Informative reminder if you believe in a religion in the current year you are regressive and holding back civilization...

That's their problem, not yours Fedora.

I belive that religions exist

FUck

Modern society is disgusting
I'll stick to my faith thanks

In the following list, I will tell you why you are a meme.
>"Current Year" in post
>The OP Image
>Fedora Tipping OP
>Fedora Tipping Argument
>Anti-Theist

Dude, lay off of the memes.
They seem to be affecting your health.

Yeah because being a faggot is so progressive

I'm not religious but according to some studies (by Baumeister or a student of his IIRC) religion (doesn't matter which) has some beneficial results for happiness and willpower on average. Some of this can be substituted with a strong philosophy of life that isn't necessarily theistic, but apparently the concept of a God keeping tabs on you or the concept of an afterlife maximizes the effect.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that most human beings are usually most content with a relative feeling of certainty and clear guidelines for conduct. A religion provides all these things, and abiding by these guidelines generally provides you with a feeling of satisfaction and the act of doing it (even when it'd feel good not to) builds character.

Cutting religion out might be a net gain (considering the negatives associated with it) but we shouldn't forget there are benefits. Some can (and should) be substituted with a strong life philosophy, but most people without any concern for an afterlife tend towards hedonism (maximize pleasure because YOLO) and this has been shown to not actually improve quality of life because we get used to pleasurable experience remarkably easily, and the pleasure is fleeting. People need to have and abide by principles to feel lasting satisfaction for how they've lived their life.

Holding civilization back from what? Complete and utter ruin? Complete and utter evil? Complete and utter darkness? Complete and utter lawlessness?

...

>You can't know everything
>But I am CERTAIN that the universe was created by God and that he watches over me.

How is it history related?

reported.

the most developed and best rated countries in the world are very irreligious with a significant atheist minority

What says. The safest and most developed countries are usually very irreligious.

Compare en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country for example.

Won't somebody please think of the children!

What's wrong with you user?

So, the only counter argument against atheism people here can come up with is muh fedora-tipping? Seriously?

>some dude writes up a really good point
> 3 paragraphs

> so nobody can refute me huh????? Hahaha

Not even a samefag

You don't think that's why they're so religious? To help keep order in their shitty states. Also happiness is high in countries with strong Religious ties

>Denmark
>happiest country in the world
>28% believes in God
>only 3% regularly attend sunday services

*tips fedora*

I'd like to have a link at least. The results of these kind of studies tend to vary a lot. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13694670600615276

Your comment was real interesting user, especially the part about pleasures not being a good measure of wellbeing. That's why I consider myself an Epicurean instead of a Utilitarian, because Epicureanism is about minimizing suffering, but doesn't have the second axiom of maximizing pleasure.

>le happiest country in the world meme

>suicide rate is average
>divorce rate is shit
>child birth rate is one of the worst in Europe

Kek

Would spreading certain not-comproved or blatantly fraudulent information with the objective of generating happiness be a good thing to society?

>implying that's not how civilizations are run anyways

>implying you can't reform said religions to suit modern day society.
>implying there aren't contradictions within religious texts that can be applied to push forward progressive attitudes.

Ok lad, we get it, you have mastered your euphoria.

>suicide rate is average
a. If the country is happier in every other aspect it's still a happy country with an average suicide rate.
b. Physician assisted suicide is legal there, and many people go there for end of life decisions which could artificially inflate the suicide rate.
> divorce rate is shit
If there are a large amount of divorces, but if the terms are amicable how are they inherently bad. It's not like in America where a divorce can financially ruin you.
>birth rate
The value of children varies from country to country. In an agricultural country or one with a population too small to pay taxes people will want more kids, whereas in a more industrialized or service oriented country or one with a stable tax base people will want fewer kids.

So you think this is a good thing?

I'm the guy who made the Epicureanism comment, and I'm not advocating spreading lies, and I personally am a pragmatic atheist. I think societally religion is way worse than irreligion. But I don't think that I or the user I responded to at any point advocated spreading lies. He just expressed a viewpoint that religion can do some good things, and I just made a comment about Epicureanism which was an incredibly naturalistic philosophy. They went as far to propose that the Greco-Roman gods were pretty much extra terrestrials, because they didn't believe supernatural things could exist. There are writings by Epicureans in Christopher Hitchens' "The Portable Atheist" and there are Epicurean poems that are recited at Humanistic funerals.

>But I don't think that I or the user I responded to at any point advocated spreading lies.
I'm not implying you did, I'm just asking your opinions.

