The worst part is that we’re rewarding them to work against all of us.
I don’t know about all religions, but I do know about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and each of their holy books are full of horrors that no civilized society today can tolerate; and each of these faiths have millions of fundamentalists that see these texts as their moral imperative.
I encourage everyone to read the Tanakh, Bible, and Koran and see for yourself; and to watch their own propaganda (straight from the horse’s mouth), which is shockingly backwards and eager to kill all that they deem unworthy (i.e. you).
Are all believers like this? No, the vast majority are not. However, they all provide a mask of normalcy for the fundamentalists that are “True Believers”. This veneer of respectability prevents society as a whole from ever questioning the Abrahamic faiths, the instructions that they are given, and their motivations.
Islam wants to murder or convert you (or force you to pay a tax for their “protection”… from them). Christianity wants to convert you or prays for Jesus to return and save them (and murder you). Judaism isn’t interested in converting you, but they see themselves as The Chosen People as ordained by God, superior to gentiles (you) in every possible way. All Abrahamic faiths have proven to be ruthless and bloodthirsty when they rule.
All of them want to control you, no exceptions. All have rules that they want you to follow; even the nice ones that don’t want to slaughter you think that you should live by their rules out of “respect”, but they have absolutely no respect for you.
Don’t believe me, if you are unfamiliar with these religions my claims will seem extraordinary and crazy. Read the Tanakh, Bible, and Koran yourself. Listen to what their fundamentalist rabbis, priests, and imam’s say (thousands of videos on Youtube to choose from).
Yes, I know that each holy book has beauty and wisdom within for all to learn from. But, unfortunately, they are also full of incredible evil and incompatible with any modern society. That is the concern, the evil.
The fact that they are tax free is ridiculous and obscene. I don’t think that these religions should be illegal, because that just fuels the fundamentalists (they all want to be martyrs); but governments should stop forcing secular taxpayers to enable these archaic and frankly loathsome belief systems.
(extensively edited because I’m on a roll, I apologize)
The point about the “veneer of respectability” is exactly why I’m now an anti-theist and not just an atheist. If religions weren’t inherently harmful to all people it may be different; unfortunately the most popular religions harm not just their adherents but everyone else as well. We, as a society, should not abide that.
BASED
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perhaps a hotter take for lemmy: this goes for “humans are a plague” rhetoric too
I also believe that anyone who thinks “humans are a plague” shouldn’t hold a public office. I don’t know of any who promote that belief on the campaign trail though.
“Humans are plague” is to point out that we should have better priorities than just infinite growth.
“Fallen world” gives people using Abrahamic trappings license to expand and consume infinitely because people are thinking about the all they get stuff they’ll be born with in the next world anyway. It’s pretty different
no, “humans are a plague” is just blatantly misanthropic. it has nothing to do with pointing out the failings of capitalism, it’s just here to say that humanity, by its very nature, is bad and to be exterminated. it serves to distract from the real issue (capitalism and the fantasy of infinite growth) even, by pretending that the issue is innate to humans (and thus unfixable except by mass genocide)
I guess I just respectfully disagree, to me capitalism is misanthropic. And people who use the phrase are being embarrassingly hyperbolic but I want to meet them where they’re at. I see their emotional position as more workable in terms of changing how we treat the world and eachother (most people aren’t ready to engage with the idea of stopping capitalism in a nonemotional way)
But, we don’t have to approach it as an all or nothing thing. In our lives I can engage with people who need to conceptualize people as a disease and you can work with people who need to not do that. This is an improvement over previous situations where progressive politics required toeing the line on rhetoric
This is such a silly take. If humans ought to have better priorities than infinite growth, then the problem is whatever necessitates the premise of infinite growth. Infinite growth is not only unnecessary in being defined as human, but even detrimental to human existence. The problem you’re blaming on humans is capitalism. Capitalism is the plague.
“Fallen World” does not give abrahamic religions license to consume infinitely. It has nothing to do with consumption, but rather to build the premises of why their religion is necessary for “salvation”. Abrahamic religions have plenty of ridiculous and immoral things to critique about them, just be sure to pick a real one.
