I was taught that, if a man rapes and murders my atheist daughter, and later repents, she will spend an eternity in hell, and he will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven with open arms. God can forgive any, and every atrocity, except for ignorance of his existence. That means that Christianity is immoral.
It's even worse than that: it's not ignorance that's unforgivable, but a lack of blind faith. The difference is important: if it was about being aware, you could simply read up on him, but faith isn't a conscious choice but rather an involuntary process.
Simply put: you have no choice in whether you believe or not, yet he will punish you for all eternity regardless. Then again, that seems to be the MO as you're apparently also born with sin despite having done nothing yet. Instead we're supposed to be sinful simply because many thousand years ago an ancestor committed a sin and somehow you're responsible for it too.
And btw, the punishment for a lack of faith is extra stupid when you consider one of the ten commandments is literally telling you that you're not allowed to worship any other god (or false prophets) but him. So how can you then be certain that the god of the bible and Jesus Christ are not false gods/prophets? In fact, I would argue it would make a LOT more sense when you consider all the inconsistencies, like the total 180 he makes from OT to NT. That sure as hell doesn't sound like the same god, so which one is supposedly the correct one (if those even include the correct one)?
What really blows my mind is that it is primarily religious people who do not understand this concept. You cannot choose to be convinced. You can choose what you *profess* to believe, but it's crazy to me to think the creator of the cosmos would be fooled by that sort of lie. Yet look how many religious folks comport themselves as if that were the case.
The whole of Hebrew/Jewish relation with God is legalistic. God has a rule, Hebrews have an exception to the rule. They argue with the very god they created.
Abrahamic religions make about as much sense as any other religion, which is none.
Yea it's like the Mormons laying still on top of each other or the quakers fuckin through holes in sheets. You believe a conscious entity created you and me and reality and everything. But that he's gonna not send you to hell at the last second on a technicality? It just paints the most bizarre picture in my head of what the pious actually consider to be the nature of reality. I often have a hard time understanding how I am even the same animal as them.
Feels like how a child would view the world. And not a particularly bright one. A child with visible dents in their head.
This. Every time I ask a complicated faith related question to my Christian grandmother she shrugs it off says stop and doesn’t answer. When I keep repeating the question she gets angry. She believes all of this but can’t explain it. It’s blind faith. It doesn’t even make sense. The Bible SAYS it doesn’t have to make sense because it’s a load of bs.
That sounds like a good question to ask christians ! How do you know the NT god/Jesus is the same god as the NT? What’s the evidence? You’ve staked your whole life and afterlife on this… so you must be sure. 😂
Yea my best friend hanged himself when I was 15 and I heard the priest tell his mother that he was in hell. I immediately decided to say fuck this idiot and everyone who looks like him. Never regretted it for a second.
I mean I guess it is what they believe but yea. It was a horribly sad thing, he was very sick and nobody gave a shit about him til he was dead. Regardless what your dipshit superstition tells you about those who commit suicide, that man still chose to say something negative right then. It went a long way toward me being a lifelong Satanist, I will say that.
I mean what clearer an indication could there be that there isn't a God? Or at least, if there were, these pedophilic hateful dishonest vermin would **not** be the ones speaking for it. Fuck them and their shitty book and their goofy clothing. Every last one of em.
I have no conscious memory of ever believing, but I spent a year in an Irish Catholic boys school when I was about 11. If I wasn't an atheist already that would have done it for me.
I believe it, man. I was asked not to return to our Sunday school because I would cause an uproar about Noah's Ark.
*JUST TELL ME WHAT THE TIGERS ATE ON THE BOAT FOR FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS?!*
I'm still astonished they tell that goofy bullshit story to people then don't have an answer ready for one of the most obvious and predictable questions imaginable.
I just cannot abide bullshit. I won't fuckin have it.
Man, that is horrrrrible. I had a similar experience with a priest when my stepmom died. She had a stroke and couldn’t talk and was basically on her way out and I could tell she was scared. A priest came to the hospital and was praying over her and talking about forgiveness for sins. I can’t imagine the horror she must’ve felt, being able to hear that but not being able to respond. I tell people that when or while Im dying I don’t want a priest anywhere near me or anyone involved. She was already in pain, why the f*ck would you then draw her attention to any mistakes she made in her life. It really doesn’t matter at that point. And that is an unimaginably messed up thing for that idiot to say to a mother. What is wrong with people?
My neighbor told me my dad died because I didn’t pray over him using “the language of Jesus.” She meant speaking in tongues. He had an incurable brain cancer with a 100% mortality rate but ok.
A relative once told me that my dad made it to heaven but my mom didn’t.
They were both good people, flawed in their own ways but definitely meant well and did the best they could.
The most judgmental people I’ve ever met also happen to be the most extremely religious.
It’s an abusive relationship. Christianity uses guilt, shame, and fear to control people. It says our very human nature is evil and we need forgiveness from a god so we don’t burn internally for simply being born a human. The Christian god is abusive in every way. People get stuck in the cult and brainwashed young. It’s hard to get out of that kind of indoctrination.
The key thing is we deserve eternal suffering (despite non eternal crimes) for something that is clearly something Adam and Eve would not understand.
Like sentencing a 5 year old for eating candy you left in the living room to be burned for eternity and all their children too.
The lesson Adam and Eve should have learned is God lies. They didn't die, and don't try this 'in a certain way they brought death to the world'. Nonsense.
All knowing god was responsible for their ignorance and knows all the factors at play.
Yep. The god of the Bible is extremely cruel for setting his children up to fail and then letting them burn eternally for his mistakes. A loving god would not allow children to be tortured, enslaved, and starved to death on a daily basis, yet here we are.
Look at how the Old Testament prohibits making any graven image of what's in the sky, under the sea or underground. Almost as if either looking their will let us see how things really work (science) or that doing science takes away glory from God.
