There’s the atheist joke that “Christians are announcing that without belief in Hell, they would be horrible people” or something to that effect.
Sad thing is that there indeed is truth to it, and it has consequences. As much as I dislike organized religion and on practical level, would align with scientific, materialist worldview, I do think that without straight forward “be good or be punished” paradigm, a lot of people will be exactly the kind of self-centered assholes we currently see in positions of power in the world.
Back in the day, rich people would fund hospitals and schools in hopes of getting to heaven. These days why bother, religion is mostly a cultural artifact to occasionally pay some lipservice to, while one fully believes that their material possessions are all they got, and even their lowest possible pleasures should be attended to with whatever resource they can spare. Scientific materialism helped get rid of a lot of assbackwards reasoning but with cold hard logic, came the ease of reducing everything to a number. Money, usually. Worth. Nothing else matters. You can’t put a number on love, care, kindness, or something as ephemeral as “goodness” - an ever moving target which is only ever defined by the person using the word, with luck at least slightly informed by (pro-)social contracts. Indeed most people would specifically reject any attempt to put a number on those qualities as it would run counter to their virtuous nature. Which just makes it easier for those with power to devalue those qualities entirely, and with power, build structures that lets them indefinitely get away with it.
A shitload of people do believe in hell and are still horrible. Their idiot church nerfed it by telling them their God died for their sins so it’s all cool now and only the bad people who don’t believe go to hell.
it actually got twisted to suit thier purpose for evangelicals, they see it is as whatever they do no wrong because they wont ever go to hell.
No, they don’t need Hell. Christianity is used as justification for all sorts of nightmarish crimes against humanity; as is Islam, Judaism, et al.
Also, don’t forget, the Bible/Tanakh/Koran teaches that murder is okay, as long as God tells you to do it; so when a woman drowns her children in the bathtub, she thinks it’s for the best! “They won’t be stuck on Earth to suffer, and will fly around Heaven with little wings”.
Putting Abrahamic faiths to the side (a very common justification for terror), those without the faith do the same thing; they justify what they are doing to themselves.
Nah, sadly (?) that’s not how it works. People’s desires come first, and then they find a way within their belief system to justify their actions.
The people I’m hurting aren’t human.
They’re bad people.
They would do the same to me.
I’m only doing it because I’m a bad person.
I was hurt, so now is my chance.
That’s just how the world works.
Et cetera. Sometimes if the conflict between their beliefs and their actions gets too great they change their beliefs.
But for the most part, people don’t want to kill, steal, rape, etc. So they make up a reason to not do it, like “God will punish me if I do that” or “It’s morally wrong” or whatever, and then they don’t do it and move on with their lives.
(And those who do that stuff come from literally all belief systems; the only real differences being social environment - acceptability, expectations, protection from consequences, etc)
Throughout history, people have always drawn the line for acceptable behavior just beyond what they were planning to do anyway.
Nah, sadly (?) that’s not how it works. People’s desires come first, and then they find a way within their belief system to justify their actions.
Exactly.
It’s why there are a bazillion Christian denominations and the Bible is left vague enough so that they all fit.
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine. I don’t want to do that. Right now, without any god
Back in the day, rich people would fund hospitals and schools in hopes of getting to heaven.
Actually, they did that to avoid peasant revolts. Attaching it to religion was just a convenient way to keep the church on their side so the pastors and priests would continue to preach the traditional message: “don’t be violent against your oppressors, let God handle them and you’ll be rewarded after you’re dead.”
Without that regular, Sunday propaganda, revolts would’ve been much more common.
I think it is a bit of both. I value your insight - more often than people think, the actions of historical leaders were done to appease the rival powerstructures (e.g peasants) - but countless historical people truly believed religion and allowed it to influence their actions, as is the case today.
A modern example of this toss-up is the USA’s action in Iran. From how Hegseth talks, it’s like he’s a particularly ignorant religious zealot; it makes me think he’s doing it out of genuine religious fervour. However, you might tell me he’s doing this to appeal to the religious voterbase, which it seemingly is doing. But that shows that support for the war does come from religious fervour, because that’s a reason why common people (the voters) might support the action in Iran.
“Christians” are the worst people I know, with almost no exception.
they are the ones aggressively trying to “correct” media how to portray christian theme shows all the time.
May I suggest to live in countries with a different religious majority to diversify your worst list?
most of them are abrahamic religions, so not that much different from christianity.
Abrahamic religions are less than 60% of total worldwide population, there’s plenty of others.
You should check the extremists Hindus, Buddhists and the creepy cults in Japan.
I second this. I have met people who are absolute pieces of shit that were of other religions.
Even a few atheists who were just the worst people.
Being a piece of shit is not exclusive to any particular faith.
Religion is often just used as excuse to be shitty and oppressive, but a shitty person is a shitty person.
Hear hear
Being a walking piece of toxic waste is a human trait. No need to blame a specific religion or a group. Blame all of them equally, since they are all humans and they all inherited the same flaw.
