reminder that every time people complain about wokeness they're literally just complaining about being conscious about systemic racism, because that's what woke means.
Just replace "woke" with "being a decent person" and it becomes pretty clear what these people want.
"Woke" started out as a simple acknowledgment that a person is conscious of the systemic oppression of various groups. Now the right wing has got its claws into the term it's been effectively neutered. Now all it means is, "stuff that right wingers don't like"
It's like "defund the police" which quickly became "abolish all policing".
It's a useful strategy for them and it works to prevent honest discussion on how to solve societal problems by preventing people from having a shared understanding of the language needed for such discussion.
Ugh, "defund the police" is a terrible phrase if you actually want the movement to succeed. I wish they would have gone with something along the lines of "police reform". Immediately every conservative glommed onto "now they want to abolish all police!"
We do need a massive overhaul to police. Unfortunately that means better marketing of the idea of it's going to happen.
I could be wrong but "defund the police" was just a discussion point for activists talking amongst themselves. In that context it makes sense. What happened was that this inelegant phrase was seized as a weapon by the right and then every Dem politician had to answer if they supported the idea of abolishing the police.
I'd imagine that many people would be receptive to the idea of taking some money out of police budgets so social workers and people trained in deescalation can be hired. For example cops aren't a good fit when dealing with people facing mental health crises because they mostly turn to use of force and make a bad situation worse.
If you twist this into, "are you in favor of abolishing all police?" then most people are going to say, "hell no, what a stupid idea, you moron".
Now any discussion about the rotten state of policing in the US had been effectively hobbled. Discussion is shut down. The right wing wins.
What happened was that this inelegant phrase was seized as a weapon by the right
I vividly remember tons of memes and posts on reddit, done in leftist grups by leftist people stating the sentence "defund the police". The right did manipulate the meaning, but saying that they were the sole perpetrators of the popularity of the phrase is silly.
How many in number, would you say? 100? 200?
In number? idk, about 1-3 a day that was on the top of r/all with tons of comments, iirc it was when the Floyd protest were happening, alongside the BLM movement (not the organization). I don't remember it too well, it's been 3 years already, but I do remember that it was a whole thing with posts, comments, memes and so on.
That makes more sense.
I know the real idea behind it. I just never liked it being summarized as defund. It's more like restructure. Personally, I would be much more aggressive with an overall. It's rotten top to bottom.
this inelegant phrase was seized as a weapon by the right
Were "the right" the ones at protests holding up hundreds of signs that said "defund the police"?
Unfortunately police reform doesn't necessarily imply taking police funds and diverting them to nonviolent responders instead. It's hard to make that into a catchy phrase that can't be misinterpreted. I could see cities implementing some rubber-stamp oversight board filled with ex-cops and saying, "see, we reformed the police! They have oversight now."
just about every police reform has failed to provide any independent oversight, failed to address the core problems, and generally just poured more money into the already bloated and militarized police force.
I like "unburden the police". Take away things that aren't actual policing. Cops don't need to be out there doing animal control for example.
For better or worse, that aspect is never going away. Places with less funds, like rural counties and cities, rely on their police to do everything that gets called in to 911 and isn't fire/ems/construction (which, thankfully, they have dedicated teams/people for).
I see that, but it doesn't mean that bigger cities couldn't have different departments handle it
Ugh, "defund the police" is a terrible phrase if you actually want the movement to succeed.
I feel like these are probably astroturfed movements. Because you can say the same thing about the "antiwork" movement, whose proponents claim to actually want to work.
The designation of your movement is kind of important.
I still have a hard time how “woke” is bad. Woke means your not asleep, it means you are not guided by others. How can people turn this into a bad thing. I’m proud to be woke.
Woke means that if you're in a privileged position in a society, more equality is a threat to your status and should be suppressed.
That’s the Bs meaning they’re giving. It’s like the way they change the definition of patriotism to match nationalism.
This is 100% correct. The term has no definition in their world, it is just another form of their "boogeyman" control methods to keep the stupid and scared engaged. It only works on these fearful idiots because of this fact.
Same happened to the terms "political correctness" and "social justice". The meaning gets twisted into something grotesque by think tanks and then it's shipped out to talking heads so Billy-Bob can regurgitate it at the water cooler.
Critical Race Theory, school libraries full of porn, caravans of migrants heading to the southern border, activist judges legislating from the bench, and so on.
Except activist judges legislating from the bench is real, and they seem to be the worst possible humans doing so. “Seem” being key.
You see, when justices make ruling based on personal rights of people conservatives hate then they are activists.
When they allow conservatives to stomp all over the rights of minorities then they are just using 'common sense' or something.
You’re not wrong and that’s sad.
"It’s like “defund the police” which quickly became “abolish all policing”."
It's actually the other way around. The radical demand got watered down but it didn't slow the fearmongeringbl even a little bit
Maybe? I don't have a definite timeline and there were lots of groups talking to each other.
acknowledgment that a person is conscious of the systemic oppression of various groups.
“stuff that right wingers don’t like”
theyre_the_same_picture.jpg
But yes. The right has polluted yet another word and tried to turn it into a pejorative.
Atheism is refusal of forced ideas upon someone. Which means one has to use critical thinking to determine their path in life. The problem is that it’s much harder to control the masses if that population thinks for themselves.
I honestly can't believe that using this word unironically has caught on. Everything I think is just a stupid joke on the internet turns out to be the internet reflecting just how idiotic humanity really is.
Either that, or just an unpleasant shock at just how 'mask-off' some people have become.
I’m going with the “mask off” probability.
Hey! It's "being a decent person in a way not sanctioned by their local culture". If you're decent to the correct people with enough pandering imagery that's fine.
Lots of 'woke' people are shitty people. I've had way too many experiences in the past few years with 'woke' people screaming at me about how I need to read more women authors or I'm a shitty awful human being. Or other equally absurd things, like I'm a bigot if I don't ask you what your pronoun is. If you have a pronoun preference, how about you tell me? Just like you tell someone how to pronounce your name if it's non-standard.
I know lots of progressive people, and I am progressive. But I would never say I am 'woke'. People who self-identify 'woke' tend to be mentally ill crazy people in my encounters, and use their politics as an excuse for abusive and hostile behavior just the way right-wing nazi nutbags do.
Hell I even had a transwoman assault me verbally one day while I was just reading a book in a cafe. Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I'm a white cis guy and I should give up my 'privileged' to her. I told her to f off. My small business has been harassed by 'woke' activists who demand we give them money or they will say we are anti-black/lgbt+, etc. That's not woke, that's blackmail.
Most 'woke' people I meet are basically 20 sometime trust-fund types who need a cause to give her their miserable lives purpose, because god knows they can't get their shit together and do something positive with their lives. If they did maybe they'd stop being such awful abusive people who threaten and harass others.
Hell I even had a transwoman assault me verbally one day while I was just reading a book in a cafe. Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I’m a white cis guy and I should give up my ‘privileged’ to her.
Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I’m a white cis guy and I should give up my ‘privileged’ to her.
I'll take "Things that never happened" for 600, Alex
Most of those people are the types to virtue signal because they know they benefit from an unjust system but won't work to dismantle it.
I've never known someone to identify as "woke".
Yea I don't believe any of this. =)
Hell I even had a transwoman assault me verbally one day while I was just reading a book in a cafe. Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I'm a white cis guy and I should give up my 'privileged' to her. I told her to f off. My small business has been harassed by 'woke' activists who demand we give them money or they will say we are anti-black/lgbt+, etc. That's not woke, that's blackmail.
That transwoman? Albertina Einstein.
You do sound like a shitty awful human being if I'm to be honest.
That's not woke, that's blackmail.
That's worse. That sort of shit turns ignorant and gullible people anti-LGBT and makes their already difficult lives even harder.
who need a cause to give her their miserable lives purpose
Tell them to fight global warming. It is the problem that makes all other problems all but irrelevant in comparison.
Lumping 'always' with 'sometimes' is cooking your results to meet your objective.
That was the most infuriating thing about this whole post to me. Elon's braindead take is on brand and expected at this point, but that chart (or worse, the reaserch behind it) is the true crime here.
I like how they count "Nothing", "No response", and "Other" as being separate religions so that the chart looks nore intimidating.
It’s by a right-wing / libertarian think tank. Spinning whatever bs they want.
Study is done by "TheFire.org," which is described as a competitor to the ACLU.
I know... why do we need a competitor to the ACLU?
Well, per Wikipedia: "FIRE has been described as a competitor of the ACLU. In 2021, the organization had an annual revenue of $16.1 million. FIRE has received major funding from groups which primarily support conservative and libertarian causes, including the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute."
This year’s survey includes 55,102 student respondents from 254 colleges and universities.[1] Students who were enrolled in four-year degree programs were surveyed via the College Pulse mobile app and web portal from January 13 to June 30, 2023
Kinda like being able to buy a 2024 Kiacarnival since July.
If this graph isn't just made up bs in the first place, one thought I recall from every major college campus I've been to is random religious preachers camped out every day telling everyone they're evil, subhuman, and going to hell. Guessing the atheists find that a little more annoying and worthy of shouting back at than some of the religiously inclined.
Nazi: "white power!"
Normal people: "hey, stfu!"
Cristian Conservatives: "hey I don't agree with it but let's hear him out. Some people might agree, his ideas deserve to be discussed and given a platform"
Alternatively:
Reasoned person: "We should help poor people"
Christian Conservatives: "STFU you woke liberal piece of shit, I hope you die! Go suck Biden's dick, loser"
Ahh yes a graph without citation of research, lovely
Let's go a step further and analyze exactly what this graph is saying:
There's only about a 20% distribution difference in the "never" sections between Christians and atheists. So on average, 4/5 atheists would answer the exact same as Christians. All this graph says is that Christians are barely more tolerant than people who identify as atheist. Barely is the key word. If anything, this graph proves that tolerance levels don't fluctuate that much for the individual between differing religions.
But Bible thumpers need any win they can get, so they don't read the data for what it is, they just see one bar longer than the other and declare victory.
I made a comment below, this is from a conservative research group funded by the remaining Koch brother, among other conservatives.
What does it mean to "Shout down a speaker"? What are they speaking about and what is the purpose of shouting at them?
When the hate preachers show up on campus with a bullhorn and try to tell everyone that they deserve to burn in hell, they don't want the reat of the world to tell them to STFU.
I see. If someone is yelling obscenities at you then its probably ok to yell at them too although I wouldn't bother personally. I don't think this poll can mean anything though as I imagine everyone has different understandings of what a "speaker" is and is doing.
I don't think this poll can mean anything
Given the obvious motivation of the person who posted it, I'd want to see some independent source before attributing any importance to it.
These open questions are always kinda crap to draw conclusions from because we don't know how the question was interpreted by the people answering. In this case we also don't know the sample size of the groups. Could also be a multitude of other variables at play like location because there are few places where you can find all these religions while getting a good sample size and controlling for other variables like income, education, age etc.
And does it apply only to verbal, podium speech, or also to written books and speech by people in [drag] costume.
They go to the lecture and just scream so that that person can't present. They don't allow the person to make their case or offer them any respect.
Bro these people stand in common areas shouting about how everyone is going to hell. They dont have a case and dont deserve any respect. If anything they deserve some counseling from a medical professional.
There seems to be an innate need for religion.
For whom? Because I sure as shit don't have any need to believe in fairy tales.
I think the biggest issue is religious people that can only view things through the lense of their own perspective equate any belief system with religion. And since we, as humans, categorize everything, everyone has a "belief system," even if you believe in absolutely nothing (nihilism).
So "atheism" is considered a religion, believing in the scientific method is a religion, and believing in the inherent and equal rights of people is a religion.
So much this.
My little brother is religious AF and I'm an atheist, and that whole tidbit was one of the more frustrating things to argue against.
He'd INSIST that if I didn't have faith in God, I must have faith in something, because it's human nature to believe.
It's like, naw bro, maybe that's just YOUR nature, but it's like he just couldn't think outside that type of thing.
it’s human nature to believe
This is why children never ask questions like "why". Not ever, not even a little bit. They just believe they understand and never even inquire.
I make my own up. There's a giant space crab coming to devour us all WORSHIP THEM
Thats just what people say when people want to categorize some idea as a religion. "wokeness" or even atheism itself is called a "religion" because it makes the religious feel better about believing in their own beliefs for which there is no basis.
For whom?
Generally the uneducated or low-iq who simply can't be educated. They don't understand science so to them it might as well be another religion. In that case why not pick the religion that gives them a nice afterlife? Something they can fall back on and blame when they make poor decision after poor decision.
On the most fundamental level: For everyone. That's because every world-view bogs down to a logical system and all logical systems are grounded in circular reasoning, paradox, or assumptions not provable in that system.
People believe in all kinds of things, e.g. that the judge who's sentencing you to prison is more than a human in fancy clothes. Or that the social reality that gives them that power doesn't exist. Both stances are, ultimately, insane, and so are we all.
EDIT: ITT: Cargo cultists not understanding what science is (a process) and isn't (proof of anything).
all logical systems are grounded in circular reasoning, paradox, or assumptions not provable in that system.