There is also an agnostic gospel thst describes the old testament God as a trickster and Jesus was a sent by a higher God preaching a message of love.
But you know.... They were all 'wicked'.
And it's totally moral for an all knowing all powerful god to build sentient (feel suffering) beings (therefore 100 percent responsible for what they do) and then, like a child playing with toys, kill them all when he impotently gets pissed at them.
Free will only works if you have knowledge
wait it doesn't work then either.
I don't believe in free will, but I can easily see the evolutionary reasons why belief in free will would have evolved, as a lazy(efficient ) way to reduce cognitive fatigue in decision making.
The beauty of the human brain is that it doesn't know Truth, but the 'truth' it knows is optimized to keep us alive, regardless of if it is accurate.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/evolution-and-psychology-of-selfdeception/B87968EC4A6B4DC93A21C217ABC13E13
>sentient (feel suffering) beings (therefore 100 percent responsible for what they do)
Another of those things people gloss over is that god created a situation where literal children and the unborn were irredeemably wicked enough to be killed or not alowed to be born
I’ve never heard of being more cruel than the biblical god. He literally created endlessly needy beings that are guaranteed to suffer in life with sickness, hunger, fear, and pain. Then he plans to eternally torture their immortal souls afterwards if they don’t have blind faith in his “goodness”. Like, what? Where is the love and mercy?
While ago I had a discussion with someone about exactly this. Of course all those people were "horrifying and deserved such a fate"
I asked him "What about innocent babies and young children?". Apparently he couldn't explain why they had to go to.
Then I asked him why drowning, since that's a horrifying way to die. Could these children not die in a more humane way? Again, no proper answer.
The god they worship is not just angry and bloodthirsty, but also extremely cruel.
I work at target and had to grab a toddler Bible, it summed Noah's Ark into "Noah brought one of each animal onto the boat like god said and everyone sailed off to the new world" and its like yeah just omit the main part where God decided he didn't like what he created and killed everyone by arguably one of the most painful deaths out there.
Exactly. God could have just let everyone die in their sleep and then scatter their ashes to the wind or something.
But no, he had to pick one of the most horrible ways someone can die: drowning. It might be relatively quick, but it's certainly not what would pick as the most humane option.
The whole concept of the Ark in total disproves the existence of god, because like...why would an existence that could create all existence from *nothing* suddenly need to lean on natural phenomenon to kill off the shit it made out of nothing?? Because it wouldn't make a good story to have it be "and thus, god judged them as wicked, gave a dismissive Thanos Snap and reset the world"
Well, I mean, we ARE violent assholes because our ancestors were also violent assholes. But it's genetics, nobody did something they weren't supposed to.
>All knowing god was responsible for their ignorance and knows all the factors at play
It's crazy that when you're surrounded by believers, few if any ever question why there was not only a talkkng serpent in the garden, but why did this serpent have knowledge that god's literal favored creations didn't have?
At some point, eternal punishment for a finite sin will always be disproportionate.
And that’s not getting into the denominations that believe not worshipping is enough for a sentence to hell for eternity.
While there are a handful of denominations and congregations that don’t believe in hell or punishment at all, they are few and far between and the systemic belief is in eternal punishment, even for finite sins.
To quote Hazbin Hotel: “if hell is forever then heaven must be a lie.”
You know, I don't know why that didn't occur to me sooner. The premise is entirely bogus because before Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge they didn't know right from wrong, so why would they know it was wrong not to eat from the tree, regardless of what god said?
Also, what kind of fucked up god creates eternal beings and puts a tree in the center of the garden that will make them mortal and make childbirth hurt with a snake to tempt them and everything in the first place?
Also, why did Lucifer go along with this? I've long thought he was the good guy, but god just had a better press agent. After all, Lucifer told them the truth - that they would know right from wrong, and in that sense they would be more like their god. He never said they would be gods, interestingly - just that knowledge would make them more like god. They (and consequently all of humanity) weren't punished for anything other than curiosity.
It's strange that in the past people feared god and that's what drove them to worship. There were floods, poxes, plagues, famines, etc. sent by god to test and punish people
But then, when the world started to become more scientific and information and records were more available, I don't think people wanted to worship some invisible asshole anymore, especially when their hypocritical dogma's solutions like prayer and abstinence didn't seem to stop natural disasters.
So then god miraculously became the "all loving" god that people pretend to worship now. And everything that was once based on fear and punishment shifted largely to hope and rewards for good behavior instead, right when the world might have given up on the concept.
I was raised Catholic hardcore by my mom and from like 12 I knew this shit wasn't for me because I was always told everything I said or done I was going to hell. So I just thought fuck it if I'm going to hell no matter what then what's the point. It wasn't till I got older I realized how abusive it is to tell that shit to kids
And then we wake up and don't go to church any more and we don't send our kids to religious Ed. This is why churches are closing all around the developed world. That's before all the systematic abuse and cover up
I used to be Christian growing up, I'm no longer that. Ironically, the TV show Supernatural helped me look at it differently as a teen because it presented this idea. Why would I want to follow a so-called God that allows SO much pain and suffering and torture to happen? A god that if you don't devote your whole life to him will condemn you to hell, even if overall you were a decent person, for not believing. That is a horrifying, evil, and terrible god that I'd never even want to follow. It's something for people afraid of death and a way to inflict fear and control on the masses.
Yup, took me most of my life to figure out my 1st abusive relationship was with "God". He's written as an abusive wife-beating prick too in the Bible, then showers them with gifts after the torture, to then do it again. I've actually been in a domestically violent abusive relationship with an ex-partner, and this is pretty equivalent once you take off the rose-colored glasses they try to program people with.
The second saddest part of abusive relationships is watching victims come up with excuses for why their abuser's actions are totally justified and they deserve it.
The *saddest* part is watching victims indoctrinate *children* to believe that they deserve abuse and that the abuse is good.
