This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Religious books are a lost cause. I’m an atheist, but I’m wondering which religion do you think is the most convincing? Don’t say none of them please.”
As others have pointed out, you’re not an atheist because you think like a believer does when they interpret their “spiritual journey” as a gym membership where their responsibility is limited to picking the right gym.
This is the sort of thinking that doesn’t care about physical health and fitness, nor about whatever benefits might be derived from an adequately customized routine fitting their personal needs in a way that optimally contributes to their development.
This is the sort of thinking that wants to take a pill to get the benefits of heavy lifting without having to do the work.
An atheist will have already sorted through this nonsense to arrive at a point where they understand that picking a religion doesn’t have anything to do with whatever one’s “spiritual journey” might be.
Picking a religion is like choosing between clown costumes to attend a formal affair.
If you were an atheist, you would be interested in the concepts defining the differences between belief systems rather than viewing them as package deals in which to immerse oneself.
If you were an atheist, you would want to know why it is that the “least spiritual” and most blatantly hypocritical and brutally violent religions are three of the most dominant religions on the planet and are entirely products of toxic patriarchy.
Many other religions demonstrate far more respect for life like Buddhism does and without dogmas rooted in barbaric violence.
If you were an atheist, you would not care about “which religion” but about which religious practices and ideals are beneficial and which are toxic to your growth. The notion of joining a team to achieve “spiritual growth” would send chills down the spine of an atheist who is otherwise clear on how utterly destructive such tribalistic thinking is to one’s mental health and personal growth.
The fact that so many believers feel compelled to address their issues through fraudulent representations of themselves is just proof that believers don’t sincerely believe their delusions. They struggle with their doubts, so they feel compelled to overcompensate through fraudulent behaviours. Sadly, they don’t know how to escape their mental prison and see no alternative but to indulge in sinful betrayals of the tenets in their scriptures.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “I won’t give up my faith, but what are the 3 things that atheists would like from Christians (or any religion really), in order to live in the best society possible?”
No one is asking you to give up your faith, and if someone does, then you have every right and justification to tell them where to stuff their opinion. You have every right to whatever belief you choose to hold. Sovereignty over one’s mind is an inalienable right (regardless of whether some might disagree — I’ll fight this one to the death — which is my belief, and if I choose a belief and hold onto it strongly enough to go to war to defend it, then I have to respect another’s right to do the same).
Having said all that,
I don’t impose my beliefs onto others (what I spoke of above was defending my belief — a big difference), and I do not want others to impose their beliefs onto me. I am severely offended by attitudes that do not respect my choice, yet I expect respect for theirs.
#1. STOP proselytizing. I don’t care if it’s a mandated directive. Do NOT impose your beliefs onto others if they do not want to endure your rendition of them. Please respect that you have the right to your beliefs ONLY because you acknowledge another’s right to their beliefs.
What this means in “real world terms” — NO MORE anti-abortion nonsense. NO MORE sexist, misogynistic imposition of your religious beliefs onto a society of individuals who do not share your beliefs. STOP PROSELYTIZING. PERIOD. Nothing of your belief system belongs in a shared society’s laws… nowhere in educational policy… nowhere in anything beyond its context.
By all means, use your existing houses of worship and your homes to worship, practice, or do whatever you like concerning your beliefs. DO NOT attempt to push your interpretation of your own beliefs onto a public sphere. Your beliefs are yours, not everyone else’s. Learn to respect that and put it into widespread practice. Speak out against toxic hypocrites like Jim Bakker, who pushes an ignorantly incendiary and self-serving agenda by riling up his “flock” into supporting violence to further his cause. That is entirely disgusting behaviour. Your beliefs do not belong anywhere outside the context they serve you.
