Is golf halal ?
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Do you automatically treat people with disdain simply for having religious beliefs? If no, then that statement is not about you. If so, why do you deserve any more credibility than anyone else who believes in a one, true, truth?
Because that’s what it comes down to. When you take the attitude that “only mine is the objective truth, and anyone who doesn’t conform is stupid/a sinner/lesser than me, etc.” then you are part of the same problem, just from a different angle.
No one here is arguing that Whittaker is right. But if you think that only you/your beliefs are… There isn’t much of a fundamental difference.
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I would appreciate not being assigned blame for wrongs done by anyone who identifies as Christian. There are bigots and assholes in any group, bar none. My religion is between me and my God, and none other. I am sorry if you are unable to see how “fundamentalist atheism” can be as damaging as fundamentalism in any other belief system. Disregarding people whose beliefs differ from yours is a basic tenant of all of them. There are many scientists, doctors, judges and so on who are quite able to perform their tasks without any interference from their belief system. If you believe tnat is not possible, might I suggest that you also have an irrational basis of belief. Like we all do. You are human. So am I. Welcome to the club.
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Damn, I guess I owe you a Coke.
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Make it an iced tea. The good kind, like you can get in the States, not the Nestea-type syrup stuff. 
It’s just amazing to me how people can rail against rigid belief systems and not see the similarities in their own actions.
This jumped out at me when I read it:
https://twitter.com/alexandraerin/status/1056283012265136129
I know that’s going to ruffle some feathers, but it’s very true for the majority of atheists I have had conversations with. I know I am shaped by the structure, despite not believing in the main tenet (i.e. God). Which is why so many of the “solutions” offered up end up replicating the same problems.
P.S., for those of you thinking that atheists will make better judges: Atheists can be bad at science. Atheists can be misogynistic, racist, man-hating, TERFy classist, pretty-much-any-dangerous-bias-you-want-to-insert assholes, too. Not believing in any gods doesn’t change the rest of the cultural influences.
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Not what I said, nor even implied.
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…but it is perfectly ok to have a racist, misogynist, three-times-married, frequent adulterer who never goes to church as the President.
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This seems a good example of the point I was making. No one assigned you blame for anything anyone did but your religious affiliation caused you to react as if I had because you felt personally attacked by my pointing out the great and extensive harm done to people by followers of religion. Further, I never spoke about fundamentalist atheism. I am against fundamentalism in all forms yet your argument focuses on it as if it where something I support or fail to see the harm in. You have no evidence of support of fundamentalism on my part yet you offer it as something I am blind to. Additionally you argue against the idea of disregarding people who have different beliefs. Yet saying religious people should not judge others is not disregarding them. In fact, it is one of the core tenets of the belief system to which you hold. In short, you have demonstrated exactly why I feel religious people should not judge others.
Of course they can. And when we select a judge we should consider all of that. No one has suggested that an atheist would be a good judge based upon their atheism. We are saying that religious people have imaginary friends and that’s troubling.
We have established that, like most fundamentalists, you cannot see past your prior assumptions. And, like most fundamentalists, you are largely unreachable. This conversation is going nowhere. Enjoy your day.
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oh the irony
Thank you for that thread; it makes me feel even more an outsider.
Rambling time:
I’m a philosopher, not a historian, so my view of history is warped through a lens of exceedingly weird people who had nothing to do but write down what they thought. That said, it struck me that up until a certain point western philosophy was ruled by religious leaders. Part of that is class-based (only the very religious or the very rich had time to study), but there is also a general idea that runs through that old philosophy: that the more we learn, the more logical and rational we are, the more we will know God. Descartes certainly thought so in the early 1600s.
Eventually we entered the real age of science and of the scientific method being the way of determining facts about the world. The more we went down that path the more it became obvious that rationality and investigation of the world was going to move us away from God and that proofs of Gods existence just plain didn’t work. A schism started forming between science and religion.
Since I grew up where I grew up, most of the people around me were culturally Christian. I notice that conflict between truth and God is really deep in us. There’s an anger about the rejection of God, a reveling in proving that there is no God, etc.
I have (an utterly non-representative sample of) Jewish and Muslim friends who don’t believe in God but they seem to have a totally different relationship with it. I remember watching Lewis Black talk about the old testament and how Christians ought to stay away from it. “Those are our stories! You don’t understand them!” (He’s Lewis Black so he was yelling) He saw the Torah as the stories of his people, even if he thought there were just stories (this, more than anything else ever, made me want to read the new testament).
Western Christian culture feels to me like it has this deeply embedded war between the church and science. So when I hear people talk about Christians have a particular “shape” to their atheism, that’s the shape that comes to my mind. Meanwhile, it seems that people from many religions have an attitude that you don’t have to think that the stories are true to have them connect you to your family and your ancestors, or to participate in the cultural traditions of them.
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Yup. Because it has no place in discussion about the operations of government. You are not allowed to establish your faith as an officially government endorsed one.
Religious freedom means never having to give a shit what someone else claims God says, nor being forced to care.
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It depends on how they do so. If that includes having laws based not on legal principles, but religious ones, then no, because the legal system is something that impacts us all. If it informs them in a compassionate way, that still allows them to recognized we live in a diverse society that needs to be secular for that reason, then I’m not so bothered.
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And I think it’s important to note that this really only becomes true in the late 19th century.
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Expand?
Things were pretty hostile during Copernicus’ and Galileo’s days; the Age of Enlightenment seems like a temporary truce.
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Were either of those atheists, though? Just because the church as an institution was hostile to them doesn’t mean that they weren’t also operating under the assumption of god that was widely shared at the time.
Newton is another example - he gave us the roots of newtonian physics, but he was also an alchemist and numerologist (and kind of a dick), and was deeply religious. Many of the early European and Arab scientists were religious and in fact were seeking to better understand and describe what they understood as god’s creation. I’d say that once you get the theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin is where there starts to be a real division.
[ETA] Copernicus had a doctorate in canon law and Galileo was pretty devout, even as the church opposed his views on the universe.
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Officially, no. Because they’d have been killed if they were.
OTOH, both of them were fairly openly contemptuous of the church of the day. Copernicus kept a live-in mistress throughout his monastic life, and Galileo routinely violated church edicts even after his arrest.
Ever read Gal’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina? It’s worth the time.
“The purpose of scripture is to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go…”
That doesn’t translate to being either anti-religious or an atheist, though. Martin Luther was deeply against the church AND was deeply pious.
Plenty of people today who are religious regularly violate church edicts.
No I haven’t but looks interesting.
My general point here, though, is that early scientific work was not done by people who were anti-religious or atheists. They very much saw the two as complimentary.
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It wasn’t that religious people in general were hostile to science, it was that the institutional church was hostile to unsupervised discovery.
The early church’s insistence on the absolute truth of classical scholarship did immense harm to the development of science; so did the prohibition of autopsy.
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