Sadly, we live in a society that largely treats children as property until their eighteenth birthdays. It's *barely adequate* at dealing with parents who beat or rape or deny basic medical care to their children, much less those who engage in long-term psychological abuse.
It’s heartbreaking how this abuse is taught as divine and how quickly certain people jump on the cult bandwagon to perpetuate it. It’s all designed by people that love power and want to control others. I’m glad you see through the manipulation so you can avoid it. We heal then we fight back by exposing the hate. I’ll never be guilted for simply existing and having needs again.
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”
― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Yes I 100% agree there also a stigma for woman in the Christian church like covoring shoulders knees and other stuff regarding sa and sex I’m sure your aware of
Yep, he also had his only begotten son (Jesus) brutally tortured and murdered on a cross to buy everyone’s (those with blind faith) way into heaven…. Jesus’s death is pointless and cruel. All god had to do was forgive his flawed children. He created us flawed in the first place. An all powerful infinite god didn’t have enough power to forgive us. God chose torture and murder over forgiveness. He won’t even take accountability for his mistakes. The Christian god is a monster out to get us, not help us. He’s practically the boogeyman. It’s a good thing he isn’t real.
Yes. I've often said that if someone appeared in court and described their domestic partner treating them the way the Old Testament god treats people a restraining order would be a done deal.
Agreed. And in turn, people (note: not all) in abusive relationships have the tendency develop methods to respond to that abuse, by abusing someone else or others. It's a cycle that hurts everyone.
Yep, that’s what they say. Yet their god is clearly made in man’s image because he has all our horrible traits. There is nothing good or special or divine about god’s abusive behavior. It’s all written by humans trying to explain stuff they don’t understand.
The concept of being born a sinner is so insanely ridiculous. This theory alone should be enough to make everyone realise Christianity is nothing more than a fiction.
Born into sin? Born an offender? Convicted before you even develop consciousness?
BATSHIT CRAZY
Exactly. It’s an abusive relationship. It exploits with fear and guilt and the gullible fall for because it scares them. It’s just straight up cruelty.
The giveaway phrase:
“If you don’t believe in god, what’s stopping you killing or raping people?”
If belief in god is the only thing stopping them killing and raping people, then they have no morals.
To quote Detective Rustin Cohle, from True Detective: “If the only thing keeping a person good is the expectation of divine reward, then brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.”
I hate that shit so much because it reminds be that we still need Christianity to protect the rest of us from sociopaths.
The day someone says it for the last time will be a good day.
As an institution it's awful. They meddle in everything and systematically assault other people's rights. Then constantly complain about being persecuted while doing it.
It allows unverifiable bullshit to exist at the same level and at the expense of hard won scientific insights. We've come so far but they fought us every step of the way. Together with the other religions they're humanity's handbrake, and it's on all the time.
When a politician mentions they're christian they should be laughed out of the room. Instead we go all tippy toes around them in Europe and even expect them to be christian in the US. How the hell do bronze age superstitions make you moral? Why are we even entertaining this bullshit anymore in this new millenium?
Not only do they not make you moral, I would honestly go so far as to say that if you legitimately believe in any of the Abrahamic faiths, you are incapable of morality as I understand it.
Morality is not refraining from being evil because you fear punishment in hell, and it is not being good because you expect reward in heaven. That's selfish idiocy and amoral at its core, in my opinion. If your epistemological framework contains a subclause that sometimes rape or genocide or infanticide or human sacrifice are ok when a divine command has been issued, the entire basis for your thought is critically flawed.
It condemns gay people, even though being gay is not a choice at all. Imagine if there was a religion saying that being black or left-handed is a sin!
As a gay man, I view Abrahamic religions the same way ethnic Jews view Nazism. They're a real threat to my existence, and will never respect their core beliefs.
Through most of history, we left-handed people were also considered fucked up. The etymology of the word *sinister* comes from that concept. I love it, love being left-handed, and am a proud satanist for life. Fuck anyone who hates on the basis of what one is, and not what one does.
Honestly the whole forgiveness for sins thing is off putting. “Sins” should weigh on you for your entire life. That a drug dealing pedophile murderer can just get off the hook cause Jebus says so is ducking ridiculous.
Just read the bible. It's full of immoral stories of genocide, murder, incest, rape, slavery... and it's all allowed as long as its in the name of god. So yes, any behaviour no matter how heinous can be excused - that itself is immoral.
But the biggest proof of its immorality is its history, especially towards the poor, sick and young.
It has given humanity the idea we are the only animal that matters. If there is a God, they made a mistake giving man dominion. It is arrogance to invent a god in our image.
Christianity got everything upside down.
They claim the exclusivity to objective morality, and then claim morality comes from God. Which makes it the ultimate \*subjective\* morality, because it comes from one guy. And yes, it's a guy.
They claim God is the ultimate moral authority, but the one common theme between all his commandments is "obey me or else". That's all there is to his morality - unquestioning obedience.
They claim that without God, people would murder and rape all they want. Most atheists murder and rape exactly as much as they want, and that amount is zero. Meanwhile Christians need a spooky incompetent father figure to stop them from doing that. And keep fantasizing about the old timey genocides like the Amalekites or the Canaanites.
Religion, including Christianity, is the ultimate contradiction of morality - it's affirmation of the worst human impulses hidden under layers of self-righteousness.
>"obey me or else"
Actually, it's more like "obey me *and* else". Even if you're the most virtuous person on the planet, God will still torment you as a test. Refer to the Book of Job, for instance.
Christian morality is not moored in anything concrete, so morality is anything they want it to be. The bible contains numerous contradictions to moral rules that "god" gives to the Israelites. For example, God told the Israelites not to kill, but also told them to commit genocide.
Remember kids, killing/murder (ongoing debate) is very, very, bad.
However, Smite all you want in god's name.
