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Important distinction
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Religion is ignorance and refusal to face reality.
As long as people behave, treat others, and vote according to the sacred scriptures written by a crackhead thousands of years ago, and their influence shapes the world around me and puts a limit to my freedom, then there will be no distinction between religion and extremism. The lesser of two evils is still evil.
It was necessary when we understood nothing. Thats not an excuse we can use anymore.
We have understanding. We have gained knowledge that makes religion meaningless. It did its job, served its purpose. Now its time to grow beyond it.
I'm a pansexual protestant Christian skepticist, who has not once tried to convert anyone and votes for far left parties. Please enlighten me how I'm inherently ignorant and taking your freedom.
Despite millenia of disproven lies about a non existing almighty being, you still believe this being indeed does exist and indeed is almighty without ever having any measurable effect on the world whatsoever.
How is that not ignorant?
I don't support the statement that you personally take away anyones freedom.
But organized churches have a long standing tradition of suppression and if you are part of one you support that at least indirectly.
I think you understand neither what a skepticist is, nor how religion or free churches work. And by your logic I assume you have to be an anarchist, since every government that ever existed - or society for that matter - has exercised some form of suppression.
I think your overgeneralizing, intollerant way of thinking is sickening and hardly better than that of a racist or sexist.
And please don't tell me what my beliefs are. That's pretty church-y of you.
Well you're wrong in both, but I am curious why you would think that.
Hilariously wrong here.
Care to explain what that has to do with anything I said in this thread?
And I think you resort to personal insults because you have no valid arguments against my positions.
But please humor me and tell me how I am intolerant in an comparable way to a racist or sexist.
Are you kidding me? You told about your beliefs yourself.
And it's especially rich after your whole post made assumptions about me.
You claim I believe in an almighty being, yet this is a key point where a skepticist might disagree with your average Christian. Moreover you claim I am supporting oppression, yet you don't even have the slightest idea what church I'm in and what they do or ever did. So you seem to have either huge misconceptions or you are prejudiced to a point where you are dismissive of anything that doesn't fit your narrative.
This just shows how you don't view Christians as individuals at all. Claiming to know exactly what I believe in based on that sole statement is exactly as silly as me claiming: 'I know what you believe, because your are an atheist.' Acting like you know a strangers beliefs for certain is arrogant to say the least.
Well, you judge churches based on the fact that some where oppressive in the past (and yes, I know some are still today). Based on that you either have to hate pretty much all governments, since it obviously doesn't matter whether anything have changed, or you have double standards.
If you feel attacked by me calling out your intolerant and overgeneralizing way of thinking, that's just because you are unable to defend yourself against a fact. Your words leave no other conclusion than that your are extremely prejudiced against Christians. You might have expressed yourself badly once, but you doubled down on your hate and ignorance. You might have good reasons for it, but would you excuse someone being racist for having had bad encounters with an ethnic group? Just as you probably wouldn't, neither do I excuse your statements about Christians.
I didn't want to reply at all because it is starting to get ridiculous and noone else keeps reading this.
But please just for the sake of being honest, show me where I am intolerant or hateful?
I replied to other comments in this thread as well, there should be plenty to pick from.
Show me my intolerance, show me my hate.
I even make it easier for you.
I think religion is a cancer to society.
I think all religions are basically cults.
Make a straightforward argument how my statements are either hateful or intolerant.
Because while those statements are my honest opinion, I am still strongly in favour of freedom of religion.
I would never forbid anyone from practicing their religion as long as they don't infringe on someone else's rights in doing so.
I don't hate anyone for being religious. There are wonderful religious people.
Still I think they are wonderful despite their religion, not because of it.
I don't even hate you, despite your ongoing insults towards me.
I just think you are very wrong on a fundamental level and haven't yet learned to deal with being told so.
There is a whole area in Philosophy called Philosophy of Religion that would really like your disproof of the existence of such a being. They have atheists and theists alike.
I don't have to proof something doesn't exist, someone that wants to be taken seriously has to proof why they would believe something does positively exist.