That's a hell of an assertion you have there. We have mathematical papers that prove 1+1=2. What logical system are you saying is grounded in circular reasoning, paradox, or assumptions? Because modern peer reviewed science sure isn't.
We have mathematical papers that prove 1+1=2
They postulate systems in which that is entailed. Generally, as we're speaking about maths, with assumptions (axioms) not provable in that system, mathematicians don't like basing things on circular or paradox stuff but ultimately that's a matter of taste, not what the system can express.
What logical system are you saying is grounded in circular reasoning, paradox, or assumptions?
All. Show me a proof of implication without using either, I'm waiting.
Because modern peer reviewed science sure isn’t.
It is based on the scientific method which can be understood as an algorithm which via Curry-Howard and Church is a logic which, well, see above. The universe might just as well be a Holtzmann brain and in exactly 15 seconds after you read this it's going to switch to a different dream, and you'll never know.
Now you may not like that we ultimately have nothing to stand on but that's your problem, not that of the universe. Or science. Don't shoot the messenger.
Is science a process or a world-view? That fact you apparently can't tell the difference is the problem here.
It's a process. Belief in it from a practical purpose is a world-view and also very sensible as that process being useful matches experience; it is a healthy adaptation of oneself to the surrounding circumstances. Belief in it from a "science knows truth and is the only source of truth" is, first of all, unscientific, secondly, a cargo cult. Science doesn't tell you shit about whether you should stick your dick in crazy and if it did it wouldn't tell you the same as your genes which is what you're going to listen to anyway, and find some rationalisation to dismiss that particular piece of science. And that's fine. We're all human.
Wait what's the difference between Atheist, No response, and Nothing?
Also why is there a generic Christian but then also Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox? But then they just Muslim and not it's different denominations? Why even have different denominations when you have the generic catch all and the Other category?
This graph categorization makes no sense!
Also unfair in the questioning. From my own experience im going to assume the person speaking at the campus is someone yelling how all are damned and calling women whores. Sadly, very few people other than atheists speak up.
Also why is there a generic Christian but then also Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox? But then they just Muslim and not it’s different denominations? Why even have different denominations when you have the generic catch all and the Other category?
There are kinds of Christian that don't fall under Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox by their own measure (which doesn't care how the Big Three want to categorize them). Perhaps this was why? (Probably not.) Graph should have just lumped them all together as "Christian".
Atheism are people who are activly against religion. Nothing are Irreligious people I assume. No Response are those who's religious identity are unknown. Could be any of the others or none of them.
Generally: atheists are those that say there are no gods and no goddesses. Agnostics tend to be more on the fence about it, making no claim either way.
But, as a rule, neither requires that someone is "against religion".
Gnosticism and theism are two different concepts and it infuriates me that every semi educated loser conflates them.
Just so you're aware, agnosticism and gnosticism are not the same. Wouldn't go calling anyone semi-educated and then use the wrong term, if I were you.
Agnosticism is the opposite of gnosticism. It's "not knowing" vs "knowing". Theism and atheism is "belief" or "not believing". Take me for instance, I'm an Agnostic Thiest. I believe there is a God, but I don't claim to know.
In the late 00s there was a New Atheism movement which was more than just not being religious, sometimes called "capital-A atheism." People conflate that with normal atheism sometimes. That movement split in the 2010s as culture war became more of a thing.
I've always thought that atheists are actively non theistic. Nothing would suggest there is no opinion formed to any conclusion.
I think you thought wrong lol. As an atheist I can assure you I don't give a shit what anyone else believes haha
Is there a difference between nontheism and atheism? If there is it's probably subtle.
Am atheist. Am not actively against religion. If it makes your life better and is also benefiting others (or at least its not a negative), have at it. I do not give a shit.
Yeah, I don't find any religion I've ever run across appealing, but I have no beef with those who do good under the umbrella of their religion and don't try to beat on others with it.
Atheist is literally "not theist" which would include nothing, none, agnostic (the belief that it's impossible to determine the existence or absence of, in this context, God). It could even be argued that people who believe in God but do not participate in theistic practices (eg lapsed Catholics) are atheists. It does not require or even imply some position against religion.
This isn't accurate though. In the most semantic, etymological sense perhaps. But atheism is widely understood to be the disbelief in deities. Agnosticism and atheism are very different. One is a position of belief (I cannot prove god doesn't exist, but I don't believe it to be so) and one is a position of ignorance (I cannot prove god does exist or doesn't exist).
Words, meanings and definitions are defined by who is interpreting them. This therefore means that the definition is whatever the majority believes it to be.
You may as well be looking at a field of flowers and describing them as gay. It may have been the appropriate term once, but it is not now. And we live now.
The etymology of the term is not the same as the meaning of the term.
Sitting there and prescribing that your interpretation of the term is the correct interpretation reminds me a lot of the tale of King cnut.
Basically, "every opinion I don't like is a religion."
even if it is a religion. So what? does that degrades it's value? what happened to them preaching about christian's tollerence?
if it was ever there.
I think calling Atheism a religion does degrade its value. It brings atheism into the same category as religion, it promotes the idea that atheists need just as much faith as religious people, it basically turns science into a religion.
Just to be clear, I define Atheism as "without belief in a God", that would include anyone saying they are agnostic.
How you define it is irrelevant. How is it defined in society? We can only trust to established dictionaries to track the usage and meaning of words.
The OED defines 'atheist' as 'a person who does not believe that God or gods exist'.
At least among most Atheists it's defined as lack of belief. It's also arguably the most correct definition based on the parts of the word itself.
Theist is usually defined as "with belief", so it makes sense that A-theist means without belief. Adding that A to another word usually means without, like asymptomatic (without symptoms) or amoral (without morals).
The same thing can be said with Agnostic, Gnostic is with knowledge, A-gnostic is without knowledge.
Agnostic/Gnostic answers the question of "do you have knowledge that a God exists". Atheist/Theist answers the question of "do you have belief that a God exists".
That's a great explanation of the terms. Thanks for that.
Given this, can you think of a word that would describe those who are hostile to the concept of a deity? Antitheist, perhaps?
No problem, It's interesting how differently the terms are used within and outside of the atheist community. I think it's also important to realize that most Atheists are going to have more certainty when it comes to a specific God not existing, compared to the general concept of a God. It's much more likely that some kind of God exists than the specific one of a given religion exists. Like I would personally put the general idea of a God existing at maybe 50% (like a God who created the universe and let nature take its course), but the specific God of a given religion that listens to your prayers at near 0%.
Antitheist is one term, I think the more common one in the same area would be Gnostic Atheist, which given my definitions from before would claim knowledge that gods don't exist.
As with anything there are always more sub categories, some go as far as to say knowledge of God is unknowable, or that no form of a God exists, but most seem to stick with Agnostic Atheist, or just Atheist.
I do know many Christians who are all about love and tolerance, the problem is, they aren't the ones going onto Fox News to declare they'll be shouting how much "Jesus loves you, but only if you're straight!" at your local university...
They're the ones quietly living their lives according to Jesus' teachings..
A few of these friends have taken to calling the kind of Christians the Alt-Right claims to be 'Xtians", for they have taken the "Christ" out of "Christians"
Heh... Xtians I like that.
Though technically X was Greek shorthand for Christ so Xtians means Christians just as Xmas means Christmas.
But I doubt any Xtians would know that so I think I'm going to start using it.
Well these are the same crowd that likes to chant keep Christ in christmas, because they are offended by Xmas and for some reason Santa claus, even though Saint Nicholas was a real person canonized by the Catholic Church
Yup. These people just want something to be angry about, so they aren't going to let facts get in the way of that.
Crosstians? They sure like to carry them and seem to be quite cross with the rest of society, fits for me.
Many of today's hard right xtians now complain that the things Jesus said sound overly "woke".
There were literally cases of Preachers being asked to stop teaching the Sermon on the Mount for being too "leftist"
True. I was raised in a religiously leftist household, and even as a child, when I first came across right wing xtians, I was legitimately confused by how they even exist. Our instruction was pointedly about reading the words of the character of Jesus (or for those too young to read, having it read to you) and boy is there a lot of stuff in there that I have no idea how the hard right xtians explain away.
Of course, there are the later writings from someone who never even MET the character of Jesus, which seem to be more problematic. I think it was RAW that said the people that seem to want to follow Paul more so than Jesus should really be called "Paulian", not xtians.
Of course, the OT and NT taken as a whole, and then trying to treat it as a cohesive message is a fool's errand and it quickly falls apart, but....
My dad converted from Christianity to Wicca, but he more or less had the same problem, you saw all of the relatives on his side of the family seemingly refusing to stand by everything they ever taught him.
As for the old and new testament, it really is a fruitless Endeavor to try to make sense of it without the proper background there's a lot of it requires a historical context or knowledge of alternate translations in order to make much sense. This is why theology is considered a science in and of itself, the science of studying religious texts.
Yeah, I have some extended family that was raised in the more liberal/red letter type of xtianity, only to later "rebel" by veering toward more authoritarian/right wing style of interpretations of "the" bible. Most of them are full maga now and don't resemble anything I was taught as the core of xtianity.
When it comes to trying to square the "old" and the "new", I think it's mostly in the eye of the beholder. A lot of xtians declare they have a "new covenant", so therefore, they can selectively decide what is not law and what isn't, especially when it comes to things like dietary laws being rejected. But there is that "not one jot or tittle" portion, and the position that the OT validates the claims made in the NT, so...not sure how they select what they will and will not follow. I think that's how absurdist things like voting on what is and what is not canon came about...
I watch all of that with a bit of amusement, I must say, much like I watch right wing Americans claim they want this country to follow xtianity and the Constitution, when right off the bat, the First Amendment and first commandment are in obvious conflict with one another...the First Amendment clearly lays out a secular country and the first commandment demonstrates that the god of "the" bible is a jealous god that won't tolerate anything else but complete devotion. No real way to square that circle without changing this country to something other than its intent, which means they will not be following the Constitution...
Or, another way of looking at it is, they're embrace of deceit and delusion means they periodically have to fabricate new imaginary dragons to slay. The problem with turning victimhood and grievance into a cult is that you need persecution for it to work. Hence, fabricating opposition. Wokeness is just a way for the elder elite to heap hate on the youth that will inevitably replace them. Constantly reminding everyone that you are a patriotic Christian is just a means to try to seize the higher ground for cultural warfare.
Wokeness is the new "politically correct" - just pure unadulterated nonsense to rile up the conspiracy theorists and Republicans (but I repeat myself). And they use it much like people were using "thanks Obama". If one of the cult stubs their toe, they can blame it on "wokeness" and also probably yell "thanks Obama!" now probably also followed up by "Let's Go Brandon!".
Personally, I didn't stop believing because of the intolerances. I stopped believing because it was an obvious ancient attempt to control people that worked to various degrees but still has the dumb shit people thought was plausible back when they didn't understand much and didn't think there was any way to disprove their claims.
I think that is most people, I just asked why is everyone automatically accepting this as true. But there are two groups of religious people that I understand moreso: people who feel they witnessed or directly saw a miracle and people who like the experience of a religious group and being around the people in it.
I have questions about this survey.
Me too, such as: why is there a separate category for "nothing", that is literally athiesm...
Not believing in it without any evidence? Wow, I bet youre one of the atheist the graph is talking about.
Getting infuriated over this stupid prick's bullshit, mildly or otherwise, just isn't worth it.
I love that he did a 100% 180 on everything he "believed in", from being pro science, atheist, and left leaning to anti science, christian, and conservative troll and none of his followers batted an eye. He does what he thinks is popular, what will keep him talked about. Nuts to that.
He's a narcissist to the extreme. The only thing he believes in is himself. And how sad a god it is.
Conservatives give him the love his father never did.
To be fair this is fake af, agnostics might question the person, but shouting out of stage without making questions first seems very odd for that specific category.
Cuz when you got to the point in life where you know you don't really know shit nothing you kinda are more tolerant to new ideas and new concepts I would guess
I don't need to ask a neo Nazi on a stage any questions first.
Sure we do, "who's your co conspirators?"
Oh yeah we’ve never had any problems with large atheist-run organized mass shootings 🙄
If you took an informed look on history, you'd realize that religious killings happen far more often and far more wide reaching than ones motivated by atheism.
Mother fucker up there acting like he ain't ever heard of the crusades, Spanish inquisition, Salem witch trials, or the genocide of the Buddhist population in tiabet to name a few, though the Buddhist population genocide could be argued as atheist since it was perpetrated by CCP who don't believe in most religions.
It's not an atheist genocide when it's not motivated by atheism. People can follow more than one doctrine. An ultra nationalist can go to church but an attack on foreigners would be a nationalist motive and not a Christian one.
It’s not an atheist genocide when it’s not motivated by atheism.
How would you define “motivated by atheism” here?
The desire to wipe out religious people in general and that was not a big thing in history. What's more common is the desire to wipe out "heretics".
And you’re acting like you never heard of the Holocaust, the GULAG, or the Great Leap Forward.
