Why I really don’t like moderate religious people – mostly addresses Christian and Muslim responses to nonbelievers. (Part 1)

I will take five of the ten ideas that were presented by Dave Jones in one of his YouTube videos, link is at the bottom, and I would like to do something different with them. The video is about how not to attack atheists so you can enter into a discussion rather than leaving it at that, it works much better into why no one should ever respect the religious arguments that are so often pushed towards us. Sticking with Christians and Muslims is useful as they are the two main groups to which we often find objection with, plus they are guilty of pretty much the same sorts of errors. Let’s assume that extremists often those that would also be called fundamentalists are unable to think for themselves through political coercion, brainwashing or simple craziness. It is the moderates that have the ability to think for themselves. Although this is comfortable it is not really true, I would rather just focus on moderate religious people and although this whole topic is part of a much larger discussion Dave Jones made me react and consider a slightly different approach. After getting some feedback on the things I have written, it does start to frustrate me after a while since I have to keep returning to the same points over and over again, as being religious appears to just mean that you have no ability to understand anyone else that does not think the same way as you do. I was also going to describe my feelings as hate although I want to make it clear that I don’t hate people, I do hate their beliefs which is completely different. Someone might be a kind, intelligent person who cares for their family and friends; I can accept this although it does not really come from religion at all. You might think it does but it does not. Ok, why don’t I like moderate religious people?

The Holy Book – the use of such books are taken to mean so much, in the critics of evolution they are often used as points of reference to which something is meant to suddenly click and the whole thing makes sense. It does not stop at what Jones argues being that nonbelievers don’t accept the holy books as God’s word, it goes further if we all make the assumption that it is then the implications are very clear. Either we have to stop learning more about the place in which we live or we have to do things that are immoral. I do go on about dinosaurs a lot; I am not really a fan still if the word reptile is meant to also include dinosaurs and this is the only mention of it in the bible, what we can take from that devalues what we already know, in the process ignoring it. Put this another way if you think that the post hoc explanation of reptiles on Noah’s Ark explains anything then you are just denying the right to access knowledge that does not agree with this, you will learn less just from one word than a body of research & theory. This is where the frustration is; partly as so much is ignored and secondly as so much is easily dismissed without consideration. The immoral refers to possible justifiable acts that holy books allow for and that is no account for the lack of intellectual honesty when using references, there are parts of all the holy books that mention depraved actions towards other humans if you never address them that makes you dishonest on all things.

Faith – it seems to be the less something has the evidence to back it up then the more faith that is required and therefore, the greater the weight belief becomes. It is like saying the less I know something for sure the more important the role of personal feelings have to become. This is just a ridiculous stand point to argue from, there is no reason to why your personal feelings should be given any weight at all, no one can check them and it is as equally possible first you had some basic understanding of religion and later personal feelings to back it up. Likewise the perspective that you must have faith in order to understand just creates a circular argument that never gets anywhere; no one should just believe stuff. The situation is often the other way around there is a lot of evidence that just does not agree with religion so why does anyone believe it; it is clear that religion does not work and is not true. The example of Stenger is useful; God is seen as transcendent, meaning he is outside of space and time still God is also omnipresent meaning that he exists everywhere – there is no way in which these two things can be true. The conclusion is that just because someone claims faith all that means is they have a personal feeling and feelings should never be something which are acted upon without anything else being there to back up those feelings, especially when the consequences are so serious. Having faith means you have accepted something because you have been told to; this is a major fault of character.

Evil concepts – all religions see certain groups as sub-human and not like the rest of us, for example Islam thinks that women should be treated like animals with their only goal to do things for men. A lot of Muslim people have commented that they respect ‘their women’, it is clear that your respect and disrespect are very much alike. Let us mention other people; it is clear in Islam that one difference is the only determining factor on how we treat them never mind what is the right thing to do or not. This I suggest is an evil concept, so is Hell I mean after all the guilt that catholic’s use over the death of Jesus they still have to blackmail with the threat of going to hell. If there was anyone that I would describe as evil it is mother Teresa, ignoring her inaction on treating the ill with medical care, she went around the world telling women that they had no choice. Surely if any woman wanted to have an abortion or use birth control it should always be up to them and it should never settle on others opinions. People promote the idea that religion is good when it is clearly never good at all; this is the most frustrating thing I have come across since it serves to simply create a distraction of the real issues that religious people support by their inaction to challenge.