"what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
"Academic philosopher Michael V. Antony (2010) argued that despite the use of Hitchens's razor to reject religious belief and to support atheism, applying the razor to atheism itself would seem to imply that atheism is epistemically unjustified. According to Antony, the New Atheists (to whom Hitchens also belonged) invoke a number of special arguments purporting to show that atheism can in fact be asserted without evidence."
If only you could read, maybe you'd be more tolerant, but I doubt it, sigh.
The sheer arrogance to post a philosophical minority opinion paired with an insult and then end it with a sigh.
And while I am not particularly familiar with Mr. Antony's work I can tell you that he either didn't understand or purposefully misused Hitchen's Razor insofar as you indeed can not apply it to Atheism the same way you can apply it to christianity.
The reason for that being that there is no particular thing at all you have to believe to be an atheist.
Atheism in and of itself doesn't assert anything at all.
So there is nothing that could be dismissed.
Atheism says there is no reason to believe in god.
How does Hitchen's Razor dismiss that? It doesn't.
Not to mention your quote still is no argument towards the positive existence of god.
And if you don't show me how I am supposed to be intolerant, I will take it as the baseless insult that it is and will no longer discuss with you.
Reported.
Well, shutting you up was that easy, who would have guessed.
This is some serious goalpost movement. You just said there was proof.
I did what now?
I said there are millenia worth of disproven lies.
Which there are.
Like that the whole world was flooded and repopulated by one single family, which is disproven by DNA samples.
Or that it is gods will that priest stay unmarried, which is historically agreed that it was a measure to keep wealth inside the church organization.
Or so so many more.
I never said there was prove god doesn't exist.
And like I said, there doesn't need to be as long as there is no documented sign whatsoever that points towards god actually existing.
I see where I misunderstood. To reframe, you're saying that claims made by various religions/churches, which are presented as evidence of God, have been disproven, not that God has been disproven.
Obviously, the fact of whether or not there is a creator cant really be disproven, but I would say that any of the gods conjured up by humans have a pretty substantial amount of evidence going against their existence.
If there is a creator of some kind, it is so far beyond our comprehension that it is pretty much useless to ponder on.
Also, I'm not the person you were going back and forth with. I apologize for jumping in the conversation at a strange point.
You also said: "A nonexistent almighty being". Did you mean no gods exist, or did you mean all the gods people claim to exist so far have been debunked?
More importantly, for the claim "no god exists" specifically, I disagree that no proof is required in general. There needs to be an actual proof as much as there needs to be a proof of the negation, that "a god exists", for either to be worth accepting. If neither can be proved, why commit to believing the truth of either?
Additionally, disproving particular examples doesn't prove the general rule. Having no documented sign pointing to the existence of a god does not confirm the absence of a god anymore than having no documented signs of a gas leak in your home confirms the absence of a gas leak in your home. Perhaps the detector you are using is broken, perhaps the type of gas leaking in your home is not detectable by your detector.
It would also be incredibly hard to design any kind of empirical test to confirm or disconfirm the existence of gods in general (not just the christian flavored ones).
If you are claiming something doesn't exist you should prove it. Why should I take your argument seriously without proof? You see how this goes both ways?
No it doesn't go both ways.
If something exists it should be easy to prove.
There should be some form of sign of it.
On the other hand it is hard to disprove the existence of anything at all.
How do we know there is not some teapot in outer space?
We can't.
But that is no reason to believe there is one.
This is absolutely not true. Things can exist without being accessible to you directly in a manner that makes it easy to prove their existence.
Proving non-existence is not always hard. If we were arguing about the food in your fridge and I were claiming you had food in your fridge when you did not you could easily prove me wrong by just showing me the contents of your fridge.
More importantly, why does the hardness of doing a thing give you special status to make claims without proof? Seems like you are artificially constructing rules here solely because they benefit your position.
The universe is massive. There are teapots here. Why is it not plausible to believe some other alien race would not also construct some kind of teapot? Also, consider the fact that all teapots here on earth are literally teapots in "outerspace" in some sense.
