Indeed the person and the religion should be separated. I hate Islam, but not most Muslims. Christianity, but not most Christians. And so on. The religions and their zealots are capable of great evil, whereas the people usually either were born into a religious family, or they were just looking for hope in dark times. Of course I find it best to keep it all to yourself anyway, unless talking with people you know will understand you
I actually can’t give a crap about a person’s race. Like I’m thoroughly against the Gaza genocide. I don’t care if other people associate religion with race, I don’t have to fall in line with anyone really. Actually, not falling in line is the entire point.
Race, gender, and quite a few things aren’t a choice. I have some tolerance for heavily indoctrinated people, but I don’t know how to deprogram them, and I’m quite irritated that states are intentionally spreading religion.
It taints everything, and ruins lives. My parents right now are ignoring signs of diseases because “if god wants to take you, he will take you”. I can’t even begin to describe how furious this makes me feel. Also, disregarding the possibility that I may not be neurotypical.
To be fair. Most people don’t choose religion. Most religious people were abused as children and are kept hostage by the cult. Leaving would mean stigma from their cult family members and in some captured countries, society as a whole. Religion is something forced upon you through abuse.
I was an Ortodox Cristian. I live with fundamentalist Ortodox Cristians, and I am at fault for how radical they are, because I believed it 100%. But I’m not one anymore, too many things made it fucking obvious that you have to be delusional to believe it. Eventually, if you are reasonable at all, you will realize.
EDIT: To be ironically one of the voices of reason, yes, most people can’t just break out, I understand.
Hate the things that religion stands for but hating the concept is just sort of a waste of time. It’s like saying you hate evil, it sounds good but when you think about it it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s much more useful to hate evil people after all you can action that.
Hating on religion is bigoted because there are and were great men and women both religious and atheist. Also there are and were horrible people both religious and atheist. There is ton of evidence for both claims, which you clearly choose to ignore. There are and were even people who are and were champions of both science and religion and who are more scientifically prepared than you would be in your whole life, yet still religious. I for example do not have a religion, but I do have a phd in mathematics and I do have faith and I think I am pretty good at arguing rationally.
And then there is also the problem that fighting against something and hating that something is two different things. You also chose to hate on what you think you are fighting. I would anytime choose to fight someone making as bigoted claims as you, however in most instances – and for certainly in this instance – I am doing it without hating on the other, in this case you.
Yes, you are rational, no thanks to religion. Maybe there’s a reason I hate on it, as it directly impacts my life and the world around it? Like the current evangelical cult being used to justify utterly oppressing America? And America is trying to spread that oppression to us. Like backstabbing Ukraine by cutting off Starlink.
If it were not making my life so much worse, I would not be hating it with such an intensity.
As for you, I can’t possibly imagine what this faith is, or why you would have it. Why choose faith?
I can empathize and sympathize with your situation. The evangelical cult based craziness in the US is truly astonishingly horrible. If you are from Ukraine, then I fully understand that you haven’t got the luxury of being patient towards enemies. I am from Hungary, and to what it is worth, I am 100% supporting Ukraine, sent money to the Hungarians fighting in the Ukrainian army as well.
On the philosophical level I still think that hating on all religions because people can use religion for horrible causes is analogous to hating on technology and science because people can construct horrible weapons using those.
As for the faith part: it is very hard to talk about it while being true to it, even when talking to close friends. So I choose to not talk about it more closely on public forums.
I love your comment, very rational argument that moves the discussion forward into more sophisticated territory. (Hopefully) respectful disagreement incoming.
