They don’t look like Methodists…
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There are no parameters that are not subject to fine tuning, despite what some of their adherents may claim.
That’s the thing, the people who claim that X religion has Y attributes and claims that Z is true about the world is only speaking for his/her interpretation of his/her religion at a certain moment in history.
Yes, some things have remained constant, thus far. But reform is inevitable, we just don’t live in the same world of a thousand years ago and allowances have to be made, not because people want to change but because the structures of society have changed and religion is by its very nature, social.
As for me, I’ve come to the realization that while other people will judge their and other faiths as atemporal, morally unchanging things, they are made up of nothing more than people who at times do good and at times do evil. I’ll judge them on their acts, not their faith. To judge them on their faith, to give faith purchase in my interpretation of the character of a person I’d need to believe as he does. I don’t.
There’s no doubt that religion played an important role in advancing the civil rights of black people at the same time that other religions whose practitioners would tell you they believe the very same thing as black pastors were busy keeping black people down. In Mexico, the catholic church played an important role during the revolution as it sided with the people in its communities at the same time that the catholic approved kings of Spain attempted to impose an unfair hierarchical society on people they considered savages half a world away.
And that’s the takeaway for me, religion is at its very best when it acts in the best interests of its people, when it is actively concerned with the lives of its people in the here and now, this is when morality is guided by peoples experiences instead of pretending that the best rules they came up with a long time ago in a galaxy far far away are not only relevant today but so important that you’ll ask both a rich man and a beggar not to steal lest their immortal souls be damned and call it morality.
TL;DR
Those fundamental flaws are only flaws if you question them, if you don’t, then you’ll work around them to adapt them to your conditions or go mad. This is where change comes from. Change is inevitable in anything man made.
To believe that dogma is inflexible, is to believe what zealots claim about their religion.
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It isn’t what we believe that makes us atheists, it is what we don’t believe.
We don’t think that any of the thousands of contradictory myths made up by various civilizations throughout time have enough substantiated evidence to be deemed believable or even plausible. We think it is more likely that they are all just stories, they might be nice comforting stories, but they are stories made up by humans none the less. while these stories may be factually implausible they have served functions throughout history, from explaining what we couldn’t explain at the time (where did we and the earth come from), to serving as moral guidelines.
At least that is my take, but since we don’t have any book or dogma to follow, other atheists are free to think whatever they want. 
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I imagine a fair few of us grew up in countries and cultures, perhaps even, explicitly, households and families, that thought of themselves as part of the Abrahamic religions.
And I also go on to imagine that many of us now find ourselves in the position of no longer associating ourselves with the beliefs fundamental to the construction of those faiths.
So we already have this perspective on what we probably thought, or believed, previous to our freedom from those memeplexes. And I say freedom because I assume, like me, you also think of it in such a fashion.
So I guess that puts the question in perspective.
What the underlying question constitutes is, ‘From a position of upholding faith (in a/the god) as an implicit fact of being, how do you portray to yourself the mindset of a person who says that they maintain no such belief?’
It’s like asking the circle in flatland to imagine the sphere. If they could, they wouldn’t exist in flatland any longer, they would, defacto, have been lifted out of their ‘reality tunnel’. I think this is why we see such asinine reactions to such questions. People may get little glimpses of the answer but their minds, their selves, stop them from going any further. They would have to stop being themselves, constructed as they are from those very ideas which limit their perspective.
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Isn’t that whats false? That there is a we that believes certain specific things?
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The mormons didn’t decide “mud-people” were okay. Society decided for them, and forced it on them if they had any hope of surviving.
Just like how christians didn’t necessarily decide to stop stoning witches, gay people, adulterers and non-virgin brides (they haven’t they just do it in Africa now, instead of everywhere, because missionaries and a bibles <=> food bait-and-switch tends toward atrocities against humanity), but rather were forced to stop in the western world once things like kings and/or democracies became just a little richer and had slightly bigger armies than the pope.
