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.
Meh. All reasoning is grounded in emotion. Even atheistic reasoning. That’s why argumentation does zip. It’s like trying to fix a warped floor by moving the rug around.
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.
Part of this was what finally got me off Facebook. People I liked, family members, posting dumb shit, and me letting it trigger me. It was literally only on Facebook, family gatherings were fun times. And honestly, since Trump, and despite the dichotomy that exists in my family and probably every other family, we seem to speak less about politics.
I’ve been off Facebook for somewhere between 10 and 15 years. I quit it because I didn’t care about what friends and family posted because they were all very religious, and I couldn’t post what I really wanted without offending said friends and family.
Instead of having faith in God, I have faith in the next generation to do slightly better each time. I can’t really bring it to myself to tell my grandma there’s no heaven or hell and her entire life has been a lie. Ignorance is truly bliss sometimes.
Slightly being the key word. I used to think we’d be fine after boomers die and millenials take over (sorry Gen X yes we always forget you) but then realized there are plenty of terrible Gen Y and then for a moment Gen Z was going to change labor politics gun control environment gender/sexuality and be super accepting but there’s still a huge proportion who still want to MAGA… we’ll see how bad alpha is
like my nephews say the same racist shit on their discord and valorant as I saw on 4chan 20 years ago and it’s just sad
Doesn’t mean people can’t change. Kids just wanna feel powerful/invincible. I used to say and hear the craziest of slurs in cod lobbies back in the day. My friends and I who have said those things have just grown up when we learned their real impact and we’ve stopped.
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.
I kid you not, all that kind of personal history creates a massive sunk cost fallacy that will make it impossible for them to admit that they may possibly be wrong.
The person who replied to you went on a rant about voting. Which I agree, religious people tend to vote against their interests. But spending 3 paragraphs talking about voting and nothing else doesn’t really elaborate on why it’s a shit lifestyle does it? I’ll add what I think are the worst aspects of a religious lifestyle.
The biggest issue with a religious lifestyle, in my opinion, is the fact that truly believing in a religion, especially a deity means you have been convinced, and are able to convince yourself to believe in something for which there is no evidence (ive heard religious arguments that faith is a “radical” belief in something that defies logic). The concept of God, for the most part, isn’t that bad. The issue is, if you’ve let in one truth about your life that you believe is true despite any supporting evidence and no logical reason, that opens the door for more random beliefs that aren’t founded on evidence. Or more accurately, they may believe new things (good or bad) for one reason or another but the idea that something needs evidence or solid reasoning to be believed doesn’t factor into their calculations nearly as much.
This means that a religious lifestyle is random, based on where and how they were raised with an ethos of not questioning their foundational beliefs. This means many religious communities grow up fine, and it means many grow up in the bizarre bigoted looney-tunes world I’m sure you’ve seen if you know religious people from disparate backgrounds.
Idk exactly what that person necessarily meant, but to me, a lifestyle based on beliefs that the person has been trained not to question and doesn’t need evidence to be true is kind of shit.
And in before people say that not all (or even most) religious people are like that. I agree that a religious person could easily be raised as someone who engages in logical reasoning and only accepts new beliefs if they think they have sufficient evidence etc. That’s probably true. I’m explaining why I think religion opens the door to a shit lifestyle because of religion.
Religious people might be polite, might even do good things, but they vote for people who do terrible things. Ideally, the whole thing would be done away with. Convincing people to reject facts and vote their feelings is never a gpod combo.
If religious people recused themselves from voting, I wouldn’t care much. But they’re dragging our country down. They’re gullible tools of awful rich men. They fight any forms of progress.
And yeah yeah you’re about to tell me about your aunt Maple who isn’t like that, she’s really lovely and doesn’t preach at you and just likes going to church for the social element. But who does she vote for??
Being religious doesn’t mean you vote for Trump. Thinking that way just encourages them.
Plenty of religious people actually vote for the person more likely to feed the hungry, liberate the captive, take care of the earth, etc. You know, the way the Bible teaches.