"Bigot: : a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices
especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance"
So technically, bigot could describe anyone who treats members of a group with intolerance. For example, I am bigoted towards Nazis. This example demonstrates that “bigot” does not intrinsically equal “bad”. It is probably a good thing to be bigoted towards Nazis. Given this definition, I don’t think there’s any way to claim these stances aren’t bigoted towards religion, but the real question is whether that bigotry is a good thing or not. That sounds obviously wrong, but only because we’re so used to hearing “bigot” as a synonym for bad. Given this definition I would proudly say, for instance, that I am bigoted against racists or sexists. And in a similar vein, if someone does a lot of good charity work in their city, and let’s say they’ve even been a factual net positive for their city, but they’re also deeply racist and sexist, I think it’s fair for me to say “I hate them”, even though they’ve done other good things. If I say “racism and sexism are evil”, then I’m not really “ignoring evidence” of this guy being a good benefactor to his city. I’m correctly disentangling an irrelevant aspect (his social benevolence) from the relevant aspect (the intrinsic goodness or badness of being racist+sexist). Yes, there are racists who have done good things, good acts, good science even, etc etc. But that is not necessarily relevant to whether racism itself is good. It is obvious to most people that when the racist guy happens to benefit his city, say with a big charitable donation to the museum (and even all races of people in the city may benefit), that he did a good thing despite his racism and not because of it. This “despiteness” is hard to establish though, and I understand that this line of thinking easily leads to unfalsifiable claims, where every good thing done by a religious person gets attributed to non-religious causes and vice versa for bad things.
But in the case of the racist, it seems clear, doesn’t it? All the good acts done by racists aren’t really fair to count as evidence for “racism is a good thing”. And to your point, all the bad acts done by racists aren’t fair to count as evidence for “racism is a bad thing”. If a racist cuts me off while driving without using their turn signal, I can’t be like “this proves that racism is bad”. We need to establish a causal link. My comment is getting long already, but to me it seems pretty clear that most of the good things done by religious people are things they likely would have done otherwise, since both atheists and religious people alike do plenty of good things, and the same sorts of good things. But there’s a whole class of bad things (usually genocidal type things, but also human abuses, etc) that seem to almost exclusively exist under religious justifications.
You think that nazism is always bad and you can deduce that when a nazi does something good they do it ‘despite’ being nazi. Then you claim the same for religious people. Do you really think the two cases are the same? I will now list a bunch or religious people who mean a great deal to me, and whose work can not be disengaged from being religious: Ferdinand Ebner, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenczweig, Franz Kafka, Jakob Böhme, Endre Ady, Béla Tábor, and I could go on and on. I could not mention one single nazi who means a great deal to me and for somewhat respectable but still somewhat racist people I can always disengage their racism from why they are important to me. So clearly for me the two cases are not paralell. I wonder if you are truly sure that they are parallel for you.
I accept your proposition to make bigoted a technical word. I am too intolerant towards nazis. And I am also intolerant towards various forms of religious zeals.
I think the biggest trickiness of this whole topic comes from the fact that it is indeed not so black and white. To clarify my stance, I cannot deny that there are people who did good acts in a way that can only be attributed to religion, and that they would not have done without religion. We have the following qualities: (good person, bad person) and how they’re done (independently of religion/lack of religion, because of religion, because of lack of religion), and thus 6 total classes of people to investigate.
Just to quickly clarify an ambiguity here, I guess we could have more classes for “good ONLY because of religion” vs “good because of religion in reality, but hypothetically we expect they would have been good without it”. But for the sake of simplicity it seems like we can lump that second type in with the “independently of religion” quality.
Definitely anyone who argues that the class of “Good Person Only Because Of Religion” is empty is being totally insane. There’s a hefty amount of people in this category. I don’t know all the people you listed, but I’m fine saying for sake of argument that they are all in it - although I imagine you’d agree some of them may have been good people and some things even if religion didn’t exist? But I’d like to go in whatever direction you think makes your argument strongest.
Likewise, anyone who argues that the “Bad Person Only Because Of Lack Of Religion” category is empty is also being really biased. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have committed atrocities because “God doesn’t exist so I can do whatever I can get away with”, etc.
I think what’s at stake here is, firstly, the relative sizes of these classes, and secondly, whether their relative size is a historical coincidence or an intrinsic result of something about religiosity.
If the stakes are right, I’m not really sure how to proceed “rigorously”. It’s really a job for sociological studies, since there are enough humans that we could both list individual examples for a very long time - I’m sure we both agree that all 6 classes of people I described have at least a million members alive even just right now. It seems like the best we can do is make persuasive type arguments.