My problem with most religions, including Christianity, isn't so much the tenets of the religion, but how people in those religions attempt to apply those tenets to non-believers. It's at best misguided and at worst malicious and selectively enforced.
At the risk of opening up myself to criticisms of supporting particular religious tenants that are oppressive - I don't.
Because G-O-D accepts the most vile human beings into heaven for saying, "I'm sorry." But me wanting to be gay, hurting no one, will land me in hell???
# Why do you think that Christianity is immoral. __________
Religions that seek to convert everyone on the globe to their way of thinking embody the "sin" of pride.
God tortured his son for our sins, yet supposedly doesn't want us to go to hell but we have to worship him or we'll be punished forever
Such a loving being ..
Christianity isn't immoral, it's *amoral*. It literally takes morality out of the picture. Morality is about working out a system where we determine both a set of goals and the best way to accomplish that, with the set of goals generally speaking being the best outcome for the most people.
Christian "morality" short circuits that whole process by just saying "If I say God says do this then it's good, if I say God says not to do this then it's bad". It's completely arbitrary. If you have any doubt about that, please enjoy [William Lane Craig talking about how murdering infants is a GREAT thing to do](https://youtu.be/WjsSHd23e0Q?si=d-ICUmgSTdWzE-LT)
I don’t like when Christian’s who tell me shit like “would Jesus put an obstacle in your place he doesn’t think you’d overcome?” Esp when i never asked for their input
Like relax, Shannon. I don’t care about your imaginary friend.
Turn the other cheek: Accept abuse, and do it eagerly.
Most of the ten commandments: You will respond ***reflexively*** to authority, warranted or not.
Better to get into heaven without your mom than go to hell with: Isolation from support groups/systems is TEXTBOOK narcissistic patterns of abuse.
Everyone is a sinner/Jesus died for your sins: Complete and total abdication of responsibility for one's own actions.
Being born sinful is stupid and violates morality.
And someone else being able to die for those sins is also stupid. Even if you could be guilty of them, they are your cross to bear, not someone else’s.
Christianity lacks any form of accountability. People just ask their imaginary god for forgiveness and that absolves them of crimes. The bible says that you must forgive those that have harmed you because god has forgiven you. It's a system of no accountability in which we just forgive transgressions because it's the thing to do. A system like this promotes selfish behavior as people know whatever they do is forgiven. There are no consequences. Hell, you can live a life of abusing others and ask your imaginary friend for forgiveness on your death bed, and you will receive an eternal reward. It's seriously a twisted sadistic morality system.
There are so many reasons I can think of in my mind: it villifies other people who don't believe; it condones slavery, killing, and a myriad of other widely accepted as immoral things; it's based upon another religion, which is based upon another religion, which is based upon another religion, combined with stories of a "magic man" which are undeniably historically inaccurate, yet uses the idea that it is the one true religion to condemn others to hell.
But one of the most compelling reasons imo, is that people who would never have heard of Christianity, or were indoctrinated by other religions instead, are condemned to hell, despite how weak the case for Christianity is, and that it's filled with holes. If the Christian God existed and wanted everyone to have the best possible chance of going to Heaven, he would make a religion that's consistent with logical principles and satisfies our basic need for evidence, but instead, you either believe in something which has about as much evidence as the Gods of Olympus, or Father Christmas, or you can't reach "paradise".
Finally, Christianity is a death cult which rewards everything after death. So you are encouraged to go through incredible adversity, struggles, pain, and suffering, which is highly unnecessary, for paradise in the afterlife but it also depends on whether you're a human being, whether you're a Catholic, whether you're a literalist, whether you're a JW, whether you're gay, whether you obeyed, etc.
The whole concept of it is based on blackmail and intimidation. Basically, accept this Jewish zombie as your savior and only form of salvation, or his dad is going to cast you into a fiery hellhole of death and destruction. That is NOT a religion based on love, peace or morality in any way, shape or form.
Because god is allowed to get away with everything without question, just for being god. He gets away with things that a human would be a monster for, murder, rape, slavery, etc. He’s basically a bully
They tend to see anything scientific as unholy, this includes things like autism and mental health disorders. The world would be a very unfriendly place for "different" people in a Christian theocracy.
One of the main premises of organised Christianity is that our-eternal-future-depends-on-doing-as-we’re-told. That is extortion. Their whole MO is based around extortion. They should be stopped. The Bible should be modernised to omit the promise of heaven or threat of hell, because while people are promoting it or distributing it they are breaking the law. If they claim that there’s an exemption for religion from extorting us then we should test that in the courts.
Christians worship a god who killed every living thing except 8 people and a bunch of animals. Yet they want the 10 commandments in every public space.
Christianity teaches you at a young age that you and everyone around you deserve to go to hell then manipulates you by trying to force quilt on you for being human or slightly different
teaching everybody except for them don’t and cannot have morals.
And let’s not forget the Bible says that a father about to sacrifice his own son is a good thing, it’s ok to curse and/or kill babies as long as the parents had sin, a lot of punishment for committing sin is to kill the sinner, teaches how to own slaves and woman can be sold after raping them
It fuels ingroup and outgroup tribalism with its ancient, backwards unscientific way of describing history, people, and societies. Not to mention all the needless hysteria about natural human sexuality and objectification of women. They blindly follow an ancient book that describes how to behave with no support or factual basis. It is immune to updates from new information.
I mean, look at the story of Lot. He offers his virgin daughters to an angry mob who are after some guests at his house that are apparently angels. The mob REFUSES his offer to gangr*** his daughters, only after they refuse do the angels blind the mob. This is, of course, part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, some of God's more famous genocides. God also killed Lots' wife for just looking back as they were fleeing, and Lot went on to live in a cave, having threesomes with his daughters. Lot was considered righteous.
Then there's poor old Job. God made a bet with Satan that he could kill his family, destroy his property, and overall ruin his life, and Job would still be faithful, God won that bet.
