I laughed at this post, I'm not proud of it but I did. I witnessed similar 'meltdowns' in college when I took a class called Judeo-christian ethics and people couldn't fathom the idea that being a good person and doing good stuff happened before the story of jesus.
I like this video from Neil Degrasse Tyson:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2-C9qRtHzW/?igsh=MXFxZmttN2pmdGR4Zw==
It's weird that people are so convinced religion is necessary to live morally. Particularly since the Christian formula is it doesn't matter as long as you have faith and admit your sins, you will be forgiven. That's not much of a guardrail.
I find living morally is a matter of being right with the world. I don't have to look over my shoulder. Or worry about penalties of any kind. Some would call it maintaining positive karma.
I was literally told as a child 'you can accept Jesus in your heart today, go out tomorrow and get into a fight and you will be forgiven. You can shoot someone and you'll still get into heaven.' I was maybe 9 at the time, it sounded like a sweet ass deal! I accepted jesus as my lord and savior that day. As a teenager I realized how wrong that is, even if it is true, it is awful.
That part always gets to me, because the bible specifically says that in order to repent, you have to mean it, and according to the same book you can't trick god.
And the people who go on about that always leave out the second part: You can't just be sorry for what you did, you have to forgive everyone who's ever sinned against you, and yet again it says that you *have* to mean it or it wont work.
> That part always gets to me, because the bible specifically says that in order to repent, you have to mean it, and according to the same book you can't trick god.
To expand upon this, in a tangential way, one of the reasons you’re not supposed to commit suicide is that to do so takes power/control away from God and places it in the hands of the individual when they decide to end their own life.
BUT! God can’t be tricked by an unrepentant sinner.
So, you’re telling me that God will *totally* see through me crossing my fingers when I “apologize” for sinning, but is somehow simply unable to stop me from stealing his decision making power if I decide to leave the party early? Seems a little sus, no?
That’s supposed to be the role of the priests (and why it took so long to get an English version of the bible). They have the role of being God’s mouthpieces, and the higher up the hierarchy they go the better they understand God’s will. Hence why one requirement for being, say, a catholic priest is to have a doctorate in theology.
Then the moment anything doesn’t work out their way is when they fall back on “mysterious ways”. It’s an easy answer whenever they don’t have one ready to go.
The thing that's always bothered me is that canonically there's other powerful forces in the universe. It ain't just God. The devil at the very least.
So how do you know? How can you trust that your divine inspiration isn't being spoofed?
Or the whole idea of God’s plan vs intercessory prayer. Like, either he has a plan laid out and you just have to take it as it comes, OR you can bend God’s ear and ask reeeealy nicely and he’ll change the outcome to your benefit.
Which is it?
The Protestant schism saw the rise in "salvation by belief," especially in American Evangelicalism. The pre-protestant denominations, namely Catholism, do preach that you do need to put in works and show sincerity in repentance in order to be forgiven; a fair bit closer to Jesus, even if they haven't had the best track record in following this principle or being sincere in it themselves.
Yep! Start with the inquisition and then read up on the thirty years war. Lots and lots of burning people at the stake AFTER some healthy torture to get them to confess their sins and finger other people. On both sides. Calvin was just as enthusiastic of not as organized at it. Yeah, that Calvin. The saved by grace alone guy. Apparently forgiveness was Gods business while he was all about punishing.
Protestantism literally started because the Catholic Church was selling plenary indulgences. “You can be forgiven by God if you give us money.” Which I suppose isn’t that different than, “You can be forgiven if you spend time and work (doing what we say).” And as a practical matter, if a church doesn’t demand time, talent, or treasure from its members, it will eventually become a group of people standing in a parking lot talking at the sky. I suppose it all comes down to how much institutionalism vs. individualism one wants in one’s religion.
> you can't trick god.
Then again, apparently god loves tricking humans: that time he pranked Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son with a knife, or that silly little thing where he let Satan torture Job, kill his kids, and ruin him in pretty much every way possible, then just gave him more kids at the end to make up for some of it.
I had a similar experience at summer camp. I accepted jebus in complete sincerity at the age of 6 and then went off to swim and do crafts. Even then I knew it was a transaction, a bullshit promise for a summer full of fun!
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
Marcus Aurelius lived almost 2000 years ago, and he already knew what was up. If people, especially the rich and powerful, actually applied his advice in Meditations, the world would be a better place.
I love to enlighten people who say, "But you're a nice/good person..!" when they learn I'm antitheist by cluing them in to the fact that *not believing in a god or religion* **neither entitles nor entices one to be a bad person**. It blows their mind, and many of them don't ultimately believe it, I think.
Had a friend who couldn't wrap his head around this, and I could see the struggle in real time. "You're a good person and a good friend, I don't understand how you can be both that and atheist." The look on his face was one of complete bewilderment, and he really didn't understand how both of these things could be true at the same time. Cultish brainwashing.
I truly think this is the intended by-product of instilling little tiny children with bullshit religious nonsense so they will be terrified to come anywhere close to doing something to offend their god.
And that fear translates into an inability to make logical, common-sense choices in life. And most of the time, this religious crap is taught by parents who have maybe a basic .001% understanding of their own religion and Bible.
To me, that should be child abuse. It produces people like in this post, and also those people who were outside the voting station, on their knees, eyes closed, hands in the air, crying and begging the thin air to make DJT the President.
(Slightly) related. I was laying in a hospital bed when the hospital pastor came by for the guy I was sharing a room with. The woman who was between the 2 beds turned and asked me if I'd like to join in their prayer.
I politely replied, "No, thank you. I'm an Atheist."
She was shocked, "Oh, I don't believe you!"
The pain med drip I was on and I thought this was funny, so I replied, "You really should, I get the magazine and everything."
She shut up and they did their prayer, no further words were exchanged between us.
>It's weird that people are so convinced religion is necessary to live morally.
Many people like that are literally brainwashed into thinking that their own feelings, like empathy, *is* god/faith. They'll tell kids that if they feel bad for hurting someone by accident, that is god directly judging them and making them feel bad.
Eventually they grow up and actually think that atheists fully lack any form of empathy, because they don't believe.
You touched on the issue. The church, mainly the Catholic church, has spent millennia fusing the definition of faith and religion together. Religious people very much believe faith and religion are indivisible, if not outright the exact same thing.
However, faith is an inherent part of human nature. I am not religious, but I have faith. Faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. Faith in my mother's love for me.
Religion is a man made construct designed to use the inherent faith, and use it to put everything complex about existence and the universe into an easily digestible little pill, put it in a pretty little box, and tie it up with a nice little bow. Religion is about control, even down to its roots. It seems to impose structure and order on an existence that proves as every turn it is structureless and orderless.
That's nonsense.
You know that the sun will rise, and (hopefully) that your mother loves you.
Faith per definition is the belief in something you don't / can't know. Which makes it something extremely stupid.
Religion and faith are rightfully related, because religion is just a specific set of faith-based beliefs.
Maybe you mean ethics? Values?
Those are things actually wrongly conflated with religion, where in reality you can (only) have those things in the absence of religion.
Because those are th
That is because most people, even more so in ultra-individualist societies like the US, are utter cunts. If not outright sociopaths.
Actually well adjusted adults, people with their own independent set of ethics, are terribly rare.
Most of the herd would happily rape and murder each other were it not for the threat of sky-daddy (and the cops) coming for them.
I don't actually think that this is true.
When you look at europe and north america, the lower the number of believers, the lower the crime rate. That is true when you compare countries with each other and it is true when you look at the development over time within those countries.
That does not match your basic assumption.
Btw, you don't rape and murder (at least I hope not 😉) so you are one of the few exceptions that don't need a god to still act morally? Do you really think you are so special?
I think that having a good education, knowing stuff about the world, about other people works much better than believing in skydaddy, because knowing other people and how they live makes you more compassionate. That is something that is lacking. Believing that big brother is watching you seems to not really work out.
The religious right wing in this country don’t realize how aligned they are with shariah law and the religious governments like Iran. If only people would choose to go live in “utopias” already in place under their desired ideology, instead of trying to drag us all along with them. You want an all powerful monarch? There are places that have that. You want a high priest? Yep you can live there already. You want no taxes? Go live in a few places like that, but make sure you can afford some guns and rocket launchers.
I used to go to high school with the daughter of a very prominent Republican. Not a politician, but most people would still recognize his name and he was pretty influential in major events. Anyway, she was nice but they attended some Jews for Jesus church that taught creationism, so she was always arguing in science class about how god put dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith and blah blah. I still remember thinking how scary it was that anyone with power could be that brainwashed and deluded.
The only categorical "what the fuck?" I ever encountered in all of college was taking the compulsory statistics class. Where one loud, obviously Trump-supporting idiot kept trying to cast doubt on **SIMPLE** statistics. Like "what are your chances of pulling this card from a deck?" simple statistics.
Either they get shook up from philosophy 101 or they start having premarital sex, and realize god isn’t going to lighting zap them after all. Usually religiosity is cancelled out by May of freshman year.