The attack of atheists – the situation in America is very disturbing. It does not stop there though after all there are decisions that are being made based on religious grounds. If religion is never proven to be correct how can such directed decisions offer the right choice. This often leads to agenda based seeing; there everything is put into context of religious perspective removing the necessary debate about important issues. Often atheists are forced to defend their position once they put real issues forward, this creates noise and distraction. There is also the implication that somehow an atheist is someone that should not be trusted, at least we explain our position and will listen to a constructed argument against the things we believe in. This leads to the next issue…

Threats and insults – religious people often demand respect for their belief, even if they don’t show it back, they just don’t understand the objections are real. Too often I have seen threats mostly from Muslims, not exclusively; this just creates a reinforcement of things that are already known. The Danish cartoonists were simply demonstrating their opinions and how do people react, they beat them down and create violence, is there any wonder about the western view of Islam as just a group of violent people? Then others have to suffer in silence with their opinion as it might cause offense, Islam causes me offense in the first place! Christians that present intelligent design wonder why others see them as stupid; it is because they reject their own intelligence. They are insulting all of us when they expect us to believe something which they made up and then demand respect for. If you want to threaten or insult then go and do that somewhere on your own, if you want to create meaningful discourse then please go ahead. There appears to be an enemy of the week sometimes, there is an outcry for people just expressing what they think which is dealt with by violence, threats and insults. Are Muslims so scared of others that don’t think like them they need to resort to this? Those that do these things are more often than not scared and trying to convince themselves of what they say is right.

I want to keep coming back to this point; religious belief has serious consequences so if religion has anything other than the divine to do about it, then we must closely look at religion. If religious people are just left with metaphysical feelings then, it is religious people that need to be worried about faith and they should never interfere with the rest of us. Rather than stating there is no ‘truth’ behind religion, it tries to promote itself as truth and that is dangerous as well as a lie. Just because a religious person believes something is true, even if it is a strong feeling they do demand others should just accept this, why should anyone accept religion as true? I cannot remember who said this; religion is a prime example of a thing above evolution in action, it has won and keeps on winning even if it no longer works. Moderate religious people are the ones that are keeping it alive even though it is something that we should let die. What use, what point does religion serve anyone anymore? I am not taking away people’s hope here, if you are an adult then you are big enough to know the truth and I don’t understand what you are hoping to gain. Does it really matter if gay people become priests, are they not just people? Should ‘gay’ be before a person, I don’t think so. We have gone too far just to allow religion to simply rip us up again and anyone who is scared of a religion free society, then they should never fear, they are safer and better places. Religion has had its time and it failed! Now let us move to something that really does work…

Dave Jones YouTube Video – http://youtube.com/watch?v=oRGziCZSV_Q

Related post – https://therationalunderstanding.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/do-we-need-to-read-understand-the-bible-the-koran-or-the-torah-in-order-to-understand-religion-or-have-an-opinion-on-it/

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How will religion ultimately disappear? The death of Christianity, Islam and all the other religions.

I have said this before, it is actually pointless to argue with religious people about how their religion is wrong since this will never really convince them into change and you will put all that energy in only achieving a complete waste of your time. So this post is not addressed to those religious people rather those that are either non-believers or those that are not closely affiliated with what they are meant to believe as believers. In other words this is the guide to how atheists will take over the world; this is most likely how religion will be slowly removed from the societies that we live in. Using these points of reference might take a long time but I assure you that, although it might take as long as trying to convince religious people to give up, it will work (most likely) and you will end up making the world a better place in the process. Plus you won’t have to talk and argue until you get to the point that arguing with a whole new set of people without thinking about how your responding to them becomes normal because they are saying the same thing over and over and over again. At no point is violence used!

Should religion ultimately disappear? Yes! I read on the apostates of Islam, which is a group of ex-Muslim believers, that Muslims are the main victims of Islam. This is an interesting point and it also is true, it is Muslims that are dealt with unjustly within Islamic Law and it is them who suffer from the “false doctrine of hate and terror”. The terror is well known by the women of Islam! Christianity is based on an evil book, if you think that the bible is God’s word then you have to accept the bible as God’s word you can’t pick from it, even the bits where it says killing and raping are justifiable. In God’s word it is fine to kill those that deny god, are homosexual, talk back to their parents and pickup sticks on the Sabbath. They want to kill me for my lack of belief and all I want is them to listen to me for a change. Certainly the concept of hell and the guilt of Jesus has never anything to do with the divine. There are other religions and they each have their own reasons for logical objection, feel free to add them for me. Pascal’s Wager is the idea it’s better to believe in God even if reason can’t prove that God is real as you will in the end not lose anything. That is not true, you do lose out by belief and so do a lot of other people, this is not a new perspective on Pascal’s Wager I admit. Steven Pinker’s study on violent crime showed a massive drop at the time of Enlightenment, the period were religion suffered the most in Europe and it’s from this period of history we can learn how to remove religion across the world making it a safer place in the process.

