Great Quote

"How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one" - Richard Dawkins.

It's amusing how people are totally fine starting with pretenses and assumptions and because they were born in an accepting community to that belief, they learn to never change or even challenge their core ideas. A literal 'safe space' - especially in the age of the Internet, ignorance is a conscious choice for religious people.

No matter where you are born, what religion you are brought up in, essentially you have a choice. Common sense prevails.

So why do people choose to remain ignorant? Cognitive Dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation involving conflicting attitudes, beliefs or behaviors. This produces a feeling of mental discomfort leading to an alteration in one of the attitudes, beliefs or behaviors to reduce the discomfort and restore balance.

For example, when people smoke (behavior) and they know that smoking causes cancer (cognition), they are in a state of cognitive dissonance.

Your religion is merely a matter of geography. I’ve had this argument with religious friends who are critical of Muslims. They get angry when I tell them they’d be Muslim if they had been born 8000 miles east.

I tell this to Muslims as well. “You’d be a Christian if you were born in Europe instead of Pakistan”...and just like your Christian friends, my Muslim friends get extremely angry when I say this.

There are theists that will spin this and try to make it as evidence for a god bc they will say all the religions are the same god and it was man who messed up the interpretation.

But then the counter argument is why your specific sect the right one?

Unless their just a plain deist, the original counter argument wouldn’t hold much water..

also how coincidental that good things come to them as a "blessing" while bad things are challenges to them. how egotistical and they don't even know it, and huge confirmation bias..

When I was 12 years old I asked my mother why she was a Christian and she said it was because that's what she was taught. I said does that mean if you would have been taught a different religion you would have followed that and she said yes..

Tenets of the locality argument:

Any god who wanted all humans to follow him/her would have revealed themselves to all humans at once, not just one culture or race at a time.

If rewards and punishment are given for belief and nonbelief respectively, then any god who waits hundreds or thousands of years before revealing itself to humans is unfair, since the people who lived and died before this revelation didn't have a chance to believe.

If believers are rewarded for their belief then it is unfair for only a specific group of people to receive more evidence than others.

And vice versa: if nonbelief is punished then it is also unfair for some people to receive less evidence than others (or no evidence at all).

Any religion that strongly reflects the beliefs and thoughts of the time in which it was created is not the "true" one.

Locality and Christianity:

God revealed himself only to the Jews at first. He was the god of the Jews and no one else. It wasn't until Christianity came along that he became the god of the world.

Even though Christianity states that its god will save anyone who follows him, he still waited thousands of years before revealing this plan to humanity. Plus, the reason he suddenly decided to save all humans instead of just the Jews was never explained — thus making it unfair for the millions of non-Jews who lived before Christ, who never got a chance to be saved.

The Christian god rewards believers. Thus, the fact that he only revealed himself to a small group of people in the Middle East 2,000 years ago and left it up to humans to spread his word is very unfair of him.

Non-belief is punished as well, which reinforces the unfairness of only telling a small group of people.

The Bible strongly reflects the beliefs and thoughts of the time (e.g. a flat earth, women being inferior to men, slavery, etc.).

Ah, another anti-religion thread. 

Ah, another anti-religion thread.

Isn't it amusing how individuals compartmentalize their religious beliefs into a safe little box, far away from all of their other beliefs that they use critical thinking on?

“God made man in his image, fully conscious with all the faculties he needs in order to live and be moral. Without God, how do we explain where consciousness comes from?”

Not only are you just making a baseless assertion and just expecting people to accept it, but you’re finishing it off with a textbook example of an Argument from Ignorance fallacy.

"But God gave us consciousness!"

This is nothing but blind assertion based on literally zero evidence. Consciousness is an emergent property based on arrangement and functionality of neurons in the brain - which is an emergent product of evolution and physical processes!

It's double-think, straight out of 1984. It's completely self-serving, a coward's move, hiding in an impenetrable (because it's sacred) box whenever reality doesn't serve your own best interests. And religious people wonder why some atheists seem to look down on them...

"You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen"

- Bono

"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

- Thomas Jefferson

"You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen"

- Bono

That's metaphorical, can be interpreted as many things. Heaven isn't even a literal place. As a self-confessed closet-atheist Bono is probably referring to the human-created concept of Heaven.

Even if Bono believes in god, what weight does it give to your stance whatsoever? Bono doesn't study human psychology, he's not a biological scientist, or an evolutionary scientist either.

Why would you let the influence of the lead singer of your favorite band influence whether you believe in god or not? The only relevant individuals for that is those in the fields of science, those who study the human condition and psychology, biology, evolution, physics etc..

"You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been
A place that has to be believed to be seen"

- Bono

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it" ~ Mark Twain.

Another good one:

"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but will in fact never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.

Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA, so massively outnumbers the set of actual people.

In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I in our ordinariness that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred."

~ Richard Dawkins.

Who hurt you?

Who hurt you?

Classic theist, if someone's an atheist, it must mean something 'sinister' happened to them that set them on that path.

Quote from: strudelwithcream on June 27, 2020, 09:18:39 PM

Who hurt you?

Classic theist, if someone's an atheist, it must mean something 'sinister' happened to them.

It was a joke.

To be honest I never gave an afterlife much thought until my mother died.  Now I rather hope there is an afterlife.

Quote from: restofit on June 27, 2020, 09:23:00 PM

Quote from: strudelwithcream on June 27, 2020, 09:18:39 PM

Who hurt you?

Classic theist, if someone's an atheist, it must mean something 'sinister' happened to them.

It was a joke.

To be honest I never gave an afterlife much thought until my mother died.  Now I rather hope there is an afterlife.

 

Quite understandable, it's physiological comfort.

I used to believe in the afterlife but then I realized it was completely irrational to do so.

It's just like I could hope that Unicorns exist but it's doesn't change the fact that they don't.

Quote from: strudelwithcream on June 27, 2020, 09:25:56 PM

Quote from: restofit on June 27, 2020, 09:23:00 PM

Quote from: strudelwithcream on June 27, 2020, 09:18:39 PM

Who hurt you?

Classic theist, if someone's an atheist, it must mean something 'sinister' happened to them.

It was a joke.

To be honest I never gave an afterlife much thought until my mother died.  Now I rather hope there is an afterlife.

 

Quite understandable, it's physiological comfort.

I used to believe in the afterlife but then I realized it was completely irrational to do so.

It's just like I could hope that Unicorns exist but it's doesn't change the fact that they don't.

If that gives you comfort in this life then good for you.

Quote from: restofit on June 27, 2020, 09:34:43 PM

Quote from: strudelwithcream on June 27, 2020, 09:25:56 PM

Quote from: restofit on June 27, 2020, 09:23:00 PM

Quote from: strudelwithcream on June 27, 2020, 09:18:39 PM

Who hurt you?

Classic theist, if someone's an atheist, it must mean something 'sinister' happened to them.

It was a joke.

To be honest I never gave an afterlife much thought until my mother died.  Now I rather hope there is an afterlife.

 

Quite understandable, it's physiological comfort.

I used to believe in the afterlife but then I realized it was completely irrational to do so.

It's just like I could hope that Unicorns exist but it's doesn't change the fact that they don't.

If that gives you comfort in this life then good for you.

If you believe Jesus is coming soon to sweep you up to Heaven, that's dangerous, it absolves people in authority of all responsibility to look after the environment for future generations.

In fact god absolves people of any responsibility whatsoever "climate change? - leave it to him.." "coronavirus? god will take care of that.."

Guess which country has the highest amount of coronavirus cases? The US.

"The worst things in the world are justified by belief" ~ Bono.