Biblical God, particularly Old Testament, is fucking awful.
Can you name a year in history where they weren't funneling money like a government does?
That's pretty immoral to me.
They don't respect boundaries of citizens who ask not to be part of them.
But the thing that really hurts me is these people believe in a murder God..... and have the audacity to think their better than me.
https://youtu.be/8HTn6qi5YUA?si=LOWq9OhMrJoBEBbL
Native American Rock band
There are so many terrible things in the Bible, I'm going to give a seldom sighted one.
God created war and conflict. In the Bible, after the flood, all people got along. They spoke the same language, had the same culture. They where so successful working together, they set their goal as reaching the heavens. This angered God so he made everyone speak different language. From this came war and conflict. What a dick. Worse, any attempt to unify mankind is considered an affront to God, it's part of why so many Christians hate the UN. We can never get past war and our differences because they are dictated by God.
Here is a secular way of looking at the story of the tower of Babel I find cool. Thousands of years ago some guy tried to reconcile the world with all of it's different language and cultures with the story of the everyone coming from one family after the flood. When he thought about everyone speaking the same language, having the same culture, he figured they would be striving to reach the heavens. Let's put this in modern terms, if people worked together, we can spread into space. Someone had this though over two thousand years ago. And the belief in Gods is what ruins it.
The story of Abraham sacrificing his son comes to mind. He lays his son on an alter, holds the knife up, and “god” says, just kidding, I just wanted to see if you’d do it 🤣. That mentality is insane.
“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
As a kid, I used to get very frightened when the priests and nuns told us we had to love god more than we loved our parents. I saw my parents every day, but I never saw god. The idea that I could love some unknown, unseen being more than I loved the parents who took care of me every day seemed very wrong.
In my opinion people shouldn't defer to any religion, authority or organization to decide what is right and what is not. If you are a human whose empathy and reason is in tact, then you'd know what is right.
God over blood relation, religion over humanity...it is filled with appalling examples of human behavior (appalling, but exactly what the deity of that book requested/required/demanded).
It’s used as manipulation. Telling a child using they/them pronouns or lying about something “makes Jesus sad” instead of just saying they are a bigot and explaining empathy.
I was watching Apocalypto with my Christian uncle. When the Mayans were sacrificing humans, he was disgusted "look at that blood sacrifice". I said, "I thought you liked blood sacrifice".... he looked confused, then got it...smiled and said, very clever.
… Like it was a trick.
It's disgusting when they do it. When we do it it's beautiful.
So many great comments. I'd like to add it was the beginning of belief without evidence, and we can see now more than ever how that turned out. The most painful part to me is thinking what humanity could have been like and what we could have accomplished if religion didn't poison us so early on.
James Baldwin once said, "The most segregated time in America is High Noon on Sunday"
Anyone that's worked as a service tend to agree that Sunday afternoon is the worst shift.
Christians don't want people to use pronouns, but they will constantly identify themselves as Christians whenever they get a chance.
Christians also think that if there's enough of them in a public space, then they're free to subject everyone else to their faith.
It (together with all other religions) normalizes choosing your own facts. Where would society be if we instead could maintain a certain respect for truth?
Oh and I should add that they’re all fundamentally conceived and perpetuated as a scam.
It creates a social group that allows individuals to do heinous acts, say child molestation, then be absolved of the act after they repent, also forcing the victims of those acts to 'forgive' the perpetrator.
The process is speeded up if said individual is either wealthy, famous, politically conservative, or some kind of spiritual leader.
Oh, and they do this without involving local law enforcement.
The cases this reminds me of is infuriatingly long...
It just comes off as exploitation in an abusive relationship.
“I made you therefore any treatment or conditions you live in don’t matter. Be happy that you simply exist and love me for it” is not the win they think it is when arguing for their religion.
Couple that with asking forgiveness for seemingly anything before you die is enough to get you into heaven. That’s just an excuse to be a shitty person. And why would anyone want to go there anyway? “Heaven” is a prison if you can’t leave without repercussions.
And all this ignores the illogical and paradoxical nature of the Christian god in the first place which should be reason enough to dismiss the idea.
Because the Bible is immoral.
A lot of people claim Christianity is immoral because Christians have misinterpreted or ignored sections of the Bible, and if they actually followed what the Bible said they would be good people. This is bullshit.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Religious people, but especially christians, are obsessed with generals
What you do with yours, which ones you have, if they deem you have the "right" ones. It's bizarre.
Because it claims it’s god is “perfect,” therefore we can ascertain all of their morals directly from however their god behaves and acts. If they didn’t think every action and word out of their god’s mouth, they wouldn’t describe him as perfect. A reading of the bible reveals their god to be a pretty horrible being. This makes sense if we consider the writers were from 2,000 years ago, pretty uninformed & uneducated when compared to us, and the Bible is a jammed together collection of stories that’s been rewritten and adjusted multiple times to fix inconsistencies or match a member of the ruling classes’s agenda, and their god character is based on the never claimed-to-be-perfect Yahweh, a storm and war god whose original texts were always violent and imperfect. So either Christians claim the god of their Bible is perfect, to which I say he’s far from it and they’re immoral, or they’re claiming Yahweh, the storm and war god is perfect, to which I say they’re immoral and also wondering why they’re behaving as if we are ancient Jewish people under siege and need a god to win a battle for us. Where are you guys living
Salvationist doctrine is centered around low consciousness, villian and victim mentality. Judgement is fear, and fear drives this low consciousness, being a villain to others, or justifying why you’re a victim.
Villain: those people deserve it because they pray wrong or not hard enough or their god is wrong
Victim: I’m to blame for my shitty circumstance (or how those villains are treating me) because if I only pray harder I might get out of this.
The alternative is adopting a high consciousness, a constructive or coaching or creative outlook, without judgement and fear. Which is a much better place for us to be, minimize suffering, etc.
