From the same author:
That's pretty funny.
Thats why I don’t do that shit to people.
Who am I to question someone’s spirituality if it makes them happpy and they practice in a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them?
Oops, now abortion is illegal and gay people can't marry!
Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences...
He said doesn’t negatively impact others
it never negatively impacts others until suddenly it does. It's insidious.
Also it can affect people in ways they aren't even aware themselves.
Fortune telling for example.
My friends mum sold her house because the fortune teller told her some vague nonsense she interpreted to mean the end of the world was approaching.
Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences
Considering how many edgelord atheists I've seen uncritically embrace the tenets of white supremacism I'm inclined to agree with you...
Just for fun, you should take a map of religious belief in the US by region, and overlay a map of racist beliefs and policies in the US, and note the overlap. I think you'll discover that large coastal urban centers (where religious belief is lowest) are not hotbeds of white supremacism.
I think you're confusing a bunch of online trolls who pick opinions specifically to get a rise, with real, actual people in the wild.
Yup.
Sometimes I catch myself thinking that we are more modern than we actually are, that we have already moved past these issues. It’s important to remember that civil rights, feminism, and LGBTQ rights are not topics to be relegated to the history books. They are as alive now as they were in the 60s for today, like yesterday and tomorrow, is a constant fight for our rights.
In my experience, people like that will be terrible with or without religion.
The difference of "external man in the sky" vs "internal concept of my own rightness" for how they feel ok about their own actions doesn't make a difference when they're still a bigoted asshat at their core.
You think that something like 40% of the population of the US is voting for cruel and regressive laws just for the lulz, and it has nothing to do with their stated belief system?
and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them?
The problem is that most of the time this isn't true.
I found out not too long ago that my best friend is perfectly willing to vote against my right to love who I want and embrace the identity that I want, and will openly (albeit only when I ask) tell me I deserve to go to hell for it. My family is even worse.
and will openly (albeit only when I ask) tell me I deserve to go to hell for it
Sorry for your loss because that's not a friend.
Exactly. Atheists don't like missionaries, so why should we become those ourselves?
As long as nobody tries to impose their beliefs on me, I don't care about their religion.
I have friends who are full on religious while I'm an atheist, they know I'm not a fan of their religion but they also know that I only care if it's making them happier and helping them, which to be fair has helped them become better people, but they were always the ones that needed some external guidance so I suppose gods a better guide than a meth dealer.
They don't try to convert me and I don't try to convert them and we still have fun, plus I enjoy hearing the weird AF stories from the bible, like the time Jesus got pissed at an out of season fig tree for not having figs when he wanted, so he cursed to for life, hungover entitled shit Jesus has some funny stories.
I struggled a lot when I lost my faith. I truly believe I’m better off now but I don’t take other people’s spiritual paths lightly. You go to dark places when you haven’t learned how to cope otherwise.
I had the opposite experience. I was convinced I was going to hell and that there was nothing I could do about it, so I thought I may as well be glutinous and selfish to enjoy my time here before getting tortured for eternity. It caused me some serious trauma, and on top of that it led to me hurting family and friends.
I don't think I could've ever left my self-loathing and selfishness behind if I didn't let go of my religion.
She's crying because she realized that she could buy a second home if she hadn't been foolishly donating to the church all this time.
This is why I may never be able to fully repair my relationship with my religious father after my own journey out, because I love him too much to undermine the belief that sustains him as an 87 year old.
My own journey out has been incredibly painful and challenging but that is MY life path, not his. He stuck with my mother for 25 years to the very end after her Parkinsons diagnosis and he got to watch her choke to death on some food at the end.
I really believe my father doesn’t need the religion to be that good and faithful, because he is just basically made of good stuff. But I will never attack his faith even though in my heart of hearts I find the foundations of that faith to be risible. What would be gained? What would it say about me if I did?
Yeah, I have no desire to "change" anyone either. As long as they are decent people, that's enough for me.
Belief only becomes a problem when someone weaponizes it. If you want to become a better person to appease the space rock, go for it, but if you tell me the space rock says no abortions for anyone, no it doesn't.
I’m an athiest, and I generally believe that religion can be easily used to be shitty towards others and push them to being the worst type of people in life (more generally this happens with all ideologies). But for many religious people they aren’t too different compared to an athiest. They might go to church only on the holidays, or maybe they go weekly. They probably have many religious values. But at the end of the day they often make similar decisions for different reasons.
But I genuinely believe that trying to convince people that god isn’t real is super shitty and counter-productive. Show some compassion you fucking deodorant-free 🤓-brained reddit moderator. Take a shower.
I occasionally hear people say something like “We should be making people atheists. Religion is a scourge that uses ideology to harm others.” I can’t help to laugh when I hear this, because someone who takes this seriously (perhaps the person in the comic) is doing the literal thing they are decrying.
So what if someone is a christian because it comforts them? I don’t care if you think it lacks logic when your alternative lacks compassion.
Instead of opposing religion unilaterally, oppose the harmful ideas laundered by religion. Shame the politicians and the charlatans. Don’t shame mary-sue who goes to church weekly for being the a Christian, even though the shitbags at NIFB hate church are also Christians.