White evangelical Protestants are an extremely numerous and extremely politically active denomination in the US. If they’re not a majority of religious people, they’re at least a plurality.
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.
Not my grandma, she always says it’s God that helps her through her troubles and that her faith in his support is what helps her cope with bad times.
There are other ways that I totally agree, she says God helped her survive, but in those cases I remind her it’s her own intelligence and resourcefulness that got her through those situations.
What I mean, which I didn’t make clear in my original post, was: If religion was erased before she was born, she’d still find something to place her faith in and power up her innate resourcefulness. And the people who force their views on others would find another authoritative vehicle for that. But you’re right, if you rip that foundation out now, you risk more harm than good.
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.
Also imo a church directory is a con-man’s gold mine. Especially elderly church members, they’ve been taught all their lives to Believe anyone exuding confidence and claiming to have answers and solutions.
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’m sorry you went through that but I literally said “It’s harmless as long as they aren’t the type to push their beliefs on you and hurt you for it.”
My family has always been live and let live. They’re religious but you wouldn’t know it unless you spent enough time with them to hear them mention going to mass or whatever.
That can absolutely be true, but the context here is just the comic where some guys got a “win” and totally crushed a person we don’t know anything about.
My initial comment was replying to someone saying it’s not worth it because of how difficult it can be with no payout. I just wanted to remind them that the outcome can be really bad for some people.
On a related topic: my mother isn’t religious, but she believes in “karma” and “reiki healing,” all that new age b.s. It helps her cope with life and i’d never want to take that from her just because it isnt real unless she starts using that as a way to cure cancer or something that will actually hurt her.
But they always do. Its like the mythical ‘good cop’, they act as cover for the rest, and (almost) never take real action to compensate for the damage the majority do. Its one if those circumstances where being individually harmless is not systemically harmless.
I think I can agree with that. They may not like what the church has to say about LGBT+ people, but they also don’t actively fight for their rights either.
I do have a gay cousin though and they all love him, but yeah how they act within their own family doesn’t change how society at large deals with those issues.
I’d absofuckinglutley love to see religion eventually go by the wayside, too much pain and suffer caused by it, but to “forcefully” remove someone from within it can also be really damaging to that individual who may not be hurting anyone. I don’t really know what the answer is there though. Hopefully in time we move away from these magical stories. :/
The solution isnt shallow stripping if shit or reeducation camps that basically amount to bullying, but actually fixing the core problems. I know I tend to talk about a lot of American atheists as ‘Christianity as directed by Christopher Nolan’; all the explicit magic and camp stripped out, but otherwise the exact same ways of thinking they were raised with.
But the most anyone can do anything here is halfway, so…
Agnostic to the sense of there might be some weird higher power or complex layering of reality - when theists hear agnostic though they think ‘oh they’re fifty-fifty on the Christian God of the Bible’ which I really don’t think is the case for most atheists. I know I’d sooner believe in pretty much anything before the paradoxical absurdity which backs the Abrahamic faiths.
I identify as an agnostic atheist in exactly this way. We don’t know, based on our current understanding, whether there is something that ‘created’ the universe, or not. That being said, I am 99.999 percent certain that no human myth about gods has ever been remotely close to the truth of reality. The Abrahamic myths are so lacking in any sort of proof that they are obviously fiction.
That’s the thing. Any human depiction of god is almost immediately disprovable because it makes supernatural claims, but the idea that there could be something out there isn’t. (We very well could be living in a simulation, and there are even some mathematical arguments that suggest we’re almost certainly in one.)
It’s a pretty bad word tbh because people have varying things they read into it, just like “atheist.” I’ve heard an old religious family member say that agnostic people believe in God/Jesus but don’t like organized religion.
The definitions that make the most sense to me are that theism/atheism is about what you believe, and gnosticism/agnosticism is about what you claim to know.
This thread made me go see what the dictionary definitions of the words are these days, and I saw that M-W not only has pretty clear definitions, but has a little write up on the terms:
“How Agnostic Differs From Atheist
Many people are interested in distinguishing between the words agnostic and atheist. The difference is quite simple: atheist refers to someone who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods, and agnosticrefers to someone who doesn’t know whether there is a god, or even if such a thing is knowable. This distinction can be troublesome to remember, but examining the origins of the two words can help.”