#2. Get out of politics and learn to respect what is sacred about the separation between church and state. While you’re doing that, start paying taxes and take every dollar back from the rich evil monsters who are preying on the weak to con them into supporting their personally lavish lifestyles. (I don’t remember who it was now, and I’m not going to research it, but an example I remember from recent news was one hypocrite crying about needing a personal jet because public air transportation is full of sinners. — — I’m happy to report that person did not say that directly to my face because I’m not sure I would have contained my disgust with that particular attitude. Still, I can tell you, every one of those entitled monsters who prey upon the weak have nothing but enmity from me, and I’m pretty sure many others as well. Do SOMETHING about them because they certainly do NOT represent any spirituality or belief. They are the same cut of sociopathic monsters as those who lead terrorist groups from other belief systems.)
#3. Get out of science and learn to respect your boundaries and the role of religion in society. Your beliefs are not science or scientific in any nature or stretch of the imagination. Your beliefs do NOT trump scientific discovery within the realm of science. Evolution, for example, as your beliefs don’t bind a topic. Evolution occurs whether you want to believe it or not. Still, you need to understand how the moment you think your subjective belief somehow forms an equivalent counter-argument to hundreds of years of an evolving discipline, you betray your faith by stepping into territory which doesn’t belong to your faith and is not beholden to any subjective conclusions you may arrive at.
Facts are Facts. Period.
Arguing creationism as some form of valid response to evolution is a disgustingly stupid form of willful ignorance. It has polluted this world far too much already, and the disgusting attitudes of believers concerning this issue are just too much to deal with now. We have more significant problems as a species, and being bogged down by idiots who think their personal, insular, and subjectively defined perspectives on life should be given enough credibility to be treated seriously in a public dialogue only makes things worse for everyone.
Keep your faith, but know this; it is subjective and not remotely determinate about our physical universe. Learn to understand how faith does not trump facts because it should work the other way around. Physical reality should determine our beliefs because we are bound to this existence. Anything beyond it is speculation. If you want to call it a belief, go ahead, but it means nothing to the facts we all must live by together.
This post is different from my typical fare. It is an answer to a question posed on Quora, but it’s also a response to a post I’ve read about AI replacing human writers. My arguments have consistently been that as long as an AI is incapable of feeling emotions like love, sorrow, hatred, anger, and the entire range of emotions bred into us throughout centuries, it will never be capable of stimulating emotion within people. AI will never, on its own, connect with humans emotionally. Humans may imbue their AI experiences with emotions, but those are projections. Those emotions are mirror reflections of oneself and one’s biases. They can certainly help develop mindfulness techniques, but that becomes a self-referential silo.
Socialization is how we grow past our self-imposed boundaries, and we need input from other humans to understand ourselves truly. The purpose of this post is to prove this contention. How I will be doing that may seem somewhat circuitous, but please be patient enough to get to the punchline because I think it’s amusing, and I hope you will be too. Thanks for reading my gurgitations.
You ask this question as a believer because you must choose to maintain your belief consciously.
Every day is a day of ritual affirmation of your belief. At least once per week, you socialize with people to reinforce your choice to believe.
Your crises of faith are caused by the fact that you sometimes struggle to maintain your beliefs. You have doubts about your beliefs, but you do what you can to put them aside, and that may include a prayer or a castigation against Satan invading your thoughts with temptations to stray.
You may even turn to your book to find inspiration to hang onto your belief. You see words that confirm how hanging onto your belief is sometimes a struggle and that you must stand firm and never lose that belief.
You fear losing your belief because you feel like you’re letting down a paternalistic entity that will be disappointed and angry with you for not maintaining.
You struggle with the fear of an eternal punishment for betraying your commitment to your belief, and yet, after all of that, you still wonder why you endured all that turmoil.
You may tell yourself that it’s a test of your character and that if you pass it, you will be graced with an eternal reward instead of an eternal punishment.
You still wonder how people can live without that struggle, so your curiosity prompts you to ask how people would choose against what does not feel like a choice.
In your mind, you may think you have a choice, but you have a choice because a choice between Heaven and Hell isn’t much of a choice. It’s a no-brainer. After all, who would be stupid enough to choose eternal torture?
This prompts your curiosity because many people seem unconcerned about what you believe will happen to them.
