Excellent ED!
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Glad you enjoyed it. I just tagged you and @Alrightmiami19c in my Professor thread, off the religion and psychology topic.
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You misunderstood me.My point was that the fact that some of the teachings of christianity are good and sensible is not a good enough reason to accept its metaphysical claims.You could view them as the teachings of many others,who you do not accepts as your saviors
Although true,those are mostly deists imo,who accept the concept of Jesus due to being raised as christians.For christianity to make sense,there must be the original sin and without Adam and Eve there isn’t
You continue to impress!
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God help me, but I’m going to try and engage with this on a serious level.
The thing is, our concepts of God are strongly related with our perceptions of ourselves. Christianity does, after all, teach that God made man in his own image. As such, it’s tangled up with our self worth, and more often than not self-justification. It seems most religions allow a certain amount of mix and match and that the more successful ones don’t really try to stop you from doing anything you really want to do and this leads to a certain amount of moral and ideological manouvering. I find it hard to believe, for example, that when the prophet Mohammed banned his followers from drinking alchohol, that he intended for them to start smoking hashish instead. But thousands of people seem to have believed precisely that, and who am I to tell them they’re wrong? The part of this thread’s title that I object to is the ‘so should You’ part. For my own part, I recognise that atheism is not a moral choice but a statement about my beliefs concerning the universe; not believing in God doesn’t make you a better person. But the OP seems to think that being a christian does. Well fine, but your perfectly valid licence to believe what the hell you want doesn’t include a right to tell other people what they can and can’t believe, and it’s impossible to make anybody believe anything- even yourself. I can’t make myself believe in God any more than I can make myself two feet taller.
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There is no such thing as a “Christian God”. This term needs to be removed from the lexicon. There is God, Creator, Uncaused-cause, Unmoved-mover, and there is Christianity which is a religion.
God is not a Christian… He’s God.
I agree. Though I am a Christian myself and I think humanity is best served if we lived by it’s precepts without hypocrisy, it’s not an easy life. People automatically hate you. People automatically think your a stupid robot. There is a lot of outside pressure to shed the Christian persona. And we have to embrace suffering for the Name and beyond. That isn’t terribly attractive to a lot of people.
But to those who feel the call and have the connection, get it. There is a whole world opened up when you embrace a Christian perspective and you experience things you cannot passively deny. But it’s diffucult to express that to others who are not in the know.
My biggest beef with some non-believers is that they perceive themselves more knowledgeable about the faith than believers. Of course its mainly negative violations of Christian tenets by those who claim to be Christian, but are hypocrites using religion to justify the unjustifiable. Knowing about those events does not make one a scholar, it just means one knows a few off color facts about evil people, mainly in the past. Dawkins was notorious for thinking he knew more about Christianity than Christians and had no shame in mocking and insulting them though he really doesn’t understand it himself.
You want to know what a Christian thinks ask a Christian. Want to know what a Hindu thinks ask a Hindu, don’t ask an atheist who hates religion about religion.
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Allah disagrees.
Honest question: Is it really like that in the US? As an outside observer, it always seemed to me to be the opposite, although that may be in the process of changing. I remember watching an American news program a few years back about how by then about 20% of Americans did not subscribe to any form of organized religion. They seemed shocked at how high that number was, and I remember I was shocked at how low it was. I also remember being told by people who had spent a significant amount of time in the US to not tell people that I was an atheist because they might stop talking to you. Or do these things just depend on the social environment you’re in?
He’s not wrong that some people will automatically hate you and some will automatically think you’re a stupid robot, but don’t understand that to mean that the majority will think that. I have found in my travels that far more people in the US are religious vs not, and the majority of those religious people are Christian.
Depends on the environment. I don’t broadcast, but I won’t shirk the question. I was being very general when I said that though. I was not only thinking of places in the U.S. but places outside where it’s a death sentence. Being a Muslim is not a death sentence anywhere, but being Christian is, in some places.
Living in the SE US, its pretty safe to be a Christian. Out west it’s less so. Based on the actions of our alt-left friends mainly out west and the violence they perpetrate on even perceived conservatism, it’s less safe, say at Berkeley. Which is ironic since Berkeley was a Christian.
Perhaps not at the moment. But it was in the recent past.
The following juxtaposition struck me as odd:
Setting aside the issue of whether violence against conservatives is an actual problem out west: Why is it assumed that being Christian equates to being conservative?
People make assumptions about others based on very little information. If you want to try the experiment, identify to somebody as a Christian and nothing else and then ask basic questions about what that means about you. You will be associated with the Conservative Right, not Liberal Left.
This is very likely true. But as I have said before on this thread (I think it was this thread), modern Christianity has a serious branding problem. The point being, the fact that the general public largely equates Christianity with conservatism doesn’t make it so.
Depending on where out west to be sure. You’ve got a very heavy Catholic population in San Diego what with the Mexican influence, and even the central coast had a good amount of it. Portland was very welcoming as well from my time there.
There is always going to be pockets of ignorance on either side.
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It seems to me that the most demonstrative Christians are athletes and recording artists. Watch ESPN or the Grammy’s and you’ll here performer after performer thank God; watch SportsCenter and after every successful athletic play there’s a good chance the athlete will not-so-subtly thank the Lord above. I’ve never heard these individuals chastised for this, and I’ve also never heard anyone assume they are “associated with the Conservative Right”.
Not even close. The vast majority of the US identifies as Christian… They have acquired a persecution complex, God only knows how.
If you tell someone you are a Christian you are very likely talking to another Christian.
Obviously there will be some pockets of non-christians, particularly in highly liberal areas I would think… But to suggest that “people automatically hate you” because you are a Christian is alarmist and beyond laughable. If anything the opposite is true, as a majority of people up until recently would not vote for an Atheist or Muslim, and even now its barely 50%
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True enough. I mean, the thing is that I truly believe that there are good people and assholes in every community, and it’s not fair to judge the majority of christians by the actions and words of a few. I mean, I don’t believe in god but I think the message that we should love not just those who are easy to love, who wish to do us good, but also those who are difficult to love, those who wish to do us harm, is a truly revolutionary one. That’s probably quite enough speculation for one post.