It’s certainly possible for people to be good to each other due to their religious beliefs. The local pro-palestine protests near me are primarilly organized by christians, and they are often led by a local group of leftist christian pacifists. They organize anti-war protests, support palestinian freedom, and do many smaller actions to alleviate suffering such as volunteering at the local food bank or other similar orgs. Compared to other groups that organize near me, I vastly prefer them over my local PSL chapter, or almost every ML group I’ve ever come across. Unlike many atheists I’ve worked with, that christian group will happily work with a local mosque, or synagogue when it doesn’t help them materially. This is because they don’t oppose people based on simple reasons like religion, but instead have deep solidarity with everyone else suffering through life on this terrible world.
Instead of opposing religion because you think it’s cringe how about you show solidarity and compassion for your fellow human beings.
I 100% agree. I think most anti-relious atheist are still living in reaction to their religious up bringing or unable to recognize where power resides to be able to hold it to account or both.
I disagree pretty strongly on especially the "don't shame someone for who is essentially a good person for sharing the same religion as a bad person."
Community is everything, and there's strength in names. If you say you are of the same religion as a bigot, you're telling the bigots that you agree with them, even if you don't. If you want to follow the teachings of the character known as Christ, you ironically have to call yourself something other than Christian, because that label is synonymous with all kinds of bigotry to a dangerous number of people. The bigotry isn't going to die out as long as they can claim to be a majority.
We're not talking about sports teams here. These labels matter, and have dangerous effects. I'd rather everyone drop religions labels entirely and just say how they claim to be a good person, because as it stands there are good people and bad people who share the same label, which makes the bad people stronger.
Eh doing that isn't really worth the headache. Blind faith is, IMO, a socially acceptable mental illness. You can't cure a mental illness by brute force; all your gonna do is tire yourself out.
It's not even that, the comic really does get right to the point. It would absolutely crush some people. My grandmother finds strength to deal with such bullshit by her beliefs so I wouldn't dare take that away from her. It's harmless as long as they aren't the type to push their beliefs on you and hurt you for it.
Your grandma is not (necessarily - I don't know her, she could be trafficking people) a bad person, but her beliefs and that of so many others who also are good (at least they might be) people provide the fertile ground for the growth of an agressive weed. It's not the grounds fault, it could be growing strawberries instead, but right now its existence nourishes a strangling vine that bears poisonous fruit.
We definetly should not poison the ground to kill the weed, though that certainly is a way to get rid of it. But we absolutely need to prevent it from spreading, new fields should not be infected by it and with the exhaution of the old places of growth, we might manage to extinct it.
That's why it is important to keep in mind that your grandma is (most likely) okay to just exist as a believer, but that the beliefs she holds are roots of something, that must not spread.
Okay but as a kid, I got crushed because my family was religious and threw me out like literal fucking trash. This shit never stays harmless, and it keeps people susceptible to the worst instincts to do shit like fascism. Its always the most vulnerable who this shit hurts, so nobody cares.
So I don't give a shit how good your delusion makes you feel. If you want to hurt people to feel good, keep it between you and yourself and just put a needle in your arm. Plus, if something goes wrong there, you have narcan.
I've decided that I can't change my mother's beliefs nor should I. I told her that we have a no-politics rule as of summer 2020. It saved our relationship.
I wish mine did that. I said one thing about Trump not having as much money as he claims, and my mom got all insulted. She said that maybe we shouldn't talk about politics, etc, and I agreed to be nice. I don't like to talk politics at all, even with like-minded people. But she'll blame a company getting hacked and losing my personal info on democrats, and tell me that she can't wait until all democrats die off.
But now she just spouts of any shit that comes to her mind without a care, while I'm keeping to our dealt and shutting up. I doubt she even remembers our promise, because the moment it wasn't convenient for her, she dropped it.
The woman on the floor is thinking about all the gay people she screamed at about God's wrath, and all the beatings she took from her husband because he was the Head of her, and all of the time and money she wasted on the church, and all of the beatings she let her husband give to her kids lest she "spoil the child," and all of the bs she swallowed from Republicans, and all of the shame she carried for masturbating, and all of the abuse she hurled at women outside abortion clinics, and all.of the children she'd terrified at Sunday School, and all of the things she never tried because someone had told her not to.
Ragebait doesn't deserve all this spilled ink.
Cool cool, now do the one where the mother was previously being a transphobic piece of shit because "her god told her so".
Be pragmatic in your atheism advocacy. Lay out your arguments why supernatural thinking is bad, both from an epistemological and pragmatic sense, poke at contradictions of the other person's religion with reality, and warn about the dangers of organized religion specifically, just don't cross the line of actually engaging in nuclear warfare.
If they haven't been brainwashed enough, they'll bite, even if it takes them months. If they have been brainwashed enough but they have intellectual honesty and curiosity, they may begin a self-questioning process themselves that will eventually make them crash, and it will be painful, but once they get recovered they'll be grateful. If they don't have that intellectual honesty, you've at least planted the potential seeds for them to decide at some later point that superstition was indeed bullshit, which may or may not come into fruition in the future. If the person you're talking with is an intellectual donkey (in terms of unwillingness to reason), you have nothing to gain from that conversation.
When it comes to old religious people, though, I limit myself to relentlessly attacking the church. Due to their material conditions, they have the lowest chance to ever leaving their beliefs anyway, so my goal is just to make them wary of any dumbfuck hate preacher they may find.
Comic Strips
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)