Oh no I quite have, no where did I say people wont find ways to kill each other. But religion isn't the bloodless doctrine it portrays itself to be. But since you mentioned the Holocaust it is arguable that was a religious motivated event as people saw Hitler as a infallible god. Nazi ism was their religion and nazis even messed with the occult.
Ooh interesting. So if there’s an infallible god we can count it as religion?
Oh really? What numbers would you attribute to religious versus atheist mass killings?
Which atheist mass killings were there? Racist killings by someone who happened to be an atheist don't count because the religion was not the driving force in those cases.
Also, what is the relation of "a speaker" to religion?
If somebody comes in to speak and starts talking about how we need to gas more jews, stop women from voting, and put the blacks back out in the cotton fields then fuck yeah I'm gonna support cutting them off and sending them packing.
The topic here is censoriousness. The relationship between a speaker and religion here is via censoriousness, and the reason for that is listed in the first sentence.
And? You could take the same data and say- "religious persons are less likely to speak out againstmessaging that potentially promotes harm" (likely also dependent on the religious affiliation of the messenger)
The preceding message that this makes atheists the more "intolerant" group is a pretty massive reach, consider that the messaging they may be against could in itself be one of intolerance as per my example.
Theres a few problems with this random graph. Wouldn't be surprised if it was just made up
It literally says 2024 ranking. That should be red flag #1.
The word woke lost all meaning due to far-right wingers constantly using it as a catch-all term for everything they don't like.
Also, I love how they made it so the top 3 bad guys are atheists, agnostics (which are pretty much the same thing) and the jewish. They're not even trying to be covert with propaganda.
Atheist are not the same thing as agnostics...
I mean they both don't have a definitive belief there is a god, one is just more certain than the other. But for classification purposes I would say they are different.
They are, however, “pretty much” the same thing.
Most self-described atheists are also agnostic. That is, they don’t claim to KNOW that they are right not to believe.
Most self-described agnostics are also atheists. That is, they are not theists.
Both can generally be described as agnostic atheists, as can most rational non believers.
They didn't say they were
Non-American here. What is Christian and why Catholic, protestant, and orthodox Christians are not Christians?
This doesn't make much sense
It's a tale as old as time, just like the Judean People's Front. Fucking splitters.
Because it's not enough to argue with Muslims and atheists, they need to be more right than other people who believe in the same God in different ways.
We have a very large christian population, and they all don't behave in a monolithic manner. For surveys it makes sense to ask which denomination or type of christian they are. Some will response Catholic, Baptist, Protestant. Some will respond christian, sometimes non-denominational christian. It improves the survey results. For example, you might find differences between Catholics and Baptists that wouldn't show up if you grouped them all together under a christian category.
It's a horrible graph. Likely they meant 'evangelical protestant' to differentiate that group from protestants like Lutherans Methodists Anglicans etc.
Oh American christianity is something different as a whole.
I'll give my best summary in as few words as I can during my lunch.
Christianity is an Abrahamic faith with its roots in catholicism. When Martin Luther, a catholic from Germany, wrote a large 95 point thesis detailing his problems with catholicism and how the church had been warped from its intention, this lead to whay most modern Americans would call Lutheranism.
This reformation of the church that started with Martin Luther is known as the Protestant Reformation, protestants being anyone who believed in Christ but not in the orthodox or catholic belief set and rites.
The separation of that faith and the pursuit to practice it openly (sometimes even if it was MORE restrictive than the existing systems) led to the exodus of religious groups to America. This is where some Americans get the idea that "america was founded on Christianity and religious freedom", as these were protestants who were escaping religious persecution for rejecting mainline catholicism.
Some time down the line, I don't know the history of this part, the general term for anyone believing in christ but not catholicism (some going as far as saying lutheranism is catholic-lite as they still practiced communion and most protestants don't recognize communion or any of the 'rites' as those are things they see as placed on top of religion by man and not by God) was just left at Christians.
For all intents and purposes, in the US, Christian mostly means Protestant, methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Southern Baptist (they're separate, I was raised Southern Baptist, they get pissy about being lumped in), calvinist, and non-denominational (people who don't claim a 'branch' but worship christ in a way not easily or intentionally not tied to a singular rhetoric.
Please ask more questions and I'll try my best. Having been born to a Southern Baptist family, it's a topic I love to discuss and learn more on. I'm not religious though, so hopefully none of my stuff comes off disrespectful, just happens to be a family trade I can't quite put down.
Thanks for taking the time to reply! But why are Christians and protestants separated in the figure?
Oh that I couldn't answer. They probably are referencing a study where those options were listed. A lot of practicing Christians I know aren't even positive what they declare so they just put down non-denominational, I'm assuming 'Christian' was another good catch-all term that nabbed anyone who had a general belief in Christ but no organized practice of that belief.
Don't forget adventist, pentecostalism, lutheranism, etc. There's dozens of christians religions in the USA that may hate each others. This doesn’t make much sense.
Shit in my comment I forgot all about Adventists and pentecostal. Oh jeez, let's hope the singular group that makes it to heaven takes mercy on my failure to include them.
Because they all seem to think their beliefs are the true beliefs of what the Bible teaches. They will always be at war with one another.
The “teachings” of the Bible are all based on how one person interprets it compared to another, the individual churches all believe the same version as they were taught by their religious leaders, who in turn believe their ultimate religious leader, for example the Catholic Church (all variations) follow the pope and his interpretation.
Well, it seems the same ding-a-lings claiming agnosticism and atheism are religions are also prone to claiming science is a "religion", following evidence is a "religion", and so on...
By lumping them all into the same category, it gives credibility to "religion".
When you have a panel where "A priest, a rabbi, and a mullah discus spirituality", it's a level playing field, everyone is just there to compare notes on their LARPing rules.
If an atheist or a scientist join the panel, you now have an emperors new clothes situation, "Yeah, I don't have all the answers, but more importantly, neither do they, and I'm not claiming to. Here are the facts and evidence as it is currently understood, and what that might mean".
When you call atheism or science or woke a religion, they are trying to trap you by saying "ha! Your belief is just as meaningless as I mine is! We're all equal and subjective rules apply".
I try to refer to things as simply dogmatic. Some people have replaced religion with other things, but that doesn't make them a religion. People beg for authority.
New Atheism is insanely dogmatic, but it's not the same as Atheism, and has been criticized by Atheists who classify "New Atheism" as being akin to a hate-group
and Scientism is a school of philosophy, albeit one that's mocked relentlessly (Basically, the philosophy that everything that is real can be measured, and if it can't be measured it isn't real)
But... that's as close as I'd get to describing Science or Atheism as religions....
I say this as an agnostic person for the record.
I'd like to understand what the definition of what "New Atheism" is. I know there have been a few tempest in a teapots over certain individuals [1] and their behavior; nothing about atheism - new or otherwise - seems to require them to behave like some individuals have, as far as I know. I also have no idea how this set of (non) beliefs would make them a hate group.
[1] thunderf00t, for example. I also know plenty of people that go crazy over the mere mention of, say, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens. Not sure if those guys are who we are talking about here.
Basically anyone who tries to militarize rationalism as a movement or tries to use science as a religion... very often these turn into misogyny, bigotry, and pseudoscience
Those three are specifically infamous as Sam Harris uses pseudoscience to justify a lack of belief in free will as straight up fact and white washes Buddhism to be "Like Atheism, but you meditate!"... but his open hostility to the religious is concerning as he literally writes in his book The End of Faith that the world would only be safe if a preemptive nuke was dropped on the middle east.
Sam Harris also parrots the talking points of Jordan Peterson and features him regularly on his podcast
Richard Dawkins is a transphobic asshole who compared transpeople to black face, shrugged off a woman being sexually assaulted at his conference as "She should be grateful, a muslim would have done worse" (a scandal known as Elevatorgate) also engages in pseudoscience to push his "Memetics" nonsense
Hitchens is the least horrible of the three, but that's only because he was dead long before Dawkins and Harris went fully radical.
Christopher Hitchens mainly wrote a bunch of books painting Christianity in a bad light.. that itself is fine.. the issue is he'd often fabricate evidence. One well known case of this; claiming Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher famous for coming up with what many theist still believe is the best evidence for god, was a "man of one book" and using cherry picked qoutes to justify it.. even though Aquinas actually warned against zealots and the full version of the original qoute was actually telling people to be wary of men of "only one book" for there was more to understand the world and God than simply the bible.
Hitchens is also responsible for the clickbait articles claiming Mother Theresa was a monster, making various accusations of her laundering money from charity with no evidence, taking quotes from her on suffering out of context to make her look like a masochist, berating her for refusing to use morphine (despite operating in India, a
ountry where morphine was illegal even for medical use) and bizzarely claimed her hospices were actually hospitals. When not only were they hospices but she basically invented the concept at a time when bedside manner was basically unheard of in professional medicine.
Many of these bogus and heavily debunked claims are from the book "Hell's Angel" which Hitchens wrote.
The cherry on top was Hitchens actually claimed the Catholic Church was trying to stop him from bad-mouthing Mother Theresa out of fear he would "give away their game".. when the opposite was true, they literally invited him to the Vatican to speak out against her canonization as it is tradition that critics and skeptics of potiential saints be given a chance to make their case before anything final is decided.
While there are many great arguments for not believing in God or really any supernatural phenomena of any kind... these three are infamous for fabricating and weaponizing such arguments for personal gain.
What are the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) that require someone advocate for any of these things, though? You are saying these individuals behaved/are behaving badly - okay, let's assume that is true. What about irreligion would lead to any of that?
When you say they "militarize" rationalism, how have any of these people done that? All of them are still proponents of liberal democracies.
I was a new monasticist Christian who deconstructed during this whole atheism thing and can vouch for all of this. We read some of these atheism books in Bible studies because they were both prevalent and quite lazily written, like these "four horsemen" just didn't have a good grasp on philosophy. I even had an agnostic philosophy prof come to a Christian Bible study and explain some of the mainstream and competing views in philosophy about these subjects and it kind of validated how they weren't serious as philosophers. After I lost my whole social group when I lost my faith I decided to check out an atheist group, which I attended for a time, but there were always these people who loved these terrible arguments for atheism and even wanted to go evangelize door to door about atheism. The group split in to culture war factions and died shortly after I stopped attending in 2012. It was worth it because I met a few very dear friends from this endeavor, but we all agreed this whole thing was trash.
The fact that we actually have peopel trying to "Spread the good word of Atheism" and coming up with arguments so bad it almost makes God sound... likely... shows the problem was never faith, it was always man. If Religion never existed, humans would be just as awful, they'd just find different reasons to be just as horrible.
Yeah basically, concepts like "civil/civic religion" describe this well. It's like the set of shared beliefs a society uses to justify itself, similar to ideaology, and the best definition of ideaology I know is, "the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest." Like in one sense partisan politics in the US right now can be summarized as two factions of the same civil religion.
The thing that frustrated me with these atheists is they both view religion as man made and contingent on societies, yet they treated it as this trans-historical essential set of beliefs and practices in the same way the most fundamentalist religious sect would. Like take the dumbest most insane religious sects, that's how these atheists understood religion too. When you see religion as something actually socially constructed and embodying the time period, then you can actually understand it on a material level. These atheists think you can just take this concept of "religion" and cleave it away, because they think it's this separate thing. They view western history in this really reductive way like: 1. smart greeks and romans 2. religious bullshit and smart people are killed 3. enlightenment and secular society wins but the battle isn't yet won. None of them actually liked learning about history either unless it was to find out who the good guys/bad guys were in reference to religion, exact same as how fundamentalist sects understand history.
I wanna give you a medal for this write up
Why is there a "Nothing" under the beliefs? Wouldn't that fall under "Agnostic"?
As a 'no response'r, I'm not going to answer you
TIL, my belief that I have the right to call out bullshit when I see it is considered a religion now.
This also ignores that shouting at someone in no way infringes on their ability to speak. It's just something they don't like to happen. Ironically, much like women going to abortion clinics and getting shouted down and harassed, simply based on their religious belief that abortion is wrong. But whew, let's not apply logic to their beliefs...
Certain people can not imagine multiperspectivity, let alone understand or try it.
Always/sometimes is one answer? Isn't that incredibly awful survey taking practice? Also, is this about people's right to criticize public speakers? Because it seems like the pro free speech position is to let people criticize public speakers
This comment needs more attention. Sometimes I wash Lemmy had awards like Reddit to make important things visible.
Never would be allowing someone to scream racial slurs and ignoring it. Rarely and sometimes should be replaced with "it depends". Always probably means the same thing as sometimes since you aren't going to shout down a good speaker that you agree with. The whole survey doesn't make sense when you stop to think about it.
My guess is that it was two answers, but few answered always, so they combined the two in the chart to make the point they wanted to make.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this. Looks very "lying with statistics"!
Who the fuck knows. Stupid shit like this that barely even makes sense is why Elron is famed for being an incredibly pretentious but dim tool.
I thought the point of Atheism was to escape the alleged intolerant nature of religion.
No. Atheism has no point. It's merely the default, catch-all, left-over position. Anyone who isn't convinced any religion's gods are real, becomes an atheist automatically, simply for a lack of any other option.
The Jedi and Sith, are both atheist.