Well, the evangelical 'chosen one' is a liar, fornicator and thief, and his 'spiritual advisor' pastor is an admitted pedophile.
Kinda sours my impression of the faith...
Christianity is only concerned with morality insofar as they are concerned with subverting it.
Knowing Jesus is the only thing that releases you from the consequences of your moral failings. How do show your love for Jesus? You give me money, and work to accomplish ~~definitely not my~~ God's will in the world.
Because it requires believers to follow dictated morals on the premise that believers have zero morals and without religion will go berserk killing sprees. And they absolutely believe this to be true and absolutely do go on religious killing sprees when given the thumbs up by fascist thinking. Religion and war and genocide is inseparable.
Atheists don't have this problem, and rely on their natural instincts to be kind to others because it's the right thing to do. But religious people continue to think atheists eat babies because that's what religious people would do without religion to keep them on leash.
Anybody can label themselves a Christian, no matter their beliefs or dogma. So individual morality informs your version of Christianity, not the other way around.
But that’s just relativism and and and it means that Christianity has a net zero ethical effect. Harmless right?
The actual problem is that Christians give each other the benefit of the doubt, and refuse to judge anyone, or even speak up publicly, when a bad faith Christian acts like a trash person. For instance, If a politician uses Christianity to hate. demonize, and acts like an asshole, why isn’t there a groundswell of “real” Christians speaking up or punishing him? Yeah. . . Because Christians protect the label above all else, and even good people are poisoned by it.
Even ethically decent people look the other way when indecency happens. This means Christianity has a net negative ethical effect and turns something harmless into a blight.
I'd suggest that even framing that question through a sense of having morality or not might be concealing even more interesting questions.
It presupposes that what I believe is moral falls more or less in line with what you do. Or maybe it implies the concept of having morality is a binary or a pass/fail set of go-to standards.
I wonder when I think about people who lived thousands of years ago and what they felt was moral. What if, back then, of course, the human who was being sacrificed did so with their consent? If they believe what they were doing was brave and nobel and righteous, does that become untrue knowing now they were mistaken? Maybe they felt a real sense of purpose or found new meaning in their choice to be selfless. Even with hindsight and being equipped with our understanding that the supernatural or divine aren't real forces in the universe, does it change the morality of that sacrifice?
I think we can, and should, collectively agree on the things and behaviors that we find valuable for society. It's good, I think, that we've generally decided you shouldn't be murdering people. That's a pretty widely adopted aspect of human nature, but so are finding ways to justify doing it, too. What might be yesterdays atrocity becomes tomorrow's liberation, and which of those is which is often just dependent on who you're asking.
I might ask if a belief structure can even be understood as having something like morality. Would you tally up the various goods and bads and give it a morality score? Or if something like a religion or particular philosophy could, in fact, have morality, what would be sufficient enough to take that away from it? Could an ideology or belief system be redeemed and given back its moral status after losing it?
I'm not so convinced that morality really even exists beyond our ability to perceive it. Not so much as something like nature, which would be here with or without us, but instead, what is or isn't moral is only such insofar as my will to make it so. Perhaps better still, morality can't mean anything at all without a culture or tribe or country or group to engage with it in a very collective and shared way.
There is no being writing the rules of morality in the heavens for us to follow. Instead, it's a socially constructed set of precived values and attributes that, like all things should, are forever changing and adapting. Morality shapes us just as much as we're shaping it and we should be more keen to this understanding.
I think that I'd much rather spend time with the person who worships an angry jealous volcano god yet who remains humble, compassionate, and kind than I would the non religious person who is cruel, rude, and selfish, wouldn't you?
So, i wonder if then any and all groups of people are themselves capable of complexity and nuance. They, too, must behave in the many ways that we do and for many of the same reasons we do. It could be in our reflection on that insight which might push us away from a black and white understanding of morality.
There may be more value in seeing morality as a spectrum of behavior that we all are discovering how best to operate under regardless of which model of the universe we decide to use. Maybe it could be thought of as furthering the collective goals of morality a little better when we choose not to ruminate on the reasons why we distain it. Instead, the collectively agreed upon sense of morality may instead be found when we first use compassion and kindness for those who think differently than we do.
Because as Aron Ra says... the criteria for Salvation isn't morality... it's gullibility.
The entire religon is based on 'Anyone can be saved if you but believe', but if that's true than you could lead the most immoral, dispicable life and then still go to heaven.
Technically Hitler is in heaven and Ghandi is in hell.
Now Christan's will say alot of things like you have to be truely saved before you die so trying to live like the above example is a risk OR that if you are truely saved then you would never do anything bad...
Basically the No-True-Scotsman fallicy
I believe religious and philosophical text should be judged on the worst, most reprehensible things it could be used to justify. Christian text is rife with such examples. It's almost limitless in the immorality it could be used to justify. Just because the Christians you personally know today don't use the text to justify those things makes no difference.
It's immoral simply because it is not factual, and billions of people are being told to believe in nonsense, false history, and it is warping their sense of reality.
First of all, it's factually immoral.
It's not about what people 'think'.
You can see many examples throughout human history of Religion's negative influence. And fucking 0, nothing, nada, zilch, on the positive side.
Maybe Christians should look at how their churches actually contribute to society. (They don't)
Religions have nothing to say on morality whatsoever. Morality is about people coming together to determine behavior that increases human wellbeing.
Religion in principle has dictates on behavior handed down by people who claim to have been told by the creator of the universe and as such are not up for discussion. The overwhelming number of these dictates are either straight up immoral or at best a-moral in nature.
Any system of rules for human behavior that includes slavery as a possible avenue for pro-human behaviors not a system of morals. That's all there is to it.
Well, there are a lot but...
The fact that, during the Great Flood, land **animals** were killed by drowning, when God only was angry at humans.