We’re all agnostic. No one truly “knows” one way or another. I personally think there isn’t a god because they don’t “need” to exist. There is no purpose, the universe just is and given a large enough system, life can be explained by randomness and chaos.
I don’t need the comfort of a god to justify my existence. I’m ok with just existing here and now and when I’m gone I hope I made enough difference in those still living to carry on in spirit.
This is atheist deletion. I know God doesn’t exist that same way I know unicorns don’t exist. Or the same way I know Gandalf wasn’t real. I am not an agnostic, I am quite sure that there is not a spooky sky wizard who refuses to demonstrate its existence.
The hypotheses that Gandalf is a fictional creation has enough evidence to it that I believe it has risen to the level of a theory. Well, I’m being a little flippant here, but just demonstrating my point.
Same thing with unicorns, there is such a lack of evidence for the hypothesis of their physical existence that at this point it’s been pretty much disproven.
The way God is generally hypothesized, it’s hard (if not impossible) to prove or disprove. I don’t adhere to someone’s hypothesis that there is a god because they have not provided evidence that it exists. And maybe it’s not even a valid hypotheses because it can’t be proven or disproven. So in that sense I just lack a belief in their hypothesis. Making me an atheist. But to also hypothesize that you know for sure God does not exist is also equally, and in the same way, invalid.
Ex. If someone would continue to refute the existence of gods despite all evidence to the contrary, they are an atheist. (And we’re talking real evidence here, not the wonder of it all shit)
Bah, if a theoretical agent had any interaction with reality, we should find evidence of some kind of interaction. If we don’t then there are three possibilities: 1. It doesn’t exist, 2. It doesn’t interact with reality. If it doesn’t interact with reality, it isn’t real in any meaningfull way. If it isn’t real, it doesn’t exist. 3. We can’t find where and how it interacts with reality, in that case it is the ever diminishing god of the gaps.
I agree that having not seen any meaningful interaction with reality that it shouldn’t be included in any theory about how things work. However, I feel it’s a logical jump to claim that this is proof it doesn’t exist.
Hmmm… I don’t think it is proof either. But it is imho the strongest possible indication of nonexistence.
For me to accept the possible existence of something, the possibility would have to be shown first. And I am at the moment convinced that the existence of anything without interaction with reality is impossible. Because I think existence is defined by interaction with reality.
Everything else would be apart, seperate from reality: not real.
To be fair, you don’t know for certain, and no one does. I guess it depends of your definition of ‘god’. No one has ever proved that there is a creator, and no one has ever proved that there isn’t a creator. I would say that, based on the facts that we know, the most scientific position to have is one of being agnostic.
I am not saying that any human description of a god, in human religions, is anywhere close to reality. I am just saying that it is very hard, and maybe impossible, to prove whether there is something that created the universe or not. At least from our perspective in the universe.
That being said, I think its fair to say that based on the facts that we do know, athiest theory is much more probable to be true than just about any other human myths about gods. It’s just that the truth is actually impossible to know, and the argument is kind of pointless until a time where we know more about the universe, if we ever get to that point.
I am pretty anti-religious and would definitely agree with you over any cultist, fwiw. I just think it’s impossible to actually ‘know’ that there is nothing created the universe. Maybe there is a creator of some kind. Maybe this is all just a product of nature. Its really impossible to know either way with our current understanding.
That’s not really a fair comparison. We know what unicorns are. If someone discovered an animal that looked like a horse but had a horn growing in the middle of its forehead, they could call that a unicorn and most people would agree with them. It’s theoretically possible (albeit extremely unlikely) that that animal exists somewhere.
With God, on the other hand, the definitions are constantly changing and self-contradictory. Even as a theoretical concept God has never been described with any degree of coherence, so the idea of whether or not it “exists” is moot. Something needs to exist as a concept before the question of whether or not it exists in the real world can even be asked.
