If We All Became Atheists?

[9-10ths_Penguin]

You don't seem to have a very high opinion about the influence of people's belief. Do you also think that most religious charities are just scams to rape, pillage and subjugate? You'd be mostly right, but even I make some concessions.

I always find it funny when people argue for Schroedinger's Religion: somehow it's simultaneously both an absolutely vital part of a worldview AND also absolutely irrelevant for motivating anything that anyone could find objectionable.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

If atheism is lack of an opinion, why are atheists in general so opinionated?

Atheism isn't a lack of opinions. Do you really not know that or was that posted in bad faith?

You, like many other theists, can't conceal your contempt for atheists. You shouldn't expect them to respect religions that teach them to think that way. Here's what the Abrahamic religions have done, and part of why I am an antitheist:

"Atheists have become the ultimate scapegoats in our culture ... but the news isn't all bad! From the American Atheists web siteA new study by the University of Minnesota Department of Sociology has found that Americans perceive Atheists as the group least likely to embrace common values and a shared vision of society. Worse yet, Atheists are identified as the cohort other Americans do not want to see their offspring marrying! These are just some of the result from a forthcoming article slated for publication in the American Sociological Review ... Atheists "play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past" in that we provide "a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society." In addition, says the study ... When asked to identify the group that "does not at all agree with my vision of American society," 39.6% of respondents listed Atheists, well ahead of Muslims (26.3%); Homosexuals (22.6%); and Jews (7.6%). " source

"Nationwide, the nonreligious population is both the fastest growing, and the most despised. I ask you all, why is that? Why are we hated, when we endorse no violence, incite no racism or hatred, and demand nothing more than equal treatment?"- David Silverman

Isn't the answer obvious:

[1] "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good" - Psalm 14:1

[2] "But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, and all and the enemy of a good god." - Revelation 21:8

[3]"Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?"- 2 Corinthians 6:14

[4] "Who is the liar? It is the man who denies that Jesus is the Christ." - 1 John 2:22

[5] "Whoever is not with me is against me" - Luke 11:23

Altogether, those five scriptures depict unbelievers as lying, corrupt, vile, abominable, wicked, godless vessels in the service of darkness and evil, not one of which does any good, and fit to be burned alive forever as the moral equivalent of murderers and whoremongers, and the declared enemy of a good god.

Like I said, you shouldn't expect atheists to have any positive feelings about the religions that teach these things or respect for people who promote them or believe them.

secular ideologies, fascism

"When Fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." - Sinclair Lewis

So, in your mind, we should only trumpet the abusers of religion, and then blame religion for this while ignoring the billions of humans that use their religion as an effective means of self-improvement?

Surely you jest. Some of the least developed and most undereducated people we encounter here are zealous theists, and the more zealous, the more uneducated. The Abrahamics are also taught bigotry. In the States, they're turning the country into a Handmaid's Tail by invading government.

The goal of most religions is not to improve society. It is to improve the individuals within it.

It does neither. If it did the latter, it would do the former. If only the Christians I encounter in life were better than the non-Christians, but they're not. Like I've said, the more Abrahamism one absorbs and the more he lets it define his thoughts and behaviors, the worse for him and his neighbors.

your brain simply will not accept this information. Why?

You're not nearly as compelling to others as you seem to think you are. Nothing you write isn't easy to understand

You could say it. But you couldn't show it to be a bias.

All opinions are biases, some rational, some irrational. I've already explained that to you, but I guess "your brain simply will not accept this information. Why?"

Actually, politics, and greed, and egotism, and bigotry and vengeance are used to justify our violence against each other FAR, FAR , more often than religion is.

But that IS religion. Just look to the Middle East to see what these ideologies do to people. What is the Hamas-Israeli conflict but politics, ancient bigotries, and each party seeking vengeance? The Abrahamic god is bigoted and vengeful. It's a jealous and angry god, **mod edit**

 

[Augustus]

Because it shows that people more often refrain from wars. In the past, war was just a "fact of life", just like slavery or women be seen as second class citizens. War is now seen more and more as a bad thing. So much so that even the most belligerent countries renamed their war ministries "ministries of defence". In other countries, the defensive character of the military is enshrined in their constitutions.

Wars become less frequent but more deadly because of technological changes.

This makes war a much different proposition.

The same thing that gives war the potential to end human life in earth also means we get fewer wars.

This is a change but not necessarily an overall good.