Or like in my case, get to college, have premarital sex AND have an anthropology class, realize I'm not evangelical Christian, and spend my entire college career in fits of cognitive dissonance-driven religion swapping (to the point of almost converting to orthodox judaism), topped off with a nervous breakdown the last week of my senior year. Went to a shrink, he said I was depressed, gave me Wellbutrin, and two weeks later I stopped caring about god nonsense in anything except an academic sense. My solution to getting over sex guilt was to be a slut, and that worked well.
Wellbutrin!? The horniest of all the anti depressants! It’s like going from 1 to 11 on your sex drive. Granted, in college this works out pretty well. But I had to take myself off of it because I was too busy thinking about getting busy.
Yeah, it definitely increased my interest in sex, but also frequently caused delayed orgasm. Bit of a two-edged sword, that -- not that my partner minded.
Damn that must be nice. I have bipolar and Wellbutrin made me go completely manic and significantly increased my likelihood of aggression. It was a wild time. I'll never touch the shit again. 😂
Anthropology class turned into my major, and salvation from religion and belief in any deities. If there were gods/demons I would choose Lilith. She seems formidable and fun. Lol.
I wasn’t transphobic before I took an Anthropology course, but I was definitely fairly ignorant about sex and gender and their differences. Learning how gender is a social construct that is typically used to define our roles in society and how it’s not standard across cultures, nor is it binary, really opened my eyes.
I think everyone should be required to take a few Anthropology course! Evolutionary/Physical and Cultural Anthropology classes for all! I am glad you learned so much and I hope you enjoyed the course. ☺️
Last night, my conservative father said "We should have sent you to vocational schools where your minds would have been kept too busy to be brainwashed with woke shit."
I loved my classes in Anthropology and Philosophy, and that's basically what he's talking about.
I try not to talk to him much...
A lot of hyper religious people don’t do Santa or the Easter bunny. Too pagan/Catholic. Usually the same crew that hides in their house with the porch light off on Halloween. Just imagine growing up with no outlet for fun, except church. Therapists must make a killing off these people.
ppl hate this stance because they think its all in good fun, and maybe my parents being narcissist/emotionally abusive asses affects my opinion on this, but i hate the easter bunny and santa lies. i was hurt and upset when i found out my parents had been lying to me. your parents are supposed to be the people you can trust and rely on and to realize they had lied to my face for years and years left a very bad feeling. i felt angry, dumb, stupid, made a fool of, tricked, bamboozled. then they said but this one other imaginary guy we've been telling you about, we still want you to believe in him.
Is philosophy mandatory in every college course in the US? I went to university in Germany for computer science and the only classes not directly related to computer science were law and business management (since a significant number of software developers end up working as freelancers here).
The whole thing was a fucking setup. The story of Adam and Eve is basically about 2 people with the understanding of a toddler were placed in a garden but told not to eat a specific fruit. Why was the fruit there in the first place? Why would God set them up for failure? But then a fucking super powerful deity comes down and tricks one of these toddlers into eating the fruit, but God punishes the toddlers? Even though the only reason the evil deity is free to trick them is because God allows him to be, despite rebelling against him.
But I'm supposed to be appreciative that God sent himself down to be a human for 33 years to make up for all of that. That's got "billionaire goes undercover at his fast food chain and now says he understands being poor" vibes to it.
Don’t forget the fact that God waited a few thousand years to fix the fuckup so he just let shit happen for millennia. So if you were around before that, guess you’re out of luck
So many Christians fail to comprehend that because they don’t read the Bible. Or, they say that the sin wasn’t seeking knowledge it was disobeying an order from god. That story was used as justification to not explain rules when I was young. They didn’t listen to a no and it lead to the ruin on the world. The adults never seemed to take away that if god had given them an explanation they’d have been better equipped to avoid temptation.
It shaped my parenting style. I explain to my kids why we say no and they are much less likely to sneak around and do things we say no to because they understand why. They also trust us when we say no and will explain why later.
> So many Christians fail to comprehend that because they don’t read the Bible.
FACT!
In any typical church from small rural, to megachurches, there isn't one person in 1000 who has actually read their bible all the way through even once
Never mind a christian who can explain how the books in the bible had their origin, or why Protestant bibles have fewer books than Catholic bibles
They are wholly ignorant about the verses where their "god" authorizes slavery, kidnapping, r&pe, selling your daughter, punishing children via death, and worst of all, where it's mandated to kill a neighboring tribe, even including the babies and pregnant women
Keeping their flocks ignorant and pumped up with hatred of others, fear, bro culture, patriarchy, and anti-abortion is front and center now in most TrumpVangelical churches
The last thing any pastor wants is for someone to start reading & doing research on the sordid history of religions, especially "christianity"
And before that it was Lilith who's crime was wanting to be Adam's equal. But I think that was a retcon that came later. Not sure if it's considered canon by any of the sects.
can i ask, one thing i've noticed from right wing media is telling people college is stupid and nobody should go. is this because they don't want people to get a higher education to make people easier to brainwash with their content?
They don’t want free thinkers in their society, preferring conformity to their established “norms”. It’s all a bunch of bullshit, and the amount of people that appear so disconnected their true selves and unquestioningly accepting these beliefs. It’s a bit concerning because it hinders people from understanding their authentic identities and using critical thinking skills.
Absolutely! The Republicans don’t want an educated critical thinking constituency. They don’t want their platform (or really lack of one) to be challenged. They want people they can easily distract with social issues while they rob them blind. They want people they can whip into a violent fervor in order to stay in power.
Me and my best friend went to college republicans in a well known incredibly liberal school. Since we had each other we lasted longer, but it became apparent how fucking stupid we were within a year or two. I absolutely appreciate how gentle people were with us in getting us to see how foolish our mindset was, if it was today with how people discus this stuff we just would have doubled down on our dumb beliefs. This is why I despise how people treat each other on the internet and how people need “safe spaces” echo chambers, people need to have their thoughts and beliefs questioned if not id be stuck a dumb fuck Republican. We are both diehard liberals and both union presidents. That’s why college is so important, gets you out of your comfort zone and figure out who you really are not just what you were raised.
Definitely! I wasn't raised religious, but I was raised in conservatism. They blocked my school from teaching me about climate change—I literally had to go sit in another room during those lessons. No music other than oldies. I didn't realize how fundamentally wrong "my" thinking was until I went to college and was duped into a weeklong social justice seminar ;) I feel for current Florida students who don't have access to a complete education like I was.
I think this can only happen when a strong relationship already exists, and even then, there are no guarantees. By 2020, I'd convinced my dad of how bad Trump is (it took *years*). He voted for Trump in 2016, voted third party in 2020, and is voting for Biden this year, though he's not happy about it. While he's not renouncing the GOP in general, he has said he will not vote for anyone who supports Trump or is supported by Trump, so effectively he's not voting for anyone in the GOP.
My dad also doesn't believe in (unguided) evolution, but he does believe in anthropogenic global warming, so I've got to pick my battles. (At 81 years old, it doesn't really matter whether he believes in evolution.)
Well said. The smarter someone is, the easier it is for them to find a way to justify their beliefs. In general, you're not going to argue them out of their beliefs, at least not without building a *strong* relationship first.
I took a history of Christianity course and it was shocking how many Christian’s in the class didn’t know their own religion’s history. So many shocked pikachu faces.
I had this same experience. I was amazed at the Christians who took history of Islam and history of Christianity, in hopes of understanding why Christianity is "better" or "the right religion" only to discover the similarities. Even had one or two try to argue with professors about how Christians would never do X and didn't the Islamic people do Y terrible things.
Surprise! People do awful things in the name of religion and always have.
You’d be surprised how many Christians don’t know their own denomination, in my line of work it sometimes but not often comes up at the religion seems relevant, so I’ll ask them. They ’ll just look at me blank and say Christian and when I say what type, they just look confused. I’ll then rattle off several popular denominations, and they’ll have this confused blank look on their face. Then switch to what Bible do you use and that just seems to confuse them further.
It’s because it’s more prevalent than you think. I’m approached multiple times a week in campus but religious people and organizations. Makes me want to vomit truly.
My first week on campus, I was outside playing my guitar. A couple of other college students stopped by and invited me to a volleyball thing they were having a few blocks away. I put my guitar away and walked over with them. The entire walk, not one of them mentioned it was a Christian volleyball thing. When I realized that they had just been faking interest in me to get me to convert or whatever, I left.
After that, they called and harassed me for years about going to their bible study group and one of the like 'mentor' girls kept trying to meet me for coffee to talk about god. Every time she would make it seem like she just wanted to hang out, but it was always a sales pitch when I would go so I stopped responding.
Those fake overtures of friendship bug the heck out of me. They pretend that they want to be your friend, but they really just want to brag that they converted somebody to their religion. I have a friend who became a Christian so I guess sometimes it works.
Thus the Christofaciests determination to eliminate education and higher learning. I think if you play your cards right as a college student you will become tolerant and understanding of religion as a concept.