Am an atheist: while I have known shitty Christians I feel pretty fortunate to have known some Christians who are among the most kind, compassionate humans I’ve ever known
I miss my neighbor Morris. I had never met him and he saw me out washing my car and we talked for like an hour and told me he leaves a hose out on the weekends for people to use and that if it wasn’t out when I woke up to come knock on his apartment door. I made myself go knock that weekend cause it’d be good for my social anxiety, and he fucking grabbed his hose, and all of his own carwashing supplies and helped me wash my car for several hours
Later when I cut my hair short he saw me around the complex and asked me why, and I don’t think he’d ever even heard or understood thw term trans before, but when I explained it was more comfortable for me with gender stuff he just wanted to understand what that meant to me, and ended up sharing a story about growing up in the rough part of NYC ages ago when he knew a gay kid and how he struggled with the way folks treated them
Sadly he bought his dream house and moved 🥹 I think he still does remote bible study with some of my other favorite people in the complex. I miss him
Morris would have obviously been a serial killer if it wasn’t for some dark ages superstition preventing it.
Very sincerely I think the nature of prescriptive morality that’s completely up to interpretation is just that it validates whatever idea of being good naturally comes to you.
For many, that is shielding themseleves from critisism and the need to self reflect by hiding behind their religion. For some people it is actually living ones life in service to others.
My life is better for having been in community with him, and I hope very badly to someday have my shit together enough to live my own version of living my life in service to others. It will not be the same as his, between the social anxiety and the atheism. But I aspire to the impact he had on the people around him.
It sounds like you’re describing a communists and not any Christian I ever met.
Yes. But only if they believe God will judge them for it, and aren’t completely poop eating crazy (as in, murdering whilst cutting themselves because “pain is good” or whatever, not just a sociopath but actually mentally broken).
Christianity/Trinitarian beliefs have the whole “anti-imperialist rabbi Jesus of Nazareth was captured, tortured and killed by the Roman empire, the creators of Trinitarianism, who then established a whole manworshipping polytheistic religion around him, God (the Father/Creator Jesus refers to and prays to often) and the Holy Spirit, and if you believe in this creed your sins are absolved and you’re saved regardless” so it does not work. And ofc people will find “scholars” and act stupid to allow themselves to act however they want in both Judaism (weird Talmudist/non-Mosaic beliefs, for instance) and Islam (eg Hadiths=>Qur’an confused fools), but that basis is not even there in Christianity.
Don’t ever be surprised by all the misery European “men of God” have inflicted in the world countless times (from the days of Rome to the new Satan, America, which even name-drops God on their money, lol, many of those will burn), as it was a Frankenstein pseudoreligion meant to poison the well. If Christians believed like Jesus instead of in Jesus, whatever the fuck that means, everything from the Crusades to the East India Company, from America to Israel (Western settler colonies), would’ve never taken place since they require entire cultures to be behind them. But since they believe they’ll be “saved” regardless, they can act like demons and rationalize their immorality and lack of humanity. But don’t ever worry, for God will give everyone what they deserve. 😉
Where I don’t think I see it. Is the question of does it actually stop what it says it does. Christians themselves hold the moral double standard of “but it’s not about works”. They tweak their interpretation of everything to make whatever they were going to do anyway acceptable. Just look at what they justify now. Supporting genocides, oppressing others.
Weird; I came pre-installed with this weird thing that tells me if what I’m doing is right or wrong, absent of cultural norms.
The joke here is that it doesn’t exist in everyone, we just presume it does.
The assumption of pre-existing universal empathy turns out to be a fatal flaw for a collective, even when the absent rate of empathy is small (<3% of the population).
My grandmother, bless her soul, grew up on a farm and her solution to psychopathic tendencies in society is to “tie a bag of potatoes or stones to them and drop them in a river”.
I said: “Grandma, what about rehabilitation?” She didn’t exactly understand the word completely but she said: “After killing six people and two children, the river does it.”
And you know what? Even then, capital punishment still feels wrong.
Where did that 3% number come from?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8374040/
Abstract:
The meta-analytical results obtained allow us to estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%. That being said, this rate varies depending on the participants’ sex (higher in males), the type of sample from the general population (higher in samples from organizations than in community samples or university students), and the type of instrument used to define psychopathy. In fact, using the PCL-R, which is currently considered the “gold standard” for the assessment and definition of psychopathy, the prevalence is only 1.2%.
So the scientific estimate is between 1.2% (strictest criteria) and 4.5% (loosest criteria).
4.5+1.2÷2 = 2.85%, which is close enough of an estimate to use in casual conversation (roughly 3%).
One area I find problematic is many I these people don’t care what you do, as long as you “believe”. And if you don’t believe, you’re gonna go to hell no matter how good you live.
Eskimo: “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?”
Priest: “No, not if you did not know.”
Eskimo: “Then why did you tell me?”
– Annie Dillard, ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek’
And if not know results in you going to hell, that’s a bigger problem.
That’s why that argument exists, because they absolutely would be shittier than they are now if they were allowed.
When people like that talk about cheating at something, whether it’s voting or relationships or investing or checkers, especially if they are accusing other people of it, it’s because that’s exactly what they would do.
If you believe that’s true then I guess you need a state religion don’tcha
A few people are held in line only by a strong belief in a vengeful god. Most are not though, they choose to believe for other reasons.
You’re talking about narcissists