Your mind struggles with the notion that people would choose eternal torture on a lake of fire as if it’s never going to happen to them.
It makes no sense whatsoever to you that people would choose to reject Paradise in favour of Hell.
The problem, however, isn’t that people choose not to believe because you can’t actually “choose” to believe. You know this yourself because you don’t “choose to believe.” You choose to maintain your beliefs.
What you do not understand about atheists and atheism is that people do not choose to become atheists.
People awaken to a new reality about themselves that they no longer believe the illusion and realize after the fact that they have become atheists.
Here’s the punchline:
An AI may be trained well enough to identify what I identified in the question posed. I don’t believe an AI could trigger the querent on such a visceral level by being so on point that they become defensive and dismissive of the information they encounter. This is a technique I refer to as “forced introspection.” This person will continue to deny, as we already know from our experiences with the MAGA mentality. However, they won’t forget how they were triggered to discover that their dismissal of what they read will vanish from their consciousness without an impact.
This dynamic can only occur between humans, so I feel comfortable putting all my economic eggs in the creative content basket. I’ve wasted a lifetime attempting to fit into a broken system and have become worse for wear. I may not ever see the same income potential I was well underway in achieving before a nuclear bomb on my life ended that aspiration. At least I can spend whatever time I have left expressing myself and permitting myself to be the “real me” through doing what I love doing.
That’s simple: Do you find the act of hurting another pleasurable?
Even if that other person has caused you harm and you lash out in self-defence while feeling sorrow toward them and the events that lead to a destructive outcome, you are demonstrating the capacity of awareness that characterizes what allows humans to think of ourselves as “civilized.”
When Hillary Clinton laughed at the death of Muammar Gaddafi, that was when she lost it for me. It doesn’t matter how evil a monster he was; there should never be any pleasure in taking a life because that’s a betrayal of one’s essential humanity on every level. One can feel relief and express that. One can find satisfaction in ridding the world of evil, even through extreme measures, but the moment one finds pleasure in that act, one embodies the evil one self-righteously destroys. Evil always wins in that outcome.
Another example of knowing when one is evil is when they are in a position to save a life and choose not to. The most iconic moment embodying this behaviour was in Breaking Bad when Walter White watched Jesse Pinkman’s girlfriend, Jane, die of an overdose. He could have saved her, but his priority was controlling Jesse.
This was a harrowing moment for me when, up until this point, I found reasons to justify Walter’s behaviour but could no longer do so after this.
This particular scenario has exploded with meaning to me as I find it occurring in real life by people I should have been able to trust. Instead, they’re responding to my struggle for survival, which they are responsible for creating in ways that echo attitudes and behaviours.
Meanwhile, I currently need more options for addressing my struggle through civilized means. I have been exhausting every supposed route to reparations, but none are forthcoming as door after door slams in my face. I empathize with Luigi Mangioni in ways I would not have expected otherwise.
This is not something to be proud of or to find pleasure in. This is a moment demanding sorrow that we must come to this extreme before those responsible for evil stop and consider the gravity of their actions.
Neither of those concepts is exclusive to believers. That you ask this question means you’ve been subjected to disparagements about atheists by other believers who spread hatred instead of the peace and love your faith alleges to represent.
This particular atheist now cringes every time I see the words “believe in” because I know it’s coming from a believer who doesn’t understand belief. They overuse that expression as a shortcut for every bit of conceptual data their brains can accommodate.
It’s like watching someone put ketchup on everything they eat, from eggs to steak to cakes and doughnuts. It just gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I am learning to hate the expression “believe in” more and more every day because the people who are supposed to understand the implications of belief the most are the least capable of comprehending the implications of a belief.
Many believers confuse belief with entrenched insularity; nothing could be more toxic to the concept.
Many believers behave as if zealotry and belief are synonymous, but they’re not. They’re just excuses to refuse to learn, grow, and change. Invoking beliefs for believers is often the equivalent of a child whining about cleaning their room or taking their medicine. Letting go of toxic beliefs is just too much “woke” for far too many.
