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American Christianity
(lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16659542
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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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While I do think it's fairly obvious that many (if not most) Christians have lost the plot, I don't think that it's Christianity's fault per se. The philosophy expounded in the Gospels is pretty sound, the problem is that few people actually follow it. Almost everyone everyone out there compromises themselves in some way in order to survive, and to that extent, their faith is worthless.
Meh, it's a religion commissioned by a Roman emperor.
The new testament is explicitly pro-slavery, anti-woman, and homophobic.
There's a whole lot of bathwater, not a lot of baby.
Well, secular society has been anti-slavery and pro-woman for at least a hundred years now, and pro-LGBT for at least 20. Would you say things seem to be improving? Because it appears to me that they're getting worse.
And who is delivering the votes to empower the forces of regression on those issues? Do they have tax free clubhouses that they hang out in on Sundays perhaps?
If you define your values to be in exact opposition to the church, do you not still have a God, except it is what the church calls Satan?
what? being anti-theist doesn't necessarily make one a satanist.
Not necessarily. You could have similar values as the church and just derive them from a different source (although I would argue that this source is then by definition your God and you’re not really an atheist), or you could have no values at all.
But if atheism means you care about all the things the church condemns, then your God is simply the antithesis of their God, which also means you aren’t really as much of an atheist as you think you are, but rather an anti-theist.
eh the antithesis of the christian god is actually, believe it or not, the christian god. satan had very little role in the religion outside of folklore. Satan was just the guy who gave knowledge to adam and eve, which was a bad thing for some reason. and there was another passage where he made a bet with god about ruining some dude's life, but all in all he plays a pretty minor role in the bible, old and new testament.
god, on the other hand, one part he's all like "kill all the amalekites" and the next he's like "just love each other". Once he even told some dude to sacrifice his only son, then changed his mind at the last minute and tried to play it off like it was just some sort of prank, bro. god is so inconsistent in christianity that if he says something, you can be almost certain that he directly contradicts himself later on.
In fact, this was the basis for a theory that early judaism wasn't actually monotheistic, and that there were several gods, each of whom has a distinct personality and commits certain actions. For example, yaweh could have been a distinct god from el, which tracks since it seems that yaweh was the one who flooded everything and destroyed villages while el was the one who created everything and loved everyone.
Think about what you just said. Because if that's true, it would make being atheist a hell of a lot more difficult, wouldn't it.
i'm not saying any of that is true, just describing the belief system and what is actually presented in the bible and old jewish texts. Still pretty easy to be atheist, all you have to do is not believe in any kind of deity.
Yeah but it’s a little bit like putting your hands in front of your eyes and saying “nanana I can’t SEE you”.
Also, any idea or concept you pick up and elevate over everything else would by definition become your God, even if only temporarily. The only way to ensure you are actually atheist would be to turn completely chaotic and change your mind every five seconds.
God is dead. God remains dead. And ADHD has killed him.
That checks out
God is the idea that a magic force is responsible for everything, atheism is rejection of this fantasy and the assumption that life is simply the result of natural processes existing without will.
What if that “magic force” is simply consciousness itself? Because that does seem to do pretty strange and inexplicable things if you leave it alone for long enough.
Also, does this mean true Atheism would require you to give up your self-will? How then can anyone choose to be an Atheist?
where are you coming from with these assertions? how would being atheist require you to give up self will?
Where did you get the idea that those are assertions? Did you miss the question marks or something?
That question was based on the previous commenter's assertion that "atheism is [...] the assumption that life is simply the result of natural processes existing without will."
I think you misunderstood the meaning of the comment you are referencing. natural process without will doesn't mean self will, it means that everything that's happened is happening without the will of a deity.
a belief system isn't something that one just picks up and puts down every 5 minutes, as you described. you're basically just saying that if i don't believe in a deity, then whatever my focus is at the present time is my belief, which is incorrect. A belief system, or a religion, exists in order to explain what we cannot comprehend. How the earth was formed, how we came to be, etc. My current focus of analyzing data with power BI doesn't answer those questions, nor would I want it to, since it's power BI.
however, we are advancing our understanding of how the universe around us works, we are learning, researching and asking questions which would have been considered heresy a few hundred years ago. Science tries to answer questions, but science is not a religion, because religion relies on belief. science relies on reproducible data.
So would you say that a belief system is more correctly described as a narrative about how the universe came into being and eventually lead to exactly to where you are right at this very moment?
If so, then isn't that narrative sort of a God-construct, because it explains who and why you are and why you do what you do? Because I would argue that this narrative then IS your God, as that is what created the world YOU live in, and determines everything that you do. You are therefore functionally behaving like a theist, whether or not you deny it makes no difference to me.
Science is the belief in the scientific method as the best tool to determine the truth. And it could certainly be said to fit the definition of religion if you go by Cicero's explanation of its etymology, which says that religiō comes from relegere: re (meaning "again") + lego (meaning "read"), where lego is in the sense of "go over", "choose", or "consider carefully" — all of which are certainly required in order to correctly do science.
Ok now you're really grasping at straws.