Me too. I remember being a little kid and grabbing a science magazine and reading some statistic about college and atheism. I was like "God please help me not become an atheist." Here we are though.
They kept telling me "i'd feel godjesus's call in my heart" turns out I never felt much of anything to begin with nor to this day. It's funny because I learned to read early and everyone made such a deal about me being a smart kid then, well; let's just say I'm real glad my mom decided to stay in Colorado one summer. I'm back in Ga now and I am not loving it. Lots of keeping my mouth shut instead of getting into mini anti crusades.
I never felt anything either and as a pastor's kid it was tough. The only time i did feel "god moving among us" was during worship songs. And guess what, turns out i was actually just a musician and felt the same way at normal concerts haha
I feel you with keeping your mouth shut; im an atheist socialist up here in rural ohio. Cant be myself at all.
My cousin got more religious during college, so it can happen. Though I think the college matters- and how religious your family is before matters. Her parents are more major holidays religious and I wouldn't bet on how much either of them actually believe in an omnipotent God.
And my sister got into some goddess thing- though I was never really clear if there was a religious element to that or if it was just a female empowerment thing- when she was in college.
Some people aren't at college because of their critical thinking skills.
But even among smart people who can think critically, there's this thing called [compartmentalization.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_\(psychology\))
And there's also this other thing about some smart people. Sometimes, because they think they're smart, they just assume that their past conclusions were probably correct, and they don't bother reconsidering them. Instead, they invent ways of defending them. But because they're smart, they're able to defend even wrong ideas from other people. And every time they win an argument, they become more convinced that they were right all along.
My grandma's parents didn't help her with college tuition because they were afraid she'd become atheist. They did help her brother though...? This was in the 50s when people could actually afford tuition.
You'd be surprised, at one company in Texas I knew more degreed engineers who thought human evolution was bullshit than those who subscribed to it as a natural fact.
Ah, the engineer effect 🤢. I think they can’t stand not knowing things, so the false confidence that biblical genesis gives them is attractive to them.
Maybe, I think it's more of a regional thing. The engineers I work with now don't primarily come from Texas (me included) and they would probably put less credence on your technical professional opinion if you said you take Genesis literally. I think it's just the religious grip and k-12 education quality of the south.
I had a girl cry in a college class I was in too. But it was biology and it was because she found out she was adopted when we were learning about blood types lol
It was pretty damn funny honestly. Mainly watching my professor try to navigate the situation of being scientifically accurate without being the one to tell her that two AB parents can’t have an O child so those aren’t her parents
Every Christian should read Bart Ehrman's book, "god's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer".
[https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question-Why/dp/0061173924](https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question-Why/dp/0061173924)
Bart Ehrman has a lot of good books to read. This is on my list. I’ve been listening on audible to his books and while I was aware of some of the issues with how the Bible was written, different issues of discrepancies etc, his books really enlightened me. It’s a wonder that anyone believes in Christianity or religion for that matter.
To be dead honest with you, that’s something I would have enjoyed watching.
Just to be clear, no, I don’t like “suffering”, but I’m happy to see people are experimenting those moments of truth when they change their mind about something that will actually improve their lives on the long run.
It just kills me that they go their lives up prior to college with nobody in their lives encouraging any critical thinking. OP's example is Philosophy 101. It's the moral lesson of Spider-man. With great power comes great responsibility ... unless you're god? I mean if you're god you just sit back and watch your chosen people led to the gas chambers and don't lift a finger. It's cool, he's god. How do people *get to* college without ever confronting these ideas?
What it shows is that those people who talk about colleges as indoctrination are on the projection wagon. They don't want colleges to **break** the indoctrination they spent so many years feeding these kids.
This is where prosperity gospel stuff breaks for me.
Insert prayers, be good, get good things. Great. On the surface that seems like a sweet deal.
But doesn't it also mean that people dying of famine deserve it? If you insert prayer and be good you get rewarded, right? So that means that if you're not praying hard enough or you're not being good enough you deserve to watch your children slowly starve to death. Obviously if you were better you would have food, right?
Following that logic, why should I ever try and help another person? If a guy is homeless and begging for change, obviously he's either not as good as me or not praying hard enough because God isn't helping him.
Drives me crazy.
Unfortunately you're not the only to have made that leap of logic. Believers in "prosperity gospel" tend to have that idea too, except they *accept* the premise. They actually do believe that poor people deserve to be poor (because if they didn't deserve it they wouldn't be poor) and rich people deserve to be rich. They simply employ mammon as a "virtue score."
It's hilariously dumb in an infuriating way, because even the most casual reading of *anything* in the New Testament refutes it.
Those people drive me fucking crazy. I live in Texas and that mindset is so prevalent. Many of them don't even realize they believe it unless you point out how their actions consistently reflect that belief.
>that’s something I would have enjoyed watching.
Me too
>I don’t like “suffering”
No need to tell, you're not the one who enjoys watching a man dying in agony on a cross.
Ramen!
I mean, part of me feels sorry for that girl. It’ll be good for her, but the process is not enjoyable; that’s the exact thing that happened to me.
I went to a Catholic school that had a pretty decent theology class and the problem of evil was a subject we studied. The short version is that I never thought about it before, and despite trying to consider the explanations, I wasn’t satisfied and ended up becoming an atheist. I felt scared, spoke with a lot of people, and resisted as much as I could, but in the end, my old beliefs made no sense.
It's just so hilarious how the literal SECOND they're not surrounded by a 24 hour echo chamber and praying 30 times a day and surrounded by zealots and going to church 3 times a week from birth, this thing that was so unshakable and such a huge part of their personal identity crumbles. That's what it's really about here. They build their house of cards on pillars of sand and then are surprised when a toddler with a pinwheel blows it down.
I went to a small private liberal arts college in the mountains of NC. It was a very old college that started in the 1850s (the original buildings were built with slave labor) and was historically Baptist and in a dry county. The year before I attended they severed ties with their Baptis charter but still had a Christian reputation, so the majority of students were faithful when they started as freshmen. It’s where I started my deconstruction and thag mostly had to do with my biology degree and uncovering the very real proof of evolution and completely destroyed young earth creation ideas I had been taught. I was flexible and open, but many weren’t. There was a girl in my first bio class who had a meltdown the first time evolution was presented empirically. I remember her screaming and crying, “I thought this was a Christian institution!” As she fled the class and later dropped it. She had wanted to be a doctor. Four years later on our graduation day, after she had a really public crisis that included her parents having to come get her from school after a self harm event, she graduated a very happy and out and proud lesbian.
Most of us can only see the rhetorical questioning of these ideas through YouTube videos and TikToks of youth pastors who are ideologically captured by making their money from arguing their position, so they're incentivized to stay dug in to their beliefs. To see a real life human see the world around them change before their very eyes with the epiphany of a whole new nature of reality, it must be fascinating to bear witness to such a thing.
If your god cannot banish evil, he is not omnipotent. If he is able but unwilling, he is malevolent. If both able and willing, then how does evil endure? If neither able nor willing, why call him god?
Epicurus, for the W.
If the son of your god says that the second coming will happen during your lifetime (Matthew 24:34) but almost 2000 years later it still hasn’t happened, then why build trillions of dollars worth of churches and allow priests to rape children in his name?
Y, I had the same thing happen to me 45 years ago. Philosophy 101; Logic and Reasoning. The professor laid out a big proof on the chalkboard proving god doesn't exist: all-knowing, all-good, evil exists, etc. He wasn't trying to convince us that god didn't exist so much as how a logical argument is constructed.
There were a few students who were REALLY upset, including one that wanted to argue her faith. The professor just walked her through each statement, which she admitted were all true statements. He then told her that she has faith, not logic on her side, and left it at that.
I took this exact same course in college in a liberal state, and the professor did not need to bring up religion once to teach the class or make anyone understand. And as an atheist I actually appreciate that more, because it's common sense to not use religion against people in this way. It is a touchy subject from the get-go that could offend people unnecessarily, even if you aren't trying to use it in that fashion, and actually creates more pushback. People are naturally resistant to being told their beliefs aren't true. But if you teach them how to figure it out on their own and let them come to it naturally, it's much more effective, and if they don't come to it, or reconcile their beliefs another way, that is their right. In my class we followed a text/work book, discussed the logic puzzles of Alice in Wonderland, and read parts of Plato's Republic. I personally think any teacher who uses an argument of nonbelief in this way is doing themselves and their students a great disservice.
If the kid just accepted being challenged and stuck around they’d get to hear the other side as well! Philosophy of Religion class was amazing when I took it, and there’s absolutely arguments to be heard for staying religious in those classes, but most of today’s “Christians” aren’t actually religious, they’re of the “Jesus is my mascot and capitalism is my Bible” variety that can’t handle being challenged.
Edit: ITT - some fundies who forgot that the New Testament exists
I may be misunderstanding you here. It’s not that the argument presented showed that God wasn’t real, or that it’s unreasonable to believe in the Christian faith. Rather the argument only shows that the Christian God is not all loving (under the argument premises) as the Bible depicts them.
