to it as “supernatural”. I merely said that it isn’t explained by current known physical laws. The point is that there’s more to physics than is known. …so don’t be so worshipful about science,
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Sure, at least in principle, most likely there could be found a physical explanation for the accelerating recessional-rates.
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That’s often been the case in the past, when there were observations contradicting known physics. Examples:
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The black-body radiation’s wavelength-energy curve
The results of the Michaelson-Morely experiment
The planet Mercury’s seemingly anomalous rotation of apsides
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…and now there’s that unexplained acceleration of recessional-rates.
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…the point being that physicists’ understanding of physics isn’t complete, and probably never will be.
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“Our”? Are you a physicist or a cosmologist?
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Science-worshippers want to identify with the objects of their worship.
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…the descriptions by you and the other scientists?
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See above.
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And then you continue to use your word “supernatural” to refer to religion, though, for many or most religious people, religion doesn’t claim contravention of physical law.
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But you have your own, largely erroneous, belief about others’ beliefs.
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Quarks are the subject of physics, not religion. You’re confusing completely different topics.
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You talk about quarks a lot. Maybe you should leave physics to physicists.
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There are meanings that language doesn’t describe well, or at all. Allegories have been devised, for or by some religious people, those who want a literal description. But even many of those who believe the allegories also have a sense of what it is that the allegories are about.
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You’re astoundingly presumptuous, with your belief that you understand the beliefs of others.
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Anyway, there’s also the question of why other people’s beliefs are important to you. I couldn’t care less what your beliefs are.
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Michael829

Last edited by Michael829 on 08 Dec 2017, 6:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I would say brain damage, drugs and worship of technology are already failing horribly along the line of moral codes!