 

Step one – The tolerance for others opinions and belief structures! This might sound like a very stupid thing to say, especially when the idea of tolerance never really comes up in the new atheist movement, still remember that the more you allow for tolerance the more likely the atheist idea is allowed to grow. Without each of us having our own belief & respecting each other then it leads to the road of closing off all communication which is something that would harm science and atheism. During the Enlightenment once people had got fed up with conflict between different religions, people simply allowed others to believe what they wanted and this allowed for non-believers to have the breathing room that was necessary. In Julia Sweeney’s letting go of God, she makes a point by telling us of what her father said when she came out as a non-believer; her father said “why could you just not be gay!” It is funny how being an atheist or non-believer can be worse than being gay, still it shows us about the level of tolerance that is currently out there. This does provide a very big problem though, as atheists and non-believers we have to also show tolerance back, this does not mean acceptance at every level, we can question even though we cannot allow ourselves to become confrontational all the time. Confrontation only allows people to move away from us and what we want is people to come closer and ask us more questions so we can share the things that we have learnt. There is no chicken or egg question here, first tolerance and then atheism. This is a two way approach of course still at a practical level rather than simply attacking religious people demand tolerance and teach them about why we don’t believe. Demand respect for your non-belief and also respect other people’s views.

Step two – the idea of Social Justice! In America this idea is not very well used, it works in Europe and other English speaking countries like Canada for example, it might work well in other countries that I am not aware of. If we start taking care of each other, providing free health care, education and many other things then it is more likely that the need for religion is reduced. Sweden is a great example of this, it has a low crime rate and a healthy population, the level of non-belief is up to 85% depending upon the study used. I am not suggesting that there is a link between religion and crime (or anything else) religion does not create those things, it does tend to disappear when people’s lives are improved. Matthew Chapman describes the current situation as very bad in some societies, the church is the only place where people can go in order to experience community and it is also the only place where people can show care for others without being considered socialists or liberals. Just because it can only happen within the church never means that is a reason to why the church should never be challenged on other grounds. He does not say this is about America as a point of reference, I do rather consider his opinions about the land of the free, the richest nation on the planet, the one of only few that are so rich but consider each other’s needs so inadequately. So what can we learn from this? Taking care of each other is not only a worthy goal it also means a better, more rational society, this will push religion to the fringes as it will mean the need for it is reduced and only belief is left. When religious people only have belief left, let them decide for themselves and if Europe is any example the level of atheism will increase quickly.

Step three – empowering every person on the planet! I could simply state here that if you feel that you cannot achieve the first two steps then you have already given up, never give up and if you think that your efforts cannot make a difference ask yourself, did you try at all? Just because something appears too difficult it does not mean that it is impossible. Still this is not what I wanted to discuss in step three, I will leave it to Christopher Hitchens to make an interesting point. Hitchens said in one of his many attacks on mother Teresa that she was never a friend of the poor she was simply a friend of poverty. He of course means many things by this but one thing I noticed through his attack was that she after being given a lot of money never actually help the poor get out of poverty, rather the journey that was made was just dealing with the end result. She was given millions of dollars most of which was not spent on the poor at all; the point was that rather than empowering the poor she conceded to clear up the mess. Whether she even did that is debatable! We must empower women to make decisions about abortion for themselves, we must empower teachers to teach evolution, we must empower societies to allow them to determine their own laws, the more we empower people the better society will be. I have heard that empowering women is the most important step after all religion perhaps within every context treats women as the second class of humans. I don’t really know how to go about this, but start with your own life and then try to work outwards.