Religious people really don't understand atheism or agnosticism. It's not like we just have a coming out ceremony where we take a bible and burn it, it's just "You know, I don't know if I believe that god is real...". They make it out to be that we all gather in groups every sunday to talk about it... but we just sleep in. We don't usually even label ourselves because the label is itself irrelevant. We don't have a religion, that's it. You all believe in something, that's great, we don't. That's literally all there is to it.
I grew up in a cult. I totally had a coming out party.
TIL that >70% of christians/mormons/other-santa-for-adults-cults would not try to get rid of hatepreachers on campus. Wow. Bleak.
The speaker in question? Some right wing Christian lunatic!
How is being atheist and being woke even related? Is it one of those “god hate gays”?
like "states right"
states right to do what motherfucker?!
"It wasn't about slavery!"
Texas' articles of secession name slavery as a main cause twelve times. Georgia's calls abolitionism "heresy" and Mississippi, bless them, referred to it with "a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization," before going even further with such quotes as
[The US government] refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
Which I am only leaving here because somebody wrote that, meant it, and sent it off, and it is insane to read.
Fortunately for Mississippi, their constituents can't.
He’s not wrong in the sense that everyone has their own worldview, and humans need a worldview to process the immense amount of information we are exposed to on a daily basis. Some people incorporate organized religion into their worldview, while others do not.
Agreed. Where he is wrong is in equating “having a world-view” with “having a religion”. The two are not the same and it’s foolish in the extreme to suggest that they are.
Perhaps it’s not “having a world-view” he’s equating with it, but something more specific.
the two are not the same
The dictionary lists this for use #3 for religion:
”a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”
In this sense of the word, many people, including atheists, do have a religion deeply rooted in their worldview.
A concrete example is people who fervently believe that FOSS is the only good way to make software, and that proprietary software is evil. Many of those people are unwilling to even consider the merits of the latter. In this sense, those beliefs very much qualify as “religious” in this sense of the word.
No, this is bullshit. FOSS advocates don't have faith in the one true RMS or whatever you're trying to peddle here. They have a principled stance derived from logic. You're free to disagree with them, but you can't just paint them as religious because they have a stance you disagree with!
principled stance derived from logic
Those logical conclusions must inherently flow from philosophical axioms that comprise the person’s world view. Two of the most fundamental axioms that lead to supporting FOSS are not supported by everyone. Namely:
What is “good” exists independent of human convention (i.e. Kantian vs. Utilitarian ethical belief system)
Humans should endeavor to be morally good (i.e. Altruism vs. Egoism)
Those axioms cannot be logically derived from some fundamental truth - they must come from one’s own personal belief system, i.e. their “religion” (definition 3).
Someone following Kantian ethics and Altruism morality (whether or not they’re aware of the names) will probably end up favoring FOSS. Someone who has a more Utilitarian and Egoistic world view will probably be okay with proprietary software.
This is all kind of a moot point because I don’t think this sense of the word is what Musk was referring to - he was probably using it as sense 1 sarcastically and mockingly.
Those axioms cannot be logically derived from some fundamental truth - they must come from one’s own personal belief system, i.e. their “religion” (definition 3).
You're re-defining religion here, because even if fundamental axioms are arbitrarily chosen, it doesn't mean they are adhered to based on faith. I don't have faith in my principles. I think they are good due to the evidence I've seen for them, but if I saw evidence for problems with my fundamental axioms, I'd adopt new axioms. This is fundamentally different from believing in something due to faith.
it doesn't mean they are adhered to based on faith
If not “faith” then what? Note that “faith” doesn’t need to mean some higher power; it just needs to be something you believe without evidence. Any “evidence” you claim to have experienced to support your worldview must inherently be interpreted through an existing lens of one’s own world view, which circularly depends on one’s axioms. You fundamentally cannot have a worldview without some amount of faith in something.
More concretely, the only thing one can prove a priori is “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). Any further cognitive reasoning requires faith in one or more axioms about the world, e.g. “the world exists independent of my own perception”.
If not “faith” then what?
Because I haven't been convinced by something better. That's it.
Note that “faith” doesn’t need to mean some higher power; it just needs to be something you believe without evidence.
According to what definition? Let's look at Merriam Webster, since you're basing your whole argument around their definitions:
1
a
: allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY
lost faith in the company's president
b
(1)
: fidelity to one's promises
(2)
: sincerity of intentions
acted in good faith
2
a
(1)
: belief and trust in and loyalty to God
(2)
: belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion
b
(1)
: firm belief in something for which there is no proof
clinging to the faith that her missing son would one day return
(2)
: complete trust
3
: something that is believed especially with strong conviction
especially : a system of religious beliefs
the Protestant faith
None of these apply to me, or other FOSS advocates I know. I don't have a strong conviction towards my basic axioms, since as I said, I simply haven't come across better ones.
More concretely, the only thing one can prove a priori is “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). Any further cognitive reasoning requires faith in one or more axioms about the world, e.g. “the world exists independent of my own perception”.
And thus you completely devalue the terms "faith", "religion" etc., because according to you literally everything past "Cogito ergo sum" is faith. Every word you wrote is faith. Everything you think beyond your basic capability to think is faith. It's fine if you want to decide for yourself that this is how you view these words, but it's not how other people use them, because they simply have no utility the way you use them.
It's fine if you want to decide for yourself that this is how you view these words, but it's not how other people use them
Oxford English Dictionary:
faith: …. a strongly held belief or theory. "the faith that life will expand until it fills the universe"
Once again: my axioms are not strongly held beliefs. How often do I have to repeat this?
I have a degree in Philosophy. You are redefining words to make your argument. That's not how good arguments work.
I view it more like: don’t let proprietary software manufacturers fuck you over, not something about morality.
It’s conceivable but a stretch to say that some people have those beliefs to the extent of a religion. However to say they’re actually a religion would be simply bizarre… nobody thinks Richard Stallman created the earth or something.
Every religion is a belief system, but not every belief system a religion.
Every billionaire Elon Musk is an idiot, but not every idiot billionaire Elon Musk.
Go set theory!
Religion is a subset of the set of belief systems.
Elon Musk is a member of the set of billionaires. We could define a set with one member, Elon Musk. It would be a subset of billionaires.
If someone is yelling obscenities at you
All religion is obscene.
I know you're trolling and indeed fuck the rest, but..buddhist monks? Pretty hard to have beef with. No pun intended.
I guess you could make the case that encouraging indifference towards suffering breeds a whole different class of sociopathy, but even then, at least they're the least destructive they can possibly be by just never touching anything.
Depends on the monk. The shitty Buddhists in Myanmar support genocide.
Well. "Extremist" and "nationalist" were never words I thought I would see attached to the phrase buddhist monk, but here we are, I fucking guess. That's a thing that I know now.
I'm about to just eschew anything bipedal at this point. Two legs bad.
And on a related note, zen buddhists have a pretty vile subsect that is entwined with Japanese militarism and has been for centuries. However there are a lot of buddhists who are really good people, and lots of buddhist sects likewise. As with almost all religions, it depends on the particular flavor of ideology they have adopted.
I think the most impressive thing about this is that they were able to travel a year into the future to obtain the survey data.
School data is labeled by the school year in which it is collected, and the label is the ending year.
The 2024 school year is 7/1/2023 - 6/30/2024, so this was most likely collected within the last month or so after school started.
Tolerance for Conservative Speakers included four topics such as “Black Lives Matter is a hate group,” and “The lockdown orders issued in response to the coronavirus have infringed on our personal liberties.” When more students indicate that they would be willing to let such a person speak on campus, this indicates a more open free-speech climate.
No, that is a climate that promotes hate speech.
Seems to me that I should follow the religion of Nothing or No response. Because we all know that this a BS bar chart.
Aww, did someone get peer reviewed?
Why are you intolerant against my intolerance
Wow look at the near perfect Buddhism balance.
This is the (middle) way.
Purely depends on the speaker
Yeah obviously, but that was the point. Would you shout down any speaker
I mean if it was literally Hitler come back to life, sure.
They shouldn't have grouped "always" and "sometimes".
It means that people who are hard line anti religion and would yell at someone if they dared to express the tiniest support for a religion to people who would protest or yell at someone who is widely accepted as bad.
Some replace various religions with a worship of money. Usually they are better at managing it.
How much has the 'X' formerly known as Twitter lost, btw?
I originally perceived this as if the religion of the speaker was x, results were how likely they'd be essentially boo'd. I don't get much shit for being an atheist lately, but depending on the peer group it can get a little..dicey.
Just try and ignore anything this antagonistic fool/troll says and your life will be better off.
I think most would cite something like the paradox of intolerance - you need a bit of intolerance of intolerance to sustain any tolerance.
I bet the Christian stat would have been higher in the past too, when they were on the front foot and the controversial speaker was less likely to be someone they agreed with.
I would cite that shouting back is also free speech
We are not censorious. We are just tired of hearing the same predatory bullshit over and over again.
Religion is harmful to people and atheism isn't. Do these people complain when someone shuts down a speaker who advocates having sex with young children? No? Then shut the hell up and let us kill religion like it should have been centuries ago.
I shout at people all day everyday and they still talk to me
If "woke" hadn't become a political buzzword, would Elon have said what that refrain used to be? As in, would he also have said that atheists just replaced god with the worship of science? Absolute stupidity and smooth brainery regardless
How is Jewish so low?? History doesn't repeat, I still hope it doesn't rhyme either.
You shout nazis out of town. Why is that a bad thing?
Sorry I'm stupid or tired or something. I misread the graph to mean that those people should be shout down but they are the people who were asked which makes a lot more sense
FIRE files lawsuits against colleges and universities that it perceives as curtailing First Amendment rights of students and professors. FIRE has been described as a competitor of the ACLU. In 2021, the organization had an annual revenue of $16.1 million. ...
FIRE has received major funding from groups which primarily support conservative and libertarian causes, including the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation\_for\_Individual\_Rights\_and\_Expression
I mean, it's been proven that humans have a psychological need for religion, but....
Wokeness? A religion?
Eh at worst you have companies overcompensating to avoid seeming racist or sexist... and you have tankies taking it too far and claiming everything is imperialist bullshit, but that's hardly a new phenomenon... Hippies of yesteryear did similar.
But again, worst case scenarios.
There's nothing wrong with saying "Maybe you shouldn't speak here, or, anywhere really?" if a guy is literally going to Colleges to give seminars on how "Hitler did nothing wrong, and maybe transpeople, and not the constantly crashing economy and the blatant failure of trickle down... are to blame for all of your problems."
I remember when being "Woke" had positive connotations, but the Right Wing ruins everything.
If humans have a need for religion then how do atheists exist?
Do you have a link for that? Not sure I believe that
It's good to be skeptical, afterall, a sourceless claim isn't worth much.
It's why you see a shrinking number of people going to church, yet seemingly paradoxical more cases of atheists going to church "For the sense of community"
Evolutionary speaking, If there really isn't a god, that's terrible news for human race. In fact the only thing keeping me believing that there might be is being fully Lucid of the horror of a Godless universe.
I can find no optimism in that
Why would there not being a god be a bad thing?
It makes me proud that humanity clawed our way through stages of evolution and was capable of getting where we are now without the need of some overseeing being controlling us like puppets.
If you see someone do good, it means they themselves did that. They chose to help, and not because some authority told them to, but because they are good inside.
Of course, if the fear of being punished is the only thing keeping you from doing harm, then please stay a believer. But the big majority of people do not need that to stay a decent human being.
I believe I already told you that I am agnostic, I do not claim to know for certain if God does or does not exist. However I doubt that he does. And I consider a universe without God to be terrifying more so than being punished by God for failure to act in a certain way. The problem with they're not being a god, is that mean this world is all we get, it is our one chance to do anything, and nothing we do will ever be remembered not even by us. Because in a world without the Supernatural death does not mean that it just goes black, it doesn't go anything. You just stop existing.
"Woke" is still positive - that's why the right wing hates it.
Not really now the connotation is more connected to the kind of out of touch corporation that thinks progress is just calling yourself "they/them" and trying to appeal to minorities and lgbt persons in ways more offense than just using slurs. (Remember Q Force?)
Or the kind of weekend warrior who thinks cancelling people over Twitter because every other word is a dog whistle. When if they really wanted to be part of the solution and not the problem they'd have abandoned twitter in favor of Mastodon by now.
Btw Hexbear is FULL of the latter.. had a gang cherry picking my posts to claim I was a pedo and a Nazi by warping a few out of context and connecting unrelated posts.... so unpleasant
Basically if you're woke now it means you're an out of touch white guy getting offended on behalf of minorities who weren't even slightly offended to begin with.
It used to mean that you were aware that society's problems are caused by the blatant greed of the rich, not the perceived laziness of the poor.
These things happen. They call it the euphemism treadmill, sometimes the meanings of words shift and what was a compliment becomes an insult and vice versa
Kind of like how "Person of Color" and "Queer" used to be slurs, the R word used to be a medical term, and the three letter F word used to be a schoolyard insult instead of "The N Word for gays"
𝕏
Dogmatic worldviews don't need to be theistic
"Atheism" has been appropriated by people with a grudge against religion who wants to destroy it at all costs, and convert all practitionerd of religion to atheism. So, armchair crusaders.