I have faith in myself and my ability to find a way to make it through this exceptionally challenging period in my life, but I have to accept that I may fail. I rely on hope to carry me through while smoothing out the rough edges and allowing me to maintain the necessary motivation to overcome adversity. I don’t see wisdom as a statically defined state of being but as an ideal, like a utopia, which serves more as a compass setting than a destination. There is no point in which a maxim of wisdom is attainable. Wisdom is often contextual and a subjective perception one has of another. To think of oneself as wise is just another means by which one admits membership into the Dunning-Kruger club.
I hope I have enough wisdom to survive my travails, but I have faith that I may succeed even if I don’t.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How can a believer provide evidence for God’s existence to refute the claim of atheists?”
The real problem here isn’t that you don’t know how to provide evidence for God’s existence but that you see that no evidence exists but still insist your God does.
The lack of evidence should be the cornerstone of your disbelief in the existence of something.
It’s the same reasoning you would use to refuse to make a significant purchase like a vehicle without taking it for a test drive.
Your approach to your God belief is like reading an ad without pictures for a $100,000.00 sports car and sending money to an address in another country while expecting your sports car to appear at your doorstep the next day.
Do you usually make your major purchases without inspecting them first?
Would you recommend buying a house without doing a walkthrough?
Why, then, would you structure your entire life around something you can’t verify?
The best you have is someone else telling you it’s true.
You can invest in some incredibly valuable swampland from me if that’s how you make big decisions for yourself.
The harsh reality you’re struggling with is that atheists make no claims.
Atheists only refuse to buy swampland from an obvious charlatan whose only interest in you is how much money they can siphon from your pocketbook.
Atheists have no expectations of an imaginary figure.
Atheists do have expectations from unhinged believers who hypocritically betray their faith and their God’s commandments to treat others like they are all God’s children,
to stop passing hateful judgments and bearing false witness against atheists,
and to render unto Caesar by staying in their lane and out of politics.
Atheists also have hopes believers that they may, one day, realize how their condemnations of atheists only condemn them to an eternal pitchfork enema while being spit-roasted in a lake of fire.
We hope for this because it may finally result in them abandoning their addictions to hatred, violence and overt destruction of all that does not comply with their fascist expectations.
We hope for this because we realize that doing so could finally reduce the number of victims of violence and war to almost nothing.
The mid-East alone would experience a real Renaissance of the kind of love and peace that religions pretend to value. The rest of the world could finally prosper by dropping believers’ widespread misanthropic attitude toward each other and everyone in general so that we could also experience a return to sane values in communities where people work together in peaceful harmony.
It’s a dream, but it’s worth having because without it, one can only descend into the madness spread by unhinged believers, and that is the worst hell of all.
After all, what do you gain by assaulting atheists with childishly delusional questions like this?
Your question is just the result of your addiction to hatred porn. It does nothing productive for you or helps you in any way.
Do you think the people in your life appreciate your efforts to demonize atheists?
Really?
Are you sure they’re not embarrassed by behaviour like this?
Maybe it would help if you understood how this hateful behaviour of yours is what drives people away from religion to make it a rapidly shrinking phenomenon in society.
Here, have a look at the effect you are having on your religion with your perpetual hatred spew:
Try to think of what Jesus would do before overtly betraying everything you pretend to believe in because you’re only helping atheism to grow…
And we atheists don’t mind that at all… the sooner you drive everyone away and your mythologies into obscurity, the happier we atheists are.
Thank you for doing our work for us.
Forget everything I said and keep up the excellent work… wallow in your hatred porn because that’s just you drinking poison while hoping your enemy will die from it.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can I say I’m an atheist, when I’m actually agnostic? If I say I’m agnostic I’m worried that people will either say that it’s not real, or try to convert me.”
You can say that your beliefs are your own. You have no obligation to share intimate details of your journey with anyone who isn’t a part of your life.
Anyone who presses you doesn’t respect your boundaries, and if that’s the case, tell them whatever they want to hear to get them off your case. They’re not interested in getting to know you as a person because they want to be closer to you but because they’re looking for some information about you that they can use for their benefit.