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That’s all true - as I have said, I don’t consider people to be the sum of my ideas about their religious beliefs and I can celebrate the contributions of religious people now and in the past without agreeing that their belief system is not problematic in a number of areas. What I was trying to get at was that there are some areas of core belief that make it a lot more difficult to reform, and after a certain point it isn’t clear what is supposed to be authoritative about the underlying belief system. There are many parts of the Bible and church history supporting civil rights, even if there are others that don’t. It isn’t difficult to maintain a pretty fundamentalist view of Christianity and be a strong supporter of many human rights, but if you choose to support gay rights or full equality for women, you’re coming up against many parts of the Bible that aren’t going to go away just because people have changed. This is my point - while human society is organic and constantly changing, and religion is not some monolithic entity, there is an extent to which having an authoritative book from thousands of years ago anchors you to the morality of that time, or following traditions and decisions from the last couple of thousands of years does the same. For all his friendliness, the Pope is not going to go much farther than saying that he loves homosexuals as people and isn’t in the position to judge them. This does not mean that he is indifferent to homosexuality, as is clear from other statements.
Sure, but that’s not really the case with a religion that is based on events that are claimed to be historical and where it is very clear that the underlying moral system focuses on God’s glory first, and people’s welfare second. A lot of the main teaching in the Bible comes from zealots, so it’s not like ‘true Christianity’ and ‘rigid zealotry’ are the opposite ends of a spectrum. If you don’t consider things like the Bible, church tradition and teaching and some relatively well defined idea of God to be authoritative, then you are basically free to believe whatever you want - I don’t really consider that to be a testament to the flexibility of Christian belief though.
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I thought she said dentists.
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Yes, or that something else goes where going to church goes, and the structure of participating in a mass-effect religion is there, just with a-theism in its place rather than another brand. I think they think like you described: there are spaces to fill.
Here’s the same conversation except about food:
“Oh, you don’t eat carbs? So what do you eat in place of bread?”
“Well, nothing. I don’t REPLACE bread with anything. I just eat differently, completely differently. Bread is a non-thought. I don’t get my meal ready then take away the bread then go, hmmm, what do I put here instead to fill that gap? That doesn’t happen. I eat a completely different meal that never had bread in it from the get go.”
Just like Sunday mornings. I don’t replace church with mowing the lawn. I might mow the lawn or I might not. There’s no space in my schedule to fill that’s any different than any other time during the rest of the week. In fact I enjoy the fact that YOU all go to church because the neighborhood is quiet. I’ll watch out for thieves while you’re away at church learning about morality. I’m happy to hold down the fort.
I haven’t replaced God with anything. Maybe with a thought: there may be a deity or deities. Maybe. I’ll leave the door open a crack. This is a big universe. But as far as how the place is run I don’t see God in front of me telling me directly what to do and how to be. It’s been left to me to determine what I do and how I think. Therefore, I’m not going to waste any more time on it with church, beliefs in old curated anthologies, fealty to mass-effect religions, preachers, echoing hatred a thousand ways and trying to whitewash it. For me, the debate is over. I cleared all that off my schedule.
Now, I mow the lawn or don’t mow the lawn on Sunday morning. I read the bible, the Koran, the paper, a book, an article or whatever I want whenever. Or not. Nothing was replaced with anything else in particular. All I did was clear stuff from my calendar.
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This was 20 years ago and I’m not going to even wikifu it because I’m lazy, but I was floored in religions class when we were discussing Hindu gods and that there’s Vishnu and he’s the main guy and there’s all these others but they didn’t create the place: some other thing did, from way back. And then I remembered Greek mythology: oh yeah there were earlier gods who spozedly created everything so why did they worship Zeus??? And then I thought about the bible, how there are all these old gods and idols but spozedly GOD stepped up and said hey, fuckers, it’s ME. IT WAS ALWAYS ME. But then there’s the New Testament and a new guy… And I was like what??? We always seem to be worshipping the shift manager, not the actual owner. The real owner is off playing golf somewhere. That’s when the wheels of belief in organeezed reeligiosities came off.
