I mean you go girl more power to ya but it definitely isn’t easier to explain pastafarianism than agnosticism to normies. Noone except programmers and other too online people even know it exists (yes i am also a terminally online freak relax peeps, real recognize real)
Yeah pastafarianism is downright nostalgic and about what 20 years old now? That isn’t very relevant anymore imho
IKR… and normies go worshiping 2k+ yo books… sheesh
That’s the neat part - you don’t have to explain anything. You just assert the truthfulness of your religion and act offended when people point out how ridiculous it is.
Chad moves. Get theology-mogged you faithless heathencell
Gotta love how one person writing a silly essay, which didn’t have anything to do with atheism, just being a gaff, got turned into something very atheist and very serious.
Just show them the graph. Can’t argue with hard data.
I remember watching an interview with a mushroom man, he posited that humans have receptors built in for magic mushrooms because humans used to have an organ that provided hallucinogenic euphoria. This allowed humans to survive in groups without killing eachother, then religion eventually evolved socially and replaced it. Now that we have technology and modern governments thats slowly replacing religion.
It was a neat idea anyways. Its also neat to think about how religions could be a form of evolution, even though they arent technically biological changes.
Have you ever done mushrooms? This theory makes no sense.
If you’re into that kind of speculation, you might enjoy “The Cosmic Serpent” by Jeremy Nearby.
I’d rather trip tbh
Sithrak is the only one true god.
Absurdity of all religion
I’m willing to bet they only know Christianity and think all religions are like Christianity, just with a different looking skydaddy.
To be fair that’s most religion.
Its not, but thanks for playing
Yes it is, look it up
Damn, that’s a real convincing argument you got there.
Any cursory understanding of world religions and theology will tell you that this “Sky Daddy” view of divinity is incredibly rare. Not only because not all religions are monotheistic, but even among monotheists, conceptions of God are incredibly varied and diverse.
I think what irks me about this kind of ‘New Atheism’ common in Western internet spaces (which frankly, I thought was a decade+ out of vogue by now) is that it isn’t simply a lack of God belief, but a specific disbelief in the God of American Evangelical Protestantism that somehow manages to retain so much of the philosophical underpinnings of the thing supposedly being rejected.
When Sam Harris famously said, “Islam is the motherload of bad ideas” he’s rooting that position in, not only War-on-terror Imperial chauvanism and racism, but also on the very Protestant idea that right beliefs are what bring about salvation.
Of course, the secular version of this idea eschews God. But it replaces faith with belief in so-called Western Values, and Salvation with ‘backward’ nations of the global south being enfolded into the sphere of western liberal hegemony.
Any cursory understanding of world religions and theology will tell you that this “Sky Daddy” view of divinity is incredibly rare. Not only because not all religions are monotheistic, but even among monotheists, conceptions of God are incredibly varied and diverse.
lol nope that’s a sky daddy
So, when a Shinto practitioner worships the animist spirit which he believes resides within Mt. Fuji, so that the crops he’s growing at its base might yield a fruitful harvest, that’s the same thing as “Sky Daddy” theology?
When an adivasi Hindu gets small pox and she believes that the affliction is her communing with the goddess Sītala, is that the same thing as “Sky Daddy” theology?
When a Wiccan performs a ritual to the Horned God who is a god of hunting, the underworld, (and is himself a mediator between an unknowable supreme deity and the people) so they might have a successful fishing trip. Is that “Sky Daddy” theology?
When a Muslim theologian says that, “God is completely different from whatever comes to your mind concerning Him” and that the nature of God is incomprehensible to human minds. Is that “Sky Daddy” theology?
I looked it up like you told me to. And none of this sounds very “Sky Daddy” to me
Yes
It really, really isn’t. Most people (think they) know Christianity and then pattern match everything else to it, instead of looking at other religions as arising from completely different frameworks, with very different philosophical assumptions about the world.
They’re still absurd
May you water always be salted
Ramen
I share my faith equally between all known and unknown deities so my faith in any particular one is quite limited.
Agnosticism is weird. It’s just atheism for cowards.