Epicureanism is truly the best philosophy. Lucky 7s confirms.

You are aware that that sounds really stupid.

>you, too, will choose some comfortable form of spirituality.
No, not all people do. Stop pretending to be somehow a norm.

Oh, I'm sorry I reread your comment, and realized it was a question, I'm low on sleep. But to answer your question, no I do not believe that spreading falsities is justified. Because, I don't believe a population being lied to is actually happy. They may be experiencing pleasure, but they are prevented from intellectual inquiry, which doesn't always lead to as much pleasure, but still seems to be inherently valuable to humans due to our natural curiosity. So I don't think you can justify intellectual dishonesty based off of happiness, because I think it would prevent us from participating in an important part of what makes people happy.

>child birth rate is one of the worst in Europe
>imblyign having kids makes you happy

My counter-argument against atheism is that God and the supernatural are fucking real whether you want them to be or not.

You can sit in your comfortable middle-class house in our technocratic society and claim that God doesn't exist because no society in history, except maybe the Imperial Romans, has been better at avoiding him. However, those who can't distract or amuse themselves, those who are poor or in poor parts of the world, know the truth.

>God and the supernatural are fucking real whether you want them to be or not.
Proofs?
>claim that God doesn't exist
Literally can't be done. How could I possibly know if some god exists or not?

I grew up poor and Pentecostal. Do you know what that taught me? It taught me that religion hurts poor people; my mom wasted most of her money by giving it to the church, and it made our lives worse. It's a scam they promise you a better afterlife, and fleece their pockets with their money.
Also, as far as poor people knowing God exists; I knew a man without a high school education that worked in construction with me, and he articulated a version of the argument of evil just based off of his life experiences. The same conditions that can cause people to be believers can also cause them to be unbelievers.

Maybe you should go looking for him.

I have some thoughts about Pentecostalism, but I'll keep them to myself because they're not productive.

What is productive is that I will again assert that the supernatural is deadly real. You, again, seem never to have encountered it. You should be grateful for that. I know people who have, and I may have myself. It's not usually pleasant.

I don't go looking for things that don't have even a tiny bit of evidence supporting it. And even if I did, look for what god? Yours? What's the difference between your god and the others?

>However, those who can't distract or amuse themselves, those who are poor or in poor parts of the world, know the truth.
The fantastic "There are no atheists in foxholes"-argument.
You know that this proofs nothing besides a need to believe in some people, right?

Maybe you should go diving for Nessie, bigger chance there too, if I might add.

>it's real dude, my neighbor saw Satan one time

Go looking for him, and what if the person who posted that comment doesn't find him? Would you just respond that he didn't look hard enough? What would constitute looking for God? How could we look for God? Should I have to look for a unicorn to disprove that it exists? That's the problem with this type of reasoning; if the person making the negative claim has the burden of proof then the person making the positive claim can just keep coming up with reasons about why the evidence doesn't really disprove his theory.
Is a good example of this; I offered a counter argument against his assertion, and instead of arguing against that point he just asserted that I "didn't really experience the supernatural". Also, as far as the supernatural goes I had many spiritual experiences that I attributed to God, and considered supernatural at the time.

I am fairly confident that I had a personal encounter with something strange and sinister in my old apartment one hot night. Don't believe me if you like, that's fine. But there was something there that terrified me, and that went away when I prayed. Call me crazy; I don't care.

What was your counterargument, exactly? I missed it, or you didn't present it clearly.

Hmmmm, an experience of something sinister that could be explained by hallucinations, hallucinations are caused by the brain, you prayed which uses many different parts of the brain, I wonder why the "sinister" things went away? And, I'm not saying you're crazy; most people have some hallucinations in their life.

Your original claim was that poor people and people in poor countries know God, and I provided counterexamples of my own experience with poverty as well as another person's experience with it to demonstrate that poor people don't necessarily know God. Also, I should have said counterexamples, not counterargument.

Do you see how I can turn that assertion totally on its head? I am rather mystically inclined. You say "most people have some hallucinations in their life." I, in response, say: "Most people have an encounter with the supernatural in their life." This assertion of mine allows me to tap your vein of evidence and use it to further MY argument. You call these widespread hallucinations; I call them widespread supernatural activity. You say that normal, rational people have hallucinations; I say that normal, rational people have paranormal encounters and accurately report what happens to them.

So this doesn't solve anything in our argument, because any time you resort to hallucinations or mental illness as explanations, I can say that they are actually explanations for the reality of the supernatural.