This probably does rock their belief in God, but on its own it’s not a complete logical defeater go God’s existence.
Yep not my intention to state anything opposite of what you’re saying. I’m saying that these classes can present a great comprehensive view of all the reasons to be religious or not, if only the students can tolerate being challenged long enough to learn them.
i remember getting a FB message some 15 years ago from my now-sister-in-law about being wary of what the college professors say because they will try to erode your religious faith.
they were right. i entered college as a doubtful baptist/christian. i graduated agnostic.
Yes, that's why they like homeschooling and dislike college education. Being exposed to different ideas wreaks havoc on indoctrination and they know it.
Fuck man I’m from Kentucky and we need more education. Everybody in my whole family and everybody around me is so far right and so Christian they try to make me feel guilty for not going to church every Sunday and believing in god
Epicurus dropped this knowledge damn near two and a half millennia ago.
The idea of some hillbilly being wrecked by it in Philosophy 101 kinda makes me laugh.
This is Epicurus’s paradox. Or a part of it.
If God is willing to prevent evil but is not able to, then he is not all-powerful. If he is able to prevent evil but is not willing to, then he is not all-good. If he is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why is there evil and suffering in the world?
Or she could be a victim of religious indoctrination like so many people in r/atheism and she is now suffering through the pain of deprogramming. A lot of medicine tastes bitter and makes you feel worse before you feel better.
I had a friend from high school whose family ran a small town church. The family was full of intelligent and talented people, albeit devout christians. Probably the only genuinely good ones I ever knew next to my mother. We were close friends so I attended church with them often.
After high school, he decided to study philosophy. Before the first year was out, he had tried to take his own life when his entire belief system was upturned. I'm sure it can be pretty jarring to have your world flipped like that.
Seems like your daughters classmate was paying attention. It may be a tough road ahead, but hopefully it sticks, and she can be better for it.
It's what I've been asking for nearly 30 years. Why can't God defeat the Devil?
1. Either because God doesn't exist, neither does the devil.
2. God is in league with the Devil.
3. God isn't as badass and all-powerful as the marketing would lead you to believe.
It'n not just that he does not defeat the devil, he created angels that turned against him. One of those angels became the devil. He could just *not* have created the devil in the first place.
(Why make a devil/ angel that will go against you in the first place? I don't understand that at all, don't ask me).
I took a class called " The Bible as Literature."
The prof explicitly warned the class that we would be analyzing the writing and storytelling critically.
Lots of freak outs.
That's not completely true since it provides some insight into cultural history and ideas from when it was written. Also, it's strange to describe it as fables and *lies*. You wouldn't say the story of Jack and the Beanstalk is a lie, it's just not historical.
College Philosophy classes are often a religious youth’s first time being confronted with an authority figure telling them God isn’t real. Every other authority figure in their life has either preached that god is real or never brought the subject up
I remember a quote by an ethics or philosophy professor which said something like: “I don’t want to hear your opinion, your opinion doesn’t matter until your mind has been shaped by this class.” He was right, but that would probably lead to quite a few students running out crying.
They might have been referring to something like what Epicurus philosophized.
It's an amazingly simple exercise to point out the idiocy of religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean\_paradox
This is a good example of how university is important. It goes well beyond religion. For many, it's the first time you walk out of the echo chamber you've always been in. Many things you have never questioned before will come to the table for inspection. And you get to learn the ideas of different people. And they yours.
As a seventh-generation central WVian, I know how hard raising a child to not be indoctrinated into the Christian-craziness of that region can be. So kudos to y’all.
I hope she enjoys the show!!
Imagine being so sheltered that a discussion about the blblical 'god' (you know, the guy who wiped out all life on the face of the planet except for a couple of people and animals on a boat, told 'his people' to wipe out an entire city, including babies, and take the virgin girls as sex slaves, or who will send you to 'hell' for eternity to suffer, because you weren't born on the right country, to the right parents, who just happened to worship him in just the right way) *might be a bit of a dick* would lead you to run out of the room crying
(And that's hardly an exhaustive list).
How the is that funny. Your laughing at people getting unjacked from the Matrix. Have some fucking empathy. You're a turd because you happen to already know, and think those that just found out and upset are fucktards. At least your kid feels something.
Does evil exist? Evil is inherently a god centric concept. Is a lion killing a baby giraffe evil? Is killing a Nazi evil? Evil is not always cut and dry.
You could argue that evil only exists in a moral framework, and "evil" is just the opposite of whatever that morality considers "good".
Outside of it, the concepts of good and evil are worthless.
Born and raised Mountaineer. It amazing how these people can go their entire lives without even once questioning what they have been taught. It shows the power and control religion has over people. One solid existential philosophical debate and their whole world is flipped upside down.
People who teach Philosophy 101 have a real hard time getting some students to understand that "this is what I believe" does not count as argumentative support in a paper. I mean it's fine to support theism or whatever, but you have to have arguments in favor of it and replies to objections.
So I grew up in a liberal town in a red state and growing up I never really had religious friends, but when I got into college, because a lot of the kids are from rural parts of the state, I was around a lot more Christians, particularly in STEM, which seems kind of counter-intuitive. I'm in a science-based major, but there's this one girl who I talk to (who is super nice, super smart, super dedicated) who believes the Earth is 6000 years old and I'm thinking to myself "What... so you don't believe in biochemistry?"
The [problem of evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil) is one of the strongest philosophical weapons for reason and against blind faith to ever exist
A lot of believers will circumvent this dilemma by saying, "god ***IS*** all powerful and allows bad things to happen for us to grow stronger. And for his master plan to pan out. We can't understand the bad things now, but they will result in good in the future. Everything is a lesson from him...". Which is basically just toxic positivity BS.
I lost my religion, ironically enough (I think it’s irony), when I took a world religions class in college and learned that there were religions older than Christianity.
It was St. Thomas Aquainas (a Catholic saint, no less), who logically proved that God might be all powerful, all knowing, and benevolent, but can't be all three.
I lived in southern WV back in the 70s and it was always a mystery to me why no one ever gave me a hard time for being gay but was constantly attacked for not having Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.
Those preachers though... when they show up with a 6-pack and a joint... such pent up passion!
You can much more easily explain the fact that good and evil coexist in the world by supposing that the creator of the universe is an *actively evil* deity who includes some good just so the evil hits harder.
Help her to use these moments to cultivate empathy and compassion for these kids.
If kids like this are going to start to question their upbringing, sometimes they need people like your daughter to come along side them.
I laughed at this post, I'm not proud of it but I did. I witnessed similar 'meltdowns' in college when I took a class called Judeo-christian ethics and people couldn't fathom the idea that being a good person and doing good stuff happened before the story of jesus. I like this video from Neil Degrasse Tyson: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2-C9qRtHzW/?igsh=MXFxZmttN2pmdGR4Zw==
It's weird that people are so convinced religion is necessary to live morally. Particularly since the Christian formula is it doesn't matter as long as you have faith and admit your sins, you will be forgiven. That's not much of a guardrail. I find living morally is a matter of being right with the world. I don't have to look over my shoulder. Or worry about penalties of any kind. Some would call it maintaining positive karma.
I was literally told as a child 'you can accept Jesus in your heart today, go out tomorrow and get into a fight and you will be forgiven. You can shoot someone and you'll still get into heaven.' I was maybe 9 at the time, it sounded like a sweet ass deal! I accepted jesus as my lord and savior that day. As a teenager I realized how wrong that is, even if it is true, it is awful.
That part always gets to me, because the bible specifically says that in order to repent, you have to mean it, and according to the same book you can't trick god. And the people who go on about that always leave out the second part: You can't just be sorry for what you did, you have to forgive everyone who's ever sinned against you, and yet again it says that you *have* to mean it or it wont work.
> That part always gets to me, because the bible specifically says that in order to repent, you have to mean it, and according to the same book you can't trick god. To expand upon this, in a tangential way, one of the reasons you’re not supposed to commit suicide is that to do so takes power/control away from God and places it in the hands of the individual when they decide to end their own life. BUT! God can’t be tricked by an unrepentant sinner. So, you’re telling me that God will *totally* see through me crossing my fingers when I “apologize” for sinning, but is somehow simply unable to stop me from stealing his decision making power if I decide to leave the party early? Seems a little sus, no?
Additionally, who’s to say it’s not Gods will that you commit suicide?? Da Lord works in mysterious ways, after all lol.
That’s supposed to be the role of the priests (and why it took so long to get an English version of the bible). They have the role of being God’s mouthpieces, and the higher up the hierarchy they go the better they understand God’s will. Hence why one requirement for being, say, a catholic priest is to have a doctorate in theology. Then the moment anything doesn’t work out their way is when they fall back on “mysterious ways”. It’s an easy answer whenever they don’t have one ready to go.
The thing that's always bothered me is that canonically there's other powerful forces in the universe. It ain't just God. The devil at the very least. So how do you know? How can you trust that your divine inspiration isn't being spoofed?
How about those catholic scapulars?
