Why are there so many churchy people here.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

No, this is a Church-y place.  Some of my anti-religion comments that are commonplace amongst my NJ social group get a lot of a venom over in the Religion & Philosophy board.   

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

I consider it a personal plus to have been raised an atheist. I had no need to rebel against it all - to break the surly bonds of faith that chain one's soul as it were. Religion is neither good nor bad to me - just irrelevant to my life.

Yes, you were very fortunate in that respect, as in all things, Torie.

But fear of religion is not the same thing as a 'need to rebel against it'.  It is also irrelevant to me in a personal sense, but I find it terrifying politically.

Indeed, is there anything in the world more in opposition to freedom?  I find the sect of America that walks around shouting about freedom with their mouth while holding a Bible with their hand particularly oxymoronic. 

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Indeed, is there anything in the world more in opposition to freedom?

Strident anticlericalism has historically come close from time to time.

Close?  Maybe.  But religion is the attempted enslavement of the body and the mind.  Anticlericalism is a response to the original wrong being done, albeit at times in the name of something almost as bad. (totalitarian communism, for example)

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

But religion is the attempted enslavement of the body and the mind.

That's as mindlessly offensive and as spectacularly idiotic as asserting that those who are not religious do not have morals.

Excuse me... I said ATTEMPTED.  How many religious leaders/strict fundamentalists who are following their scriptures to a T can you think of that would not relish the idea of controlling their adherents like puppets?  We can only be grateful that the vast majority of people who claim to be religious take the particularly nasty bits as metaphor/push them aside (stoning your neighbor for working on the Sabbath, for example).   I understand religion is supposed to be one's way of connecting with God, but what is the end result of it all?  Control... and it's not control coming from another person... it's control coming from God itself, here AND in the afterlife, it's eternal.

Once again proving the point of this thread... around the Atlas it's OFFENSIVE to have a negative opinion of religion.  Sorry, but I'm not going to moderate myself on an institution I consider to be inherently the worst kind of evil. 
 

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Excuse me... I said ATTEMPTED.

What has that to do with the price of rice?

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Somewhat inevitably it appears that you don't know the first thing about the target of your juvenile ravings. Religion is far too complex a thing (if it is even really a single thing) to be dismissed as merely a form of 'social control'. The same rites and institutions that may be profoundly oppressive to one person may well be profoundly liberating to another. And that's just scratching the surface.

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I don't think that's true, but it is certainly true that I found your particular post to be quite offensive. I believe that I have a right to find offensive what offends me; I think we all do, actually. No one has a right to have their opinions accepted without question, without criticism.

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Leaving aside first the irony and second the idea that 'religion' can be thought of as a single 'institution', it strikes me as a little strange to view (say) a rosary as more evil than (say) Treblinka.

1. It means that the end result of religion is not always mind/body enslavement... but fundamentalists certainly give it the old college try.

2. And heroin can be liberating for a drug addict, torturing animals can be liberating for a sociopath... does that make it a good thing?  My argument is that a terrible price is paid so people can have their liberating rituals.  Someone praying by themselves is still a cog in the wheel of mass delusion, which I find to be just terribly harmful to humanity and it's potential. 

3. I didn't say you don't have a right to be offended, of course you do, I was just pointing out a observation I've made about this forum. 

4. Nazism was profoundly based and backed by religious belief.  Nazi Germany would never have happened without religious superstition.  Gott mitt uns, ja?

I don't think I ever tried to say religion was a single institution, but don't you think there are some things that all or a vast majority of religions have in common...belief in the supernatural, little to no evidence for that, restrictions on personal behavior, etc.?

 

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Your argument is essentially 'it doesn't matter who finds it liberating if I find it oppressive'.

Essentially, yes, because in my view anyone who is stridently religious can not truly be free.  And before you jump down my throat... are there not a very large number of things that religious people claim are not open to agnostics/atheists; namely salvation and morality?  Hell, I've been told by my religious friends that my lack of belief means I myself can never be free.   

My belief is that rejection of religious or god-ly beliefs are a path to enlightenment and freedom of the mind.  So, how could I see religion as anything BUT oppressive? 

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

By recognizing that other people don't share that belief, which is something that people holding belief systems purporting to be 'rationalist' have, I'm sorry to say, not historically been especially good at. My mind is significantly freer (in the sense of having room to entertain a greater variety of possibilities) treating its contents as having some depth and a mystical connection to past, future, and eternal minds than it would be were I to treat reality as some sort of Murakami Takashi installation piece.

In a way you've sort of proved his point; that's an incredibly dismissive thing to say. He was wrong to say he's 'freer' than you spiritually, as individual freedom is an internal state and cannot be objectively measured, but you can't say you're 'significantly freer' either or be as dismissive of other views of reality.

I said I believe my mind is freer, to clarify; I certainly do not think spirits exist.  I did not make any claims to that being an absolute fact, and I don't find that statement particularly controversial for an atheist who hasn't chosen to be so.  

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Ignoring the fact that i havent posted for 11 days, I don't think this forum is very churchy. Even if it was, why is that a bad thing?

Yeah, this forum is only 'churchy' relative to memphis, Joe Republic, and HockeyDude's apparent social circles. It isn't churchy relative to American society or the world as a whole at all.

It's much churchier here than I expected. And that was my entire point. Maybe it's less churchy than other people would expect.  It is true that I am beyond baffled by the culture of religion, but that's rather a different topic and I certainly have no expectation of changing any opinions. Not like anybody has ever been persuaded by political arguments on here either.

My point is the expectation being flouted by this ULTRA-'CHURCHY' FORUM TWO-FIFTHS OF WHICH GOES TO CHURCH ON CHRISTMAS!!!! seems to have been dictated by a very particular social environment, because that's the only standard by which this place could possibly be so characterized--and HockeyDude and Joe Republic have more or less admitted as such. Maybe if you interacted with a broader cross-section of American society more your 'bafflement' would decrease.

My "bafflement" is contrived from the fact that such a large number of young liberals would find so much merit in religion, particularly since so many of those liberals seem to agree with someone like me on most if not all major issues, and then we hit this wall religion where it could not be more opposite.  It's confusing on a purely psychological level.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

You either didn't read or didn't understand my point.  I was talking to memphis, and by extension anybody else who is baffled by the culture of religion.  Not Nathan, not you, or any other religious people.  (Didn't you see my use of the word "us"?)  Sure, you guys are all here anyway and can all read my posts, which makes things a little awkward I guess, but I'm simply talking amongst my peers.

Remember when HockeyDude said earlier that this forum is different from real life in that whenever he discusses religion with his social peers, it's to criticize or mock it?  I'm the same; I'm just not used to talking about religion in front of people who actually subscribe to it.

Not entirely true, Joe.  I've plenty of teligious friends, but in my closest crew agnosticism is the majority, and even the religious ones at least see my point and don't consider it offensive in the least.