The fact that atheism is another belief system is true (none of us is out there proving shit because it can't be proved, both ways), but calling it wokeness and a religion makes you look like the dumbass you are, Elon.
Atheism just means that you have yet to find a reason to believe in God or some higher power. It is not a belief system, it is a lack of reason to believe in any belief system.
Atheism is the denial of god's existence, a-theism, and since you have no way to prove that there's no god (the same way there's no way of proving that there is), you believe that your version of the story is the correct one.
it is a lack of reason to believe in any belief system.
You believe all the things you think are true but can't prove.
I don't really want this to devolve into an argument, since I get that this way of thinking holds no practical purpouse, so if you think that it's too philosophical, that's okay.
If something makes absolutely no sense logically and there is zero proof for something and a few tonns of evidence against it (not talking about god but rather every single big religion) it's a rational decition not to believe in it, well that and not every believe is religous...
reminder that every time people complain about wokeness they're literally just complaining about being conscious about systemic racism, because that's what woke means.
Just replace "woke" with "being a decent person" and it becomes pretty clear what these people want.
"Woke" started out as a simple acknowledgment that a person is conscious of the systemic oppression of various groups. Now the right wing has got its claws into the term it's been effectively neutered. Now all it means is, "stuff that right wingers don't like"
It's like "defund the police" which quickly became "abolish all policing".
It's a useful strategy for them and it works to prevent honest discussion on how to solve societal problems by preventing people from having a shared understanding of the language needed for such discussion.
Ugh, "defund the police" is a terrible phrase if you actually want the movement to succeed. I wish they would have gone with something along the lines of "police reform". Immediately every conservative glommed onto "now they want to abolish all police!"
We do need a massive overhaul to police. Unfortunately that means better marketing of the idea of it's going to happen.
I could be wrong but "defund the police" was just a discussion point for activists talking amongst themselves. In that context it makes sense. What happened was that this inelegant phrase was seized as a weapon by the right and then every Dem politician had to answer if they supported the idea of abolishing the police.
I'd imagine that many people would be receptive to the idea of taking some money out of police budgets so social workers and people trained in deescalation can be hired. For example cops aren't a good fit when dealing with people facing mental health crises because they mostly turn to use of force and make a bad situation worse.
If you twist this into, "are you in favor of abolishing all police?" then most people are going to say, "hell no, what a stupid idea, you moron".
Now any discussion about the rotten state of policing in the US had been effectively hobbled. Discussion is shut down. The right wing wins.
I vividly remember tons of memes and posts on reddit, done in leftist grups by leftist people stating the sentence "defund the police". The right did manipulate the meaning, but saying that they were the sole perpetrators of the popularity of the phrase is silly.
How many in number, would you say? 100? 200?
In number? idk, about 1-3 a day that was on the top of r/all with tons of comments, iirc it was when the Floyd protest were happening, alongside the BLM movement (not the organization). I don't remember it too well, it's been 3 years already, but I do remember that it was a whole thing with posts, comments, memes and so on.
That makes more sense.
I know the real idea behind it. I just never liked it being summarized as defund. It's more like restructure. Personally, I would be much more aggressive with an overall. It's rotten top to bottom.
Were "the right" the ones at protests holding up hundreds of signs that said "defund the police"?
Unfortunately police reform doesn't necessarily imply taking police funds and diverting them to nonviolent responders instead. It's hard to make that into a catchy phrase that can't be misinterpreted. I could see cities implementing some rubber-stamp oversight board filled with ex-cops and saying, "see, we reformed the police! They have oversight now."
just about every police reform has failed to provide any independent oversight, failed to address the core problems, and generally just poured more money into the already bloated and militarized police force.
I like "unburden the police". Take away things that aren't actual policing. Cops don't need to be out there doing animal control for example.
For better or worse, that aspect is never going away. Places with less funds, like rural counties and cities, rely on their police to do everything that gets called in to 911 and isn't fire/ems/construction (which, thankfully, they have dedicated teams/people for).
I see that, but it doesn't mean that bigger cities couldn't have different departments handle it
I feel like these are probably astroturfed movements. Because you can say the same thing about the "antiwork" movement, whose proponents claim to actually want to work.
The designation of your movement is kind of important.
I still have a hard time how “woke” is bad. Woke means your not asleep, it means you are not guided by others. How can people turn this into a bad thing. I’m proud to be woke.
Woke means that if you're in a privileged position in a society, more equality is a threat to your status and should be suppressed.
That’s the Bs meaning they’re giving. It’s like the way they change the definition of patriotism to match nationalism.
This is 100% correct. The term has no definition in their world, it is just another form of their "boogeyman" control methods to keep the stupid and scared engaged. It only works on these fearful idiots because of this fact.
Same happened to the terms "political correctness" and "social justice". The meaning gets twisted into something grotesque by think tanks and then it's shipped out to talking heads so Billy-Bob can regurgitate it at the water cooler.
Critical Race Theory, school libraries full of porn, caravans of migrants heading to the southern border, activist judges legislating from the bench, and so on.
Except activist judges legislating from the bench is real, and they seem to be the worst possible humans doing so. “Seem” being key.
You see, when justices make ruling based on personal rights of people conservatives hate then they are activists.
When they allow conservatives to stomp all over the rights of minorities then they are just using 'common sense' or something.
You’re not wrong and that’s sad.
"It’s like “defund the police” which quickly became “abolish all policing”."
It's actually the other way around. The radical demand got watered down but it didn't slow the fearmongeringbl even a little bit
Maybe? I don't have a definite timeline and there were lots of groups talking to each other.
theyre_the_same_picture.jpg
But yes. The right has polluted yet another word and tried to turn it into a pejorative.
Atheism is refusal of forced ideas upon someone. Which means one has to use critical thinking to determine their path in life. The problem is that it’s much harder to control the masses if that population thinks for themselves.
I honestly can't believe that using this word unironically has caught on. Everything I think is just a stupid joke on the internet turns out to be the internet reflecting just how idiotic humanity really is.
Either that, or just an unpleasant shock at just how 'mask-off' some people have become.
I’m going with the “mask off” probability.
Hey! It's "being a decent person in a way not sanctioned by their local culture". If you're decent to the correct people with enough pandering imagery that's fine.
Lots of 'woke' people are shitty people. I've had way too many experiences in the past few years with 'woke' people screaming at me about how I need to read more women authors or I'm a shitty awful human being. Or other equally absurd things, like I'm a bigot if I don't ask you what your pronoun is. If you have a pronoun preference, how about you tell me? Just like you tell someone how to pronounce your name if it's non-standard.
I know lots of progressive people, and I am progressive. But I would never say I am 'woke'. People who self-identify 'woke' tend to be mentally ill crazy people in my encounters, and use their politics as an excuse for abusive and hostile behavior just the way right-wing nazi nutbags do.
Hell I even had a transwoman assault me verbally one day while I was just reading a book in a cafe. Comes up to me and demands that I give her my table because I'm a white cis guy and I should give up my 'privileged' to her. I told her to f off. My small business has been harassed by 'woke' activists who demand we give them money or they will say we are anti-black/lgbt+, etc. That's not woke, that's blackmail.
Most 'woke' people I meet are basically 20 sometime trust-fund types who need a cause to give her their miserable lives purpose, because god knows they can't get their shit together and do something positive with their lives. If they did maybe they'd stop being such awful abusive people who threaten and harass others.
I'm betting this never happened.
I'll take "Things that never happened" for 600, Alex
Most of those people are the types to virtue signal because they know they benefit from an unjust system but won't work to dismantle it.
I've never known someone to identify as "woke".
Yea I don't believe any of this. =)
That transwoman? Albertina Einstein.
You do sound like a shitty awful human being if I'm to be honest.
That's worse. That sort of shit turns ignorant and gullible people anti-LGBT and makes their already difficult lives even harder.
Tell them to fight global warming. It is the problem that makes all other problems all but irrelevant in comparison.
Except woke people aren't decent. Some woke people have good intentions, sure, but they aren't decent. Being woke means being evil.
this is actually incoherent
I have mixed feelings about Lemmy still being so small that I can recognize usernames and think, "oh, there's that nut job again"
One of these days, I'll pay attention to usernames. It didn't happen on Reddit for over a decade, but you never know.
Well, do explain then.
Haha oh yeah I've seen your around. Fuck off.
Lumping 'always' with 'sometimes' is cooking your results to meet your objective.
That was the most infuriating thing about this whole post to me. Elon's braindead take is on brand and expected at this point, but that chart (or worse, the reaserch behind it) is the true crime here.
I like how they count "Nothing", "No response", and "Other" as being separate religions so that the chart looks nore intimidating.
It’s by a right-wing / libertarian think tank. Spinning whatever bs they want.
Study is done by "TheFire.org," which is described as a competitor to the ACLU.
I know... why do we need a competitor to the ACLU?
Well, per Wikipedia: "FIRE has been described as a competitor of the ACLU. In 2021, the organization had an annual revenue of $16.1 million. FIRE has received major funding from groups which primarily support conservative and libertarian causes, including the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute."
Oh Charles Koch, you scoundrel.
They have unmatched methods. Is there any other place on the internet with 2024 college free speech rankings?
Fwiw, they do explain:
Kinda like being able to buy a 2024 Kiacarnival since July.
If this graph isn't just made up bs in the first place, one thought I recall from every major college campus I've been to is random religious preachers camped out every day telling everyone they're evil, subhuman, and going to hell. Guessing the atheists find that a little more annoying and worthy of shouting back at than some of the religiously inclined.
Nazi: "white power!" Normal people: "hey, stfu!" Cristian Conservatives: "hey I don't agree with it but let's hear him out. Some people might agree, his ideas deserve to be discussed and given a platform"
Alternatively:
Reasoned person: "We should help poor people"
Christian Conservatives: "STFU you woke liberal piece of shit, I hope you die! Go suck Biden's dick, loser"
Ahh yes a graph without citation of research, lovely
Let's go a step further and analyze exactly what this graph is saying:
There's only about a 20% distribution difference in the "never" sections between Christians and atheists. So on average, 4/5 atheists would answer the exact same as Christians. All this graph says is that Christians are barely more tolerant than people who identify as atheist. Barely is the key word. If anything, this graph proves that tolerance levels don't fluctuate that much for the individual between differing religions.
But Bible thumpers need any win they can get, so they don't read the data for what it is, they just see one bar longer than the other and declare victory.
I made a comment below, this is from a conservative research group funded by the remaining Koch brother, among other conservatives.
What does it mean to "Shout down a speaker"? What are they speaking about and what is the purpose of shouting at them?
When the hate preachers show up on campus with a bullhorn and try to tell everyone that they deserve to burn in hell, they don't want the reat of the world to tell them to STFU.
I see. If someone is yelling obscenities at you then its probably ok to yell at them too although I wouldn't bother personally. I don't think this poll can mean anything though as I imagine everyone has different understandings of what a "speaker" is and is doing.
Given the obvious motivation of the person who posted it, I'd want to see some independent source before attributing any importance to it.
These open questions are always kinda crap to draw conclusions from because we don't know how the question was interpreted by the people answering. In this case we also don't know the sample size of the groups. Could also be a multitude of other variables at play like location because there are few places where you can find all these religions while getting a good sample size and controlling for other variables like income, education, age etc.
And does it apply only to verbal, podium speech, or also to written books and speech by people in [drag] costume.
They go to the lecture and just scream so that that person can't present. They don't allow the person to make their case or offer them any respect.
Bro these people stand in common areas shouting about how everyone is going to hell. They dont have a case and dont deserve any respect. If anything they deserve some counseling from a medical professional.
For whom? Because I sure as shit don't have any need to believe in fairy tales.
I think the biggest issue is religious people that can only view things through the lense of their own perspective equate any belief system with religion. And since we, as humans, categorize everything, everyone has a "belief system," even if you believe in absolutely nothing (nihilism).
So "atheism" is considered a religion, believing in the scientific method is a religion, and believing in the inherent and equal rights of people is a religion.
So much this.
My little brother is religious AF and I'm an atheist, and that whole tidbit was one of the more frustrating things to argue against.
He'd INSIST that if I didn't have faith in God, I must have faith in something, because it's human nature to believe.
It's like, naw bro, maybe that's just YOUR nature, but it's like he just couldn't think outside that type of thing.
This is why children never ask questions like "why". Not ever, not even a little bit. They just believe they understand and never even inquire.
I make my own up. There's a giant space crab coming to devour us all WORSHIP THEM
Thats just what people say when people want to categorize some idea as a religion. "wokeness" or even atheism itself is called a "religion" because it makes the religious feel better about believing in their own beliefs for which there is no basis.
Generally the uneducated or low-iq who simply can't be educated. They don't understand science so to them it might as well be another religion. In that case why not pick the religion that gives them a nice afterlife? Something they can fall back on and blame when they make poor decision after poor decision.
On the most fundamental level: For everyone. That's because every world-view bogs down to a logical system and all logical systems are grounded in circular reasoning, paradox, or assumptions not provable in that system.