How do I know that this is true? Well it has already happen in some parts of the world and let’s be honest the difference between us are not really that great at all. Tolerance is an interesting thing, it something that has to be worked on and the next generation always seem to understand much more than their parents. Who does not want universal health care free to all? Other than those the benefit from such a system, since there are only few of them that makes the rest of us in a stronger position to change what is going on. There is no excuse for anyone to not demand universal health care free to all and not get it in America. I am not American and I do have universal health care free to all in my country, if it ever was removed I would burn down parliament. It’s a human right not a luxury. If you are against it then you cannot call yourself moral in any respect. I did not want to get political then but everything I say is political, so I can’t help it! Empowerment is difficult to achieve, maybe someone telling another they have a choice whether they can be a catholic or not, is enough to give them a chance to become an atheist. We can empower children by giving them a very useful skill, as well as a very easy one to teach – critical thinking! Religion one day will end and when that day comes I don’t think that it will be scary at all. I think there will be peaceful joy and the knowledge that the things we do while we are alive are so important we better do them right.

A little more on this matter…

 

I have mentioned Pat Condell before and on his website it clearly states that he does not respect your beliefs! See earlier post: https://therationalunderstanding.wordpress.com/2008/05/16/pat-condell%e2%80%99s-christian-and-islamic-comments-and-the-feedback-he-gets/. Since atheism is not a belief system I don’t consider that Condell’s views as coming from a person within my group. I do understand why he is saying what he does but it is difficult to see why it is helpful to those that share his views on religion. In fact a lot of the websites about atheism that I have come across never practice what they hope to achieve, in order for people to understand why religion is at fault it needs to be explained in such a way that it does not form a personal attack from the start. Do people like Pat Condell think that their confrontational style really helps in their goals? It does not! We are just the same as those religious people if all we do is tell others they are wrong, we need to be better and explain why we think differently. I did find a blog called the friendly atheist, this is the best blog I have found so far and in particular the post titled “The Four Cs of Atheism”, it gives us a set of wonderful rules! http://friendlyatheist.com/2008/06/03/the-four-cs-of-atheism/ I will end on this note: we are all perhaps guilty of producing statements that we know will get attention, the point is once we get people’s attention we need to use it a lot better.

 

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Do we need to read & understand the bible, the Koran or the Torah in order to understand Religion or have an opinion on it?

It is a bit of No – Since I have never believed in the idea that religion should receive special treatment I don’t understand the argument to why reading the religious books is necessary in order to understand religions. Let’s take this from a different perspective most people use technology everyday whether it’s a computer or a mobile phone, how many of those people really understand what makes it work? Most will have a rough understanding of the components that fix together to make it work as a whole, this is about were the knowledge stops. When expressing an opinion about a mobile phone it is done on the usefulness, the attractiveness, what is new and how it makes things easier, so in other words the opinion is not the result of a technical view of the mobile rather the end result, whether its benefits or services that it provides are good quality. This I suggest is also possible with Religion, to understand Christian’s and their beliefs we can look at the end result, there actions or inaction, from this we understand what religious people are all about and how they are different from us. I recently blogged about how Islamic law in Pakistan prevented a rape victim speaking out and bringing the police officer that raped her to justice. Many Muslims that I know in the UK have found this shocking, so can we blame this on religion? Yes even though many Muslims would find this distasteful, the Koran has to answer for its end results. If the Koran is allowed to exist then it has to answer for what people do within the elevated position the Koran provides them. A lot of my earlier understanding of religion has come from the end result of how people act in accordance with their belief.

The answer is also a bit of Yes – I will use another analogy, if you go to a psychologist you can sit there and have the process pushed upon you, the only understanding is that you’re having something done to you. If it’s a good psychologist they will include you in the process and from that you’d learn the methods which you could then later use yourself. You never learn the whole body of knowledge of psychology rather you learn some of its rationale & methods and this is in part what religious teachers do. In particular those teachers are a good source of information, they present an argument based on the idea of A for the reason of B and this allows you to see the process which was involved and in turn start to understand their logic & internal world. Unlike in the No part of this answer, if I wanted to criticise religion you can present evidence or an alternative of A for reason C. I do accept that here I am making a jump because as a non-religious person I would want to criticise religion, still the same is true if you wanted to learn about another religion or more about yours. I am personally fed up of religious text or quotes that are basically unclear and wishy washy in the first place being used to promote religion as a good thing. Especially, when it seems there are as many negative evil religion text or quotes that really does present religion in a bad light.

The point of this post is to confirm to everyone that at a certain level the you can judge religion by its followers; after all I am not a Christian, Muslim or Jew so why should I have to read their religious books. They should and then I will be able to judge what those books are say by watching religious people and their behaviour. It is about what is happening in the real world which is more important than the words, if the words are wrong we will be able to tell.

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