People mention “American Taliban” as a phrase for a reason. It isn’t just haters hating on the poor innocent and persecuted Christians of the world.
Come back to me when Christianity in America supports equal rights for women and queer folks. Almost every time I see someone ranting about “dem queers,” I’m looking at a Christian, aren’t I? I see churches leading campaigns to keep folks from having equal rights. Hell, here in California, the number 1 and 2 supporting organizations of Prop 8 were the Catholic and Mormon churches.
I’d say ethics are the social construct in this case. And I’m honestly sick and tired of various religions claiming I can’t be a decent human without buying into their dogmas.
They’ve stolen morality, (“you don’t believe in god? Where do your morals come from?”), they’ve attempted to steal marriage (“traditional marriage is one man, and one woman” says the christian who’s never read the bible and doesn’t know that Solomon supposedly had a thousand wives and concubines), they’ve attempted to steal our democracy (Decalogue on the courthouse steps anyone? Dominionists asserting the absurdity that the constitution is based on biblical law. That Moses inspired the declaration of independence), They just keep trying to plant their flag on secular values then push the secular people off that land. I’m tired of it.
I could be a quiet atheist who doesn’t say a word, when confronted with the assumption that religion is inherently good. But I’d rather be a spiny bastard and raise a stink, just to make sure my rights are respected.
I understand you - there are lots of people out there who are Christian who don’t really do all the hateful stuff that we associate with the religious right. But it isn’t just a handful of outliers who are anti-gay, anti-woman, and pro-child-abuse. Catholics are nearly half of the Christians in the world and are openly anti-gay. Pentecostals are mostly anti-gay and compose another quarter of the world’s Christians. Sure, in the US and Canada you are going to run into lots of Baptists who are completely past the anti-gay stance, and the Catholics I know are totally pro gay rights, despite ostensibly having an infallible monarch who disagrees with them.
That is to say, people actually have their own moral compass and ignore the teachings of the church where they seem wrong. As a moral compass, though, I don’t know you could do that much worse than Catholicism. It’s an openly anti-gay organization that automatically throws people out for ordaining female priests while dithering over defrocking child molesters. If treating women as equals is a more serious crime than child sex abuse, then the term “moral compass” shouldn’t really come into it.
Human beings are full of holes. Just as our gut has an appendix our brain is not designed for what we use it for. It’s not designed to sit in traffic or think rationally and quickly at the same time. It just isn’t designed leading it to fall short of what we want it to be, keep us from fully understanding the world around us, and truely understand our own emotions. The problem is that people feel compelled to fill their inherent gaps in ability, motivation, and knowledge. It’s a good sign when you can accept filling them with a mix of awe, angst, and mild frustration rather than imagining the perfect square peg and trying to convince your neighbors that they should imagine the same thing.
As with others I think that is where you lose me on religion. It doesn’t really do this, what it does is it enforces a moral compass. And what it enforces is a 2-3,000 year old moral compass as updated by the most conservative and sex starved people it can find.
Because of that, it has lagged behind every moral advancement the human race has come up with in the last 2,000 years. So it ends up constantly resisting moral advancement.
That is what gives Star Wars the advantage in moral passtimes
I wanted to post something similarly vulnerable during the Bjork thread…but wasn’t quite so brave.
Ironically, it was that thread that turned me away from Athiesm. Who but a kindly diety would have led me past the enclaves of easy jokes and bad impressions to the promised bbs where pure, unironic Bjork-love could thrive? Or wait…what kind of cruel clockmaker would have let me wander those lonely deserts for so may years! never mind, I’m back…
I know what you mean, but I’d say a lot of theists have hole-shaped gods too - i.e. god is the panacea for whatever they feel is missing in their life.
I’ve always thought a moral compass is more like your sense of taste, or universal grammar - the seeds are there (basic ideas like fairness, empathy, shame, dignity, loyalty), but they’re strongly influenced by your culture in the same way that nobody speaks ‘universal grammar’ and people’s tastes vary depending on the food they’re exposed to. Christianity has a very strong influence on people’s moral compass, although in some ways that’s not surprising - your obligations in a universe with a personal god who created humans for specific purposes are going to be very different from those in an indifferent universe, especially if that god puts so much significance on religious exclusivity, gender complementarity and marriage. If it’s not true, it’s like putting a big magnet near your moral compass - “love your neighbour as yourself” is only the second greatest commandment, after all.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t say that empathy toward people who are different from you is necessarily a given - people tend to be good at ‘othering’ people, whatever ideological background they’re from. It doesn’t necessarily make you a better person to reject religion, but it can remove the idea that there are sacred things that are more important than acting compassionately toward others and living responsibly in the world.
i will never convince anyone with lists of bad things vs. good. so let me try a different approach.
Embrace and Extend. Religion isn’t going anywhere any time soon. so celebrate the good parts, be stern with the bad parts, and make changes from the inside.
here is a parable @albill may recognize.
one time a magnificent piece of software was deemed unsuitable, so a couple people decided to nuke it from orbit and rewrite it. this caused the web to stagnate for years, since there was no stable and useful competitor to its biggest rival.
then a young developer embraced the codebase, stripped out the bad parts which weren’t needed, and extended the functionality that was sorely lacking–which existed in the original code base. it went on to huge success.