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As stated at the top of this thread, the Satanic Temple protest thread was derailed by an arrogant fool claiming to know what atheists “believe.” I started this thread to provide a place where the ever vociferous Abrahamists could share their odd ideas of what atheists “beliefs.”
Bloody cowards, though, not one has shown up here.
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Yeah, but he sings the Methodist blues, and he has’em 
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Change color there to… anything, really. Belief system, ideology, class, gender, etc, etc and this is how I feel about this topic.
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My larger point is that religion only exists as defined by the people who practice it. Which means that if you influence people you influence religion.
My specific point here is that if you don’t believe a religion is true, then why believe when people tell you that it cannot change? If people can believe in one untrue thing, they’re certainly capable of believing a different untrue thing.
Yes, some people insist that religion is true because of the bible, and yet others claim that the bible is not also true but a historical document as well, but if you don’t believe either is true, then why believe that a false claim is a valid reason for accepting that religion is immutable?
Yes, some people are too far gone to change, but if you don’t believe that what they say is true then why believe that the reason they give for believing said untrue thing is helpful in predicting future behavior?
Sure, it makes sense that if a person believes x, then they might believe y, But that’s precisely where I’m going with this, there’s no firm reason for them to believe x in the first place so it can be changed.
But its already happened, most Christians (For example) don’t care about mixed fabrics, or worry that a woman on her period needs some sort of purification and no matter how literally they take their bible, they’d be hard pressed to believe that the pharaohs magicians really turned canes into snakes.
But I bet they did once.
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I don’t even believe in the chair I’m sitting on! And, coincidentally, it too was just made up by some people. But I’m sitting on it anyway!
Or… am I?
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The relationship of Christians to that part of the Mosaic law is covered in a few places in the New Testament, and it’s made clear that it’s not required for Gentiles to follow the ceremonial parts of the Mosaic law. I suppose some of the ways where definite prohibitions are given to Christians that are ignored would include divorce and remarriage, which Jesus said was equivalent to adultery, or eating “blood or things strangled”, which are two of the four things that Gentile Christians were told that they couldn’t do:
The apostles and elders, your brothers,
To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:
Greetings.
24 We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. 25 So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul— 26 men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27 Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. 28 It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: 29 You are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to avoid these things.
Farewell.
So theoretically, you are breaking some of the few really important laws if you eat black pudding or strangled chicken, or commit ‘sexual immorality’. I guess it’s possible that statements like those of the Pope and others will lead people to stop judging others and say something like “well, technically remarriage, homosexuality, eating blood and so on are prohibited, but that’s their business, there are more important things, I’m not going to try to change other people’s minds or force others to follow my morality etc.”:
I think on a personal level, that’s quite true. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong about other groups like the Catholic church and conservative Evangelicals too - maybe they’ll ignore the issue or focus on issues like personal freedom as more important than what the Bible and established church doctrine have said pretty much consistently throughout history. Maybe they’ll just act like they don’t understand those passages or protest that they don’t have the right to judge people based on them. There are many statements by Jesus and others calling Christians to love others rather than just focusing on people’s sin, so that’s quite promising. Dominionism isn’t necessarily a natural conclusion from Christianity, even if it’s very clear that God is portrayed as the judge of the whole world.
I think we agree on most things with regard to how to actually treat people in society. It doesn’t matter if I think a loving person needs to be hateful in order to be logically consistent with my understanding of their beliefs, but on the other hand I think it’s valid to recognise what people are saying when they essentially say, “yes, homosexuality is a sin like adultery, but I’m not judging”.
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Now I’m curious about exactly what strangulation means linguistically and semantically in that passage.
Does it mean the same thing as a doctor understands as strangulation, ie cutting off bloodflow to the brain? Or does it mean simply squeezing the neck until dead, whether it’s by asphyxiation or strangulation or internal bleeding or any combination of those? Or is it broader, including neck wringing?
Just a small side track. I’ll have to look up some translation notes.