People believe in all kinds of things, e.g. that the judge who's sentencing you to prison is more than a human in fancy clothes. Or that the social reality that gives them that power doesn't exist. Both stances are, ultimately, insane, and so are we all.
EDIT: ITT: Cargo cultists not understanding what science is (a process) and isn't (proof of anything).
That's a hell of an assertion you have there. We have mathematical papers that prove 1+1=2. What logical system are you saying is grounded in circular reasoning, paradox, or assumptions? Because modern peer reviewed science sure isn't.
They postulate systems in which that is entailed. Generally, as we're speaking about maths, with assumptions (axioms) not provable in that system, mathematicians don't like basing things on circular or paradox stuff but ultimately that's a matter of taste, not what the system can express.
All. Show me a proof of implication without using either, I'm waiting.
It is based on the scientific method which can be understood as an algorithm which via Curry-Howard and Church is a logic which, well, see above. The universe might just as well be a Holtzmann brain and in exactly 15 seconds after you read this it's going to switch to a different dream, and you'll never know.
Now you may not like that we ultimately have nothing to stand on but that's your problem, not that of the universe. Or science. Don't shoot the messenger.
Is science a process or a world-view? That fact you apparently can't tell the difference is the problem here.
It's a process. Belief in it from a practical purpose is a world-view and also very sensible as that process being useful matches experience; it is a healthy adaptation of oneself to the surrounding circumstances. Belief in it from a "science knows truth and is the only source of truth" is, first of all, unscientific, secondly, a cargo cult. Science doesn't tell you shit about whether you should stick your dick in crazy and if it did it wouldn't tell you the same as your genes which is what you're going to listen to anyway, and find some rationalisation to dismiss that particular piece of science. And that's fine. We're all human.
Wait what's the difference between Atheist, No response, and Nothing?
Also why is there a generic Christian but then also Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox? But then they just Muslim and not it's different denominations? Why even have different denominations when you have the generic catch all and the Other category?
This graph categorization makes no sense!
Also unfair in the questioning. From my own experience im going to assume the person speaking at the campus is someone yelling how all are damned and calling women whores. Sadly, very few people other than atheists speak up.
There are kinds of Christian that don't fall under Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox by their own measure (which doesn't care how the Big Three want to categorize them). Perhaps this was why? (Probably not.) Graph should have just lumped them all together as "Christian".
Atheism are people who are activly against religion. Nothing are Irreligious people I assume. No Response are those who's religious identity are unknown. Could be any of the others or none of them.
Generally: atheists are those that say there are no gods and no goddesses. Agnostics tend to be more on the fence about it, making no claim either way.
But, as a rule, neither requires that someone is "against religion".
Gnosticism and theism are two different concepts and it infuriates me that every semi educated loser conflates them.
Just so you're aware, agnosticism and gnosticism are not the same. Wouldn't go calling anyone semi-educated and then use the wrong term, if I were you.
Agnosticism is the opposite of gnosticism. It's "not knowing" vs "knowing". Theism and atheism is "belief" or "not believing". Take me for instance, I'm an Agnostic Thiest. I believe there is a God, but I don't claim to know.
In the late 00s there was a New Atheism movement which was more than just not being religious, sometimes called "capital-A atheism." People conflate that with normal atheism sometimes. That movement split in the 2010s as culture war became more of a thing.
I've always thought that atheists are actively non theistic. Nothing would suggest there is no opinion formed to any conclusion.
I think you thought wrong lol. As an atheist I can assure you I don't give a shit what anyone else believes haha
Is there a difference between nontheism and atheism? If there is it's probably subtle.
Am atheist. Am not actively against religion. If it makes your life better and is also benefiting others (or at least its not a negative), have at it. I do not give a shit.
Yeah, I don't find any religion I've ever run across appealing, but I have no beef with those who do good under the umbrella of their religion and don't try to beat on others with it.
Atheist is literally "not theist" which would include nothing, none, agnostic (the belief that it's impossible to determine the existence or absence of, in this context, God). It could even be argued that people who believe in God but do not participate in theistic practices (eg lapsed Catholics) are atheists. It does not require or even imply some position against religion.
This isn't accurate though. In the most semantic, etymological sense perhaps. But atheism is widely understood to be the disbelief in deities. Agnosticism and atheism are very different. One is a position of belief (I cannot prove god doesn't exist, but I don't believe it to be so) and one is a position of ignorance (I cannot prove god does exist or doesn't exist). Words, meanings and definitions are defined by who is interpreting them. This therefore means that the definition is whatever the majority believes it to be. You may as well be looking at a field of flowers and describing them as gay. It may have been the appropriate term once, but it is not now. And we live now. The etymology of the term is not the same as the meaning of the term. Sitting there and prescribing that your interpretation of the term is the correct interpretation reminds me a lot of the tale of King cnut.
Basically, "every opinion I don't like is a religion."
even if it is a religion. So what? does that degrades it's value? what happened to them preaching about christian's tollerence?
if it was ever there.
I think calling Atheism a religion does degrade its value. It brings atheism into the same category as religion, it promotes the idea that atheists need just as much faith as religious people, it basically turns science into a religion.
Just to be clear, I define Atheism as "without belief in a God", that would include anyone saying they are agnostic.
How you define it is irrelevant. How is it defined in society? We can only trust to established dictionaries to track the usage and meaning of words.
The OED defines 'atheist' as 'a person who does not believe that God or gods exist'.
At least among most Atheists it's defined as lack of belief. It's also arguably the most correct definition based on the parts of the word itself.
Theist is usually defined as "with belief", so it makes sense that A-theist means without belief. Adding that A to another word usually means without, like asymptomatic (without symptoms) or amoral (without morals).
The same thing can be said with Agnostic, Gnostic is with knowledge, A-gnostic is without knowledge.
Agnostic/Gnostic answers the question of "do you have knowledge that a God exists". Atheist/Theist answers the question of "do you have belief that a God exists".
That's a great explanation of the terms. Thanks for that.
Given this, can you think of a word that would describe those who are hostile to the concept of a deity? Antitheist, perhaps?
No problem, It's interesting how differently the terms are used within and outside of the atheist community. I think it's also important to realize that most Atheists are going to have more certainty when it comes to a specific God not existing, compared to the general concept of a God. It's much more likely that some kind of God exists than the specific one of a given religion exists. Like I would personally put the general idea of a God existing at maybe 50% (like a God who created the universe and let nature take its course), but the specific God of a given religion that listens to your prayers at near 0%.
Antitheist is one term, I think the more common one in the same area would be Gnostic Atheist, which given my definitions from before would claim knowledge that gods don't exist.
As with anything there are always more sub categories, some go as far as to say knowledge of God is unknowable, or that no form of a God exists, but most seem to stick with Agnostic Atheist, or just Atheist.
I do know many Christians who are all about love and tolerance, the problem is, they aren't the ones going onto Fox News to declare they'll be shouting how much "Jesus loves you, but only if you're straight!" at your local university...
They're the ones quietly living their lives according to Jesus' teachings..
A few of these friends have taken to calling the kind of Christians the Alt-Right claims to be 'Xtians", for they have taken the "Christ" out of "Christians"
Heh... Xtians I like that.
Though technically X was Greek shorthand for Christ so Xtians means Christians just as Xmas means Christmas.
But I doubt any Xtians would know that so I think I'm going to start using it.
Well these are the same crowd that likes to chant keep Christ in christmas, because they are offended by Xmas and for some reason Santa claus, even though Saint Nicholas was a real person canonized by the Catholic Church
Yup. These people just want something to be angry about, so they aren't going to let facts get in the way of that.
Crosstians? They sure like to carry them and seem to be quite cross with the rest of society, fits for me.
Many of today's hard right xtians now complain that the things Jesus said sound overly "woke".
There were literally cases of Preachers being asked to stop teaching the Sermon on the Mount for being too "leftist"
True. I was raised in a religiously leftist household, and even as a child, when I first came across right wing xtians, I was legitimately confused by how they even exist. Our instruction was pointedly about reading the words of the character of Jesus (or for those too young to read, having it read to you) and boy is there a lot of stuff in there that I have no idea how the hard right xtians explain away.
Of course, there are the later writings from someone who never even MET the character of Jesus, which seem to be more problematic. I think it was RAW that said the people that seem to want to follow Paul more so than Jesus should really be called "Paulian", not xtians.
Of course, the OT and NT taken as a whole, and then trying to treat it as a cohesive message is a fool's errand and it quickly falls apart, but....
My dad converted from Christianity to Wicca, but he more or less had the same problem, you saw all of the relatives on his side of the family seemingly refusing to stand by everything they ever taught him.
As for the old and new testament, it really is a fruitless Endeavor to try to make sense of it without the proper background there's a lot of it requires a historical context or knowledge of alternate translations in order to make much sense. This is why theology is considered a science in and of itself, the science of studying religious texts.
Yeah, I have some extended family that was raised in the more liberal/red letter type of xtianity, only to later "rebel" by veering toward more authoritarian/right wing style of interpretations of "the" bible. Most of them are full maga now and don't resemble anything I was taught as the core of xtianity.
When it comes to trying to square the "old" and the "new", I think it's mostly in the eye of the beholder. A lot of xtians declare they have a "new covenant", so therefore, they can selectively decide what is not law and what isn't, especially when it comes to things like dietary laws being rejected. But there is that "not one jot or tittle" portion, and the position that the OT validates the claims made in the NT, so...not sure how they select what they will and will not follow. I think that's how absurdist things like voting on what is and what is not canon came about...
I watch all of that with a bit of amusement, I must say, much like I watch right wing Americans claim they want this country to follow xtianity and the Constitution, when right off the bat, the First Amendment and first commandment are in obvious conflict with one another...the First Amendment clearly lays out a secular country and the first commandment demonstrates that the god of "the" bible is a jealous god that won't tolerate anything else but complete devotion. No real way to square that circle without changing this country to something other than its intent, which means they will not be following the Constitution...
Or, another way of looking at it is, they're embrace of deceit and delusion means they periodically have to fabricate new imaginary dragons to slay. The problem with turning victimhood and grievance into a cult is that you need persecution for it to work. Hence, fabricating opposition. Wokeness is just a way for the elder elite to heap hate on the youth that will inevitably replace them. Constantly reminding everyone that you are a patriotic Christian is just a means to try to seize the higher ground for cultural warfare.
Wokeness is the new "politically correct" - just pure unadulterated nonsense to rile up the conspiracy theorists and Republicans (but I repeat myself). And they use it much like people were using "thanks Obama". If one of the cult stubs their toe, they can blame it on "wokeness" and also probably yell "thanks Obama!" now probably also followed up by "Let's Go Brandon!".
Personally, I didn't stop believing because of the intolerances. I stopped believing because it was an obvious ancient attempt to control people that worked to various degrees but still has the dumb shit people thought was plausible back when they didn't understand much and didn't think there was any way to disprove their claims.
I think that is most people, I just asked why is everyone automatically accepting this as true. But there are two groups of religious people that I understand moreso: people who feel they witnessed or directly saw a miracle and people who like the experience of a religious group and being around the people in it.
I have questions about this survey.
Me too, such as: why is there a separate category for "nothing", that is literally athiesm...
Not believing in it without any evidence? Wow, I bet youre one of the atheist the graph is talking about.
Getting infuriated over this stupid prick's bullshit, mildly or otherwise, just isn't worth it.
I love that he did a 100% 180 on everything he "believed in", from being pro science, atheist, and left leaning to anti science, christian, and conservative troll and none of his followers batted an eye. He does what he thinks is popular, what will keep him talked about. Nuts to that.
He's a narcissist to the extreme. The only thing he believes in is himself. And how sad a god it is.
Conservatives give him the love his father never did.
They're the same picture
you oddly misspelled 'fascist' as 'conservative'.
I suppose it's real easy without any actual values or ethics whatsoever.
Good lord this man is stupid
Atheists: shout at people.
Religious disciples: shoot people.
To be fair this is fake af, agnostics might question the person, but shouting out of stage without making questions first seems very odd for that specific category.
Cuz when you got to the point in life where you know you don't really know shit nothing you kinda are more tolerant to new ideas and new concepts I would guess
I don't need to ask a neo Nazi on a stage any questions first.
Sure we do, "who's your co conspirators?"
Oh yeah we’ve never had any problems with large atheist-run organized mass shootings 🙄
If you took an informed look on history, you'd realize that religious killings happen far more often and far more wide reaching than ones motivated by atheism.
Mother fucker up there acting like he ain't ever heard of the crusades, Spanish inquisition, Salem witch trials, or the genocide of the Buddhist population in tiabet to name a few, though the Buddhist population genocide could be argued as atheist since it was perpetrated by CCP who don't believe in most religions.
It's not an atheist genocide when it's not motivated by atheism. People can follow more than one doctrine. An ultra nationalist can go to church but an attack on foreigners would be a nationalist motive and not a Christian one.
How would you define “motivated by atheism” here?
The desire to wipe out religious people in general and that was not a big thing in history. What's more common is the desire to wipe out "heretics".
And you’re acting like you never heard of the Holocaust, the GULAG, or the Great Leap Forward.