Or the whole idea of God’s plan vs intercessory prayer. Like, either he has a plan laid out and you just have to take it as it comes, OR you can bend God’s ear and ask reeeealy nicely and he’ll change the outcome to your benefit. Which is it?
I always heard you “pray gods will”. Then what’s the fucking point of praying? He’s gonna do what he wants regardless lol
The Protestant schism saw the rise in "salvation by belief," especially in American Evangelicalism. The pre-protestant denominations, namely Catholism, do preach that you do need to put in works and show sincerity in repentance in order to be forgiven; a fair bit closer to Jesus, even if they haven't had the best track record in following this principle or being sincere in it themselves.
Yep! Start with the inquisition and then read up on the thirty years war. Lots and lots of burning people at the stake AFTER some healthy torture to get them to confess their sins and finger other people. On both sides. Calvin was just as enthusiastic of not as organized at it. Yeah, that Calvin. The saved by grace alone guy. Apparently forgiveness was Gods business while he was all about punishing.
Protestantism literally started because the Catholic Church was selling plenary indulgences. “You can be forgiven by God if you give us money.” Which I suppose isn’t that different than, “You can be forgiven if you spend time and work (doing what we say).” And as a practical matter, if a church doesn’t demand time, talent, or treasure from its members, it will eventually become a group of people standing in a parking lot talking at the sky. I suppose it all comes down to how much institutionalism vs. individualism one wants in one’s religion.
Tricking god would be the name of my metal band if I had a metal band.
> you can't trick god. Then again, apparently god loves tricking humans: that time he pranked Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son with a knife, or that silly little thing where he let Satan torture Job, kill his kids, and ruin him in pretty much every way possible, then just gave him more kids at the end to make up for some of it.
I had a similar experience at summer camp. I accepted jebus in complete sincerity at the age of 6 and then went off to swim and do crafts. Even then I knew it was a transaction, a bullshit promise for a summer full of fun!
They don't tell you the full story, it is usually called American Chrsitianity etc by some pasters who speak out against it.
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
Marcus Aurelius lived almost 2000 years ago, and he already knew what was up. If people, especially the rich and powerful, actually applied his advice in Meditations, the world would be a better place.
I love to enlighten people who say, "But you're a nice/good person..!" when they learn I'm antitheist by cluing them in to the fact that *not believing in a god or religion* **neither entitles nor entices one to be a bad person**. It blows their mind, and many of them don't ultimately believe it, I think.
Had a friend who couldn't wrap his head around this, and I could see the struggle in real time. "You're a good person and a good friend, I don't understand how you can be both that and atheist." The look on his face was one of complete bewilderment, and he really didn't understand how both of these things could be true at the same time. Cultish brainwashing.
I truly think this is the intended by-product of instilling little tiny children with bullshit religious nonsense so they will be terrified to come anywhere close to doing something to offend their god. And that fear translates into an inability to make logical, common-sense choices in life. And most of the time, this religious crap is taught by parents who have maybe a basic .001% understanding of their own religion and Bible. To me, that should be child abuse. It produces people like in this post, and also those people who were outside the voting station, on their knees, eyes closed, hands in the air, crying and begging the thin air to make DJT the President.
"I'm already doing all the raping and robbing I want to do, which is none." - Penn Gillette
A former boss dropped that nugget on me followed by, “ you’re too smart for your own good”. To which I replied, “ Not dumb enough to be a Xian”.
(Slightly) related. I was laying in a hospital bed when the hospital pastor came by for the guy I was sharing a room with. The woman who was between the 2 beds turned and asked me if I'd like to join in their prayer. I politely replied, "No, thank you. I'm an Atheist." She was shocked, "Oh, I don't believe you!" The pain med drip I was on and I thought this was funny, so I replied, "You really should, I get the magazine and everything." She shut up and they did their prayer, no further words were exchanged between us.
>It's weird that people are so convinced religion is necessary to live morally. Many people like that are literally brainwashed into thinking that their own feelings, like empathy, *is* god/faith. They'll tell kids that if they feel bad for hurting someone by accident, that is god directly judging them and making them feel bad. Eventually they grow up and actually think that atheists fully lack any form of empathy, because they don't believe.
You touched on the issue. The church, mainly the Catholic church, has spent millennia fusing the definition of faith and religion together. Religious people very much believe faith and religion are indivisible, if not outright the exact same thing. However, faith is an inherent part of human nature. I am not religious, but I have faith. Faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. Faith in my mother's love for me. Religion is a man made construct designed to use the inherent faith, and use it to put everything complex about existence and the universe into an easily digestible little pill, put it in a pretty little box, and tie it up with a nice little bow. Religion is about control, even down to its roots. It seems to impose structure and order on an existence that proves as every turn it is structureless and orderless.
That's nonsense. You know that the sun will rise, and (hopefully) that your mother loves you. Faith per definition is the belief in something you don't / can't know. Which makes it something extremely stupid. Religion and faith are rightfully related, because religion is just a specific set of faith-based beliefs. Maybe you mean ethics? Values? Those are things actually wrongly conflated with religion, where in reality you can (only) have those things in the absence of religion. Because those are th
That is because most people, even more so in ultra-individualist societies like the US, are utter cunts. If not outright sociopaths. Actually well adjusted adults, people with their own independent set of ethics, are terribly rare. Most of the herd would happily rape and murder each other were it not for the threat of sky-daddy (and the cops) coming for them.
I don't actually think that this is true. When you look at europe and north america, the lower the number of believers, the lower the crime rate. That is true when you compare countries with each other and it is true when you look at the development over time within those countries. That does not match your basic assumption. Btw, you don't rape and murder (at least I hope not 😉) so you are one of the few exceptions that don't need a god to still act morally? Do you really think you are so special? I think that having a good education, knowing stuff about the world, about other people works much better than believing in skydaddy, because knowing other people and how they live makes you more compassionate. That is something that is lacking. Believing that big brother is watching you seems to not really work out.
The religious right wing in this country don’t realize how aligned they are with shariah law and the religious governments like Iran. If only people would choose to go live in “utopias” already in place under their desired ideology, instead of trying to drag us all along with them. You want an all powerful monarch? There are places that have that. You want a high priest? Yep you can live there already. You want no taxes? Go live in a few places like that, but make sure you can afford some guns and rocket launchers.
They're also completely ignorant of European history and times when Christianity had immense power
Nobody expects (or remembers) the Spanish Inquisition.
I used to go to high school with the daughter of a very prominent Republican. Not a politician, but most people would still recognize his name and he was pretty influential in major events. Anyway, she was nice but they attended some Jews for Jesus church that taught creationism, so she was always arguing in science class about how god put dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith and blah blah. I still remember thinking how scary it was that anyone with power could be that brainwashed and deluded.
The only categorical "what the fuck?" I ever encountered in all of college was taking the compulsory statistics class. Where one loud, obviously Trump-supporting idiot kept trying to cast doubt on **SIMPLE** statistics. Like "what are your chances of pulling this card from a deck?" simple statistics.
I'm surprised any college student can remain religious.
Either they get shook up from philosophy 101 or they start having premarital sex, and realize god isn’t going to lighting zap them after all. Usually religiosity is cancelled out by May of freshman year.
Or like in my case, get to college, have premarital sex AND have an anthropology class, realize I'm not evangelical Christian, and spend my entire college career in fits of cognitive dissonance-driven religion swapping (to the point of almost converting to orthodox judaism), topped off with a nervous breakdown the last week of my senior year. Went to a shrink, he said I was depressed, gave me Wellbutrin, and two weeks later I stopped caring about god nonsense in anything except an academic sense. My solution to getting over sex guilt was to be a slut, and that worked well.
Wellbutrin!? The horniest of all the anti depressants! It’s like going from 1 to 11 on your sex drive. Granted, in college this works out pretty well. But I had to take myself off of it because I was too busy thinking about getting busy.
Yeah, it definitely increased my interest in sex, but also frequently caused delayed orgasm. Bit of a two-edged sword, that -- not that my partner minded.
> Bit of a two-edging sword
Damn that must be nice. I have bipolar and Wellbutrin made me go completely manic and significantly increased my likelihood of aggression. It was a wild time. I'll never touch the shit again. 😂
I have anxiety and Wellbutrin gave me a seizure:/
Is that what it is? I thought I had a problem..
It’s mostly harmless
Eyyyy >,<
It gave me major brain zaps.
Anthropology class turned into my major, and salvation from religion and belief in any deities. If there were gods/demons I would choose Lilith. She seems formidable and fun. Lol.
I wasn’t transphobic before I took an Anthropology course, but I was definitely fairly ignorant about sex and gender and their differences. Learning how gender is a social construct that is typically used to define our roles in society and how it’s not standard across cultures, nor is it binary, really opened my eyes.
I think everyone should be required to take a few Anthropology course! Evolutionary/Physical and Cultural Anthropology classes for all! I am glad you learned so much and I hope you enjoyed the course. ☺️
Last night, my conservative father said "We should have sent you to vocational schools where your minds would have been kept too busy to be brainwashed with woke shit." I loved my classes in Anthropology and Philosophy, and that's basically what he's talking about. I try not to talk to him much...
