Not only do they not have room to cut, this is political dynamite here right now. Ireland is in court defending a very low tax for Apple, and the French are moving to have unified tax rates in the area (and you can trust them to move the needle higher if they succeed)
This ends a major source of EU tax arbitrage. How that actually affects bottom line growth and tax receipts is still not clear.
In aggregate the numbers are totally on TB’s side. Unfunded pension liabilities are an impending disaster all across the Western world.
Well first off, it’s “excessive” credulity in the def above. You really want to say that religious people today (of all religions) aren’t “excessive” about it. Even if you don’t think the most influential aspect of many peoples lives doesn’t impact them in an excessive way, it’s a matter of opinion. You can’t define “extreme credulity” for me any more than I can for you.
I’m aware. I went to Catholic school and I’m the first open Atheist in my entire family (Gma wrote me out of the will for that one).
Many a religion teacher loves to preach about the logical arguments of God. I merely don’t subscribe to them. While many of them can hold up to logical scrutiny (kudos to them for well thought out points), that doesn’t mean single logic points can outweigh the entirety of my opinions re: personal religion.
No problem 
Indeed. However as you know from the posts on this forum these aren’t logically infallible. I’m an agnostic for this very reason though I certainly don’t believe in a God in the Christian sense and heaven and hell and all that.
Fake news pic! That had to be photoshopped only the not born here Muslim Obama would do that.
I would say your painting with a broad brush here, first. Second, you are talking about the behavior of people who supposedly believe ‘x’, and the initial criticism was that the source, reason for belief is extremely credulous. Accusing people who claim to believe a proposition and the way they behave are two different things.
It’s perfectly plausible to believe a correct proposition and behave in a incredulous fasion. That doesn’t make what they believe to be true false, it merely means that they are behaving in a way that is poor and probably incongrent with their core belief.
Speaking of the psycho-emotional state of a person and whether or not they believe in God, are two different things.
People can believe that which is correct and act in an antithetical manner. In other words they can believe something true and act badly nonetheless.
My point is that religious belief is not extremely credulous, whether or not you believe them to be hypocritical by default.
Most people are hypocrites. They know right from wrong and choose wrong regardless of knowing better. And religious folk are not unique in this phenomenon.
As an atheist, I find religion excessively credulous. I have no idea why you keep saying extremely. Huge difference.
Point made. Now you’ll just have to find someone to make it to. Again, the word is excessively.
Awesome. Another point you’ll have to find an audience for. I’ve said nothing to the contrary.
Religious beliefs are irrational. Believers can argue about degrees of credulity but they can’t deny (well, I suppose they can) that religion is an irrational belief.
What I wonder is, does holding one irrational belief, especially something like a religion, mean that one is more likely to hold others? Does it make it someone more credulous?
Rational is subjective. When you have true faith, you end up believing that everyone else is the irrational group.
Ehhhhhh maybe? Probably impossible to discern for real. If you’re asking whether or not religious people are more inclined to believe in UFOs, I’d say they’d be more skeptical than a non religious person. You could then flip that to some arbitrary topic for non religious people.
Faith, by definition, is irrational.
Agreed. Which is why it’s called “faith” and not “reason.”
But logically, to those WITH faith, they believe people like me are the irrational ones. Whether or not they’re “right” doesn’t change that they believe I’m being irrational.
Speaking for myself here. I don’t think it’s irrational to not have religious faith. It’s completely understandable. We’ve always had ethical nonbelievers.
There’s some research on this. The New York Times did an article on it in July of this year. The less religious you are, the more likely you are to believe in aliens and UFOs. It lends some credence to the idea that humans seek belief in things they cannot prove or cannot see and people without traditional religious faith sometimes express that in some other form of belief.
Of course, we’ve talked before about how people form communities or movements that take on all the aspects of religion from sacred ideals, to purity norms, blasphemy and ostracism or punishment for people who don’t go along. Membership signalling. In-groups and norms of behavior and belonging. You can see all of those things in groups formed around environmentalism and the social justice movements.
This is a very good point (also kudos to you). Anecdotally, my family can’t fathom how I would choose eternal damnation by not believing in God, they think I’m ridiculous.