Today I was thinking about how the brilliant minds of today (Hawking, for example), ones I could think of anyway, are atheist, others agnostic - open to the possibility of a 'higher power', for lack of a better term' perhaps, but typically they don't believe in a god of creation, or a god watching over everything. These men don't believe in heaven or sin and things like that.

(Is there a chart somewhere that lists all the great philosophers and mathematicians and physicists and writers - what their religious beliefs, if any, were? I'd really like one.)

In contrast, all the great minds of say, medieval times (again, I was just wondering this randomly today, the point wasn't going through specific people and finding out exact details) - because of the nature of the time they lived in, so many of those guys were Christian. ok, maybe not Da Vinci...

what I'm trying (poorly, I'm afraid) to get to is:

is it reasonable to think that a couple hundred years from now humanity will have come to a point where they see religious beliefs for what they are? that they'll be all logical like Spock or something? that they'll look back on this time (like we can look at history) and say, "Hawking was so right all along. Shame people didn't listen to them. All of them still fighting over which god is -thee- god" or whatever.

hope this makes sense. very sleepy. gonna read through the thread now and fall asleep.

But people have contradictory hallucinatory experiences if it was a God causing them why would he give contradictory ones, also not all hallucinations are of paranormal things. Most are of completely normal things e.g. being tired and seeing a person off in the distance that's not really there. But if hallucinations can be of non paranormal things and can explain paranormal things then I don't think my argument can be flipped on its head, because it's using an accepted theory about normal occurrences to explain something "paranormal".

by the way I'm honestly not trying to be edgy or insult anyone. I'm just asking Veeky Forums about thinkers and religion... I don't think having personal spiritual beliefs is a problem or that you're dumb for having them. my sis falls into the category this user is talking about
>I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that most human beings are usually most content with a relative feeling of certainty and clear guidelines for conduct. A religion provides all these things, and abiding by these guidelines generally provides you with a feeling of satisfaction and the act of doing it (even when it'd feel good not to) builds character.

Just wanted to say save your "fedora" calls for someone else. I'm thinking bigger picture. And looking for answers, and others' thoughts.

The difference is that you need to go one step ahead and assume that things which violate every knowledge of the natural world not only exist, but are also frequent and yet never been able to produce even a tiny bit of evidence corroborating with it existence.

I believe religion will never go away. I think anyone who thinks it will is an idiot and is naive.

Look at all the supposedly 'atheistic' nations of Europe and the Americas. They all believe in stuff like ghosts and crystal healing, they all believe in chakras, they all believe in the Law of Attraction and in weird American Buddhism. There are almost no 'hard' atheists, hard atheists are actually hugely rare, there are just a lot of people who aren't Christian any more but who still believe in a lot of supernatural stuff.

There will never be a world where hard atheists are a majority. I think anyone who thinks that is a lunatic.

Gee, it's a good thing that, here on a history board, history itself can serve as my evidence.

As far as what those people would be called, I don't know about Hawking, but Einstein, Penrose, and a few others could be labeled as "agnostic leaning to Platonic Pantheism", because they're unsure of the existence of God (agnosticism), believe that God could be some force immanent in the Universe (Pantheism) e.g. Penrose believing the universe is material but with a purpose or Einstein's version of the argument from design, and they both believed in real, abstract, independent mathematical objects (Platonism) Penrose has made arguments for Platonism and Einstein had such an extreme Certainty about his math that he was at least a strong realist.

well, spirituality is a natural instinct that hasn't left because it has helped us survive pretty well

so i'd say it's a good thing yeah

>history itself can serve as my evidence
Only for historical claims. You can find "X people believed in Y" or "X claims to have seen Y", but that doesn't necessarily mean that Y is true/exists.

The vast majority of great minds in history were religious (not just a little, I mean actually religious), if anything their faith is what motivated their intellectual curiosity.

Nowadays a lot of great minds are atheist because with capitalism, everyone is expected to be excellent at one thing and live off that. In the Christian atheist society we live in, most people who don't work in anything theological will be atheist/agnostic.

The trouble with conflating agnosticism with Platonism is that Nietzsche was right about Platonism: it's more than halfway to Christianity. If you are a Platonic realist, you are naturally led to think of the Forms as emanating from the "Form of the Good" in the Republic, insofar as this is the origin of the Good-ness of the Forms. It's just a short skip to thinking of the Form of the Good as God. Maybe not the Christian God, but some kind of omnipotent intelligence.