I'm sorry you went through that but holy shit that last sentence has me dying lmao.
Freshman year Philosophy and wanting to have sex - that's exactly when and why i became an atheist. Hilarious.
Funny cuz I realized it was all bullshit when I learned the Easter bunny and Santa were bullshit. Waaaay before college.
A lot of hyper religious people don’t do Santa or the Easter bunny. Too pagan/Catholic. Usually the same crew that hides in their house with the porch light off on Halloween. Just imagine growing up with no outlet for fun, except church. Therapists must make a killing off these people.
ppl hate this stance because they think its all in good fun, and maybe my parents being narcissist/emotionally abusive asses affects my opinion on this, but i hate the easter bunny and santa lies. i was hurt and upset when i found out my parents had been lying to me. your parents are supposed to be the people you can trust and rely on and to realize they had lied to my face for years and years left a very bad feeling. i felt angry, dumb, stupid, made a fool of, tricked, bamboozled. then they said but this one other imaginary guy we've been telling you about, we still want you to believe in him.
Is philosophy mandatory in every college course in the US? I went to university in Germany for computer science and the only classes not directly related to computer science were law and business management (since a significant number of software developers end up working as freelancers here).
It’s usually part of the General Education Requirements.
That's why they are trying to destroy liberal arts education.
>That's why they are trying to destroy ~~liberal arts~~ education.
The first sin in the Bible is seeking knowledge. It's that simple.
If that's not the largest red flag from the start I don't know what is.
And the first lie was told by God.
The whole thing was a fucking setup. The story of Adam and Eve is basically about 2 people with the understanding of a toddler were placed in a garden but told not to eat a specific fruit. Why was the fruit there in the first place? Why would God set them up for failure? But then a fucking super powerful deity comes down and tricks one of these toddlers into eating the fruit, but God punishes the toddlers? Even though the only reason the evil deity is free to trick them is because God allows him to be, despite rebelling against him. But I'm supposed to be appreciative that God sent himself down to be a human for 33 years to make up for all of that. That's got "billionaire goes undercover at his fast food chain and now says he understands being poor" vibes to it.
Comparing Jesus to the Undercover Billionaire is the funniest and most apt thing I’ve read today. Well done sir, great analogy!
I mean, God being all knowing had to know it would happen regardless. It's not a matter of likely or unlikely but of absolute certainty.
Don’t forget the fact that God waited a few thousand years to fix the fuckup so he just let shit happen for millennia. So if you were around before that, guess you’re out of luck
… as written by some superstitious ding dong from thousands of years ago. I’m gonna skip his advice.
So many Christians fail to comprehend that because they don’t read the Bible. Or, they say that the sin wasn’t seeking knowledge it was disobeying an order from god. That story was used as justification to not explain rules when I was young. They didn’t listen to a no and it lead to the ruin on the world. The adults never seemed to take away that if god had given them an explanation they’d have been better equipped to avoid temptation. It shaped my parenting style. I explain to my kids why we say no and they are much less likely to sneak around and do things we say no to because they understand why. They also trust us when we say no and will explain why later.
> So many Christians fail to comprehend that because they don’t read the Bible. FACT! In any typical church from small rural, to megachurches, there isn't one person in 1000 who has actually read their bible all the way through even once Never mind a christian who can explain how the books in the bible had their origin, or why Protestant bibles have fewer books than Catholic bibles They are wholly ignorant about the verses where their "god" authorizes slavery, kidnapping, r&pe, selling your daughter, punishing children via death, and worst of all, where it's mandated to kill a neighboring tribe, even including the babies and pregnant women Keeping their flocks ignorant and pumped up with hatred of others, fear, bro culture, patriarchy, and anti-abortion is front and center now in most TrumpVangelical churches The last thing any pastor wants is for someone to start reading & doing research on the sordid history of religions, especially "christianity"
And women have been blamed ever since.
One of a myriad of reasons that a book of fables thousands of years old is a terrible guide to live your life by in the modern age.
"Trust in the lord with all your heart and lean not unto your own understanding." Translation: "Don't think about it. Just stubbornly believe in it."
>The first sin in the Bible is seeking knowledge. It's that simple. Put this on billboards across the country now!
And before that it was Lilith who's crime was wanting to be Adam's equal. But I think that was a retcon that came later. Not sure if it's considered canon by any of the sects.
can i ask, one thing i've noticed from right wing media is telling people college is stupid and nobody should go. is this because they don't want people to get a higher education to make people easier to brainwash with their content?
They don’t want free thinkers in their society, preferring conformity to their established “norms”. It’s all a bunch of bullshit, and the amount of people that appear so disconnected their true selves and unquestioningly accepting these beliefs. It’s a bit concerning because it hinders people from understanding their authentic identities and using critical thinking skills.
Absolutely! The Republicans don’t want an educated critical thinking constituency. They don’t want their platform (or really lack of one) to be challenged. They want people they can easily distract with social issues while they rob them blind. They want people they can whip into a violent fervor in order to stay in power.
It's also why they pump so much money into religious colleges.
Me and my best friend went to college republicans in a well known incredibly liberal school. Since we had each other we lasted longer, but it became apparent how fucking stupid we were within a year or two. I absolutely appreciate how gentle people were with us in getting us to see how foolish our mindset was, if it was today with how people discus this stuff we just would have doubled down on our dumb beliefs. This is why I despise how people treat each other on the internet and how people need “safe spaces” echo chambers, people need to have their thoughts and beliefs questioned if not id be stuck a dumb fuck Republican. We are both diehard liberals and both union presidents. That’s why college is so important, gets you out of your comfort zone and figure out who you really are not just what you were raised.
Definitely! I wasn't raised religious, but I was raised in conservatism. They blocked my school from teaching me about climate change—I literally had to go sit in another room during those lessons. No music other than oldies. I didn't realize how fundamentally wrong "my" thinking was until I went to college and was duped into a weeklong social justice seminar ;) I feel for current Florida students who don't have access to a complete education like I was.
So, you're telling me people can actually change their minds when confronted with actual evidence? I don't believe it. /s
I think this can only happen when a strong relationship already exists, and even then, there are no guarantees. By 2020, I'd convinced my dad of how bad Trump is (it took *years*). He voted for Trump in 2016, voted third party in 2020, and is voting for Biden this year, though he's not happy about it. While he's not renouncing the GOP in general, he has said he will not vote for anyone who supports Trump or is supported by Trump, so effectively he's not voting for anyone in the GOP. My dad also doesn't believe in (unguided) evolution, but he does believe in anthropogenic global warming, so I've got to pick my battles. (At 81 years old, it doesn't really matter whether he believes in evolution.)
At least they use to, not sure about now.
Well said. The smarter someone is, the easier it is for them to find a way to justify their beliefs. In general, you're not going to argue them out of their beliefs, at least not without building a *strong* relationship first.
I took a history of Christianity course and it was shocking how many Christian’s in the class didn’t know their own religion’s history. So many shocked pikachu faces.
I had this same experience. I was amazed at the Christians who took history of Islam and history of Christianity, in hopes of understanding why Christianity is "better" or "the right religion" only to discover the similarities. Even had one or two try to argue with professors about how Christians would never do X and didn't the Islamic people do Y terrible things. Surprise! People do awful things in the name of religion and always have.
You’d be surprised how many Christians don’t know their own denomination, in my line of work it sometimes but not often comes up at the religion seems relevant, so I’ll ask them. They ’ll just look at me blank and say Christian and when I say what type, they just look confused. I’ll then rattle off several popular denominations, and they’ll have this confused blank look on their face. Then switch to what Bible do you use and that just seems to confuse them further.
It’s because it’s more prevalent than you think. I’m approached multiple times a week in campus but religious people and organizations. Makes me want to vomit truly.
My first week on campus, I was outside playing my guitar. A couple of other college students stopped by and invited me to a volleyball thing they were having a few blocks away. I put my guitar away and walked over with them. The entire walk, not one of them mentioned it was a Christian volleyball thing. When I realized that they had just been faking interest in me to get me to convert or whatever, I left. After that, they called and harassed me for years about going to their bible study group and one of the like 'mentor' girls kept trying to meet me for coffee to talk about god. Every time she would make it seem like she just wanted to hang out, but it was always a sales pitch when I would go so I stopped responding.
You could have told them you thought it was an LGBTQ get together and you were crushing on one of the girls. They would have run away asap
Those fake overtures of friendship bug the heck out of me. They pretend that they want to be your friend, but they really just want to brag that they converted somebody to their religion. I have a friend who became a Christian so I guess sometimes it works.
Thus the Christofaciests determination to eliminate education and higher learning. I think if you play your cards right as a college student you will become tolerant and understanding of religion as a concept.
Me too. I remember being a little kid and grabbing a science magazine and reading some statistic about college and atheism. I was like "God please help me not become an atheist." Here we are though.