It doesn't. But, "God doesn't exist" is not a claim, it is a counter-claim to the claim "God exists". The very concept of a higher power didn't even exist until people started claiming without evidence that it did exist, and it's been many branching games of telephone of that original unproven claim since then that has resulted in basically every major religion.
The counter-claim of "God doesn't exist" needs no proof beause it is countering a claim that also has no proof. If and when the original multiple millenium old claim of "God exists" actually has some proof to back it up, then the counter-claim would need to either have actual proof as well to support it, or debunk the "evidence" if possible. But again, the original claim is literally thousands of years old and still has absolute bupkis to prove it, so... I'm not too worried.
ETA:
The other person you replied to worded this bit poorly. The original analogy is trying to convince people on Earth to believe that there is a teapot(which is too small to see with a telescope) orbiting the Sun independently somewhere in between Earth's and Mars' orbits. It's completely illogical to believe seeing as humans haven't sent anything without scientific value beyond maybe the moon, and there's no evidence aliens have visited our solar system let alone left a teapot in orbit. But since it can't be proven there isn't a teapot orbiting by itself, does that mean you should believe there is? No, of course not.
I'd agree that at least sometimes it is a counter claim, but I don't agree that counter claims aren't claims themselves. The wording "counter claim" seems to me to indicate that "counter claims" are just claims of a particular type?
"God doesn't exist" is surely a statement right? If I tell you "god doesn't exist" (in response or not to something you've said), this feels like I am claiming the statement "god doesn't exist" is true.
I absolutely agree with you on this point.
I don't think we need proof to reject a claim like "god exists". There's no real good evidence for it and all attempts at proofs of this in the history of the philosophy of religion have been analyzed and critiqued to death in some pretty convincing ways.
But, there is to me a difference between rejecting the truth of a claim vs excepting the truth of its denial. So, for example if you tell me tax code says X, that is not a proof of what tax code says. It would make sense for me to not outright believe you (since we are strangers), but you could be telling the truth, so it seems equally silly for me to immediately jump to believing tax code doesn't say X too.
This ties into the part you absolutely agreed with. The word "God" as it is defined now would not exist without the original unproven claims that God. Even if you're not responding "God doesn't exist" directly to someone who said "God exists", you are if nothing else still responding to the original millennia old claim that they do exist. For that reason, it is always a counter-claim.
As for what makes counter-claims different from regular claims, it's simply that the burden of proof lies first with the original claim. A counter-claim has no responsibility to prove their claim until such time as the original claim presents evidence supporting itself.
I absolutely agree. That was kinda my point. If the claim ever did get some actually noteworthy evidence, then it would certainly need to be properly proven or disproven... but I don't think that will ever happen.
The problem with that is I at least in theory could have looked up the tax code, remembered it, and then told you it correctly. Sure, I could have lied or remembered wrong, but it was 100% within my capacity to give you the accurate information, and even show you where I got the information from. With a claim about God's existence, that's impossible for either side of the debate as far as we know, and since the original claim was "God exists", that side is, possibly forever, stuck holding the burden of proof.
If I say god doesn't exist to you I feel like I'm making a true or false factual claim to YOU rather than to a bunch of old dead people or some greater historical/cultural context. The history of the word/definition might be relevant for deciding what the word means, but the claim is aimed at YOU. The actual truth status of the claim (even if we call it a counter-claim) that I might be making is either true or false (assuming we subscribe to bivalence like that) regardless of the history or culture that lead us to the discussion.
It seems like a silly double standard for only one side to have a burden to prove their claim, but the other gets to claim the negation is true with no burden of proof.
For example, if you say "2+2 is 4" and my response is "NO IT IS NOT. IT IS 3! I REFUSE TO PROVE IT THOUGH", not only will I be wrong in a classical arithmetic sense but I have presented no argument for why you ought to believe my new counter claim to your original claim. It would make no sense to believe me without more info in such a case.
The fact that you can look up tax code is not really a problem for my hypothetical example. It is not particularly hard to come up with hypotheticals where you just can't easily obtain the answer. We could rephrase the context, perhaps we are stranded on a desert island? We could rephrase the question, perhaps it is about what some obscure historical figure had in their pockets on the day they died?