What do you see as "human nature"? Is it just genetics? In that case, I'd mostly agree. We are still monkeys. We lost the hair, but not the aggression.
But we are a social species and we have culture. It is the culture that has changed. And culturally, violence isn't as much tolerated as in the past.

Cultural is impermanent, especially when whatever underpins this culture is basically “personal preference” or happens to be intellectually fashionable at the time.

Im less confident than many that the mass jettisoning of traditional beliefs will lead to long term development of stable, humanistic societies.

Beyond this though, again we have technological changes that make cooperation easier and reduce uncertainty that allows for greater trust.

Living in a world where a horde can descend on you from nowhere leads to a need to be more powerful than potential rivals, which often requires aggression.

The question is whether the world is now too interconnected and technology becoming too powerful to control leading to new instability.

Think of the damage a $1million AI drone swarm will be able to do in a few years for example.

Changes are differences but not necessarily advances.

My view is cycles of gain are likely to be followed by cycles of losses.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I disagree. Atheism is an opinion, a philosophical position. Nobody is born with such. Nobody is born holding a belief that Santa does not exist, by the same token.

We aren't born with a belief or disbelief in Santa, but it appears we do have an innate sense of being spiritual/religious.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

I see no reason why. It seems people will always find something to fight about.

I do think if everyoke turnes atheist it would likely resemble that South Park episode where atheists were still fighting and killing over pointless stuff. We are animals, afterall.

 

[Augustus]

I do think if everyoke turnes atheist it would likely resemble that South Park episode where atheists were still fighting and killing over pointless stuff. We are animals, afterall.

The question of whether religion causes violence always seems the wrong one to me.

Pretty much any belief system can cause violence, the question is whether or not there is anything special about religion that makes it better able to cause violence than the thousands of replacement belief systems that would fill the vacuum.

I’ve never seen any meaningful evidence that we would expect the diverse replacements for religion to be, on average, any more conducive to peace.

 

[RestlessSoul]

As prone? What human institution compares the Catholic Church's pedophilia coverup?

Carlin said it well:

"When it comes to bull****, big-time, major league bull****, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bull**** story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bull**** story. Holy Sh**!"

Those are called enemies, and it a fool who loves somebody who intends him harm. Such people need to be excommunicated from one's life and no resources shared with them.

Why wouldn't they ignore such words? Behavior is taught by example, not from words read from a pulpit.

Also, the Christian god doesn't have those qualities. You don't get to punish the human race with the loss of paradise and immortality, nearly drown it all, offer a human sacrifice that has to be believed in to be able to stomach being near humans, unleash Satan on mankind, and build a torture pit and staff it with demons and then use any of those words to describe yourself.

I'm with him there. What good?

Humanism does good for the world. Religion as I'm used to it is divisive and tribal. Abrahamic religions teach bigotry and anti-intellectualism. They teach that believing by faith is a virtue. It is not. It's a logical error that always generates non sequiturs which are either false or unfalsifiable, and if one somehow actually guessed correctly, he's have no way to know that he was correct without empirical confirmation.

They're the words your god supposedly spoke. If they were calculated to mislead, it wasn't by the skeptics who read them back to believers.

Atheists don't care about gods and religions.

A better question would be what would theists obsess about if there were no gods or religions?

What about puppies?

That also describes baby humans, who you say are closer to gods than you are.

We don't. It's religion that needs to be sold.

Atheism is all of that, but most people don't reason very well. Religion won't ever disappear as long as there are people making a living selling it.
but Christianity is fading into relative irrelevance now in countries where people are educated in the liberal arts, which is all that the rest of us ask of it.

Wow. That’s quite the tirade; so much bitterness, so much prejudice. It must be hard for you to carry that around.

And yet you choose to live in a country where religion shows no sign at all of disappearing. Why is that, do you think? I do hope your Mexican neighbours are more tolerant of your beliefs and values, than you are of theirs.

 

[Heyo]

The question of whether religion causes violence always seems the wrong one to me.

Agreed. It isn't so much a question of "does religion", but "which religion".

Pretty much any belief system can cause violence, the question is whether or not there is anything special about religion that makes it better able to cause violence than the thousands of replacement belief systems that would fill the vacuum.

Maybe it's the acceptance of violence in its fundamentals? Sam Harris said, "the only problem with Islamic fundamentalism is the fundamentals of Islam". Religions - and ideologies - are not made equal. Some are fundamentally violent, and others are fundamentally pacifistic.

I’ve never seen any meaningful evidence that we would expect the diverse replacements for religion to be, on average, any more conducive to peace.

