“Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James 5%3A1-6&version=NIV
Turning Christians into anti-capitalists is a very easy thing - they were literally taught the logic of anti-capitalism from birth.
Yet the left prefers edgelord atheism because reasons.
Atheism is just something I wear. It mostly revolves around being rational. Using more bullshit because it’s more effective kind of defeats the point of it all. I don’t have a problem with speaking to someone in their own terms. Proselytizing atheism just falls on dead ears and I don’t care what someone else believes as long as I don’t have to live by it.
I have yet to meet a “rational” atheist. Or, at least, an atheist that’s any more rational than a religious person.
Yeah… I wonder why.
C’mon down here to the south and experience the wonderful world of preachers straight up preaching conspiracies instead of the Bible! And their followers eating that shit up!
I’m already south. Way, way south.
Mentally, physically, or both?
I’m not sure what you mean… please do explain.
Nah, I think you just proved my point for me.
Sooo… no explanation?
Who pissed in your Cheerios?
And that does not describe US Christianity. Most of the regressives haven’t ever read the bible.
It hasn’t described “Christianity Inc.” since the time of Constantine. You’d think leftists would have a problem with that… but all I’ve seen the left do is encourage it.
Talking about shooting yourself in the foot.
No. But their mothers have.
The idea that “the left” has any influence on mainstream American Christianity is completely divorced from reality.
I never said it did. Maybe you should ask yourself why the left has completely surrendered religion to the right - you know… considering that religion happens to be important to a large part of the working class and all.
Nothing was surrendered. The right fought for decades to get it. Go back a century and a huge chunk of pastors either describe themselves as socialist or lean towards it. The first attempts at the Prosperity Gospel were laughed off as being obviously self serving. It wasn’t until the 70s that they found a formula that worked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyHd6wEC4IE
Never been too keen on BtB - the “Great Man” fallacy cuts both ways. Maybe I’ll give it a try.
I despise the “prosperity” grifters as much as anyone - but let’s not pretend that establishment religion was any kind of left before they arrived on the scene. The Catholic church was literally the face of right-wing ideology for centuries (and still has the hidden gold reserves to prove it), and WASP ideology is still one of the driving forces behind white supremacism to this day.
I know what you’re trying to say - this is the part where establishment Christianity went explicitly capitalist - but the fact that establishment Christianity was perfectly servile to the status quo before made this inevitable no matter how many people laughed it off initially.
Yes, this is a huge problem in modern day society. You’re good point could do without all of the name calling.
People here do agree with you that Jesus’s teachings have laid out some anticapitalist seeds (see supply side Jesus to see a parody of capitalism Jesus) but with your angry debate style it took me several of your posts to get your point.
Oh, I’d say that the new testament does a bit more than that.
I take it you’ve never dealt with too many fundamentalist atheists?
Calling all of a group irrational is not how to deal with some of the group. Your mannerisms is a problem. If someone else is giving you an issue, report it. Don’t become the problem for the sake of an internet debate where almost no one changes their opinions.
You mean… like atheists do?
That’s not the point of internet debate.
Don’t be naive.
Most Christians missed that part of scripture - they’d freak out if you told them Jesus was a communist
This also missed the parts that say “love thy neighbor” and that vengeance is God’s domain alone (“Vengeance is mine.”)
This sentence just outed you as a 15 year old.
Do you have a problem with 15-year olds?
Your lawn is not as impressive as you think it is.
Imagine thinking Sam Harris is a Leftist.
Imagine capitalizing the word leftist for no good reason whatsoever.
You don’t have a membership card to The Leftist organization? You’re not paying dues to that singular, discrete, monolithic organization that determines everything not Centrist or Rightward?
I’m a Christian and I approve.
You might be interested in Liberation theology. In short, the US didn’t like them and started quite the thing in El Salvador…
I am aware of Liberation theology. I am also aware of how it was crushed - and the ones who did the crushing.
Christians don’t actually learn anything logical. They are brainwashed from a young age and trained to be obedient.
If they actually thought about what their book said, they wouldn’t vote for a dude who is constantly stealing, committing adultery, and bearing false witness.
I could say that about a lot of things - nationalism, liberalism, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacism, individualism - yet I see lots of these supposedly “logical” atheists unquestioningly embracing those.
Soooo… it’s not the book then - is it?
Right, every group has irrational people and some believe awful garbage. Now go get us a demographic breakdown with odds of being Christian compared to not religious for white supremacists, etc.
You said it yourself, the teachings from their literal god lean pretty far left, but they’re not a core foundational group of leftists. That’s because from childhood they are brainwashed and trained to believe contradictory delusions.
If they actually thought about their religion, or had any initiative of their own, they wouldn’t need to be approached by leftists, they would be the leftists approaching others.
Holy shit, did mommy leave her computer unlocked?
I suggest you wipe your browsing history before she comes back… I’m not one to kink shame, but I can’t speak for her.
Atheism gains when people turn to science over faith, and seek to truly understand the world around them.
There’s nothing “scientific” about atheism.
They do? They don’t even understand religion - and it’s literally one of the easiest things to study in our society.
Atheism is scientific. It rejects unknowns until proven. Atheism is not a gnostic worship of nothingness, but a rejection of accepting religions as fact.
