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.
Freedom FROM religion is just as important as freedom OF religion.
We should have put freedom FROM religion in the constitution instead of freedom OF religion.
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.
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.
*too easy.
No, to easy.
See:
Hard>Medium>Easy
Man, it must really be hard taking this L. Sorry, how does it feel to be so wrong? Oh man.
Mate, get off your high horse lol, you’re wrong here
Lol holy shit. The irony
Cry harder, bro.
LOL, just wait until you crack open a world history book.
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.”
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.
/sChristian 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.
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.
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.”
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…
Not every culture, but look at the Aztecs man!
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.
If it can’t coexist with civilized society, it needs to be destroyed.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
Pre-TLDR: I will be happy to accept if my hypothesis only holds in the weaker form of applying only to evangelical religions.
Yeah, I do think that that’s a fair nuance to add to it and I was thinking whether I wanted to get into that in my original comment as well. However, and maybe it’s just because I’m feeling particularly anti-theist lately, but I feel like the evangelical religions (And really there are at least two, aren’t there? Muslims are generally pretty intent on forcing non-Muslims to live by their code) are just the more obvious presentation and maybe a more exaggerated presentation of the same principle.
The core problem is that any religion espouses an objective morality, an objectively correct way to behave. This means that as a religious person, although there may be some differences in behavior between me and others that don’t fall under the purview of my doctrine, there will always be at least some behaviors that are mandated, and someone who behaves differently than me in those ways is objectively committing wrongdoings. I may be content to let them simply go on doing that, maybe. I believe their punishment will come to them in the afterlife, or something like that, but it seems to me like this would inevitably devolve into “I must force other people not to do X, even if they want to do X and it harms nobody, because it is evil to do X and they must be stopped”. This is what I meant by saying that the most harmless form of religion is one that just hasn’t followed its premises through to the rational conclusion.
Of course, it’s a deep subject and there’s a lot of other ways that it could evolve too. And it remains to be seen whether or not groups of humans would inevitably arrive at the same behavior under nihilism as well, just for different reasons. I.e " there is no objective wrongdoing, therefore if I don’t like someone doing X, there’s nothing wrong about me stopping them from doing it even if it harms nobody - just because I don’t like it is good enough." You can maybe argue that one road being longer than the other makes it preferable… I’m really not sure. Definitely a lot of fun stuff to think about!
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.
Say every person in america was Christian. What exactly would change for the better?
The tenants of the religion wouldn’t even allow it.
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.