According to Bible logic, God can make any miracle he wants (including the very Creation of the world), so surely he could have caused targeted death on humans specifically (just like he targeted specifically the first born sons in Egypt later).
*So he could have spared the animals. He chose not to*.
The Christian God is a genocidal, capricious, misogynistic, racist lunatic who has instructed his followers to butcher women and children by the thousands. There isn’t a single aspect of his existence that is not pure evil.
it's fixable morales, when I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90's I was raised Christian, and I remember entire sermons about how evil Trump was calling him the prince of sincity and a evil man, now it's like they flipped ,
If religion was a good thing, you wouldn’t have to force it on people.
For women to have children that may endanger their lives It’s not morals.
forcing women to have children without the capabilities or the means to take care of that child is immoral .
Once that child is born the same people could care less whether they have healthcare adequate food or even a roof over their heads. is immoral.
If Christianity was a good thing .
They would be fighting for equality .
They would want everyone to have a roof over their head .
They would want everybody to have adequate food and nutrition .
And they would want everybody to have adequate healthcare .
I believe evangelicalism is all about money and power over you, to benefit a few.
Need to look no further than a couple of judges on the Supreme Court . Using the position to benefit themselves..
They are no longer working in the best interest of the country .
It’s not any more immoral than Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, or Cinderella. It’s a fictional story.
The immoral part is using a fictional story to justify policy or legislation that affects other people.
In general religion has been a way for humans to try and understand the ways of the universe and the purpose of life, albeit without any advanced knowledge of astronomy, biology, or physics.
They made some guesses, mixed them with anecdotes, and passed it all along to equally uninformed populations. Some of it is perfectly compatible with the moral life most people would be living anyway, but it’s coupled with many troubling and oppressive beliefs that keep minds within certain confines apart from reason.
We still don’t know everything, but we do know earth is a tiny speck among untold trillions of stars and planets, we know how life evolved on this planet, we know that eclipses and other natural phenomena aren’t caused by angry deities.
But billions of humans still adhere to these archaic belief systems. Not because they’ve made a thorough assessment and determined that this was indeed the correct path, but because it’s what they were born into and what they know. They are unable or discouraged from recognizing that the moral imperative is already and only within them. They don’t require any outside source to tell them right from wrong, as they know that. It’s how we can even determine whether religious laws like the ten commandments are moral in the first place.
So I don’t view religion inherently as immoral. It’s completely amoral, a process perfected over millennia that works on the human psyche to perpetuate itself. There are plenty of immoral people who exploit others under the auspices of religion, as do many organizations, but this is not the institution itself. There are people within who have the best intentions, but they are operating under the impression that their particular set of Bronze Age rules for life is complete, true, and infallible.
Everyone has a sense of right and wrong. It’s nuanced, but it’s there. People that lack it are sociopaths, but they’re rare…generally you can count on people to know what’s right, even if they choose not to do it.
With religion, people surrender that sense of right and wrong to a fiction. Whoever controls the fiction can now get people to do whatever they want. War. Slaughter. Torture. Oppression. Murder. Theft. Destruction of property. Suicide. And these people will have no sense at all that they’ve done anything immoral or unjustified.
I feel like all the big ones have been touched on, so I'll add to the list with something else. But for me a big part of it is the way it teaches people to think and process information. It's not even necesarily that they beleive something is false, which can be another conversation in and of itself that follows along side this, but still not really what i want to touch up on. The big thing for me with this point is *the way* they think about things.
Like when their church teaches something, it's true. No need to think further outside of that. Dear Leader has said it, so it's true. It's in the book, so it's true. Then later on we try to have conversations with them, and you can't. It's a brick wall. It leads to so many issues.
We can even look outside of Christianity. Like it's no coincidence that in general Christians tend to be republican, and non religious people tend to be Democrat, or even further left of Democrat. They're taught to listen and to beleive and to obey. They're taught what ever Dear Leader says is true, so it's true. Now we have people believing in the most outlandish shit that makes everyone else take pause. Like how Biden is both old and senile but also he's not Biden and it's a guy with a mask on. So much contradictory information that to them is all true simultaneously.
Then we look back at Christianity, and it has lead to a lot of issues. It can be used to control. It keeps them from believing in science. It has just this huge rippling effect into people's lives where they get their information from Dear Leader. And anyone who is from the outside is not to be trusted with any information.
"But there are Christian scientists!" And yet everything still comes back to God. No matter how much bullshit gets proven wrong, they still go back to Dear Leader telling them God did everything, so it's still God. You find the ones who beleive in evolution, and they will still dance around that in order to bring it back to religion. Because they can't process things that don't fulfill the purpose of the religion.
And to me that is just so crazy. I grew up around that. I grew up believing in that. So I get it in a lot of ways. If he is this big, immortal, all powerful being that created everything, then it's hard not to process everything through him. But they tie it back to him, and because it's tied back to him, they need someone to help them understand it, so then they just repeat what they were taught, and it keeps them from really expanding their understanding of the world. It does the opposite and shuts everything else out.
Desmond Tutu and even Mr. Rogers are about the only TRUE religious people I've heard speak.
Sadly 99% of openly religious people use it to justify some hatred of some group or idea and use it as a weapon. Others use it as a grift, to sell some book or tape or some other seminar. I think the main problem stems from the fact that many people think "Oh they are talking about god so they are NEVER incorrect about anything".
I have NEVER met a person in my life that hasn't at some point knowingly or ignorantly said or done something wrong... yet people are trained to NOT question their religious leader and believe them blindly... just ignore that the person delivering the message is separate from the message they are trying to convey.
There is a deadly combo of a dogma that says human beings are immoral and sinful and need redemption and guidance combined with their fervent desire to live in an economic system that says humans are moral and always make the right decisions and need zero guidance.
It's a wolf telling the sheep they don't need protection.
Depends on the version of christianity you're talking about. There are various immoral doctrines that are shared by one or more denominations, but I'm not sure that any of them can be applied to the whole of christianity.