Have you looked at crime statistics? Are there groups, religious, political or philosophical, who have statistically significant more or less convictions of violent crimes?

 

[RestlessSoul]

Agreed. It isn't so much a question of "does religion", but "which religion".

Maybe it's the acceptance of violence in its fundamentals? Sam Harris said, "the only problem with Islamic fundamentalism is the fundamentals of Islam". Religions - and ideologies - are not made equal. Some are fundamentally violent, and others are fundamentally pacifistic.

Have you looked at crime statistics? Are there groups, religious, political or philosophical, who have statistically significant more or less convictions of violent crimes?

That last is an interesting point. I haven’t examined the statistics, but I can offer some anecdotal evidence. I used to live in an area of London which was impoverished but home to a large, mostly Moslem, immigrant population. Thieving was rare and the streets were safe to walk at night; you certainly couldn’t say that of the rest of the borough.

I’ve also found the people of Italy to be spontaneously generous and kind; years ago when I was a weather beaten wanderer sitting on my backpack, an old lady dressed in black tapped me on the shoulder, handed me a 1000 Lira note, and asked me to pray for her. This was not an untypical experience; wether that has anything to do with near universal Catholicism in Italy, I couldn’t say.

 

[Augustus]

Agreed. It isn't so much a question of "does religion", but "which religion".

But also which is ones, in which contexts and how consistently over time and place when compared to the average of other societies.

Also the question of how much violence is prevented by religion is probably impossible to answer. Much as it is knocked for being divisive, religion has been one of the most powerful unifying forces in human history that creates common bonds across ethnic and national divides.

Maybe it's the acceptance of violence in its fundamentals? Sam Harris said, "the only problem with Islamic fundamentalism is the fundamentals of Islam". Religions - and ideologies - are not made equal. Some are fundamentally violent, and others are fundamentally pacifistic

Very few ideologies are fundamentally pacifistic, many wars have been fought recently over human rights.

Have you looked at crime statistics? Are there groups, religious, political or philosophical, who have statistically significant more or less convictions of violent crimes?

Not sure these are very meaningful given they are hard to isolate from other factors.

Muslims commit more crimes in Europe but less in somewhere like UAE.

 

[Heyo]

But also which is ones, in which contexts and how consistently over time and place when compared to the average of other societies.

Also the question of how much violence is prevented by religion is probably impossible to answer. Much as it is knocked for being divisive, religion has been one of the most powerful unifying forces in human history that creates common bonds across ethnic and national divides.

A common enemy is a great device for unity within the tribe.

Very few ideologies are fundamentally pacifistic, many wars have been fought recently over human rights.

For example?

Not sure these are very meaningful given they are hard to isolate from other factors.

Muslims commit more crimes in Europe but less in somewhere like UAE.

Which again shows the tribal nature of that (and many other) religion. Crimes and violence are committed against "the other", not the tribe.
I don't count tribal behaviour as essentially non-violent.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Have you looked at crime statistics? Are there groups, religious, political or philosophical, who have statistically significant more or less convictions of violent crimes?

Nationalism has a blood soaked history with or without religion.

 

[Augustus]

A common enemy is a great device for unity within the tribe.

All worldviews define themselves as much by what they are not as by what they are.

There is always the “enemy” as can’t simply define ourselves by some universal criteria that applies to all.

A”common humanity” is not sufficient to create common interests.

For example?

The liberal interventionist support for wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

Which again shows the tribal nature of that (and many other) religion. Crimes and violence are committed against "the other", not the tribe.
I don't count tribal behaviour as essentially non-violent.

I would very much question the logic you are using here given low crime is not common to all Muslim societies, but only to a few Middle Eastern ones.

I’d say religious tribalism has very little to do with it.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Agreed. It isn't so much a question of "does religion", but "which religion".

We've even seen Buddhist terrorists and extremists, and Buddhism isn't filled with justifications for violence like the Abrahamic Texts are.
We are animals, we at the end of the day we still act like no matter how much we tell ourselves we are civilized. We are a violent species living in a time where just about everything in our environments have outpaced out evolution by immeasurable bounds. 300 years ago the world still slowly changed. 200 years things still looked largely the same, though radical changes were around the corner. 100 years looks primitive by today's standards but it was basically modern society in the wealthier parts, with some parts still resembling the later parts of the previous century. Those are massive leaps in just a few centuries, yet evolution tends to work with a time frame of many millenia for such changes, our own modern species not even being that different from out most recent relatives of hundreds of thousands of years ago.
I seriously think it's messing with our psyche, especially with things like social media and smart phone apps exploiting our long term evolutionary habits acquired over incomprehensible generations of when we were tribes and nomads, and even further back as apes wonder in Africa.
I won't be surprised if history regards this as a major issue facing today. We're giving it our best to live ahead of what we normally do, but were still beasts, better off and worse off than the beasts who crawl on all fours. And this Western Liberal Democracy thing is hard enough before information overload and 24/7 instant global connection came into play. Add in all the chemicals and even Nature is probably saying what the hell?
But then again we were made in God's image, amd God made in our image, and he too impulsively destroyed the world thinking it would solve his problems. Yet it still doesn't work to solve problems, but it feels good and peace is really, really hard, even for a god.

