I have never sinned

It is freeing to recognize that I have never sinned and it pissed Christians off when I say this. To clarify, in Christianity sin is not simply “the bad things we do” it is specifically an offense against god. God does not exists so i have never sinned against him.

I’ve been an atheist for for 16 years but it was only recently that I realized this distinction. It short-circuits the guilt based evangelism. It forces the christian to first demonstrate that god exists before they can convince me I have sinned and need to be saved from that sin. And to say the least, they are ill equipped to demonstrate the existence of god.

jjhanger,

Since I became an atheist, I have been really trying to sanitize my speech away from the religious speak because its not a matter of simply choosing different synonmyns because words like immoral and sin are words with completely different meanings.

uriel238,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

One of the fundamentals I’ve learned in a hobby study of moral philosophy (unaccredited. I just read stuff and watch videos.) is the English language is not great for talking about wrongdoing.

We have the words sin and crime

Sin is a wrongdoing against God or against the divine, as asserted by organized religious ministries, who often do not agree. (Here in the States, some churches assert that gay sexual behavior is a sin, whereas others assert that judging others for being gay is a sin.) None of this is true. As Pope Frances observed, Only God knows the mind or intent of God, and Protestant faiths operate by the doctrines Sola Fide (By faith alone) and Sola Scriptura (By scripture alone) does one find salvation. Your favorite minister can only advise with opinions, and often they do to serve their own agenda. You and you alone get to decide what parts of the bible are valid in your life in the 2020s, and which parts are allegory, which parts are out of date (e.g. slavery, genocide, human sacrifice) and whether God will understand you’re doing your best in the circumstances He threw at you.

Crime is an offense against the state, which is, in turn, the organization that defines and enforces state law and is supposed to provide governance, often typically serving only the plutocrats and oligarchs that define what kinds of policy will be enacted. The state is not the community or the land, hence we see routine pushes to roll back environmental protections so that the community has clean air and drinking water, instead allowing industry to dump its soot and pig farmers to let their poop lagoons leak and poison the water table.

As a younger adult, seeing the CIA extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program kidnap people and torture them, including innocent Americans, without judicial review or due process was one of my first steps into realizing the illegitimacy of the United States. None of that served the people of the US (we have much more effective non-pain-driven ways to interrogate POWs. Torture only happened because rich people wanted brown people to suffer). Since then we’ve seen our own rights stripped away peacemeal, and noticed a disparity in how the rule of law applies to those with wealth, and those without. So the state is very much an entity other than the public or our society.

Neither sin nor crime reflect wrongdoing against the self, the community, the society or the commonwealth, and English doesn’t have names for such wrongdoing. We have to modify sin and crime such as crime against humanity or sin against nature

And this, then leads to what we imagine sin and crime to be, mostly wonton (unlicensed) sex, bank robbery and serial killing. Our songs of sin and remorse talk about killing neighbors or fucking neighbors. They don’t talk about war profiteering, or pushing addictive pharmaceuticals, or capturing the government of the people, or actively obfuscating the effects of mass fossil-fuel use on the ecology, collapsing the ecology, extinguishing biodiversity and possibly the human species. Elite deviance (e.g. white collar crime) causes more death, more destruction and more cost than all the petty sins and crimes _by multiple orders of magnitude) and yet God (God’s alleged voice) has nothing to say about them, and the state says very little, while it’s instead looking to abolish drag queens reading to children at the library.

So not only is there no sin, but sin and crime are irrelevant, except for those things that are enforced by law enforcement institutions that mostly want to rob citizens and / or shoot them. But this is to say you will be hunted for self publishing your music or whistleblowing a company for balking safety regulations as you will robbing a bank.

So not only are we truly free from moral obligations, but we might actually be ethically bound to consider for ourselves what we opine is right and wrong. When religious ministries are asserting violence against gays, Palestinians and immigrants is right and proper, obedience to divine command theory is no longer safe or right.

Hugh_Jeggs,

For a bunch of so-called atheists, yous sure do spend a lot of time thinking about god 😂

In civilised countries, you know how you can tell if someone is atheist or religious?

You can’t.

You don’t talk about that shit

Same goes for politics

Mpeach45,
@Mpeach45@lemmy.world avatar

Avoiding discussion of politics is the privilege of those who benefit from oppression.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

For a bunch of so-called atheists, yous sure do spend a lot of time thinking about god 😂

There are dozens of churches in my town. There are religious messages everywhere, from billboards to plaques. There are Christian radio stations people play music from when I go into their businesses. Religious people knock on my door trying to convert me.

Of course I spend a lot of time thinking about it. You people shove it down my throat every chance you get.

TokenBoomer,

Amen

Hugh_Jeggs,

Best pun in the thread, and the edgy teenagers missed it :)

TokenBoomer,

God, I hope not.

Hugh_Jeggs,

You people

😂😂😂

Mate, we got rid of our religious nutjobs in the late 15th/early 16th century.

Here’s the secret - stick them all on a boat, send them off to some distant western continent (we found that 3500 miles was the bare minimum) and let them create the most fucked up country on the entire planet while the rest of us slowly forget about their weirdo religion 😂

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t help but note that you don’t say where you live. And I have a feeling that it’s because there are, in fact, religious extremists in your country.