I was thinking of it more in the sense of “God only created man there’s no intel life elsewhere” ala my family, but this is a better explanation lol.
About your grandmother disinheriting you over your lack of faith…
I find this really sad. Wow. I just can’t imagine disinheriting a child because they didn’t have belief, or didn’t share my specific tradition as adults. Or over sexual orientation. Or politics. People become estranged from their children and grandchildren over all kinds of things. For me, it would have to be some kind of psychopathology or scary destructive behavior. It’s hard to imagine doing that because your grandchild didn’t believe in God.
I’m sure a lot of people just don’t talk about deep things like this with their families for these reasons. My BFF was raised in my faith tradition, but is agnostic. She is very private about that, mostly because she doesn’t want to hurt her in-laws, get into it with more religious family members. I also find that really sad, to think that my kids wouldn’t be able to talk about that kind of thing with me because I’d reject them.
It felt much much worse in the moment than it does now. I’ve since rationalized it with knowing my family is more likely to hand down debt than it is assets, so I might be better off lol.
We’re not estranged. I just took my kids down there last weekend. She just doesn’t get me things on Xmas/Easter/etc but she still loves my daughters quite a bit. Honestly she’s a very genuinely kind human being, just a flaw with her religious beliefs.
Personally (read: zero data to back this up) I attribute a large chunk of the religious/non religious swing to the floodgates more or less opening when things like “disowning your kids for being atheists” didn’t happen as often.
We saw a similar wave (I believe data backs this up?) regarding people coming out as homo/bi/etc when society became more accepting of it.
Oh, I’m happy to hear that. I was thinking that you’d won the family lottery. Bigots and racists on one side, and religious people that disown kids without faith on the other. Bad all around! Ha!
BTW, my youngest has been telling me that staying in the church is undecided, and she’s not going to college. She’s planning to travel around the US in an old VW bus. Make art and sell pot brownies for a living. Lol. She’s fourteen so my response is, “That would be cool. I love those old VWs.”
That speaks to a lack of education, religious and otherwise. I can’t speak for every denomination (or heresy) but the Catholic Church long ago recognized there was a difference between faith and reason. The problem is that people hear irrational and automatically think it is an insult to their intelligence.
When the answer to a particular issue or event is, “the Lord works in mysterious ways,” and you are supposed to be satisfied with that (and keep on believing) it sort of tells you something about the inherent irrationality of faith.
threadjack -
@ “I’m not going to college.” You have to admit, this is a pretty good dream. Add her longboard and ukulele.
The explanatory power for the cause or reason for existence is far more rational under theism than atheism.
In a nut shell, theism responds to existence as something from something. Atheism necessarily posits a something from nothing proposition which is both false and lends itself to circular reasoning.
Many atheists will say in reply, “Well its ok to say ‘I don’t know’”. But that’s not what atheists are actually saying. They say rather, ‘we don’t know how or why existence is or came to be, but we know there is no God, or God like thing that could be the source of existence.’
Even Dawkins doesn’t dispute that life on Earth could have come from elsewhere. He believes it’s possible aliens seeded life here, but calls on his followers to mock and harass believers… in public.
So he believes in alien seeding, in complete absence of evidence, but theism is just retarded.
You perhaps are speaking of things religious people do you find weird?
A pretty large majority of the areas where both sides of my family live tend to fall into the slightly racist category. Neither side is even close to putting on a white hood and burning a cross in someone’s yard, but they’d be more than comfortable throwing away a Hispanic person’s resume “just cuz.” It’s really just my mom’s side in WV that gets super vocal about it.
So I actually don’t have a problem with this at all (shocker, right?). My youngest sister is a huge stoner. She actually went out to CA for 6 months a couple years ago to work on a pot farm. She has no ambition, rotates through shitty jobs, can usually barely pay her bills come month end, YET she’s blissfully stupidly happy. Like all the time.
My parents have repeatedly asked me to talk to her and find some way to motivate her onto bigger and better things. I’ve never even come close to obliging. She’s absurdly happy and I’d feel like a monster for pushing her towards a lifestyle that she doesn’t want when she’s already figured out what she loves about life and is pursuing it.