Eh. It sounds like you can’t or won’t engage with either position, which I’m not really on this planet to convince anyone to do anyway. I probably made it sound like I hold one of those opinions, which I don’t so that’s on me.
You could look into millenarianism as an ideology and why they’re like that but it’s work and it’s thankless.
People are really underestimating how many accelerationist dominionists are now at high levels of the US government.
The Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025, is chock full of them, and their aim is to bring on the rapture and apocalypse.
Several of them were in Israel recently for a practice run of the red cow sacrifice that’s meant to bring Jesus back. The Jews and evangelicals want this for different reasons, but this is why US evangelicals are supporting Israel. Because in order to summon Jesus, evangelicals believe Palestine must be destroyed, the mosque at the temple mount must be razed (part of why they’re also hot for muslim skin), and the original temple rebuilt.
This is not fringe conspiracy bullshit – they’re serious enough that several senators have been funding the breeding programme for a perfect red cow, and some (including Mike Johnson IIRC) were in Israel for their practice run last year.
It all sounds insane, but they’re serious about this. It’s also why they don’t care about climate change. It’s not that they don’t think it’s real, but that they think it’s one of the signs zombie Jesus is coming back to give them a paradise from which they can watch the rest of us burn. This is all very, deadly serious to them. It’s a death cult, and they’ve been given the means to kill us all for their apocalyptic fantasies.
e: and to put a finer point on it, from that first article:
The arrival of the five heifers in Israel may have played a role in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that began the Israel-Hamas war. In a speech listing motives for the attack on Israel, one of the leaders of Hamas accused Israelis of bringing five cows into the Holy Land, CBS News reported. The Temple Mount is the current site of the Dome of the Rock, part of the al-Aqsa Mosque, an Islamic sacred site.
e2: look into what Peter Thiel believes, too. The most powerful and rich people on earth believe this nonsense, and are amassing the resources to realise their bullshit. They’re openly talking about their apocalyptic antichrist fantasies now.
It’s hard to pick what our single greatest existential risk is at a moment in time with such an embarrassment of choices, but if I had to pick one, it’s probably Dominionist Evangelical Christianity as exemplified by Heritage and the 7 Mountain Mandate - please click on that if you’re unfamiliar.
The movement’s theology is based on biblical passages like Revelation 17:9 and Isaiah 2:2, promoting the idea that Christians should actively take control of the seven societal mountains to establish God’s kingdom on Earth.
Because it’s a people powered nexus for a lot of the other bad shit that competes for it on the list.
Zionism and antisemitism yes at the same time, AI, capitalism, and climate change, all intensified and utilized by the 7MM.
To be clear, those seven mountains are family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.
I never knew they were founded during and deeply involved in the Reagan presidency. Go figure
The 70s and 80s saw a conservative Renaissance and we are living in the conservative golden age. The reason the world is on fire and threatening humanity with extinction? Conservatives.
Yeah, this shit has been burning for decades, with prominent evangelicals infiltrating government for a long time. Watch the docuseries The Family on Netflix if you really want to get angry and depressed.
They’re the ones responsible for the White House prayer breakfast (the ones with the creepy photos where they lay hands on trump).
Judges 7:1-9 where god wants gideon to use a smaller army so god can get credit
Paraphrased:
I’m god, and your military is too strong. Do stupid shit and make it weaker and win anyway so that I get credit. Uh…warrior ethos or something.
Damn it’s almost like we should separate religion from politics.
That’s a hard sell for anyone who actually believes in their religion, for the same reason you’d find it a non-starter to ignore your own concept of morality when doing politics. “Keep religion out of politics” is a nonsensical statement, for the simple reason that to a religious populace (which is most of them) their morality will to some degree come from their religion.
Religions have a very large part in creating the population’s morals, opinions, and values, so I think that’s practically impossible.
That’s objectively untrue. Religious leaders want you to believe that, and it’s a major part of their propaganda. But no, religions co-opted morals and human values; they did not invent them by any stretch of the imagination.
