Is Catholicism Christianity?

[John Dule]

Let them fight.

[John Dule]

Let them fight.

Too much of your emotional animosity toward religion comes through in your persona of “intellectually superior atheist who’s above this stuff.”  You can make some counter argument (“Well, when these fanatics pass legislation and influence society, it directly affects me!”), but I suspect you know this is true.

I've never made an attempt to hide my visceral hatred of religion on this site. It's one of those things where an emotional reaction is warranted; in fact, I'd be annoyed with anyone who didn't have a strongly emotional reaction to this issue one way or the other.

[John Dule]

Let them fight.

Too much of your emotional animosity toward religion comes through in your persona of “intellectually superior atheist who’s above this stuff.”  You can make some counter argument (“Well, when these fanatics pass legislation and influence society, it directly affects me!”), but I suspect you know this is true.

I've never made an attempt to hide my visceral hatred of religion on this site. It's one of those things where an emotional reaction is warranted; in fact, I'd be annoyed with anyone who didn't have a strongly emotional reaction to this issue one way or the other.

I completely don't give a crap to be honest. I grew up in an essentially totally secularised culture, and religious practice, or debate, or theology is just completely devoid of interest to me because it is completely irrelevant to my upbringing and my culture.

I mean, you live in a society where the influence of religion is still deeply impregnated. So it makes sense for you to have a deeply emotional reaction to it. But for me, the whole concept of being religious is just too fundamentally alien for it to even be really possible to get emotional about. It's just not relevant to the world I live in

I wish I had the luxury of feeling this way about it. I certainly did back when I was a kid; I remember feeling no animosity towards religion whatsoever because I was simply never exposed to it. The last five years have been a wake-up call, though. It's become clear that America simply will not progress until it expunges Christianity from the realm of political discourse.

For religious people who don't understand why someone would feel this way, imagine living in a country where 80% of citizens are QAnoners. At some point, that sh*t would start to weigh on you.

[John Dule]

From my perspective as a seriously religious non-Christian in the United States, I can say that the proportion of people I interact with (outside of my own religious group) who are meaningfully religious is vanishingly small. Consequently my default assumption until proven otherwise is that anyone who claims to be religious, particularly in a political context, is simply doing so for cultural or political reasons and in fact lacks any sort of real religious belief that I would find worthy of respect.

Yeah, the thing about the modern phenomenon of religious conservatism is that it's not actually about sincere faith-based moral stances on public policy, but it's all about identity politics for a certain brand of White Americans. There is very little actual religious content to it, and it's obvious if you look at the detail of their rhetoric that they engage in ridiculous mental gymnastics to twist Christian doctrine into the narrow box of post-Reagan conservative orthodoxy. Which is what makes Dule's obsession with debunking it with Facts&Logic(TM) so misguided: that was never the point to begin with.

I'm much more concerned with debunking the religious left than the religious right. They're far more dangerous.