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue for or against the existence of god. My issue is that there should be a burden of proof for the CLAIMS "god exists" and "god does not exist" if somebody is claiming either is true. I don't think there's any kind of burden for believing some random claim without proof, but I think it's silly to commit to the negation of a claim without proof unless you have a reason to believe the negation. You can always just not commit and say you don't know in such a case, rather than believing the claim or its negation.
Why is it silly that the claim originally presented should have to present evidence first? The counter-claim only has zero burden of proof so long as the original claim has failed to give any proof of their own.
You wouldn't have to present an argument yet, at that stage. I'd think you're really dumb for needing something like that proven to you, but the initial burden of proof would still be on me. However, when I quickly and easily provide proof that 2 + 2 does equal 4, THEN the burden of proof falls to you to prove your counter-claim.
That's not what I'm claiming. I'm saying the claim AND counter-claim should provide evidence/proof before either one is accepted. Blindly believing not B because you can't prove B is just as bad in my opinion as believing B itself with no proof.
A lack of evidence or proof for some claim B is not sufficient proof for not B. It doesn't really matter what claim we assign to B here.
For example, you might not have evidence/proof that it will rain today (i.e. B is the statement "it will rain today"), that doesn't give you sufficient evidence/proof to now claim that it will not rain today. You just don't know either way.
I agree with your points. I just want to add that what OP was talking about is that the existence of a deity or higher power is not falsifiable and thus is impossible to logically disprove. I'm sure many, many, many people have tried on both sides.
My favorite proof against any higher power is from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:
Edit: changes "logically prove" to "logically disprove" as that's why the concept of a higher power cannot be disproven.
My issue here is with what I perceive as bad argumentation, double standards and general ignorance to the field of study where these sorts of questions are applicable on the part of the person I am replying to.
Edit: I want to be clear that I'm not saying you are doing that. I am referring to the other people I have been replying to.
Richard Dawkins has demonstrated that you don't need to know a lick of philosophy to be an atheist. Simply cite anecdote as universal knowledge.
Corporations have been stealing ever since the dawn of time, anyone working under a big company willingly is not the one to blame, and also what’s with this ‘I know everything’ stuff in the comments section? Is your only basis of hating 90% of the world’s population is that they believe in a god? If anyone can tell for a fact that God doesn’t exist, go on, but everyone knows its a matter of choice and you can’t prove that god doesn’t exist
You are all over the place.
But I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and reply to your specific points.
That is a strawman argument.
In most societies people are more or less forced to work for some employer, so I think it is hard to blame a worker for the company he works for.
And additionally I think one can blame a worker if they choose to work for the ethically worst companies.
That is very insulting.
I don't hate religious people, my mother is deeply religious and I truly love her.
But she is misguided and gives time, effort, believe and most of all money to an organization that still to this day promotes homophobia, suppresses women and staunchly defends child rapists.
I don't like that and I won't stop criticizing it.
Off course it is your prerogative to believe in god.
I wouldn't ever want to ban you from believing in whatever you want.
But you shouldn't be surprised if people put you in the same category with people believing in a flat earth or something like that.
If you just choose to believe random stuff without evidence than it is only natural that your opinion is not taken seriously.
It is not like there are two equally valid theories about what to believe.
One group believes in things if there is proof and one group believes in things because some dude from the bronze ages wrote it down.
I am gonna make an apology for the fact that I am getting a little bit excited, which might be becoming apparent, religion is a complex subject and discussing so much matter is a bit complex and no one here in the comments seems to be interested in having a discussion but rather spouting nonsense against 90% of the world
But I will agree that I am also against giving money to organizations that promotes hate, whether it’s affiliated with religion or not, that money is better spent on a better cause, and I also respect the fact that you don’t hate religious people, but also there are lots of institutions affiliated with religion that work for a good cause, a lot of churches and mosque provide shelter, gurudwaras are famous for providing food, atleast where I live
The thing is I don’t think a person should be judged for their beliefs but rather they should be judged based on their actions, a person kills someone, it should be condemned, no matter if he is a priest or the pope, a person donates money to the charity and helps someone, that should be praised, no matter what he believes personally about god
Me believing in a flat earth is me disbelieving in a proven fact, you would be right to call me dumb, but there is no study that disproves the existence of god, so if anyone believes in one, you can’t call him/her dumb because it’s not against any proven fact, it’s just that he thinks that life around him is enough evidence that someone out there exists, and there is nothing unscientific or unreasonable about that, and spouting hate comments against them and claiming they are dumb, banning them for wearing a piece of clothing is just wrong, no matter how you look at it.