>They all believe in stuff like ghosts and crystal healing, they all believe in chakras, they all believe in the Law of Attraction and in weird American Buddhism
Are you describing someone you know?

I actually am, yes, and not just one someone, either. I am a fairly young person, and I can't tell you how many people I know believe in shit like 'energy,' like chakras, like homeopathy, stuff that has no evidence to it at all.

I'm a hardcore Catholic, so I don't really have grounds to criticize them, I suppose, but what fascinates me is that they're all supposedly atheists, or at least are 'non-Christian,' and my bullshit isn't any more ludicrous than theirs.

that's not clit part user, no one cuts his glans penis...

Do you think it would be correct to say that religious books are viable sources of criticism?
As i see it, the questions we ask today are the same ones our ancestors asked, only perhaps more nuanced and specific.
Every topic has been stretched and became detailed.
Religious writings, as wholesome, all inclusive aggregates of primordial world views can be a source of criticism of modern and contemporary ideas and descisions.
Post modernism opened the road for people to view the past not as a lesser source of knowledge but as a general and more concentrated source of knowledge.
Perhaps modern religions can be retooled as religious that embrace all change and give its oppinion on it.
A non dogmatic all embracing religious perspective.

A religious criticism of science.
A religious criticism of shovinism.
A religious criticism of corporations.
A religious criticism of globalization.
And so on and on and on.

Maybe we need an expansion of religious ideas and criticisms about all aspects of life..
Religious criticism that has absorbed all the changes and elaborations and advances in all other areas of life and is open, broadened and evolving..
It doesn't even matter if you believe in god or not, a religious text's power is in its primacy.
Its power also lies in its unique status since it cannot be repeated today. It was for our ancestors as valueable in practice as modern science is to us.
and moderr science is not some magical new phenomena but an extension of previous human interactions with the world.
The importance of anciant texts is in their historical place as all encapsulating anciant world views on which our modern lives are based, now and probably forever.

But this is nonesense imo.
You cannot replace religions with another life philosophy...
Thats a theoretical proposition but not a practical one.
The power of anciant religious texts is exactly in their unrepeatable primacy and thus in their ability to not only deliver life lessons but do so in an infinitely persuasive way.
It is not enough to teach, you have to deliver knowledge in a way others want to learn.
This is why you cant just repalce religion with a "life philosophy" unless its done through coercion.

And are all dying societies...

youtube.com/watch?v=Il7Kxw9TDBc

Imagine a tree of knowledge well its stem is made up of ancient religions and texts.
All else springs up from them and all branches are roots in the trunk to which they return one in a while to understand where to grow next.

You cannot throw religions away. our existence, art, thinking, ways of acting are all laced with religious texts.
Those texts are a rock-bed of interpretations and reinterpretations.
Imagine the bible as an encapsulating description of the ancient world by ancient people. When reading it, we open a window and looking on all of ancient society. Through their primordial understandings of the world we can criticize our modern world since it is a detailed variation, an outgrowth of that world who's description of itself is in the bible.

>You cannot throw religions away.

You mean like what Christians did with the pagans?

Well they did not really throw them away.
Paganism is still alive within Christianity

This plus what matters is the extent of influence.
You cannot rewrite history. Much of western culture, art, music, philosophy, and even war and social structures and classes were inspired by christianity and the bible/new testament.

Sure, shamanistic religions existed and people worshiped tree gods but this did not produce some sort of all inclusive world view, like what Judaism, Christianity and Islam managed to produce.

Thats no really accurate the pagan religions could produce the same wonders if they had been in force during times like the renaissance.
Art does not rely on aberhammic faiths. They were just in the right place at the right time. Art is a human endevor religion does not matter at all.

>tfw am paranoid scizophrenic
>people constantly telling me to "listen for the voice of god" and to "let the angels into your heart"
>they immediately stop when I tell them that the "voice of god" usually tells me to murder the prostitutes and offer their blood to satiate the thirst of Shayugoth the Infinite and prevent him from entering into the mortal plane

Seriously though I've yet to see any serious answer on how Christianity can be valid when people like me (read as: people with serious psychiatric disorders) can exist

Before, it could easily be waved away by saying "demonic possession" but I seriously doubt anyone would shoot themselves in the foot by putting themselves on the same level as Scientologists and say that mental illnesses are caused by literal Theatans