I can think of a few directions of arguments to make, so forgive me in advance if I’m scatterbrained. I’ll just write an idea of one:
Your examples of Good Because Of Religion people are outstanding, “great” people. Such people are not representative of the population as a whole. Perhaps for very outstanding people, religion is more likely to be beneficial. But when we look at how “the masses” (to use an elitist term) use religion to justify things, I usually see it for much more petty things like controlling one’s children, as a justification for condemning groups they just don’t like, as a justification for violence, etc. The role religion plays in the current American social situation is undoubtedly an example of this, and the same goes for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and much of the perpetual conflict in the Middle East in general. I am not aware of similar situations in the world right now that are not largely based on religious zealotry. Even from historical concepts, it seems religion is often used as a tool to manufacture mass consent for these things.
All evidence, considering it’s based on BELIEF, and not the scientific method. Such as a wall killing a 200k+ army, when such an army would have been impossible in ancient times, and such a wall impossibly huge. The sheer bigoted bullshit that makes you a bad person just for believing in it.
ALL irrational beliefs are a plague on humanity, not just religion!
All evidence, considering it’s based on BELIEF, and not the scientific method.
Would you believe something if it were demonstrated through the scientific method?
Such as a wall killing a 200k+ army, when such an army would have been impossible in ancient times, and such a wall impossibly huge.
I don’t think that a wall could kill an army, regardless of the size of the wall or the army. This is because walls are inanimate objects. I feel like you’re leaving something out of this story.
ALL irrational beliefs are a plague on humanity, not just religion!
Religion isn’t a belief. It’s a social construct. It includes beliefs, and those beliefs may be rational or irrational.
It had something to do with the Ark of the covenant or something. It just does not make sense to me, and the stakes of actually following through with abrahamic religions are dire. We are talking about gambling away your entire material existence, which you only get one of, on something better that probably does not exist. Regardless, I’m not having this battle with every single person again, I will just wait for AI to advance, which will pretty much deconstruct everything we do with ease soon. It just needs significantly larger context window probably.
What is so biggoted about hating on religion? Religion is a choice, a choice to be irresposnible and ignore evidence.
Because hating the religion is a thin excuse for racism. And being of a certain race is not a choice.
Because when they say “Muslim”, they aren’t talking about a white person, even though there are white Muslims.
Indeed the person and the religion should be separated. I hate Islam, but not most Muslims. Christianity, but not most Christians. And so on. The religions and their zealots are capable of great evil, whereas the people usually either were born into a religious family, or they were just looking for hope in dark times. Of course I find it best to keep it all to yourself anyway, unless talking with people you know will understand you
I don’t have a problem with religious folks who are reasonable about their religion. The problem is that so many of them are not.
I actually can’t give a crap about a person’s race. Like I’m thoroughly against the Gaza genocide. I don’t care if other people associate religion with race, I don’t have to fall in line with anyone really. Actually, not falling in line is the entire point.
Race, gender, and quite a few things aren’t a choice. I have some tolerance for heavily indoctrinated people, but I don’t know how to deprogram them, and I’m quite irritated that states are intentionally spreading religion.
It taints everything, and ruins lives. My parents right now are ignoring signs of diseases because “if god wants to take you, he will take you”. I can’t even begin to describe how furious this makes me feel. Also, disregarding the possibility that I may not be neurotypical.
It makes me wish we would just get nuked.
Being of a certain race does make you a certain religion.
To be fair. Most people don’t choose religion. Most religious people were abused as children and are kept hostage by the cult. Leaving would mean stigma from their cult family members and in some captured countries, society as a whole. Religion is something forced upon you through abuse.
I was an Ortodox Cristian. I live with fundamentalist Ortodox Cristians, and I am at fault for how radical they are, because I believed it 100%. But I’m not one anymore, too many things made it fucking obvious that you have to be delusional to believe it. Eventually, if you are reasonable at all, you will realize.
EDIT: To be ironically one of the voices of reason, yes, most people can’t just break out, I understand.
They need to be deprogrammed.
Hate the things that religion stands for but hating the concept is just sort of a waste of time. It’s like saying you hate evil, it sounds good but when you think about it it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s much more useful to hate evil people after all you can action that.