 

[Nakosis]

The question of whether religion causes violence always seems the wrong one to me.

Pretty much any belief system can cause violence, the question is whether or not there is anything special about religion that makes it better able to cause violence than the thousands of replacement belief systems that would fill the vacuum.

I’ve never seen any meaningful evidence that we would expect the diverse replacements for religion to be, on average, any more conducive to peace.

What if we all became Catholics?

I think the question of peace vs violence because of religion nullifies itself to some degree. Within the group, religious ideology causes cohesion. Therefore common morals/values. More likely peaceful resolution within the group. Outside of the group, conflicts are more likely to result in violence.

Same if we all became Islamic. Division of morals/values/"religious" ideology sets up a situation where violence is the response.
Of course it is not likely the world would suddenly all start sharing the same morals/values/"religious" ideology, but the question was more, assuming shared ideology, would it cut down violence and would it matter whether this shared ideology were religious based or not?

 

[Augustus]

What if we all became Catholics?

I think the question of peace vs violence because of religion nullifies itself to some degree. Within the group, religious ideology causes cohesion. Therefore common morals/values. More likely peaceful resolution within the group. Outside of the group, conflicts are more likely to result in violence.

Same if we all became Islamic. Division of morals/values/"religious" ideology sets up a situation where violence is the response.
Of course it is not likely the world would suddenly all start sharing the same morals/values/"religious" ideology, but the question was more, assuming shared ideology, would it cut down violence and would it matter whether this shared ideology were religious based or not?

I think we naturally create differences based on religion/ideology to justify other differences ethnicity, class, material self-interest etc.

If we all adopted the same beliefs, then we’d create differences out of sheer boredom if nothing else.

We simply need to differentiate ourselves in one way or the other.

This is why I find it so ridiculous when some people believe that getting rid of religion would lead to less division and more unity. Division is our natural state.

As we have different ideological and material interests violence will rear its head sooner or later

 

[Nakosis]

I think we naturally create differences based on religion/ideology to justify other differences ethnicity, class, material self-interest etc.

If we all adopted the same beliefs, then we’d create differences out of sheer boredom if nothing else.

We simply need to differentiate ourselves in one way or the other.

This is why I find it so ridiculous when some people believe that getting rid of religion would lead to less division and more unity. Division is our natural state.

As we have different ideological and material interests violence will rear its head sooner or later

You don't think humanity as a whole can come up with a list of values we all share in common with could bring some cohesion?

 

[Heyo]

The liberal interventionist support for wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

Do you really think Afghanistan or Iraq had anything to do with human rights? For the misanthropic view, you've taken in this thread, you are quite naïve.

I would very much question the logic you are using here given low crime is not common to all Muslim societies, but only to a few Middle Eastern ones.

I’d say religious tribalism has very little to do with it.

So, what is it that is common among the countries with low crime rates? If it was all random, we'd expect to see great fluctuation in time - which we don't.

 

[Augustus]

Do you really think Afghanistan or Iraq had anything to do with human rights? For the misanthropic view, you've taken in this thread, you are quite naïve.

In the diverse coalitions that supported these wars there were plenty of support from liberal interventionists.

Do you really think it was only “bad people” with sinister motives? Now that would be naive.

Tony Blair would be the classic example of the liberal interventionists among the politicians.

Christopher Hitchens was a vocal proponent of liberal interventionism if you would prefer an explicit articulation of their ideological justifications.

Political views of Christopher Hitchens - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

So, what is it that is common among the countries with low crime rates? If it was all random, we'd expect to see great fluctuation in time - which we don't.

Good governance usually.

 

[Augustus]

You don't think humanity as a whole can come up with a list of values we all share in common with could bring some cohesion?

Not that override our competing interests.

There is a wide enough range of “natural” values that mean there will always be disagreement without any ability to decide which values are “better” than others.