Oh no I quite have, no where did I say people wont find ways to kill each other. But religion isn't the bloodless doctrine it portrays itself to be. But since you mentioned the Holocaust it is arguable that was a religious motivated event as people saw Hitler as a infallible god. Nazi ism was their religion and nazis even messed with the occult.
Ooh interesting. So if there’s an infallible god we can count it as religion?
Oh really? What numbers would you attribute to religious versus atheist mass killings?
Which atheist mass killings were there? Racist killings by someone who happened to be an atheist don't count because the religion was not the driving force in those cases.
Also, what is the relation of "a speaker" to religion? If somebody comes in to speak and starts talking about how we need to gas more jews, stop women from voting, and put the blacks back out in the cotton fields then fuck yeah I'm gonna support cutting them off and sending them packing.
The topic here is censoriousness. The relationship between a speaker and religion here is via censoriousness, and the reason for that is listed in the first sentence.
And? You could take the same data and say- "religious persons are less likely to speak out againstmessaging that potentially promotes harm" (likely also dependent on the religious affiliation of the messenger)
The preceding message that this makes atheists the more "intolerant" group is a pretty massive reach, consider that the messaging they may be against could in itself be one of intolerance as per my example.
Theres a few problems with this random graph. Wouldn't be surprised if it was just made up
It literally says 2024 ranking. That should be red flag #1.
The word woke lost all meaning due to far-right wingers constantly using it as a catch-all term for everything they don't like.
Also, I love how they made it so the top 3 bad guys are atheists, agnostics (which are pretty much the same thing) and the jewish. They're not even trying to be covert with propaganda.
Atheist are not the same thing as agnostics...
I mean they both don't have a definitive belief there is a god, one is just more certain than the other. But for classification purposes I would say they are different.
They are, however, “pretty much” the same thing.
Most self-described atheists are also agnostic. That is, they don’t claim to KNOW that they are right not to believe.
Most self-described agnostics are also atheists. That is, they are not theists.
Both can generally be described as agnostic atheists, as can most rational non believers.
They didn't say they were
Non-American here. What is Christian and why Catholic, protestant, and orthodox Christians are not Christians?
This doesn't make much sense
It's a tale as old as time, just like the Judean People's Front. Fucking splitters.
Because it's not enough to argue with Muslims and atheists, they need to be more right than other people who believe in the same God in different ways.
We have a very large christian population, and they all don't behave in a monolithic manner. For surveys it makes sense to ask which denomination or type of christian they are. Some will response Catholic, Baptist, Protestant. Some will respond christian, sometimes non-denominational christian. It improves the survey results. For example, you might find differences between Catholics and Baptists that wouldn't show up if you grouped them all together under a christian category.
It's a horrible graph. Likely they meant 'evangelical protestant' to differentiate that group from protestants like Lutherans Methodists Anglicans etc.
Oh American christianity is something different as a whole.
I'll give my best summary in as few words as I can during my lunch.
Christianity is an Abrahamic faith with its roots in catholicism. When Martin Luther, a catholic from Germany, wrote a large 95 point thesis detailing his problems with catholicism and how the church had been warped from its intention, this lead to whay most modern Americans would call Lutheranism.
This reformation of the church that started with Martin Luther is known as the Protestant Reformation, protestants being anyone who believed in Christ but not in the orthodox or catholic belief set and rites.
The separation of that faith and the pursuit to practice it openly (sometimes even if it was MORE restrictive than the existing systems) led to the exodus of religious groups to America. This is where some Americans get the idea that "america was founded on Christianity and religious freedom", as these were protestants who were escaping religious persecution for rejecting mainline catholicism.
Some time down the line, I don't know the history of this part, the general term for anyone believing in christ but not catholicism (some going as far as saying lutheranism is catholic-lite as they still practiced communion and most protestants don't recognize communion or any of the 'rites' as those are things they see as placed on top of religion by man and not by God) was just left at Christians.
For all intents and purposes, in the US, Christian mostly means Protestant, methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Southern Baptist (they're separate, I was raised Southern Baptist, they get pissy about being lumped in), calvinist, and non-denominational (people who don't claim a 'branch' but worship christ in a way not easily or intentionally not tied to a singular rhetoric.
Please ask more questions and I'll try my best. Having been born to a Southern Baptist family, it's a topic I love to discuss and learn more on. I'm not religious though, so hopefully none of my stuff comes off disrespectful, just happens to be a family trade I can't quite put down.
Thanks for taking the time to reply! But why are Christians and protestants separated in the figure?
Oh that I couldn't answer. They probably are referencing a study where those options were listed. A lot of practicing Christians I know aren't even positive what they declare so they just put down non-denominational, I'm assuming 'Christian' was another good catch-all term that nabbed anyone who had a general belief in Christ but no organized practice of that belief.
Don't forget adventist, pentecostalism, lutheranism, etc. There's dozens of christians religions in the USA that may hate each others. This doesn’t make much sense.
Shit in my comment I forgot all about Adventists and pentecostal. Oh jeez, let's hope the singular group that makes it to heaven takes mercy on my failure to include them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3fAcxcxoZ8
Because they all seem to think their beliefs are the true beliefs of what the Bible teaches. They will always be at war with one another.
The “teachings” of the Bible are all based on how one person interprets it compared to another, the individual churches all believe the same version as they were taught by their religious leaders, who in turn believe their ultimate religious leader, for example the Catholic Church (all variations) follow the pope and his interpretation.
Well, it seems the same ding-a-lings claiming agnosticism and atheism are religions are also prone to claiming science is a "religion", following evidence is a "religion", and so on...
By lumping them all into the same category, it gives credibility to "religion".
When you have a panel where "A priest, a rabbi, and a mullah discus spirituality", it's a level playing field, everyone is just there to compare notes on their LARPing rules.
If an atheist or a scientist join the panel, you now have an emperors new clothes situation, "Yeah, I don't have all the answers, but more importantly, neither do they, and I'm not claiming to. Here are the facts and evidence as it is currently understood, and what that might mean".
When you call atheism or science or woke a religion, they are trying to trap you by saying "ha! Your belief is just as meaningless as I mine is! We're all equal and subjective rules apply".
I try to refer to things as simply dogmatic. Some people have replaced religion with other things, but that doesn't make them a religion. People beg for authority.
New Atheism is insanely dogmatic, but it's not the same as Atheism, and has been criticized by Atheists who classify "New Atheism" as being akin to a hate-group
and Scientism is a school of philosophy, albeit one that's mocked relentlessly (Basically, the philosophy that everything that is real can be measured, and if it can't be measured it isn't real)
But... that's as close as I'd get to describing Science or Atheism as religions....
I say this as an agnostic person for the record.
I'd like to understand what the definition of what "New Atheism" is. I know there have been a few tempest in a teapots over certain individuals [1] and their behavior; nothing about atheism - new or otherwise - seems to require them to behave like some individuals have, as far as I know. I also have no idea how this set of (non) beliefs would make them a hate group.
[1] thunderf00t, for example. I also know plenty of people that go crazy over the mere mention of, say, Sam Harris, or Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens. Not sure if those guys are who we are talking about here.
Basically anyone who tries to militarize rationalism as a movement or tries to use science as a religion... very often these turn into misogyny, bigotry, and pseudoscience
Those three are specifically infamous as Sam Harris uses pseudoscience to justify a lack of belief in free will as straight up fact and white washes Buddhism to be "Like Atheism, but you meditate!"... but his open hostility to the religious is concerning as he literally writes in his book The End of Faith that the world would only be safe if a preemptive nuke was dropped on the middle east.
Sam Harris also parrots the talking points of Jordan Peterson and features him regularly on his podcast
Richard Dawkins is a transphobic asshole who compared transpeople to black face, shrugged off a woman being sexually assaulted at his conference as "She should be grateful, a muslim would have done worse" (a scandal known as Elevatorgate) also engages in pseudoscience to push his "Memetics" nonsense
Hitchens is the least horrible of the three, but that's only because he was dead long before Dawkins and Harris went fully radical.
Christopher Hitchens mainly wrote a bunch of books painting Christianity in a bad light.. that itself is fine.. the issue is he'd often fabricate evidence. One well known case of this; claiming Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher famous for coming up with what many theist still believe is the best evidence for god, was a "man of one book" and using cherry picked qoutes to justify it.. even though Aquinas actually warned against zealots and the full version of the original qoute was actually telling people to be wary of men of "only one book" for there was more to understand the world and God than simply the bible.
Hitchens is also responsible for the clickbait articles claiming Mother Theresa was a monster, making various accusations of her laundering money from charity with no evidence, taking quotes from her on suffering out of context to make her look like a masochist, berating her for refusing to use morphine (despite operating in India, a
ountry where morphine was illegal even for medical use) and bizzarely claimed her hospices were actually hospitals. When not only were they hospices but she basically invented the concept at a time when bedside manner was basically unheard of in professional medicine.
Many of these bogus and heavily debunked claims are from the book "Hell's Angel" which Hitchens wrote.
The cherry on top was Hitchens actually claimed the Catholic Church was trying to stop him from bad-mouthing Mother Theresa out of fear he would "give away their game".. when the opposite was true, they literally invited him to the Vatican to speak out against her canonization as it is tradition that critics and skeptics of potiential saints be given a chance to make their case before anything final is decided.
While there are many great arguments for not believing in God or really any supernatural phenomena of any kind... these three are infamous for fabricating and weaponizing such arguments for personal gain.
What are the set of beliefs (or lack thereof) that require someone advocate for any of these things, though? You are saying these individuals behaved/are behaving badly - okay, let's assume that is true. What about irreligion would lead to any of that?
When you say they "militarize" rationalism, how have any of these people done that? All of them are still proponents of liberal democracies.
I was a new monasticist Christian who deconstructed during this whole atheism thing and can vouch for all of this. We read some of these atheism books in Bible studies because they were both prevalent and quite lazily written, like these "four horsemen" just didn't have a good grasp on philosophy. I even had an agnostic philosophy prof come to a Christian Bible study and explain some of the mainstream and competing views in philosophy about these subjects and it kind of validated how they weren't serious as philosophers. After I lost my whole social group when I lost my faith I decided to check out an atheist group, which I attended for a time, but there were always these people who loved these terrible arguments for atheism and even wanted to go evangelize door to door about atheism. The group split in to culture war factions and died shortly after I stopped attending in 2012. It was worth it because I met a few very dear friends from this endeavor, but we all agreed this whole thing was trash.
The fact that we actually have peopel trying to "Spread the good word of Atheism" and coming up with arguments so bad it almost makes God sound... likely... shows the problem was never faith, it was always man. If Religion never existed, humans would be just as awful, they'd just find different reasons to be just as horrible.
Yeah basically, concepts like "civil/civic religion" describe this well. It's like the set of shared beliefs a society uses to justify itself, similar to ideaology, and the best definition of ideaology I know is, "the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest." Like in one sense partisan politics in the US right now can be summarized as two factions of the same civil religion.
The thing that frustrated me with these atheists is they both view religion as man made and contingent on societies, yet they treated it as this trans-historical essential set of beliefs and practices in the same way the most fundamentalist religious sect would. Like take the dumbest most insane religious sects, that's how these atheists understood religion too. When you see religion as something actually socially constructed and embodying the time period, then you can actually understand it on a material level. These atheists think you can just take this concept of "religion" and cleave it away, because they think it's this separate thing. They view western history in this really reductive way like: 1. smart greeks and romans 2. religious bullshit and smart people are killed 3. enlightenment and secular society wins but the battle isn't yet won. None of them actually liked learning about history either unless it was to find out who the good guys/bad guys were in reference to religion, exact same as how fundamentalist sects understand history.
I wanna give you a medal for this write up
Why is there a "Nothing" under the beliefs? Wouldn't that fall under "Agnostic"?
As a 'no response'r, I'm not going to answer you
TIL, my belief that I have the right to call out bullshit when I see it is considered a religion now.
This also ignores that shouting at someone in no way infringes on their ability to speak. It's just something they don't like to happen. Ironically, much like women going to abortion clinics and getting shouted down and harassed, simply based on their religious belief that abortion is wrong. But whew, let's not apply logic to their beliefs...
Certain people can not imagine multiperspectivity, let alone understand or try it.
Always/sometimes is one answer? Isn't that incredibly awful survey taking practice? Also, is this about people's right to criticize public speakers? Because it seems like the pro free speech position is to let people criticize public speakers
This comment needs more attention. Sometimes I wash Lemmy had awards like Reddit to make important things visible.
Never would be allowing someone to scream racial slurs and ignoring it. Rarely and sometimes should be replaced with "it depends". Always probably means the same thing as sometimes since you aren't going to shout down a good speaker that you agree with. The whole survey doesn't make sense when you stop to think about it.
My guess is that it was two answers, but few answered always, so they combined the two in the chart to make the point they wanted to make.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw this. Looks very "lying with statistics"!
Who the fuck knows. Stupid shit like this that barely even makes sense is why Elron is famed for being an incredibly pretentious but dim tool.
No. Atheism has no point. It's merely the default, catch-all, left-over position. Anyone who isn't convinced any religion's gods are real, becomes an atheist automatically, simply for a lack of any other option.