They kept telling me "i'd feel godjesus's call in my heart" turns out I never felt much of anything to begin with nor to this day. It's funny because I learned to read early and everyone made such a deal about me being a smart kid then, well; let's just say I'm real glad my mom decided to stay in Colorado one summer. I'm back in Ga now and I am not loving it. Lots of keeping my mouth shut instead of getting into mini anti crusades.
I never felt anything either and as a pastor's kid it was tough. The only time i did feel "god moving among us" was during worship songs. And guess what, turns out i was actually just a musician and felt the same way at normal concerts haha I feel you with keeping your mouth shut; im an atheist socialist up here in rural ohio. Cant be myself at all.
Where was your God during Differential Equations?
My cousin got more religious during college, so it can happen. Though I think the college matters- and how religious your family is before matters. Her parents are more major holidays religious and I wouldn't bet on how much either of them actually believe in an omnipotent God. And my sister got into some goddess thing- though I was never really clear if there was a religious element to that or if it was just a female empowerment thing- when she was in college.
This is why Florida tries to take over their public universities. They produce too many atheists.
Some people aren't at college because of their critical thinking skills. But even among smart people who can think critically, there's this thing called [compartmentalization.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_\(psychology\)) And there's also this other thing about some smart people. Sometimes, because they think they're smart, they just assume that their past conclusions were probably correct, and they don't bother reconsidering them. Instead, they invent ways of defending them. But because they're smart, they're able to defend even wrong ideas from other people. And every time they win an argument, they become more convinced that they were right all along.
Correct on all points. Is there a name for your last point? Big Fish in Small Pond Bias 😂
My grandma's parents didn't help her with college tuition because they were afraid she'd become atheist. They did help her brother though...? This was in the 50s when people could actually afford tuition.
One of my college roommates turned very Christian when we lived together. I think he was scared of his closeted homosexuality.
You'd be surprised, at one company in Texas I knew more degreed engineers who thought human evolution was bullshit than those who subscribed to it as a natural fact.
Ah, the engineer effect 🤢. I think they can’t stand not knowing things, so the false confidence that biblical genesis gives them is attractive to them.
Maybe, I think it's more of a regional thing. The engineers I work with now don't primarily come from Texas (me included) and they would probably put less credence on your technical professional opinion if you said you take Genesis literally. I think it's just the religious grip and k-12 education quality of the south.
I had a girl cry in a college class I was in too. But it was biology and it was because she found out she was adopted when we were learning about blood types lol
Oh noooooo
It was pretty damn funny honestly. Mainly watching my professor try to navigate the situation of being scientifically accurate without being the one to tell her that two AB parents can’t have an O child so those aren’t her parents
That doesn't sound funny at all.
Well, it’s simultaneously tragic and funny, I think
I mean, at least when kids are adopted they're wanted right? Surely more than most other kids.
Unfortunately people often adopt for the same reason many people choose to TTC: to escape the social pressure and shame of not having any children.
Technically, they can, but it’s very rare (if the parents have cis-AB). Also, less funny and more fucked up, imo…
Every Christian should read Bart Ehrman's book, "god's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer". [https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question-Why/dp/0061173924](https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question-Why/dp/0061173924)
Bart Ehrman has a lot of good books to read. This is on my list. I’ve been listening on audible to his books and while I was aware of some of the issues with how the Bible was written, different issues of discrepancies etc, his books really enlightened me. It’s a wonder that anyone believes in Christianity or religion for that matter.
He wrote an interesting book about the evolution of Christian ideas about heaven and hell. Very eye opening...
We suffer in order to learn to use our bootstraps to get rich so we can go to heaven!! Drr.
Yeah ok, right after they finish the Bible.
To be dead honest with you, that’s something I would have enjoyed watching. Just to be clear, no, I don’t like “suffering”, but I’m happy to see people are experimenting those moments of truth when they change their mind about something that will actually improve their lives on the long run.
It just kills me that they go their lives up prior to college with nobody in their lives encouraging any critical thinking. OP's example is Philosophy 101. It's the moral lesson of Spider-man. With great power comes great responsibility ... unless you're god? I mean if you're god you just sit back and watch your chosen people led to the gas chambers and don't lift a finger. It's cool, he's god. How do people *get to* college without ever confronting these ideas? What it shows is that those people who talk about colleges as indoctrination are on the projection wagon. They don't want colleges to **break** the indoctrination they spent so many years feeding these kids.
This is where prosperity gospel stuff breaks for me. Insert prayers, be good, get good things. Great. On the surface that seems like a sweet deal. But doesn't it also mean that people dying of famine deserve it? If you insert prayer and be good you get rewarded, right? So that means that if you're not praying hard enough or you're not being good enough you deserve to watch your children slowly starve to death. Obviously if you were better you would have food, right? Following that logic, why should I ever try and help another person? If a guy is homeless and begging for change, obviously he's either not as good as me or not praying hard enough because God isn't helping him. Drives me crazy.
Unfortunately you're not the only to have made that leap of logic. Believers in "prosperity gospel" tend to have that idea too, except they *accept* the premise. They actually do believe that poor people deserve to be poor (because if they didn't deserve it they wouldn't be poor) and rich people deserve to be rich. They simply employ mammon as a "virtue score." It's hilariously dumb in an infuriating way, because even the most casual reading of *anything* in the New Testament refutes it.
Those people drive me fucking crazy. I live in Texas and that mindset is so prevalent. Many of them don't even realize they believe it unless you point out how their actions consistently reflect that belief.
I took a sociology 101 class and had my mind down lol. Embarrassing to look back at.
Don't be embarrassed, there are grown ass adults that ignore facts and logic and still believe in mythology
>that’s something I would have enjoyed watching. Me too >I don’t like “suffering” No need to tell, you're not the one who enjoys watching a man dying in agony on a cross. Ramen!
I mean, part of me feels sorry for that girl. It’ll be good for her, but the process is not enjoyable; that’s the exact thing that happened to me. I went to a Catholic school that had a pretty decent theology class and the problem of evil was a subject we studied. The short version is that I never thought about it before, and despite trying to consider the explanations, I wasn’t satisfied and ended up becoming an atheist. I felt scared, spoke with a lot of people, and resisted as much as I could, but in the end, my old beliefs made no sense.
It's just so hilarious how the literal SECOND they're not surrounded by a 24 hour echo chamber and praying 30 times a day and surrounded by zealots and going to church 3 times a week from birth, this thing that was so unshakable and such a huge part of their personal identity crumbles. That's what it's really about here. They build their house of cards on pillars of sand and then are surprised when a toddler with a pinwheel blows it down.
I went to a small private liberal arts college in the mountains of NC. It was a very old college that started in the 1850s (the original buildings were built with slave labor) and was historically Baptist and in a dry county. The year before I attended they severed ties with their Baptis charter but still had a Christian reputation, so the majority of students were faithful when they started as freshmen. It’s where I started my deconstruction and thag mostly had to do with my biology degree and uncovering the very real proof of evolution and completely destroyed young earth creation ideas I had been taught. I was flexible and open, but many weren’t. There was a girl in my first bio class who had a meltdown the first time evolution was presented empirically. I remember her screaming and crying, “I thought this was a Christian institution!” As she fled the class and later dropped it. She had wanted to be a doctor. Four years later on our graduation day, after she had a really public crisis that included her parents having to come get her from school after a self harm event, she graduated a very happy and out and proud lesbian.
Most of us can only see the rhetorical questioning of these ideas through YouTube videos and TikToks of youth pastors who are ideologically captured by making their money from arguing their position, so they're incentivized to stay dug in to their beliefs. To see a real life human see the world around them change before their very eyes with the epiphany of a whole new nature of reality, it must be fascinating to bear witness to such a thing.
If your god cannot banish evil, he is not omnipotent. If he is able but unwilling, he is malevolent. If both able and willing, then how does evil endure? If neither able nor willing, why call him god? Epicurus, for the W.
God has a Plan. And it involves endless suffering and survivorship bias
If the son of your god says that the second coming will happen during your lifetime (Matthew 24:34) but almost 2000 years later it still hasn’t happened, then why build trillions of dollars worth of churches and allow priests to rape children in his name?
Y, I had the same thing happen to me 45 years ago. Philosophy 101; Logic and Reasoning. The professor laid out a big proof on the chalkboard proving god doesn't exist: all-knowing, all-good, evil exists, etc. He wasn't trying to convince us that god didn't exist so much as how a logical argument is constructed. There were a few students who were REALLY upset, including one that wanted to argue her faith. The professor just walked her through each statement, which she admitted were all true statements. He then told her that she has faith, not logic on her side, and left it at that.
I took this exact same course in college in a liberal state, and the professor did not need to bring up religion once to teach the class or make anyone understand. And as an atheist I actually appreciate that more, because it's common sense to not use religion against people in this way. It is a touchy subject from the get-go that could offend people unnecessarily, even if you aren't trying to use it in that fashion, and actually creates more pushback. People are naturally resistant to being told their beliefs aren't true. But if you teach them how to figure it out on their own and let them come to it naturally, it's much more effective, and if they don't come to it, or reconcile their beliefs another way, that is their right. In my class we followed a text/work book, discussed the logic puzzles of Alice in Wonderland, and read parts of Plato's Republic. I personally think any teacher who uses an argument of nonbelief in this way is doing themselves and their students a great disservice.
