Atheist / theist

[RichardTheFrog]

religious people truly don't understand the extent of ridiculousness non-believers view their practice. I would compare it to their belief in unicorns or Santa clause. Nonetheless I keep my mouth shut as long as I or my neighbor is not being affected by such actions.

Yea as long as they're not blowing up concerts full of kids and destroying civilization, right?

 

[LimaBean]

Yea as long as they're not blowing up concerts full of kids and destroying civilization, right?

By no means would I say you're wrong, but what good could I do to fight the wickedness that is religion? The only thing I can imagine is disallowing the indoctrination of my possible future children.

 

[ChristopherColumbus]

The enemy is not religion but fanaticism, which can emerge from any religion, race, creed, or belief... whether theist or atheist. Witness the twentieth century. What should we do? Lobotomize the human race [they are trying]? No, I think a good humane and tolerant education is the solution....one that does not breed a militant mind one way or the other.

The problem is, say this dumbing down through social media is completely successful, just at the moment of its success, you might see its downfall. A massive reactionary movement may arise, and sweep all in its path... a romantic revenge of human nature on technology so to speak.

 

[Twodogs]

I personally just freely express my lack of belief when the question of religion comes up. Admittedly it's not too hard to do in Australia as it's not taken seriously by most of the population, thankfully.
What helps is that in the past few years various religious organisations have been found guilty of covering up decades of child sex abuse. In one area alone 40% of the priests were kiddy fiddlers.
The last census results were released just last week showing that 30.1% of the population has no religious belief, this is up from 18.7% 5 years ago.
Also the top ranking Australian catholic has just been charged with child molestation himself and now will hopefully return from the vatican to face the music.
And then of course the fact that all streams of science agree that the biblical account of creation, the flood etc is just nonsense.
Religion is in its death throws here in Australia, and that's not a bad thing in my opinion.

 

[EyeBRollin]

I'm agnostic atheist. Most women I talk to tend to be religious.

I dodge and deflect like a politican. When they ask me about god I just nod and change the subject.

It's a race against time. If you hold out long enough with a woman, it eventually doesn't matter. She'll rob banks for you if she has 100% interest level. How do you think criminals and deadbeats get women? lol

 

[Bible_Belt]

Yea as long as they're not blowing up concerts full of kids and destroying civilization, right?

A hundred years ago, it was the Atheists who were doing the bombings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_bombings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing

Extreme right or left-wing ideologies typically hate religion and ban it. The state and its Great Leader are god. North Korea and China are modern examples, but all of the red governments were that way - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. They killed millions and millions of people in the name of anti-religion. ISIS has a lot of catching up to do, if they are going to be regarded on that level.

 

[LimaBean]

A hundred years ago, it was the Atheists who were doing the bombings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1919_United_States_anarchist_bombings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing

Extreme right or left-wing ideologies typically hate religion and ban it. The state and its Great Leader are god. North Korea and China are modern examples, but all of the red governments were that way - Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. They killed millions and millions of people in the name of anti-religion. ISIS has a lot of catching up to do, if they are going to be regarded on that level.

If you can prove Stalin, mao, pol pot (surprised you didn't attempt to throw in hitler), were killing in the name of anti-religion you may have a shadow of a point. But, simply being atheist doesn't mean they were doing it in the name of atheism. Admittedly this can hold true with religion as well.

 

[Bible_Belt]

Hitler did have an antagonistic relationship with the church in their few attempts to criticize him. He allowed the church to exist as long as they never questioned his authority. But any totalitarian regime is the same - the state comes first. So they are all anti-religion to that extent.

 

[ThisNThat]

It really depends on where you live. Most academic environments are very Atheist, outside of Southern Bible colleges. For what it's worth, the same scorn you get for being a non-believer happens in the reverse at most universities. Use the word "Jesus," and people immediately look at you in fear and disgust, like you are an illiterate inbred hillbilly.

You just need to find young, progressive-minded people to hang around. They tend to group together. They also tend to be not all that progressive if you disagree with their stances on politics and religion. So when you do meet people like that, and words such as "feminist" come up in casual conversation, you probably want to keep your mouth shut if you want to keep your new friends.

This...I actually met a woman on POF that had no inkling of talking about religion, Jesus, or being Christian and "looking for a man who walks with the Lord" in her dating profile.

Later I met her at a Meetup and got to know her. She is actually plays the organ during Sunday services at her church in the community and is highly active with her kids in the Christian community.

She told me, outside of just ticking the box for "Religion" that she purposely left out ANY mention of her belief system IN her profile, for fear of being seen as fanatical.

So she's deliberately portraying an progressive stance and the last guy she dated, that was wanted to marry her she didnt WANT to marry.
*Gasp!* Sinner...living in sin! (he'd stay over night)

Of course she's in her mid-40s, so it made no difference her lack of commitment to marriage...well, at least to him. She liked him, but not enough to marry him. He dumped her for that reason, which was fine by her

She has no concern of shacking up or whatever, because when she was in her early 20s, she was married to a man that was an abusive alcoholic. Did a lot of lying, and cheated on her.

Apparently, this bad experience in a previous marriage made her more grounded and will vow to at least live with someone outside of marriage until she knows for sure he's someone worth marrying. She said, "If God has a problem with it, then we'll cross that bridge when I pass on."

She said she played the "Good little housewife, and fat lot of good that did her."

 

[ChristopherColumbus]

What I find interesting is the old Christian demarcation between Church and state. There was an orthodoxy over and above a community of states, where political power was multi-polar and heterodox. One was to be a part of a spiritual community that could transcend countries. But problems arose with the Reformation... and on both sides. Now the church increasingly became co-extensive with the state. You had the reactionary Church, where the state authorities pushed the Inquisition on the church as much as on the heretics. You had the progressive new state churches, as to be found in Germany, with a theology that was eventually secularized, with grandiose delusions about a perfect Unity to be had on God's green earth. In short, you had the rise of [ideological] fanaticism due to the collapse of the original distancing of politics from religion that's to be found in the Christian tradition [this coincides with the collapse of Art and the rise of Reason]. That [epistemological] distancing is what preserved the bulwark against all political mass movements. It channeled and siphoned off the excess of energy to the metaphysical realm.

Given the horrors of the holocaust and the Gulag, it seems we've stumbled onto a solution of sorts. We must emasculate politics as much as possible from any belief or orthodoxy. And what has unfolded in the field of politics, has also unfolded in our psychology, for one produces the other. But I have my doubts. Human nature is what it is. We are in the midst of something like a social experiment today, where energy is not to be re-directed upward in the collective and public art of religion, but to be dissipated downward in endless consumption and titillation... bread and circuses. It's a dangerous gamble - it may work until it doesn't, and then you may see the greatest outbreak and revenge of romanticism against rationalism that the world has ever seen.