Atheists often understand religion more than many religious people, so you need to explain just what you mean by this. What are Atheists not getting?
Not who you’re replying to, but I’ll attempt a diplomatic answer.
Many (not all) atheists and theists alike lack the capacity to separate fact and faith in their worldviews, and see them as conflicting with one another.
But some people see them as entirety separate realms that do not interact. For us science and fact is based on knowledge and impiricism, whereas faith is based on the unknowable.
Thatbis, something cannot be known AND believed. If it can be known, it’s in the realm of science. If it cannot be known it is the realm of faith. They don’t conflict because they are entirely separate, and pitting them against each other is like arguing about the conflict between Wayne Gretsky and Renee Descartes.
It’s more that Theists attack Atheists for believing absolutely in nothing, instead of not believing anything unproven.
And there’s the disconnect. If it can be proven it can’t be believed.
If you don’t believe in something unproven, then you don’t believe in anything at all.
And that’s fine, by the way.
You’re taking statements beyond their logical extremes, ad absurdum. You can believe facts that have moumtains of evidence, and not believe stories with no evidence, and be perfectly rational and believe in things.
Belief is accepting something without evidence. If you have evidence, belief isn’t necessary, because you know it.
Saying you won’t accept anything without evidence is saying you don’t hold any beliefs at all. But nobody is really like that. Atheists believe all kinds of things.
The part that trips people up is when something is unknown but knowable. That is where someone can have belief without having faith.
Faith is for stuff that is not and never can be empirically known.
No. It isn’t.
No. It doesn’t. Science embraces the unknown. If it rejects the unknown, it is committing the same anti-scientific logic atheists accuse religious people of committing.
Nope. It is an irrational fetishization of something’s non-existence.
Good thing you told me… I would never have been able to tell by all the atheist shittakes I see.
Is it really this difficult? Are there no religious people in your family?
Wow, that was certainly a comment!
Science does not embrace the unknown, it pokes, prods, and seeks to turn the unknown into the known via the scientific method. It rejects the unproven and untested until confirmed tested and proven.
Atheism is not believing that fairies exist until the existence of fairies is proven, it is not “fetishizing something’s non-existence,” lmao. Atheism is the default state of humanity brought up in an environment with a strong emphasis on the scientific method.
Yes, I do have religious family members. None of them are particularly technically minded, and usually use their faith as a weapon to oppress trans people. Please answer my question instead of gesturing vaguely, what are Atheists not getting that theists do?
If it didn’t it would discover absolutely nothing of any value.
Science does not treat the unknown as an enemy. That’s how a colonizer sees the world - not a scientist.
Really? There is absolutely nothing else to atheism, is there? You try to conflate science with atheism - but you fail abysmally because there is absolutely nothing about the scientific method that is incompatible with any religion anywhere.
To try and “substitute” religion with “science” is anti-scientific because science is not religion. I’m starting to get the idea that a lot of atheists don’t have a very good grip on what the scientific method actually entails.
LOL! And your proof of this is what?
Where is your scientific method now? Did you forget it in your other lab-coat, perhaps?
So you think the only reason your family members are religious is to opress transgender folks?
What the hell does “technically minded” mean? Do they not know how to turn on a blender, perhaps?
I never said science treats the unknown as an enemy, science pokes at the unknown via the scientific method to turn it into known. You do not see scientists embracing Lord of the Rings as history.
Religion is as of now unproven. Atheism is the default stance, once a religion is proven then atheism will be no more. Atheism is the default stance because it is the absence of unproven claims.
No, I believe my family is religious because they were brought up religious, and the outcome of this is opression of trans people and women.
Technically-minded meaning trained and educated on technical or other scientific topics, as opposed to business, marketing, accounting, etc.
Really? You’re not really thinking about what it is you’re actually saying, are you?
I guess it’s no mystery why the atheism expressed on here sounds so downright liberal - the unknown can only make sense to you once it’s dead.
Religion requires no proof. It hasn’t required any proof since the glaciers retreated, and it won’t require any proof as long as humanity exists.
Atheists have been attacking religion at it’s strongest point for a few centuries now (as you just did)… it seems even the oldest method of scientific rigor - trial and error - completely escapes atheists. Can we trust you with something as complicated as a Bunsen burner, then?
Your religion is failing you - it requires proof, remember?
But then, again… I’m not an all-knowing technocrat - oops, sorry, I meant to say ,“technically-minded person”. I could be wrong - there could very well be evidence for these “default atheist” communities and societies in anthropology if that truly is the “human default” as you claim.
Can you provide such?
So you are claiming that people get nothing from religion? They are merely automatons who follow their (constantly alleged) “brainwashing?”
Mf doesn’t know what atheism means, but is trying to pretend they do, its so cute
Once an edgelord always an edgelord, huh? Is this yet more of that (supposed) “atheist rationalism” I’ve heard so much about?
You’re failing as hard as all the others - you just managed it a lot faster.
I’m more of an agnostic anyways 😎
And Buddhism is really cool
And what do you know about Buddhism?
Oh im no expert, I’ve been studying it on and off for 20 years tho 😅. Mainly just meditation and mindfulness seem to be really helpful for my adhd riddled brain…