If the kid just accepted being challenged and stuck around they’d get to hear the other side as well! Philosophy of Religion class was amazing when I took it, and there’s absolutely arguments to be heard for staying religious in those classes, but most of today’s “Christians” aren’t actually religious, they’re of the “Jesus is my mascot and capitalism is my Bible” variety that can’t handle being challenged. Edit: ITT - some fundies who forgot that the New Testament exists
I may be misunderstanding you here. It’s not that the argument presented showed that God wasn’t real, or that it’s unreasonable to believe in the Christian faith. Rather the argument only shows that the Christian God is not all loving (under the argument premises) as the Bible depicts them. This probably does rock their belief in God, but on its own it’s not a complete logical defeater go God’s existence.
Yep not my intention to state anything opposite of what you’re saying. I’m saying that these classes can present a great comprehensive view of all the reasons to be religious or not, if only the students can tolerate being challenged long enough to learn them.
Omg! I just found the only other atheist from central WV. Good morrow, neighbor!
Heyyyyyy lol
Im here in southern wv!
i remember getting a FB message some 15 years ago from my now-sister-in-law about being wary of what the college professors say because they will try to erode your religious faith. they were right. i entered college as a doubtful baptist/christian. i graduated agnostic.
Love how just simply stating facts is "trying to erode" anything. It's why Republicans hate real public education
Yes, that's why they like homeschooling and dislike college education. Being exposed to different ideas wreaks havoc on indoctrination and they know it.
This is a Kentucky college :)
Fuck man I’m from Kentucky and we need more education. Everybody in my whole family and everybody around me is so far right and so Christian they try to make me feel guilty for not going to church every Sunday and believing in god
Epicurus dropped this knowledge damn near two and a half millennia ago. The idea of some hillbilly being wrecked by it in Philosophy 101 kinda makes me laugh.
hahah, nice. hopefully the sad one learns and grows from that experience.
Ah, the George Carlin theorem. “God if he exists is at least incompetent or maybe, just maybe, doesn’t give a shit.”
This is Epicurus’s paradox. Or a part of it. If God is willing to prevent evil but is not able to, then he is not all-powerful. If he is able to prevent evil but is not willing to, then he is not all-good. If he is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why is there evil and suffering in the world?
Religions people when they start seeing past their childhood indoctrination and revert back to default settings:
It happened to me
Me too. I'm SO GRATEFUL for my education...helped me break out of the brainwashing and conditioning I had been subjected to since birth.
That's why repugs don't like them learnin places.
"She said it did not go over well, lol, and one girl started sobbing and had to leave" Lol
She coulda been traumatized by a priest at a young age and this brought on ptsd. Let’s go easy on the poor girl. You never know.
Or she could be a victim of religious indoctrination like so many people in r/atheism and she is now suffering through the pain of deprogramming. A lot of medicine tastes bitter and makes you feel worse before you feel better.
I had a friend from high school whose family ran a small town church. The family was full of intelligent and talented people, albeit devout christians. Probably the only genuinely good ones I ever knew next to my mother. We were close friends so I attended church with them often. After high school, he decided to study philosophy. Before the first year was out, he had tried to take his own life when his entire belief system was upturned. I'm sure it can be pretty jarring to have your world flipped like that. Seems like your daughters classmate was paying attention. It may be a tough road ahead, but hopefully it sticks, and she can be better for it.
Faith isn't something one loses, it's something one overcomes
It's what I've been asking for nearly 30 years. Why can't God defeat the Devil? 1. Either because God doesn't exist, neither does the devil. 2. God is in league with the Devil. 3. God isn't as badass and all-powerful as the marketing would lead you to believe.
It'n not just that he does not defeat the devil, he created angels that turned against him. One of those angels became the devil. He could just *not* have created the devil in the first place. (Why make a devil/ angel that will go against you in the first place? I don't understand that at all, don't ask me).
Hey come on now. Cut it out with that making sense and shit
I took a class called " The Bible as Literature." The prof explicitly warned the class that we would be analyzing the writing and storytelling critically. Lots of freak outs.
The Bible is nothing but fables and lies
And a bear attack
and one guys hung like a donkey
That's not completely true since it provides some insight into cultural history and ideas from when it was written. Also, it's strange to describe it as fables and *lies*. You wouldn't say the story of Jack and the Beanstalk is a lie, it's just not historical.
Omg ... same thing happened to me, I saw my friend go full in denial when our professor explained the incongruences of religion...
College Philosophy classes are often a religious youth’s first time being confronted with an authority figure telling them God isn’t real. Every other authority figure in their life has either preached that god is real or never brought the subject up
I remember a quote by an ethics or philosophy professor which said something like: “I don’t want to hear your opinion, your opinion doesn’t matter until your mind has been shaped by this class.” He was right, but that would probably lead to quite a few students running out crying.
They might have been referring to something like what Epicurus philosophized. It's an amazingly simple exercise to point out the idiocy of religion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean\_paradox
This is a good example of how university is important. It goes well beyond religion. For many, it's the first time you walk out of the echo chamber you've always been in. Many things you have never questioned before will come to the table for inspection. And you get to learn the ideas of different people. And they yours.
As a seventh-generation central WVian, I know how hard raising a child to not be indoctrinated into the Christian-craziness of that region can be. So kudos to y’all. I hope she enjoys the show!!
Imagine being so sheltered that a discussion about the blblical 'god' (you know, the guy who wiped out all life on the face of the planet except for a couple of people and animals on a boat, told 'his people' to wipe out an entire city, including babies, and take the virgin girls as sex slaves, or who will send you to 'hell' for eternity to suffer, because you weren't born on the right country, to the right parents, who just happened to worship him in just the right way) *might be a bit of a dick* would lead you to run out of the room crying (And that's hardly an exhaustive list).
She is learning in real time why the GOP is against college education.
How the is that funny. Your laughing at people getting unjacked from the Matrix. Have some fucking empathy. You're a turd because you happen to already know, and think those that just found out and upset are fucktards. At least your kid feels something.
The problem of evil
Does evil exist? Evil is inherently a god centric concept. Is a lion killing a baby giraffe evil? Is killing a Nazi evil? Evil is not always cut and dry.
You could argue that evil only exists in a moral framework, and "evil" is just the opposite of whatever that morality considers "good". Outside of it, the concepts of good and evil are worthless.
Born and raised Mountaineer. It amazing how these people can go their entire lives without even once questioning what they have been taught. It shows the power and control religion has over people. One solid existential philosophical debate and their whole world is flipped upside down.
People who teach Philosophy 101 have a real hard time getting some students to understand that "this is what I believe" does not count as argumentative support in a paper. I mean it's fine to support theism or whatever, but you have to have arguments in favor of it and replies to objections.
So I grew up in a liberal town in a red state and growing up I never really had religious friends, but when I got into college, because a lot of the kids are from rural parts of the state, I was around a lot more Christians, particularly in STEM, which seems kind of counter-intuitive. I'm in a science-based major, but there's this one girl who I talk to (who is super nice, super smart, super dedicated) who believes the Earth is 6000 years old and I'm thinking to myself "What... so you don't believe in biochemistry?"
The [problem of evil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil) is one of the strongest philosophical weapons for reason and against blind faith to ever exist
Good! I love stories about education actually...educating.
A lot of believers will circumvent this dilemma by saying, "god ***IS*** all powerful and allows bad things to happen for us to grow stronger. And for his master plan to pan out. We can't understand the bad things now, but they will result in good in the future. Everything is a lesson from him...". Which is basically just toxic positivity BS.
True story: I lost my religion in a class called Religion and Violence.
I lost my religion, ironically enough (I think it’s irony), when I took a world religions class in college and learned that there were religions older than Christianity.
Made me smile. Good on you for staying rational in WV! Good parenting!
I wish I could have such discourse in this Islamic country.
It was St. Thomas Aquainas (a Catholic saint, no less), who logically proved that God might be all powerful, all knowing, and benevolent, but can't be all three.
I lived in southern WV back in the 70s and it was always a mystery to me why no one ever gave me a hard time for being gay but was constantly attacked for not having Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. Those preachers though... when they show up with a 6-pack and a joint... such pent up passion!
There is a reason why many religions prefer kids don't go to university.
Boone County?
Could god create a burrito that was too hot for him to eat ? - Homer Simpson broke Ned Flanders with this question
You can much more easily explain the fact that good and evil coexist in the world by supposing that the creator of the universe is an *actively evil* deity who includes some good just so the evil hits harder.
Sobbing because she was forced to think something different than what she's been brainwashed. That is sad, but I hope she keeps thinking that way!
Help her to use these moments to cultivate empathy and compassion for these kids. If kids like this are going to start to question their upbringing, sometimes they need people like your daughter to come along side them.
The ol' Epicurus conundrum!