Being honest about the uncertain nature of the mystical experiences of our world is a cowards move now? P sure that has been a marker of wisdom for many great thinkers in the western canon, eg well over 2000 years
Atheism is not about treating the nonexistence of gods as more certain than mathematical theorems. It’s about recognizing that just because the theist ideas are put into words doesn’t mean we should treat them as any closer to the truth then the virtually infinite potential strings of characters - meaningful or otherwise - that were not “fortunate enough” to be put to writing.
Agnosticism is the centrism of the theological world.
Agnosticism is just saying “I don’t know”. If you know that gods don’t exist, I’d like to hear about how you got this knowledge.
People seem to think belief (or lack thereof) is a one dimensional line.
Theism - Agnosticism - Atheism
But it’s more like the political compass with Theism - Atheism on one axis and Gnostism - Agnosticism on the other.
Theism/Atheism is a comment on whether you believe in god(s).
Gnostism/Agnosticism is a comment on how strongly you hold that belief (or lack of belief).
Are you absolutely certain there’s no god? Then you’re a gnostic atheist. Believe in god in sort of a wishy-washy way? Then you’re an agnostic theist.
I’m a die hard atheist, but I also consider myself an agnostic. Because although there’s no evidence of a god it’s also impossible to prove a negative.
To be a gnostic atheist would actually take a leap of faith I’m not willing to risk.
So you’re atheist? You have unwavering faith in the unknown then. No proof, just feelings and opinions. Just like theists.
… and piracy! yeah
As in the R.E.M. song: “boobs are my religion”
RAmen
I believe in all the Gods
All gods matter
yes!
…also no gods matter
Vacuous truth FTW
Vacuous? Hardly, see atheism
How does atheism make our statements any less vacuous?
I’ve decided to worship the reconstructed proto-indo-european pantheon.
OG gods for the win!
Why get all fancy with the rules and names and shit? I just worship the straight-up sun. Maybe the occasional volcano. REAL OG shit.
im torn between tst and secular buddhism. Luckily they are not mutually exclusive or demand they are the only way.
I’ve encountered several TST members who also practice Buddhism. It seems to be the religion that overlaps the most. It seems odd to me, because I thought Buddhism rejected the material world while TST embraces it, but I’m probably missing something.
embracing the material world is a different satanism. tst has the seven tenents which are mostly about human rights.
How are those not embracing the material world? The 5th tenet makes it explicitly materialist.
The leaders aren’t sitting around meditating. They’re in court, doing material things.
Honestly, “it’s easier than explaining” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here 😅
“I’m not religious”
Can’t say I’ve ever had to explain anything more than that.
So how will you teach little girls that they’re the problem? How will you fondle little boys? How will you comitt a genocide to prove that your religion is more moral?
Wtf are you talking about?
Generally in atheistic communities discourse around religion tends to be around where religion is used to replace science, often as a means of control of behavior and othering of out groups.
Speculating, that is likely because many people join these communities after being ostracized or faced abuse at the hands of people in the in-group so it makes sense that those are the aspects of religion that stand out most to them are those aspects.
There is a reason communities have had religious and spiritual practices for millennia, they do provide concrete benefits and social good in terms of community building and as forms of cultural preservation and providing support systems, both emotional and material. Those aspects tend not to be talked about in atheistic and skeptic communities. Not saying they’re obligated to balance every negative comment with a positive one out of some misguided sense of fairness or balanced discourse but if you’re interested in having some kind of well rounded view of the world, it is helpful to understand positive aspects of things you generally disagree with.
In this case, if someone is arguing religion be removed completely it is important to address the loss of positive aspects that keep people in a religion otherwise you’re just going to be yelling at a wall and not actually doing anything or putting people off by assuming everyone who holds any kind of religious belief or engages in religious rituals is some kind of brainwashed cultist.
It’s a sarcastic counter to the typical arguments that there’s no inherent morality in human culture without religion. You know, people don’t naturally have empathy, so they have to be taught to simulate empathy because they beleive they’ll be judged when they die.
But what does that have to do with my comment?
You can do all of those without having to actually believe in a specific religion. And the first two happen very easily without religion.
i prefer “i’m not superstitious”
Yeah, you can give up on superstition without giving up on religion.
Ramen.