Hey first and foremost, thanks for the good faith discussion.
I want you to be reassured that I don't hate you for your religion.
And I don't think you or any religious person is necessarily dumb.
We just happen to fundamentally disagree on certain points that seem to hold at least some value for both our lives.
And I will gladly admit that believing in god has the fundamental difference to believing in a flat earth that you described. The flat earth is soundly disproven and the existence of god is not.
I would in reply try to refine my point to saying that I think believing in god is comparable to believing in the easter bunny or the often quoted flying spaghetti monster (that I purposefully didn't want to invoke earlier).
Yes you are absolutely free to believe in any of those things.
I would fight to defend your right to believe in them.
But I cannot ever accept it as truth or even an educated opinion to hold without any proof pointing specifically towards the existence of any god.
And not to end on a negative note.
I love life around me, I love nature, I love animals.
I think the world is a wonder.
I do not believe any god made it the way it is.
I have no reason to believe that.
I just love it for itself.
Nobody is saying that people should be judged by their religion. People here are saying Religion itself encourages anti-science and bigoted views.
Secondly, it's absolutely unscientific to believe that the lack of disproof is sufficient evidence for belief. This is fundamentally unreasonable and is just as much proof as saying that pigs can fly when nobody observes them.
No, religious people are not morally wrong for being religious, and they are not to blame. Religion itself is.
Listen everyone! According to cowbee, we should make sure that from now on, nobody will ever put out any hypothesis ever again! It’s absolutely unscientific! Any claim should be absolutely 100% correct and if not, we should leave it at there!
No, that is not what I've said.
Believing firmly in a hypothesis without confirmation of said hypothesis is not sound. Again, pigs flying when nobody can see them, and firmly believing in it.
This gets additionally dicey when religion is used as a tool to restrict women's rights, and uphold homophobia, transphobia, and racism.
The scientific method works by creating a hypothesis, and testing it to verify. It does not work by creating a hypothesis and firmly believing in it until its disproven. You take an agnostic approach until confirmed one way or the other.
Somewhere along the line churches have gotten it all wrong, along with supporting corrupt politics. So it's them that needs fixin is how I see it
I don't get what your sexuality has to do with anything, but anyhow.
Why do you have to be {insert cult-membership here} if you believe in something? Don't dare to believe {whatever} for yourself? Do you need to be told what to believe and how? You don't make it sound like that, yet you are christian, hence member of said cult? I don't get the correlation. Why does one rarely hear people say "i believe in some god, but I'm not a member of blahblah"?
Unfortunately I don’t think you will be able to actually getting anything from them. They clearly already look down on you for believing what you believe.
Care to back your statement that ‘religion’ is ignorant? No one has any Idea what happens after death or are you enlightened enough to know and which case I would like you to tell us, which religion is taking away your freedom? You have the choice, you can follow any religion or leave it
You can just go back and read your own comments, makes a pretty strong case.
What happens after is that brain stops functioning, as a result of that, your body starts to rot. Nothing else happens. Your brain, that I argue is the real you, stops functioning.
My parents circumcised my penis when I didn't know what they were doing, they permanently stole a part of me; and as a result of that crap, my sex life is ruined forever. They took away my freedom because of you shitheads who are ruining our world by influencing people into accepting religion. You guys have the audacity to claim that people have a choice after indoctrinating children of religions so that once they are adult they follow your religion.
If you are so about choices, then make sure your kids don't get to know about superstitious beliefs until they are an adult and only then tell them about your fantasies that you believe that a bearded man is watching us from the sky. I bet your kid is going to think you've gone crazy.