That’s agnostic atheism. The term “agnostic” is the opposite of “gnostic”. Being a gnostic atheist would mean you think there’s direct proof against god as a concept, rather than merely saying there’s no evidence in favor.
I’m gnostic about the Abrahamic god existing, and agnostic about any other god existing. I call myself an atheist, and most other atheists seem to hold a similar position. Not that I have a randomly selected poll of atheists or anything; just anecdotal observation.
Free will also isn’t real, but I don’t go around to people I know and care about trying to collapse their entire world view around it. Sometimes it’s better if people believe in fundamentally incorrect things that don’t impact others.
Edit: here’s a crazy idea, if you think I’m wrong…that’s ok. Just leave me be? Maybe? Isn’t that the point of my entire initial comment. Lol.
It was relevant to this discussion as I’m saying I similarly wouldn’t bring this truth up with someone like my mother or similar as shown in the original post.
My goal is not to convince anyone who feels differently, I just felt others could relate to my example. I will not provide any explanation unless specifically asked as my goal here is not to force my knowledge onto someone who doesn’t want it.
I think he’s trying to refute your claim that your will isn’t free. I.e. you made that comment of your own free will. Not literally asking why you made the comment.
I do not believe I had free will to make or not the comment. And this seems upsetting to many. So I suggest they just keep their world view if it benefits them.
You said that free will isn’t real and went on to say the reason YOU DECIDED to make that comment, as well as what YOUR GOAL was, and what YOU WILL OR WILL NOT DO.
If you’re not the one deciding what you did in the past or what you will or won’t do in the future, it seems pretty arrogant of you to speak one way or the other about it.
At best, maybe you’re saying that all existence is just made up of particles colliding and interacting with each other, and that if you knew the exact position, vector, and velocity of the most base level of all particles, you could perfectly predict all future events or extrapolate past events and that we’re all forced to proceed just like pool balls moving on the table. Since we currently can’t map those values for a single electron, I’m thinking that maybe your “truth” can’t be extrapolated to the rest of the 99.99999999999% of existence that we haven’t discovered and don’t understand.
My favorite part is at the end where you say you’re not going to force “your knowledge” on anyone, as if you’ve found this immutable truth that the rest of us are just too daft to understand.
My guess is that you’re between 13 and 22 years old and like to feel special by knowing “the truth.” That’s why we have flat earthers and people who say that 5G causes autism. Their goal is to feel like one of the enlightened ones much more than performing or understanding research.
If you really want to be a lifelong learner and something closer to a scientist, your goal won’t be to arrive at some final destination (“my knowledge”/“the truth”) but to continue to move forward, press on, learn more, take it to the next level (“my most recent theory…”/“what I’m thinking right now…”/“this study suggests…”), and drop the arrogance and fake superiority.
I guess you were also predestined to not address any of the points I made?
Telling someone that their thought process is flawed/immature is not the same as being triggered.
If logic doesn’t move the needle, how about this: every person who thinks they have it all figured out is seen by most others as an arrogant douche.
If you ask any real scientist who’s running real research and experimentation - those people who have 1,000 more understanding of the subject for which you claim to hold “The Truth” - they’ll tell you that every new discovery leads to many more questions. The last step of the scientific process isn’t, “sit back and enjoy having figured it all out.” It just starts over.
The reason I think (hope) you’re younger is because it’s more natural for younger people to believe that they get it, they understand, they have the answer. After all, that’s much of what school pounds into us: here’s The Answers. Repeat them back to me for full credit. Most education is focused on creating a foundation for different subject areas as opposed to teaching students how to learn and think for themselves. Having “the answer” and being “right” is heavily encouraged and younger people gain validation from it. It’s natural to continue reaching for more truths and answers instead of innately valuing the learning process itself.
A lot of people never grow out of that stage. Feeling like you own all the answers can be quite comforting. That’s why the mom in the comic is broken on the floor. She just lost all the answers that got her that far in life. You probably relate to the guys in the first frames who know The Truth (god isn’t real) but you’re also being represented by the woman on the floor. You don’t know how to cope with the actual truth which is that you don’t and will never know The Truth. The best you can do is accept your current level of understanding in all its deficiencies and to keep learning more.