>holding back civilization
Yeah, from mass murder lmao
Seriously, look at the major attempts to eliminate religion and replace it with atheism
>French Revolution
Led to the Terror where tens of thousands of innocent people were slaughtered, people were killed without trial, and even mass rapes were instigated by the atheist leaders
>Soviet Union
Mass oppression, slave labor, a program of famine as a weapon, and millions of innocent people slaughtered
>Republican Spain
Led to the Red Terror where you had such great events and nuns being gang raped and/or burned alive, entire families killed for saying prayers, and the government killing people without trial for being accused of being Catholic. Like the French Terror tens od thousands of innocent people were slaughtered
>Communist China
The attempt to wipe out religion and superstition led tot he deaths of millions *before* the Cultural Revolution led to the murder of millions more for crimes like 'having been religious, once, before becoming an atheist'
>Socialist Mexico
There attempts to 'cleanse the nation of the scourge of religion' led to (once more) mass slaughter of the innocent, including the murder of tens of thousands by the government without trial (seems like a theme, doesn't it?) for the 'crime' of being religious, wearing religious jewelry, etc. Highlights include soldiers stabbing a 14 year old boy to death for refusing to say 'death to Jesus'
>Khmer Rouge
Slaughtered at least 50,000 Buddhist monks alone - any sort of Buddhist activity by anyone was, effectively, an instant death sentence without trial (again).
>Communist Albania
Three guesses: Yup! More execution (often by starvation) of members of almost all religions, without trial. Thousands slaughtered for being religious.

It is a clear pattern - state atheism = the senseless murder of thousands to millions of innocent people.

>my coincidences

It doesnt matter what could have been. Fact is those religions did not produce a bible or a new testament and thus we cannot rely on their world views for reinterpretation and critique.

You have to try and see our modern problems and structures as an extension of anciant ones and because of that we can refer to the more concentrated and general anciant world views as a source for criticism of modern issues.

The pagan religions were not able to produce such thing. They lost the cultural religious war. They were not universalist enough, or perhaps some other reasons but in short thye were not good enough or appropriate enouhg for the needs of that time to be able to flourish.
The reasons dont really matter. what matters is to have a bedrock of interpretation through which we can examine modern issues .

Much like Luther freed christianity from certain dogmas, we can now do so again. US, the thinkers, the humanists have to start using the tools religious texts give us so that they are not used by those who want ot use them to perpetuate harm and savagery.

>Khmer Rogue
>"replace with atheism"
>slaughter 50,000 Buddhist monks
Lel okei

I think you're confusing a state of being with the overall shittiness of humanity. You're born a murderer whether or not you decide to praise a God. You're born a murderer whether or not you decide to kill for or against a God.

Many religions priduced holy texts. The ones that were 'defeated'.
We dont rely on christanity for interpretation only context. It works like every other major religion.
We interpret little if anything through religions. We always bend them to the mores of the day.

I cant seem to shake this feeling that you are full of shit. Its weird.

Yeah well tell the jews that.
In an atheist world jews cease to exist

()
thank you for the insightful replies, Veeky Forums. I don't think I adequately described exactly how I thought (and hoped) things might change far into the future based on the past and present, but your posts (and this thread) have given me clear new avenues to consider in my thinking more on this.

For now, I think these anons
were touching on is related to what I was thinking about.
By that I mean, based on great scientific and philosophical contributions to human knowledge and thinking with regard to the religious views held at the time of the new break-throughs/views, I hope that it's likely or even possible that, one day in the (even very distant) future, we'll have arrived at a more peaceful and prosperous way of living - that we find a way to put our various and conflicting beliefs either aside or put them to use in uniting for common good, and to ultimately end the war and destruction and social divides related to religious beliefs today.
After all, though OP somewhat in-eloquently put it like the true Faggot he is, I find views like these

>pic related

>conservapedia.com/Evolution

>conservapedia.com/Atheism#Atheism_and_morality.2Fethics

>calling Intelligent Design "science" and atheism "religion and insisting it be taught in U.S. schools

disheartening, even disturbing. And I hope we humans are intelligent (and compassionate perhaps? or maybe "a majority of us convinced that serving others serves us as a whole" enough?) somehow, to solve these problematic conflicts in (as OP said) "modern sensibilities" and resolve them in a manner that helps civilization evolve in positive ways more than negative.

Thanks again, all, from a faithful Veeky Forums lurker.

>linking conservapedia

This has to be triple-layered irony we're dealing with here, right?

> You are wrong for wearing fedora even if you aren't really wearing one!
I miss when religious arguments at least tried to be creative with fictional eternal punishment and divine zombie Jew who want to save you from it.