You’re making the false assumption that there are universal morals and human values here. That’s immediately falsifiable by noting that different societies don’t, in fact, have the same morals or values. You’re also making the other false assumption that religions never (or essentially never) challenge their host societies’ morals or values when the two biggest religions in the world (Islam and Christianity) provide ample evidence to the contrary. You’re then deriving from those two false assumptions the false conclusions that religions don’t shape the values and morals of their host societies when, for example, it’s not a coincidence that Americans regardless of religion tend to find polygamy morally unacceptable.
They aren’t necessary for that role.
They aren’t, but I don’t see religions as a whole getting anywhere close to dying out. People are going to be shaped by what they’re taught as children, for better and worse.
Clearly religion is doing a shit job of it, judging by the results. Throw it in the trash can
If this was the fate of humanity there was no need for the whole Jesus arc. He could have just said holy fuck you people are corrupt and ended the whole planet at once but didn’t, and the end times crap was not endorsed by his teachings. Not that I expect internal consistency in Christianity but I like to bring it up when they start ranting about Revelations like it’s a policy position.
To be fair, that whole story is obviously nonsense. Why would an omni god need to make himself human in order to sacrifice himself to protect us from himself? It’s ludicrous.
This is exactly the sort of story superstitious people in the Iron Age would invent to tell each other why their suffering during war and famine was righteous, though, to prevent uprisings and further societal collapse.
why not just make heaven and skip the whole test-you’re-definitely-gonna-fail-without-me garbage. it all falls apart under the tiniest scrutiny, just so not compelling.
I feel like a lot of the revelation stuff happened at the turn of the 20th century great awakening when the church was sort of co-opted by the wealthy to prevent the spread of socialism, though you could probably make a good argument about the great awakening and the downfall of the divine right of kings.
The Jesus arc was a problem from the beginning. That’s why everyone was sort of fine with, or onboard, the original arthors killing him off so early in the storyline.
A lot of modern fanfiction authors would make the same choice.
Yeah the whole thing is so stupidly convoluted, and I guess impressive if it’s the only book you’ve ever read…
God makes the rules, why does he need to be a human sacrifice to stop his own creation from going to hell (also his creation and insanely abusive)? Why even invent the stupid rules that apparently require that in the first place?
We need to stop making excuses for harmful mentalities like this
religion is a blight on humanity and should be left behind if we want to survive as a species. it has no inherent value and serves only to hold us back and harm us. feel free to out yourself as one of the intellectually negligent by disagreeing with me.
American atheists’ favorite hobby is reconstructing christian cosmology from an unexamined base of fundamentally christian assumptions about the world. Look at roko’s basilisk.
Understanding religion gives you a better context for the culture you emerge from, how it got to be where it is, and what underlining assumptions drive it ideologically. You can wish for a clean break from that historical context all you want, is isn’t gonna actually happen.
understanding isnt believing. people need to be educated about the dangers and failures of religion if we ever want to move past it. i would never advocate for forgetting it. but sure put words in my mouth.
Understanding it is why I don’t believe it
understanding it doesn’t make it true. it isn’t real, but the harm it perpetuates definitely is.
But that is literally what they believe, though. Most Christians don’t know or care about theological deep cuts
Yeah as opposed to other modes of self-identification such as the famously wholesome nationalism.
More serious, something tells me you only have one or two (definitely not more than three) religions in mind with that massively broad statement.
Also crime and punishment
I’m not sure how they justify getting on the wrong side of humanity. It strikes me as an explain this to St Peter type of thing.
Oh my God y’all have to be kidding me this is utter nonsense when you think about it for five seconds. Off the top of my head:
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Christians believe they’re redeemed by believing in Jesus, so even if this applied to non-Christians it wouldn’t apply to them. So in an American context they’d still want better public health and a better environment for them.
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TF you mean “cleansed with fire and destruction” that’s not how Abrahamic eschatology works at all. The trials of the end of times aren’t there to make people better (not a Christian so I could be wrong on that one, but I really doubt it).
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This hypothesis fails when tested against populations who aren’t white American Evangelicals or Mormons. Most famously the Pope himself seems to disagree.
This literally is what Christians believe, though. They say it out loud
What people believe and what’s in the scripture are two different things. Selective enforcement goes back a long time.
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