People in life will ask you questions about yourself only because they’re looking for weapons to use against you.
You cannot trust people who cannot respect your boundaries. Life does boil down to being as simple as that.
The next time you wonder if you’re “allowed to say something” or another about yourself, try to remember how an orange Nazi turd concocts bullshit about himself and others with every sentence spewing out of his lying piehole.
I am certainly not advocating for any “benefits” of becoming a pathological liar because that’s just disgusting. I am simply pointing out that you have no reason to tie yourself up in knots over how you describe yourself to someone else.
The harsh reality is that you could likely spend an entire month describing intimate details about your life and why you arrived at certain conclusions that prompted you to think one way over another. The chances are excellent that 99% of what you say will be lost on your audience. People remember only 20% of what they hear.
Most of what you say about yourself passes through another person’s perceptual filters, and you have no control over how they interpret what you say. The only thing you can do is make your best guess at understanding them well enough to use the right combination of words that will get them close enough to understand something resembling what you want them to know and then hope for the best.
Your thoughts and feelings are your own… and if you’re anything like what I’ve gone through, then one day, you’ll be agnostic within a specific context and then a militant atheist within another context the next day. The following day, you’ll be amenable to believers, and later on that afternoon, after encountering a zealous believer, you’re back to hating religion and thinking of yourself as an anti-theist while thinking atheism itself isn’t firm enough to get the stench of the zealous asshole off your body and cleared from your mind.
The entire point I’m getting at is that human beings are not robots. As much as too many people want to create labels and stuff people into neat little boxes, humans are not that defined in such discrete terms.
Humans are more like water or vapour, constantly shifting in the wind or changing direction and flow depending upon the shape of the land one moves over. Whatever defines you as you is summed up entirely as your collection of memories.
Meanwhile, your memories are not stored like magnetic particles on a hard drive. Your memories are stored in eleven-dimensional space as “signposts” — symbols that your mind unravels as you recall events from your life… and your recollection changes as your state of mind changes.
Humans are more fluid than literal fluids in nature.
The next time someone asks you what you are, tell them you’re human.
The next time someone asks you what you believe, tell them you believe dinner is being served at 6:00.
Unless you find yourself in a long and deeply meaningful conversation with someone who truly wants to know your person, you have no obligation to barf up serial numbers for their mental registration of who they want you to be.
Be you and let the “Nosy Parkers” in your life be confused. That’s a “them problem,” not a “you problem.”
Being worried about how other people will respond to you because you’re trying to be honest with them about trying to figure yourself out is an unfair and intrusive expectation from another person.
You may not feel annoyed enough by such prying yet. If you manage to get on to your senior years, you’ll find yourself pissed off at such a rude and entitled attitude precisely because you have gone through a lifetime of being worried about telling people what you fear might be the wrong thing.
Don’t apologize for being who you are. You will only end up hating yourself for doing that. If someone decides they have a right to push their beliefs onto you, tell them to fuck off. Seriously. If Helen Mirren can endorse this response out of regret for being more polite than she should have been, you should not ever feel guilty about drawing your boundaries with a nosy someone in the harshest of terms.
Now that I’ve gone on this rant, I bet you might remember a half-dozen words… assuming you read any of it with any consideration instead of skimming over it all.
Good luck in navigating through this monkey house we call life. You’ll do fine if you can learn to duck and weave around all the flying feces.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can a religion be political? If so, which religions are left-wing and which are right-wing?”
People are political — from the self-management perspective by establishing community systems and laws to live by.
Religions are intended to guide people to live with the support they need to find happiness within themselves and through their relationships with others.
Religious zealots and leaders, however, seek to leverage community support to achieve political power. Wings are either moot within the context of religion, or they are leveraged to create further divisions between people while furthering the aims of the corrupt in their quests for power.
The consequences of seeking power ultimately corrupt a community’s politics to destroy community cohesion and create an oppressive environment where neither politics, community development, nor spiritual development are best served.
