In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city became the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council. They viewed the power shift and diversity as a meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
i think this line of thinking is easily the least useful anti-theist critique you can make of religion. even if we dispensed of all religion, spirituality, and superstition, most people would still be fundamentally irrational actors. religion might influence the ways in which they are and how that practically manifests—but let’s be clear, most people do not even come close to having a coherent moral system or set of beliefs and that wouldn’t even if you made them blank-slate irreligious people. the problem you are describing is not a religious problem, and it would exist even if we had no religion.
EDIT: fyi this post was attached to something previously but something fucked up happened so it’s totally context-less now lol. upvote if you will but this makes no sense in the context it’s now being displayed in
religion is what gives them cause to act on their shitty way of thinking. It gives them an excuse that they can then go to sleep thinking they’ve done right.
Without religion society would come down so fucking hard on them for their shitty ass views… Sadly lots of people are religious so even those that don’t agree, agree that it’s against god or w/e stupid ass shit they come up with.
you’re just describing being an asshole here, which is not religion exclusive. how would your point—which appears to be this is some unique property of religion—reconcile someone like Mao Zedong? Mao was not a religious person in any meaningful sense of that word. he renounced Buddhism and was basically an anti-theist (and/or at least an atheist) for most of his life, and in fact presided over one of the largest systematic destructions of religious heritage in modern history during the Cultural Revolution.
Sure, people of all types can be awful, but there’s definitely trends within an organizations history from which a larger effect can be seen. Religion isn’t needed to be an asshole, but the venn diagram overlap is rather large. If you’re looking at things structurally, religion is often used as a tool of population management and often times goes hand in hand with imperialism. Everything from the Kamloops massacre and genocide to the undertones of homophobia in dancehall music often times comes from religious values imposed by authority figures.
Sure, there are philosophies such as liberation doctrine and the like that seek to make religion as a means to lift people from oppression, but if you take a large look at the effects of organized religion, that is very clearly the exception to the norm. Organized religion is often used as a structural hierarchy to dictate and govern morality, which is why it shares a lot with authoritarians that want to set up strict hierarchies of other means.
Theres ways to practice religion in non-assholish ways, but the religion itself, especially those with more organization in their structure, absolutely to spreads hate and vileness
the contention here is not scope or scale or anything of that nature, it’s literally whether this is an intrinsic and unique property of religion—and it’s not, thus it’s bizarre to pretend that if we didn’t have religion suddenly people would cease acting irrationally, or cease acting shitty, or whatever else. you, in your post, literally agree with this and admit people of all types can be awful and irrational, so i don’t know what your disagreement here is.
well currently in the US religion is fighting progress and religion is what half the bills in Texas that just passed were based on. Abortion is sceince, but religion is what has caused it to lose legality. Religion ignores science. Same thing going on with climate change… religion says humans aren’t doing this… Science disagrees, but here we are.
So yeah religion is the thing. not just being an asshole. It’s written into the various religions (who all think the other is wrong by the way) that this is the way to be. To deny science is the right choice of action for them.
Irrational, yes, but not fundamentally so. Without supernatural beliefs, they’d have to at least think that they care about empirical reality. Their beliefs would be falsifiable, whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not.
When you throw religion into the mix, though, you can’t even guarantee that much. Were the beliefs of Heaven’s Gate wrong? I’d like to think so. Can I prove that? Not in the slightest, because supernatural beliefs like their founders’ “revelations” are fundamentally unfalsifiable. For all we know, there’s still a chance they were right, and that all 8 billion of the rest of us are still under the thumb of the “Luciferians”.
That fundamental inability to be reasoned with, which I would consider fundamentally irrationality, is unique to supernatural beliefs. Even if they don’t take it nearly as far, it’s still a concern I have with other religions. I’d like for people’s moral
beliefsjudgements to at least be ostensibly possible to reason with.EDIT: “belief” is a bit too nebulous on second thought.
i just do not think this at all nor do i think falsifiability is a meaningful consideration in this conversation (because people do not care about falsifiability, i’m sorry. to my knowledge this is well studied and the bulk of those studies show that proving someone wrong seldom influences their opinions in any meaningful way). you don’t even have to get harmful here: just try reasoning with a person who thinks Pluto should still be a planet at this point about why it isn’t. there is no rational underlying justification to continue to believe this, yet people will go so far as to say the Whole of Science got it wrong and there is no argument you can make to convince them. people will gladly die on fundamentally irrational hills and fundamentally be incapable of being talked out of defending those hills with or without religion. this is not a supernatural thing.
I agree that people cant really be convinced by proving them wrong on the spot. However, if someone is just a little bit interested in being rational, then after going home over time they will think about that question again and again, until they resolve that dissonance, not necessarily, but potentially by changing their mind. I would assume that this would be somewhat hard to study, but if you have some good resources on this im interested. Its just that when people constantly hear from their leaders that faith is a virtue and even more virtuous when practiced despite strong evidence to the contrary (i was raised christian, and i experienced this there, i would assume its somewhat similar in Islam), then they will be a lot less likely to go through this.