Hugh_Jeggs,

Yeah but they tend to be the “blowy-uppy” type so they tend not to push their agenda either

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Once again, you aren’t saying where you live and it’s becoming more and more obvious that it’s because there are crazy Christians there and you don’t want us to know that.

macattack,

There is an irony that atheism becomes a religion to a lot of atheists.

It reminds me of how some liberals have transformed into the people they disliked when they just want to own the MAGA crowd instead of actually rallying behind progressive policies and ideals

DmMacniel,

Is it really a religion when it doesn’t follow deities?

TheDoozer,

Shhhhh, let’s not give them ammunition against TST.

DmMacniel,

Sorry

tsonfeir,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

It’s an opinion on religion, not a belief. It is the lack of belief.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Define religion for us please.

macattack,

A circle jerk around the meaning of life

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Atheism has nothing to say about the meaning of life. Atheism is the lack of belief in gods.

So either religion is “a circle jerk around the meaning of life,” and therefore atheism is not a religion “to a lot of atheists” or your definition is wrong.

Which is it?

Hugh_Jeggs,

A cult?

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Religion is a cult or atheism is a cult?

Hugh_Jeggs,

Both

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Okay, then please define ‘cult’ in such a way that describes both religion and atheism. You could start by telling us who the atheism cult’s leader is, because I sure don’t follow whoever that is.

macattack, (edited )

Theism in its purest form is similarly devoid of religion. My point is that as a practicing atheist, I do not identify with the ways that many of you practice atheism.

Look at the recently-created threads: “everyone, here’s a Christian pedophile”, “everyone here are stupid Christians” etc. there are ways to actualize your perspective on atheism without always punching down on religion. If we reduce ourselves to only comparing ourselves to the other, we lose who we are as individuals in the process.

The approach that this board has is disappointing and mirrors religion in a way that seems obvious to those that are not taking part of the circle jerk

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

So by ‘practice atheism,’ you mean talk about it. And that’s what makes a religion. Talking about something.

So I guess discussing the weather is a religion.

macattack,

If my main reference of weather was “why my weather forecast is better than your weather forecast”, then yes, weather becomes a religion

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think you understand the argument atheists are making if you think that’s all there is to it.

StupidBrotherInLaw,

Kindly fuck off with the unsolicited, worthless criticism, Hugh.

tsonfeir,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

Religious people sure spend a lot of time thing about getting little girls pregnant and marrying them.

waz,

I’m curious of what your definition of “a civilized country” is.

I expect the answer is going to be prejudice AF.

spaceghoti, (edited )

What an amazing display of privilege. It must be nice to live in a society where religious belief isn’t being injected into the public and our government.

PmMeYourBees, (edited )
PmMeYourBees avatar

I love to piss them off by telling them the only way for god to objectively exist as an all omnipotent being is for the simulated universe theory to be true.

LostWanderer,

It is freeing as an agnostic atheist; I’ve dropped the idea of sin. An unproven being cannot be ‘sinned’ against. The bible to begin with was written by man, until God himself visits all of humanity to introduce themselves…The shackles of sin that Christians wear is for them alone. No amount of shame or anger those believers attempt to burden me with will cause me to adopt the concept of sin again! Their creator must prove that it exists, as the burden of proof always lies with the one who presents an idea.

I simply act with a moral compass that guides me into not doing illegal or shitty things to other human beings. I feel this is enough to live a good life.

GardenVarietyAnxiety,

The Bible proves God is real, and God wrote the Bible, which proves he’s real because he wrote it.

Deconceptualist,

I know you’re illustrating the circular logic at play here. But don’t these people ask how the words got onto paper? Like didn’t Yahweh need a scribe and a printing press or something? And which version did he write anyway? The ancient Greek one? The King James version from well over a millennium later? The modern one used at their local church?

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

What’s really fun is that I’ve talked to Christians who have told me in all seriousness that the King James Bible is the “correct” version and all others, including all those that predate it, are wrong.

I assume some Christians who speak German say the same thing about whatever German edition they consider to be the “correct” one.

I don’t get it, but that is really what they believe. That it wasn’t the true Bible until it was put into English.

PlasticExistence,

The original Klingon is obviously the correct version.

Colonel_Panic_,

Oh no! That means all those millions of people that read it in Aramaic or Greek had the wrong version and are in hell now. Bummer for them.

GardenVarietyAnxiety,

I had a couple Christian missionaries ring my doorbell last week and I brought some of that up.

She was reading from the King James New Testament I think… I asked her who controlled the text between the time God wrote it and today. She didn’t have an answer and seemed confused as to why I was asking.

I said that the message of the Bible has been controlled by the Church or the State since its inception, and both of those entities have an acute interest in guiding the will of the people, for good or for ill, depending on when and where. It’s how society has always worked.