The Jedi and Sith, are both atheist.
Religious people really don't understand atheism or agnosticism. It's not like we just have a coming out ceremony where we take a bible and burn it, it's just "You know, I don't know if I believe that god is real...". They make it out to be that we all gather in groups every sunday to talk about it... but we just sleep in. We don't usually even label ourselves because the label is itself irrelevant. We don't have a religion, that's it. You all believe in something, that's great, we don't. That's literally all there is to it.
I grew up in a cult. I totally had a coming out party.
TIL that >70% of christians/mormons/other-santa-for-adults-cults would not try to get rid of hatepreachers on campus. Wow. Bleak.
The speaker in question? Some right wing Christian lunatic!
How is being atheist and being woke even related? Is it one of those “god hate gays”?
"Ree my free speech"
The free speech in question:
like "states right" states right to do what motherfucker?!
"It wasn't about slavery!"
Texas' articles of secession name slavery as a main cause twelve times. Georgia's calls abolitionism "heresy" and Mississippi, bless them, referred to it with "a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization," before going even further with such quotes as
Which I am only leaving here because somebody wrote that, meant it, and sent it off, and it is insane to read.
Fortunately for Mississippi, their constituents can't.
He’s not wrong in the sense that everyone has their own worldview, and humans need a worldview to process the immense amount of information we are exposed to on a daily basis. Some people incorporate organized religion into their worldview, while others do not.
Agreed. Where he is wrong is in equating “having a world-view” with “having a religion”. The two are not the same and it’s foolish in the extreme to suggest that they are.
Perhaps it’s not “having a world-view” he’s equating with it, but something more specific.
The dictionary lists this for use #3 for religion:
”a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”
In this sense of the word, many people, including atheists, do have a religion deeply rooted in their worldview.
A concrete example is people who fervently believe that FOSS is the only good way to make software, and that proprietary software is evil. Many of those people are unwilling to even consider the merits of the latter. In this sense, those beliefs very much qualify as “religious” in this sense of the word.
No, this is bullshit. FOSS advocates don't have faith in the one true RMS or whatever you're trying to peddle here. They have a principled stance derived from logic. You're free to disagree with them, but you can't just paint them as religious because they have a stance you disagree with!
Those logical conclusions must inherently flow from philosophical axioms that comprise the person’s world view. Two of the most fundamental axioms that lead to supporting FOSS are not supported by everyone. Namely:
Those axioms cannot be logically derived from some fundamental truth - they must come from one’s own personal belief system, i.e. their “religion” (definition 3).
Someone following Kantian ethics and Altruism morality (whether or not they’re aware of the names) will probably end up favoring FOSS. Someone who has a more Utilitarian and Egoistic world view will probably be okay with proprietary software.
This is all kind of a moot point because I don’t think this sense of the word is what Musk was referring to - he was probably using it as sense 1 sarcastically and mockingly.
You're re-defining religion here, because even if fundamental axioms are arbitrarily chosen, it doesn't mean they are adhered to based on faith. I don't have faith in my principles. I think they are good due to the evidence I've seen for them, but if I saw evidence for problems with my fundamental axioms, I'd adopt new axioms. This is fundamentally different from believing in something due to faith.
If not “faith” then what? Note that “faith” doesn’t need to mean some higher power; it just needs to be something you believe without evidence. Any “evidence” you claim to have experienced to support your worldview must inherently be interpreted through an existing lens of one’s own world view, which circularly depends on one’s axioms. You fundamentally cannot have a worldview without some amount of faith in something.
More concretely, the only thing one can prove a priori is “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). Any further cognitive reasoning requires faith in one or more axioms about the world, e.g. “the world exists independent of my own perception”.
Because I haven't been convinced by something better. That's it.
According to what definition? Let's look at Merriam Webster, since you're basing your whole argument around their definitions:
1 a : allegiance to duty or a person : LOYALTY lost faith in the company's president b (1) : fidelity to one's promises (2) : sincerity of intentions acted in good faith
2 a (1) : belief and trust in and loyalty to God (2) : belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion b (1) : firm belief in something for which there is no proof clinging to the faith that her missing son would one day return (2) : complete trust
3 : something that is believed especially with strong conviction especially : a system of religious beliefs the Protestant faith
None of these apply to me, or other FOSS advocates I know. I don't have a strong conviction towards my basic axioms, since as I said, I simply haven't come across better ones.
And thus you completely devalue the terms "faith", "religion" etc., because according to you literally everything past "Cogito ergo sum" is faith. Every word you wrote is faith. Everything you think beyond your basic capability to think is faith. It's fine if you want to decide for yourself that this is how you view these words, but it's not how other people use them, because they simply have no utility the way you use them.
Oxford English Dictionary:
faith: …. a strongly held belief or theory. "the faith that life will expand until it fills the universe"
Once again: my axioms are not strongly held beliefs. How often do I have to repeat this?
I have a degree in Philosophy. You are redefining words to make your argument. That's not how good arguments work.
I view it more like: don’t let proprietary software manufacturers fuck you over, not something about morality.
It’s conceivable but a stretch to say that some people have those beliefs to the extent of a religion. However to say they’re actually a religion would be simply bizarre… nobody thinks Richard Stallman created the earth or something.
Wow so he actually talks like that
Every religion is a belief system, but not every belief system a religion.
Every billionaire Elon Musk is an idiot, but not every idiot billionaire Elon Musk.
Go set theory!
Religion is a subset of the set of belief systems.
Elon Musk is a member of the set of billionaires. We could define a set with one member, Elon Musk. It would be a subset of billionaires.
All religion is obscene.
I know you're trolling and indeed fuck the rest, but..buddhist monks? Pretty hard to have beef with. No pun intended.
I guess you could make the case that encouraging indifference towards suffering breeds a whole different class of sociopathy, but even then, at least they're the least destructive they can possibly be by just never touching anything.
Depends on the monk. The shitty Buddhists in Myanmar support genocide.
Well. "Extremist" and "nationalist" were never words I thought I would see attached to the phrase buddhist monk, but here we are, I fucking guess. That's a thing that I know now.
I'm about to just eschew anything bipedal at this point. Two legs bad.
And on a related note, zen buddhists have a pretty vile subsect that is entwined with Japanese militarism and has been for centuries. However there are a lot of buddhists who are really good people, and lots of buddhist sects likewise. As with almost all religions, it depends on the particular flavor of ideology they have adopted.
I think the most impressive thing about this is that they were able to travel a year into the future to obtain the survey data.
School data is labeled by the school year in which it is collected, and the label is the ending year.
The 2024 school year is 7/1/2023 - 6/30/2024, so this was most likely collected within the last month or so after school started.
Link to source: https://rankings.thefire.org/
Well that seems like a centrist bullshit site.
No, that is a climate that promotes hate speech.
Seems to me that I should follow the religion of Nothing or No response. Because we all know that this a BS bar chart.
Aww, did someone get peer reviewed?
Wow look at the near perfect Buddhism balance.
This is the (middle) way.
Purely depends on the speaker
Yeah obviously, but that was the point. Would you shout down any speaker
I mean if it was literally Hitler come back to life, sure.
They shouldn't have grouped "always" and "sometimes".
It means that people who are hard line anti religion and would yell at someone if they dared to express the tiniest support for a religion to people who would protest or yell at someone who is widely accepted as bad.
yes
Holy meaningless buzzwords batman
Some replace various religions with a worship of money. Usually they are better at managing it. How much has the 'X' formerly known as Twitter lost, btw?
I originally perceived this as if the religion of the speaker was x, results were how likely they'd be essentially boo'd. I don't get much shit for being an atheist lately, but depending on the peer group it can get a little..dicey.
Just try and ignore anything this antagonistic fool/troll says and your life will be better off.
I think most would cite something like the paradox of intolerance - you need a bit of intolerance of intolerance to sustain any tolerance.
I bet the Christian stat would have been higher in the past too, when they were on the front foot and the controversial speaker was less likely to be someone they agreed with.
I would cite that shouting back is also free speech
We are not censorious. We are just tired of hearing the same predatory bullshit over and over again.
Religion is harmful to people and atheism isn't. Do these people complain when someone shuts down a speaker who advocates having sex with young children? No? Then shut the hell up and let us kill religion like it should have been centuries ago.
I shout at people all day everyday and they still talk to me
If "woke" hadn't become a political buzzword, would Elon have said what that refrain used to be? As in, would he also have said that atheists just replaced god with the worship of science? Absolute stupidity and smooth brainery regardless
How is Jewish so low?? History doesn't repeat, I still hope it doesn't rhyme either.
You shout nazis out of town. Why is that a bad thing?
Sorry I'm stupid or tired or something. I misread the graph to mean that those people should be shout down but they are the people who were asked which makes a lot more sense
Still, a lot of the cases they fight for seem to be all over the political spectrum.
I mean, it's been proven that humans have a psychological need for religion, but....
Wokeness? A religion?
Eh at worst you have companies overcompensating to avoid seeming racist or sexist... and you have tankies taking it too far and claiming everything is imperialist bullshit, but that's hardly a new phenomenon... Hippies of yesteryear did similar.
But again, worst case scenarios.
There's nothing wrong with saying "Maybe you shouldn't speak here, or, anywhere really?" if a guy is literally going to Colleges to give seminars on how "Hitler did nothing wrong, and maybe transpeople, and not the constantly crashing economy and the blatant failure of trickle down... are to blame for all of your problems."
I remember when being "Woke" had positive connotations, but the Right Wing ruins everything.
If humans have a need for religion then how do atheists exist?
Do you have a link for that? Not sure I believe that
It's good to be skeptical, afterall, a sourceless claim isn't worth much.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/12/believe
It's why you see a shrinking number of people going to church, yet seemingly paradoxical more cases of atheists going to church "For the sense of community"
Evolutionary speaking, If there really isn't a god, that's terrible news for human race. In fact the only thing keeping me believing that there might be is being fully Lucid of the horror of a Godless universe.
I can find no optimism in that
Why would there not being a god be a bad thing?
It makes me proud that humanity clawed our way through stages of evolution and was capable of getting where we are now without the need of some overseeing being controlling us like puppets.
If you see someone do good, it means they themselves did that. They chose to help, and not because some authority told them to, but because they are good inside.
Of course, if the fear of being punished is the only thing keeping you from doing harm, then please stay a believer. But the big majority of people do not need that to stay a decent human being.
I believe I already told you that I am agnostic, I do not claim to know for certain if God does or does not exist. However I doubt that he does. And I consider a universe without God to be terrifying more so than being punished by God for failure to act in a certain way. The problem with they're not being a god, is that mean this world is all we get, it is our one chance to do anything, and nothing we do will ever be remembered not even by us. Because in a world without the Supernatural death does not mean that it just goes black, it doesn't go anything. You just stop existing.
"Woke" is still positive - that's why the right wing hates it.
Not really now the connotation is more connected to the kind of out of touch corporation that thinks progress is just calling yourself "they/them" and trying to appeal to minorities and lgbt persons in ways more offense than just using slurs. (Remember Q Force?)
Or the kind of weekend warrior who thinks cancelling people over Twitter because every other word is a dog whistle. When if they really wanted to be part of the solution and not the problem they'd have abandoned twitter in favor of Mastodon by now.
Btw Hexbear is FULL of the latter.. had a gang cherry picking my posts to claim I was a pedo and a Nazi by warping a few out of context and connecting unrelated posts.... so unpleasant
Basically if you're woke now it means you're an out of touch white guy getting offended on behalf of minorities who weren't even slightly offended to begin with.
It used to mean that you were aware that society's problems are caused by the blatant greed of the rich, not the perceived laziness of the poor.
These things happen. They call it the euphemism treadmill, sometimes the meanings of words shift and what was a compliment becomes an insult and vice versa
Kind of like how "Person of Color" and "Queer" used to be slurs, the R word used to be a medical term, and the three letter F word used to be a schoolyard insult instead of "The N Word for gays"
𝕏
Dogmatic worldviews don't need to be theistic
"Atheism" has been appropriated by people with a grudge against religion who wants to destroy it at all costs, and convert all practitionerd of religion to atheism. So, armchair crusaders.
The fact that atheism is another belief system is true (none of us is out there proving shit because it can't be proved, both ways), but calling it wokeness and a religion makes you look like the dumbass you are, Elon.
Atheism just means that you have yet to find a reason to believe in God or some higher power. It is not a belief system, it is a lack of reason to believe in any belief system.
Atheism is the denial of god's existence, a-theism, and since you have no way to prove that there's no god (the same way there's no way of proving that there is), you believe that your version of the story is the correct one.
You believe all the things you think are true but can't prove.
I don't really want this to devolve into an argument, since I get that this way of thinking holds no practical purpouse, so if you think that it's too philosophical, that's okay.
If something makes absolutely no sense logically and there is zero proof for something and a few tonns of evidence against it (not talking about god but rather every single big religion) it's a rational decition not to believe in it, well that and not every believe is religous...
It's not philosophical, it's incorrect.
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/about-atheism/
The fact that bald is another hair color is true