I think it’s more about how you do it
Hating on religion is bigoted because there are and were great men and women both religious and atheist. Also there are and were horrible people both religious and atheist. There is ton of evidence for both claims, which you clearly choose to ignore. There are and were even people who are and were champions of both science and religion and who are more scientifically prepared than you would be in your whole life, yet still religious. I for example do not have a religion, but I do have a phd in mathematics and I do have faith and I think I am pretty good at arguing rationally.
And then there is also the problem that fighting against something and hating that something is two different things. You also chose to hate on what you think you are fighting. I would anytime choose to fight someone making as bigoted claims as you, however in most instances – and for certainly in this instance – I am doing it without hating on the other, in this case you.
Yes, you are rational, no thanks to religion. Maybe there’s a reason I hate on it, as it directly impacts my life and the world around it? Like the current evangelical cult being used to justify utterly oppressing America? And America is trying to spread that oppression to us. Like backstabbing Ukraine by cutting off Starlink.
If it were not making my life so much worse, I would not be hating it with such an intensity.
As for you, I can’t possibly imagine what this faith is, or why you would have it. Why choose faith?
I can empathize and sympathize with your situation. The evangelical cult based craziness in the US is truly astonishingly horrible. If you are from Ukraine, then I fully understand that you haven’t got the luxury of being patient towards enemies. I am from Hungary, and to what it is worth, I am 100% supporting Ukraine, sent money to the Hungarians fighting in the Ukrainian army as well.
On the philosophical level I still think that hating on all religions because people can use religion for horrible causes is analogous to hating on technology and science because people can construct horrible weapons using those.
As for the faith part: it is very hard to talk about it while being true to it, even when talking to close friends. So I choose to not talk about it more closely on public forums.
I love your comment, very rational argument that moves the discussion forward into more sophisticated territory. (Hopefully) respectful disagreement incoming.
"Bigot: : a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices
especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance"
So technically, bigot could describe anyone who treats members of a group with intolerance. For example, I am bigoted towards Nazis. This example demonstrates that “bigot” does not intrinsically equal “bad”. It is probably a good thing to be bigoted towards Nazis. Given this definition, I don’t think there’s any way to claim these stances aren’t bigoted towards religion, but the real question is whether that bigotry is a good thing or not. That sounds obviously wrong, but only because we’re so used to hearing “bigot” as a synonym for bad. Given this definition I would proudly say, for instance, that I am bigoted against racists or sexists. And in a similar vein, if someone does a lot of good charity work in their city, and let’s say they’ve even been a factual net positive for their city, but they’re also deeply racist and sexist, I think it’s fair for me to say “I hate them”, even though they’ve done other good things. If I say “racism and sexism are evil”, then I’m not really “ignoring evidence” of this guy being a good benefactor to his city. I’m correctly disentangling an irrelevant aspect (his social benevolence) from the relevant aspect (the intrinsic goodness or badness of being racist+sexist). Yes, there are racists who have done good things, good acts, good science even, etc etc. But that is not necessarily relevant to whether racism itself is good. It is obvious to most people that when the racist guy happens to benefit his city, say with a big charitable donation to the museum (and even all races of people in the city may benefit), that he did a good thing despite his racism and not because of it. This “despiteness” is hard to establish though, and I understand that this line of thinking easily leads to unfalsifiable claims, where every good thing done by a religious person gets attributed to non-religious causes and vice versa for bad things.
But in the case of the racist, it seems clear, doesn’t it? All the good acts done by racists aren’t really fair to count as evidence for “racism is a good thing”. And to your point, all the bad acts done by racists aren’t fair to count as evidence for “racism is a bad thing”. If a racist cuts me off while driving without using their turn signal, I can’t be like “this proves that racism is bad”. We need to establish a causal link. My comment is getting long already, but to me it seems pretty clear that most of the good things done by religious people are things they likely would have done otherwise, since both atheists and religious people alike do plenty of good things, and the same sorts of good things. But there’s a whole class of bad things (usually genocidal type things, but also human abuses, etc) that seem to almost exclusively exist under religious justifications.