Religion was the first form of government. The consequences were the Dark Ages, in which humanity lived in a dark state of repression where no progress was made for society for hundreds of years. The world was ruled by the complete corruption of the human spirit made manifest by unrestrained power that we have always struggled with as a species.
We have yet to learn our lessons about restraining power enough to apply them to the mess we’re creating now through capitalism.
It’s become so overwhelmingly attractive a source of power acquisition that it has enticed corruption within religion to grow into a capitalist horror of its own.
The Vatican is among the wealthiest institutions on the planet, and it’s supposed to represent a religious commitment to ending poverty.
Some of the wealthiest people on the planet have grown their seed of corruption by betraying religious principles and leveraging hope against those in despair.
One of the most corrupt of political monsters today pretends at religion to leverage the naive trust of people who have become resentful of a political system that has betrayed them for decades.
Every day on Facebook, I see advertising for “lawyers” who claim they can help people recover the money they lost by trusting a scammer who swindled them.
There is no possible way to recover one’s money from a scammer, especially when their true identity remains a mystery.
The lawyer claiming to be able to help is just another scammer preying on people who were already scammed once and are desperate to trust someone who will help them.
These are among the worst of predatory parasites because they are preying on people who have already lost much.
Meanwhile, Facebook does nothing to protect its “community” because it benefits from the advertising dollars it collects.
What we end up with is an informal cadre of predatory parasites preying on victims on multiple levels throughout society, and to such a degree that it becomes impossible to trust anyone.
Everywhere one looks, every system one turns to hides another predator ready to invite one into their web to drain them dry.
That’s what the whole of society reminds me of today. I’m sure I am not the only one who sees how impossible the situation is that we have allowed ourselves to live within.
I don’t think we can hold out much longer before it all collapses like a house of cards. The problem with that is the most vulnerable among us who have suffered the most will also become the most significant casualties of the ensuing chaos.
People who genuinely wish to hang onto their sanity and maintain something of a resemblance of hope must do what they can to build walls between domains to prevent the corruption of power from perpetually overwhelming our systems and threaten our stability as peaceful and progressive societies.
Religion is not supposed to be political in the sense of a social management system.
Religion is supposed to be about personal growth.
“Render unto Caesar” was a prescient command for its time because the threat it addresses is always beyond evident to those who do not fall under the spell of attraction to power over others.
Some of us are lucky enough to learn that our power over ourselves is the only power that matters.
That is the most fundamental lesson all religions hint at and the only lesson of value they have for humanity, but they’ve lost touch with that.
Ironically, the best teachers of this principle today are characters from fiction.
You don’t in the same way you don’t get rid of scars. They’re a part of you for life.
The injury may no longer affect you, but you will live with a reminder of it until you die.
That’s just life.
There is no point in fighting with yourself over “clinging remnants,” especially when they can still be helpful as shields against the perpetual assaults of believers.
Being aware of your “clinging remnants” gives you deeper insights into the effects of religion on a person’s mind and helps you to develop an objective perspective of yourself while improving your ability to help someone else when they’re struggling with the impact of their conditioning.
Being aware of “clinging remnants” helps you to be more aware of other forms of conditioning or manipulations like gaslighting because you’re more attuned to the subtle implications of words and their meaning.
Whatever may be clinging today may drop off over time to be forgotten while other remnants you were unaware of begin to crop up and occupy your attention. This is a natural part of the healing process that helps you to develop deep insights into the tangled web of confusion that religion weaves into one’s consciousness and unconsciousness.
This deconditioning process is a valuable experience in developing self-knowledge and awareness of oneself in depths many never achieve. They may irk you for a long time, and even for the rest of your life, but you will find moments where their presence allows you to perceive events or a situation on levels of subtlety that surprise you how people can miss what appears evident to you.
The most important goal is not to fight against the remnants but to develop an objective perspective of them. Understanding one’s sensitivities is like a vaccine against being conditioned in other areas and ways by different types of bad actors one encounters.
thotbag 