If you currently possess the ability to take in what I said and accept some new Truths about yourself, great. I’m really writing for anyone who might see this and benefit from your example.
I have answered the only question presented to me. The rest is you ranting aimlessly to feel better about your own position.
I wish I had 1,000 more understanding though! If you have any legitimate evidence to provide that demonstrates I’m wrong, please share it. If not, shut the fuck up. Or don’t. It’s not in your control anyway.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could meaningfully clarify what ‘truths’ I should take away from your comment and why.
It sounds like there’s already some cracks in your foundation, and that’s a good thing. If you were privy to The Truth you surely wouldn’t care about what one person thinks about how flawed your thought process is. You definitely wouldn’t tell them to shut the fuck up.
That shows that you’re a bit rattled and don’t like having your authority challenged. If you can become aware of this predisposition within yourself, you can start to change it.
Anyone who “knows how it all works” stops learning because there is nothing more to learn. They started digging and got all the way to the bottom and there’s no more to go. You said you wish you had a 1,000 times more understanding which doesn’t align with your position of owning The Truth. Either you understand The Truth or you have a lot of understanding to go. You can’t have both. And spoiler, no one has ever come anywhere close to The Truth in any discipline. What we can do however is increase our understanding to be used in meaningful ways and to create and test current and new theories as we keep moving forward.
You can accept this, or tell me to shut the fuck up and down vote my comment. If it’s the latter I hope that this either planted a seed or was meaningful in any way to someone else.
I’ll edit my comment to respond to the edited addition in your last one:
The truth is that you don’t and won’t ever know The Truth. Knowledge is a journey, not a destination. Claiming to know The Truth is arrogance and leads to the end of learning. Intellectuals seek to learn more and keep digging while they understand that they’ll never reach the bottom.
Our current understanding of math tells us that it’s 4, and simple addition like this led to higher levels of mathematics that we’ve used to do things like place humans on the moon.
That never would have happened if we’d collectively said, “2+2=4 and now we know all math.”
We don’t Know All Math. Check out all the unsolved proofs that our best mathematicians haven’t been able to solve. And those are just the questions we’ve thought to ask due to our current level of understanding.
People who acted like you used to believe that they were having a drought because enough virgins weren’t blood sacrificed, as that was the contemporary thinking. They were just as unbending as you in believing they knew The Truth. We have the benefit of hindsight and advancements in science to better understand and predict droughts. You’re lacking the ability to see your place in history objectively and understand that what you call Truth is merely a theory of today that requires infinitely more understanding.
If you’re not ready to accept that you don’t know The Truth, that you’re not in the special club of enlightened people like everyone who goes to the Flat Earth conferences also believes, I understand. It’s not an easy transition from “I’m so smart that I understand the very foundation of reality” to “I’ll never know The Truth about anything but I’m excited to keep learning.” It’s not something that happens quickly either. It’s a whole shift that changes how you see everything, and it can initially lead to feeling like the mom in the comic. I hope you can make that transition someday as the earth always needs more scientific minds.
If you were able to take in anything I’ve said you wouldn’t have asked that, though you’ve made it abundantly clear that you don’t currently value the process of learning. I’ve never cast judgement on the theory you’ve chosen to call The Truth. Through everything I’ve said, you either refuse or can’t understand what I’ve clearly laid out. Your issue is blind acceptance of something you heard. Your arrogance and lack of actual knowledge told you that it sounds neat and makes sense at 30,000 feet so it’s Truth.
You go for personal attacks because you have nothing of value to retort or add. Your Knowledge was challenged and you reacted with anger and name calling because you can’t reasonably address anything I’ve said.
You and religious people have a lot more in common than you think. You all believe that you’ve found The Truth. Whether it’s Jesus or some theory you actually know practically nothing about, you’re drunk on feeling superior and think you comprehend the very nature of existence. There’s no real difference between you and any religious person because there’s as much hard evidence for one belief as the other. You believe there’s a difference because you chose to go all in on a theory as opposed to a god, and that makes you feel smug.
