btw, and i am a little testy about this:
Children of Abraham: tell us what you believe atheists believe
@RJMeelar, @AcerPlatanoides, you understand you are doing the same thing we are gently mocking, right?
I haven’t thrown out religion. I’m a Buddhist.
I’ve thrown out the Catholic Church though.
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like i said, bad lists vs. good lists aren’t gonna sway anyone.
it doesn’t matter that they save lives in my neighborhood, because they destroy them in yours. it doesn’t matter they tolerantly and progressively help cis/lbgt families here, because they rip them apart in yours.
it doesn’t matter they advocate for science and technology, because they don’t advocate for the science and technology you advocate for.
there is nothing i can do to reason with you about this. so i’m gonna shut up, donate to charity run by atheists, and continue to set up a few proxy servers.
Is it too late to?
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Isn’t saying, “I don’t want to be part of a religion that shields child molesters in the name of the religion” improving on religion? Since the Catholics are being forced to be less terrible by their members leaving, isn’t it even the best road to improving that particular religion?
Anyway, I don’t see why I would care to improve religion. If 50 years from now we wake up and find that religion has almost entirely gone away, I can’t think of any reason we would be worse off.
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it certainly can be, but why does that question even need to be asked? it is the equivalent of, “so when did you stop beating your wife?”. it’s weird and deeply uncomfortable. i can’t support the good things about an organization because there are also monsters?
that is what evangelicals say about me, an atheist!!
(the stalin and mao comparisons are like catnip to rabid evangelicals)
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I disagree when it comes to Abrahamic faiths, as there seem to be some pretty fundamental flaws that are not subject to fine tuning. I like the idea that the Mosaic law is fundamentally about purity - pure worship of one god, purity in your actions (eating, clothing, sex, hygiene), a pure law etc. A nomadic people settling in cities will see definite benefits from this development - less disease, a fairly clear basis for law, a more sustainable foundation for society than one that was based more on tribal identity etc., but there are big, inherent problems with it and I don’t think it’s a system that you can tweak without making it into a different animal altogether. While I admire a lot of the statements in the UUA principles that @AcerPlatanoides shared, it has a lot more in common with my current beliefs as an atheist than anything specific to the Judeo-Christian tradition that I can recognise.
What I definitely believe is that you shouldn’t throw out religious people. I don’t have any interest in gaming religion, but I think we can respect people whatever their beliefs, be sceptical about our own wisdom, learn a lot from the centuries of tradition and progress in different religions and keep many of the benefits of religion without having any commitment to the underlying narratives.
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i don’t think history backs this argument up. and if you remove your feelings for some of the fucked up shit in abrahamic religions, it is clear that judaism, christianity, islam, the church of mormon have been doing exactly that–fine tuning. the anglican church itself is a perfect example of a wholesale fine tuning.
now, like i implied, in the words of Reggie Watts much of it is, ahem, a “Fuck Shit Stack”. But I disagree, based on history, that it is even difficult to fine tune abrahamic religions.
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I am not sure that its really a contestable idea that the Catholic church elected a more progressive Pope because of falling membership… I have tried to comment on the actions and apparant motivations of religious institutions, but if deserve light mocking I can certainly cowboy up and endure it. 
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I think its more like the need customers to walk away and find their own alternatives one at a time, rather than some outside source destroying the structure all at once.
Well, “Have you stopped beating your wife?” takes on a very different tone when everyone knows, as a matter of fact, the person being asked used to beat their wife. And if the man’s wife had left because he was hitting her then good for her, I’m not going to suggest she goes back because he’s changed.
The Catholic church, only two years ago, was headed by a man who personally aided and abetted child molestation and who ought to be in prison. We aren’t talking about imagined sins of the past, we are talking about the head of the organization, whose word is law for the organization, himself being a criminal of the most detestable kind (in North American culture, at least).
And that’s the first world problem of the Catholic church. They’re anti-birth-control (read anti-STI-control) policies in Africa were borderline genocidal and were only changed extremely recently.
I think attacking the Catholic church is the best way to improve it. They probably think twice about shielding molesters now because they have been so viciously attacked for do so. The best way to improve religion is to force it to improve by reducing it’s funding base. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, the Catholic church is all about the money.
Edit: I’m going on about Catholics here because that organization drives me insane and it galls me that no one has arrested Ratzinger for crimes that no one even disputed he committed. But I actually see the argument as generalizable - the best way to make religion better is to walk away from religions that do evil.
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There is no God and Dirac is His prophet
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I swear this is the last one
What you are describing is a race to the bottom. Put the fuckers in jail and convene Vatican 3. The specifics of that church aren’t different than other institutions that need reform-- the BBC, the police, jails, silicon valley, the french government…
There are literally monsters under our bed and in our closets. Do we burn down our beds and closets, or go after the monsters?
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Sure, it’s possible, and it has been done multiple times for good and bad reasons. This is just one of the ways that religion is a human system and claims to perfection don’t really hold up. My point is that to do something like accept women in equal positions of leadership or homosexuality as equivalent to heterosexuality as a Christian, you’re fighting against statements about gender roles that are all through the Bible and Christian tradition. You can get past them and some groups do, but it gets less and less like Christianity and more like a reaffirmation of your existing belief system. (I’m talking specifically about Christianity, but it does seem to be a similar story in other Abrahamic faiths).
The current Pope’s statements on a number of current topics are much softer than those of earlier popes, but he specifically stops short of saying things like “gay sex is OK”; “women priests are OK”; “birth control is OK” or “marry whoever you like”. He has also specifically praised more conservative popes for holding to church doctrine over more popular ethics. While the new developments are refreshing, they don’t go that far beyond “love the sinner, hate the sin”. If you’re happy with that, that’s OK, but I wouldn’t necessarily see it as the first step in the sweeping relaxation of church doctrine.
I don’t have a problem with principles like those of the UUA - they’re actually very close to my own, which is part of my point. As long as I don’t have to take ideas like God, sacred, prophetic and idolatry in the biblical sense, I can voice my affirmation to the principles without any challenge to my current beliefs or need to attend a congregation at all. (I understand that the UUA isn’t necessarily a Christian organisation, but it does seem to have many Christian members and historic links to Christianity). Where there’s any sort of commitment to the Bible or church tradition as defining elements of belief, a lot of these questions aren’t going to go away.
And that’s where I’ll leave the conversation, to stop making it about atheists talking about what they believe children of Abraham believe.
But isn’t “Children of Abraham” exclusionary to the mud-people?
Okay, last one then. I don’t see how arresting people who have committed crimes is a “race to the bottom”. I would call it “Rule of Law” instead. Ratzinger is not in prison and will not go to prison because he is a powerful white man and a former head of state. If the owner of a chain of daycares or the president of the Make a Wish foundation did the exact same thing he did they would be in prison for sure.
If you want to lodge your protest with a business, the best way is to stop shopping there. If you want to lodge your protest with a church, the best way is to stop worshipping and donating there. Either it will reform itself in the wake of these problems or it will die off. That’s not burning anything to the ground, that’s just evolution at work.
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Bhuddists are all terrorists these days.
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Don’t forget the Methodists
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I thought that the Mormons decided that mud-people were ok.