You think that nazism is always bad and you can deduce that when a nazi does something good they do it ‘despite’ being nazi. Then you claim the same for religious people. Do you really think the two cases are the same? I will now list a bunch or religious people who mean a great deal to me, and whose work can not be disengaged from being religious: Ferdinand Ebner, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenczweig, Franz Kafka, Jakob Böhme, Endre Ady, Béla Tábor, and I could go on and on. I could not mention one single nazi who means a great deal to me and for somewhat respectable but still somewhat racist people I can always disengage their racism from why they are important to me. So clearly for me the two cases are not paralell. I wonder if you are truly sure that they are parallel for you.
I accept your proposition to make bigoted a technical word. I am too intolerant towards nazis. And I am also intolerant towards various forms of religious zeals.
I think the biggest trickiness of this whole topic comes from the fact that it is indeed not so black and white. To clarify my stance, I cannot deny that there are people who did good acts in a way that can only be attributed to religion, and that they would not have done without religion. We have the following qualities: (good person, bad person) and how they’re done (independently of religion/lack of religion, because of religion, because of lack of religion), and thus 6 total classes of people to investigate.
Just to quickly clarify an ambiguity here, I guess we could have more classes for “good ONLY because of religion” vs “good because of religion in reality, but hypothetically we expect they would have been good without it”. But for the sake of simplicity it seems like we can lump that second type in with the “independently of religion” quality.
Definitely anyone who argues that the class of “Good Person Only Because Of Religion” is empty is being totally insane. There’s a hefty amount of people in this category. I don’t know all the people you listed, but I’m fine saying for sake of argument that they are all in it - although I imagine you’d agree some of them may have been good people and some things even if religion didn’t exist? But I’d like to go in whatever direction you think makes your argument strongest.
Likewise, anyone who argues that the “Bad Person Only Because Of Lack Of Religion” category is empty is also being really biased. I’m sure there are plenty of people who have committed atrocities because “God doesn’t exist so I can do whatever I can get away with”, etc.
I think what’s at stake here is, firstly, the relative sizes of these classes, and secondly, whether their relative size is a historical coincidence or an intrinsic result of something about religiosity.
If the stakes are right, I’m not really sure how to proceed “rigorously”. It’s really a job for sociological studies, since there are enough humans that we could both list individual examples for a very long time - I’m sure we both agree that all 6 classes of people I described have at least a million members alive even just right now. It seems like the best we can do is make persuasive type arguments.
I can think of a few directions of arguments to make, so forgive me in advance if I’m scatterbrained. I’ll just write an idea of one:
Your examples of Good Because Of Religion people are outstanding, “great” people. Such people are not representative of the population as a whole. Perhaps for very outstanding people, religion is more likely to be beneficial. But when we look at how “the masses” (to use an elitist term) use religion to justify things, I usually see it for much more petty things like controlling one’s children, as a justification for condemning groups they just don’t like, as a justification for violence, etc. The role religion plays in the current American social situation is undoubtedly an example of this, and the same goes for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and much of the perpetual conflict in the Middle East in general. I am not aware of similar situations in the world right now that are not largely based on religious zealotry. Even from historical concepts, it seems religion is often used as a tool to manufacture mass consent for these things.
Which evidence?
All evidence, considering it’s based on BELIEF, and not the scientific method. Such as a wall killing a 200k+ army, when such an army would have been impossible in ancient times, and such a wall impossibly huge. The sheer bigoted bullshit that makes you a bad person just for believing in it.
ALL irrational beliefs are a plague on humanity, not just religion!
Would you believe something if it were demonstrated through the scientific method?
I don’t think that a wall could kill an army, regardless of the size of the wall or the army. This is because walls are inanimate objects. I feel like you’re leaving something out of this story.
Religion isn’t a belief. It’s a social construct. It includes beliefs, and those beliefs may be rational or irrational.
It had something to do with the Ark of the covenant or something. It just does not make sense to me, and the stakes of actually following through with abrahamic religions are dire. We are talking about gambling away your entire material existence, which you only get one of, on something better that probably does not exist. Regardless, I’m not having this battle with every single person again, I will just wait for AI to advance, which will pretty much deconstruct everything we do with ease soon. It just needs significantly larger context window probably.