You’re a kid who doesn’t know much about anything, and you think you’ve got existence figured out. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so sad and common.
Hopefully you’ll grow out of this but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that may not be the case.
You’re the only one making personal attacks. I only expressed my concern that you are unwell. Like just read what you yourself wrote, it’s all right there.
I get that you feel like you have to “win” and that since facts and logic aren’t on your side you want me to feel upset which would give you some sort of moral victory. You try and change the topic away from you claiming your own god (predestination) in response to an atheism comic no less, to debating my mental health which could put me on the defensive and begin to get under my skin like I have to you.
It doesn’t work when you’re so transparent though. And even if it had, you’d still walk away knowing that some stranger poked a few holes in the latest belief structure that you were trying to use to make sense of your reality. That would be a fun challenge to an intellectual but just sucks for someone like yourself who wants to be right and feel smug.
There’s hope though. You don’t have to stay like this. As you get older and mature, your awareness can help you to become someone who’s interested in learning instead of being right. Then you could grow into a real intellectual thinker instead of cosplaying one.
You didn’t answer the only question: ‘what name calling?’
You may want to consider showing this thread to a friend or family member you trust and get their opinion of the interaction. I’m not at all trying to hurt your feelings or belittle you.
Telling someone that their thought process is flawed/immature is not the same as being triggered. The amount of text contained in your answer is usually associated with “being triggered” though (at least in my experience)
Then again, depending on what exactly one means with “triggered”, you could say that you’ve “been triggered” (like activating some mechanism or something) to write a long response :D
(Not trying to join any side of the original discussion, just sharing what’s on my mind ^^)
If “triggered” means to be influenced to think or act due to stimuli, then sure, everything is triggering to everyone all of the time. You were triggered to respond. I was triggered to pee when I woke up.
It’s true, I spent way too long replying. I usually avoid engaging but I think it was the absurdity that made me throw away what had to be at least a combined hour of my day. They knew the true nature of the universe and tried to convince an atheism group.
It was obvious pretty quickly that they weren’t in a place where they could accept their belief being challenged, but maybe a really bored person read it all and took something away from it.
If you define “free will” as individual processing of input based on your genetic makeup and past experiences/memories and circumstances, with some inherent randomness. Then i guess free will is real.
If everything is predestined, whatever you choose is your destiny. Which means you get to choose your destiny. Even if the decision is already determined, your decision process is a part of that and whatever you decide is what becomes the future (or present). Predetermination is irrelevant unless it can be seen beforehand, but if it could, that knowledge could be acted on to change it. So either you can see the future and change it, or you can’t so there’s no functional difference between it being indeterminate.
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?
All I want is an apology for forcing their religion onto me so aggressively as a child. I don’t think that is too much to ask, but they sure seem to think it is.
not even an apology. I don’t need anyone to be sorry. The nuns who beat me will never be sorry, they think that they’re doing it for God and nothing can be wrong when you’re doing it for God. But if one of the other adults that I trust could at least say ‘Hey, they shouldn’t have beat you with sticks. They were wrong for that.’ it would make me feel like maybe I wasn’t a fucking crazy person for not wanting to get beat with sticks. But they won’t. Everyone pretends it didn’t happen, or that it was some sort of misunderstanding, because everyone needs to maintain the delusion that everything the church does is good just because it’s the church doing it. For years I was essentially told “that didn’t happen because the church wouldn’t do that but if they did it’s because you deserved it”. What can a six year old do to deserve being beaten with a yardstick by a grown woman?
My philosophy is if they are truly happy with what they believe and aren’t harming other people with vitriolic speech or dogmatic beliefs just leave them be. It’s not harming anything for them to comfortable in their little bubble.
But when they put on their “holier than thou … I know better and I am going to push my beliefs on you” hat the gloves are off. Although it’s unlikely you’ll change their mind, you can usually score a few jabs that rock their world just a smidgeon.
![Victory? [elder cactus]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/244d43ec-eeec-4e9c-a97a-a7e978cc47a5.jpeg){kind=link}
Add comment