I asked if she could see how that message could have been altered over time in the interest of maintaining a complacent (I didn’t say it, but also “ignorant”) populace. Needless to say, it wasn’t very effective.

tsonfeir,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

If they aren’t allowed to question it, then you aren’t allowed to question them on it. That must make them feel powerful.

tsonfeir,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

god’s version was like a shitty draft of short stories and some people made a really terrible translation of it and tried to tie it all together in the same universe

GardenVarietyAnxiety,

Like how Nintendo tries to say the Zelda series is cohesive, lol

(Except Zelda is amazing, imo)

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Hey, if you take out all of the preachy bullshit, the Bible has a lot of pretty amazing stories too. The entire world drowns except for one family and a boat full of animals. A lady turns into a pillar of salt. A group of people try to build a tower, but can’t finish it because suddenly everyone speaks a different language. That’s just in the first chapter.

So maybe we can look at the Bible as someone playing Zelda games, but really badly.

Deconceptualist,

the Bible has a lot of pretty amazing stories too. The entire world drowns except for one family and a boat full of animals

I don’t think you’ll ever convince me the Noah’s Ark story isn’t hot garbage. It’s like the shittiest knockoff version of the flood myths from thousands of years prior because someone wanted to shoehorn it into the Bible. Even if we accept it as myth, the water didn’t form the earth or give birth to any primordial gods or anything, it was just Yahweh having a childish ecocidal tantrum.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t know, I think the childish ecological tantrum part of the story is part of what makes it interesting, divorced from the religious context. Angry gods are more interesting than benevolent ones, at least to me. And sure, it was a derivative story, but so what? So was much of Shakespeare. I would suggest to you that the very fact that it was derivative is evidence that people think it’s a good story.

Deconceptualist,

Angry gods are more interesting than benevolent ones, at least to me.

Sure, but that’s also in some of the older, better versions. Noah’s flood has the extra tacked on crap about the boat and gathering two of each animal, as if somehow any of that is plausible or sensible. This isn’t Shakespeare putting an interesting new spin on the tale of Julius Caesar, IMO it’s just sad.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t think you can look to Iron Age mythology for plausibility and sensibility.

tsonfeir,
@tsonfeir@lemm.ee avatar

My favorite is when Lots daughters got him fucked up and rode his cock.

rambling_lunatic,

You jest, but a classmate of mine tried to convince me of Christianity this way back in elementary school.

That pretty much guaranteed that I would never believe in that for the rest of my life.

30p87,

The Hobbit proves Bilbo is real, and Bilbo wrote the Hobbit, which proves he’s real because he wrote it.

DmMacniel,

Bilbo didn’t wrotr the Hobbit. He wrote the red book.

30p87,

Yet it’s the basis, just like deluded people say god is the basis of the bible.

DmMacniel,

Given that JRR Tolkien wrote the books and invented Bilbo and Eru Iluvatur I don’t think it’s applicable here.

LemmyKnowsBest,

If you ever broke the law like even rolling through a stop sign, or bigger crimes like theft or murder, would you still consider yourself not a sinner?

slickJujitsu,
@slickJujitsu@lemmy.today avatar

The thrust of the argument is that sin is a thing assigned by God. If there is no god, there is no sin; there are only moral and immoral acts

FuglyDuck,
@FuglyDuck@lemmy.world avatar

I submit that there are also criminal acts (and non criminal,) that are not necessarily moral or immoral. for example, feeding hungry people might be a crime… but it’s far from immoral.

and I suspect that most christians would, at least agree as far as that goes.

slickJujitsu,
@slickJujitsu@lemmy.today avatar

Agreed. Just goes to show how laws can be moral or immoral as much as any action can be.

froh42,

No I don’t, at all. I follow a few moral rules, like “Don’t be an asshole”. I actively don’t try to hurt other people. But there is no superior being that makes me do it, whose will I bend to.

By the way, this was my road to atheism: As a teenager, brought up with a few christian viewpoints (nothing like in the US) I one day thought

  • if I only am behaving “well” because I will be judged one day, I’m still not a good person.
  • if I want to be a morally good person I need to be that person out of my own free inner will
  • if I am, I need no judge, therefore god is irrelevant

Then I stayed with atheistic agnosticism (god is improbable but possible) for another 30 years or so.

Calling myself an atheist now, as I do not BELIEVE gods exist (*) , but the nonexistence of something can not be scientifically proven.

*= Of course gods “exist”. Gods are an idea, thought up by many human minds, as a shared idea they really are potent things. GOD IS A MEME. Therefore gods are everything and as powerful as religious people believe.

FlyingSquid,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

A sin is a transgression against a god. I can’t transgress against something I don’t think exists.

If I break the law, I’m a lawbreaker, not a sinner. If I break an unjust law, I doubt even you would consider me a sinner.

Colonel_Panic_,

God commanded us to do things like stone women that spoke, gouge our eyes out if we lusted, kill slaves that didn’t obey, and on and on.

So how exactly do we reconcile that god commands us to stone women to death that speak or have slaves and kill them for misbehaving and our laws that sorta say don’t kill people. Hmm?

I hope you haven’t been sinning against those commands. Gods gonna be big mad if you haven’t murdered infidels lately.

LemmyKnowsBest,

well I don’t believe in the Bible because of all the bullshit you just cited. The only question here is what is the definition of sin. It’s purely religious so we can discard that word because religion is bullshit.

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