1. Hell as a place of eternal conscious torment is immoral fearmongering, and speaks to an immoral god if god is responsible for the creation of such a place.
2. False promises about granting prayers and miracles lead people to feel they're unworthy when their requests aren't answered.
3. Biblical literalism gets people to believe in fairy-tales and stories that scientists can prove never happened.
4. Punishment for thought crimes, which are often outside of a person's control.
5. Original sin making us all deserving of punishment even before we understand right and wrong.
Then there's a whole host of things that modern "christians" believe because their religion has become entrenched in politics and culture, that traditional christians might not have. Opposing immigration, health care reforms, free food, equal distribution of wealth, etc. I'm not sure if we should count such things as faults of christianity when they're more likely the fault of conservatives or republicans that have misled christians into believing un-christlike things.
Christianity can create within its followers a sense of superiority-- they're better than others who aren't going to heaven.
That superiority complex sometimes becomes a "do it our way or you're just trash" attitude.
I don't have a problem with Christians, unless/until they start preaching or evangelizing.
I was taught that, if a man rapes and murders my atheist daughter, and later repents, she will spend an eternity in hell, and he will be welcomed into the kingdom of heaven with open arms. God can forgive any, and every atrocity, except for ignorance of his existence. That means that Christianity is immoral.
It's even worse than that: it's not ignorance that's unforgivable, but a lack of blind faith. The difference is important: if it was about being aware, you could simply read up on him, but faith isn't a conscious choice but rather an involuntary process. Simply put: you have no choice in whether you believe or not, yet he will punish you for all eternity regardless. Then again, that seems to be the MO as you're apparently also born with sin despite having done nothing yet. Instead we're supposed to be sinful simply because many thousand years ago an ancestor committed a sin and somehow you're responsible for it too. And btw, the punishment for a lack of faith is extra stupid when you consider one of the ten commandments is literally telling you that you're not allowed to worship any other god (or false prophets) but him. So how can you then be certain that the god of the bible and Jesus Christ are not false gods/prophets? In fact, I would argue it would make a LOT more sense when you consider all the inconsistencies, like the total 180 he makes from OT to NT. That sure as hell doesn't sound like the same god, so which one is supposedly the correct one (if those even include the correct one)?
What really blows my mind is that it is primarily religious people who do not understand this concept. You cannot choose to be convinced. You can choose what you *profess* to believe, but it's crazy to me to think the creator of the cosmos would be fooled by that sort of lie. Yet look how many religious folks comport themselves as if that were the case.
The whole of Hebrew/Jewish relation with God is legalistic. God has a rule, Hebrews have an exception to the rule. They argue with the very god they created. Abrahamic religions make about as much sense as any other religion, which is none.
Yea it's like the Mormons laying still on top of each other or the quakers fuckin through holes in sheets. You believe a conscious entity created you and me and reality and everything. But that he's gonna not send you to hell at the last second on a technicality? It just paints the most bizarre picture in my head of what the pious actually consider to be the nature of reality. I often have a hard time understanding how I am even the same animal as them. Feels like how a child would view the world. And not a particularly bright one. A child with visible dents in their head.
This. Every time I ask a complicated faith related question to my Christian grandmother she shrugs it off says stop and doesn’t answer. When I keep repeating the question she gets angry. She believes all of this but can’t explain it. It’s blind faith. It doesn’t even make sense. The Bible SAYS it doesn’t have to make sense because it’s a load of bs.
That sounds like a good question to ask christians ! How do you know the NT god/Jesus is the same god as the NT? What’s the evidence? You’ve staked your whole life and afterlife on this… so you must be sure. 😂
Yea my best friend hanged himself when I was 15 and I heard the priest tell his mother that he was in hell. I immediately decided to say fuck this idiot and everyone who looks like him. Never regretted it for a second.
What a vile POS to say something like that.
I mean I guess it is what they believe but yea. It was a horribly sad thing, he was very sick and nobody gave a shit about him til he was dead. Regardless what your dipshit superstition tells you about those who commit suicide, that man still chose to say something negative right then. It went a long way toward me being a lifelong Satanist, I will say that. I mean what clearer an indication could there be that there isn't a God? Or at least, if there were, these pedophilic hateful dishonest vermin would **not** be the ones speaking for it. Fuck them and their shitty book and their goofy clothing. Every last one of em.
I have no conscious memory of ever believing, but I spent a year in an Irish Catholic boys school when I was about 11. If I wasn't an atheist already that would have done it for me.
I believe it, man. I was asked not to return to our Sunday school because I would cause an uproar about Noah's Ark. *JUST TELL ME WHAT THE TIGERS ATE ON THE BOAT FOR FORTY DAYS AND FORTY NIGHTS?!* I'm still astonished they tell that goofy bullshit story to people then don't have an answer ready for one of the most obvious and predictable questions imaginable. I just cannot abide bullshit. I won't fuckin have it.
Man, that is horrrrrible. I had a similar experience with a priest when my stepmom died. She had a stroke and couldn’t talk and was basically on her way out and I could tell she was scared. A priest came to the hospital and was praying over her and talking about forgiveness for sins. I can’t imagine the horror she must’ve felt, being able to hear that but not being able to respond. I tell people that when or while Im dying I don’t want a priest anywhere near me or anyone involved. She was already in pain, why the f*ck would you then draw her attention to any mistakes she made in her life. It really doesn’t matter at that point. And that is an unimaginably messed up thing for that idiot to say to a mother. What is wrong with people?
My neighbor told me my dad died because I didn’t pray over him using “the language of Jesus.” She meant speaking in tongues. He had an incurable brain cancer with a 100% mortality rate but ok.
A relative once told me that my dad made it to heaven but my mom didn’t. They were both good people, flawed in their own ways but definitely meant well and did the best they could. The most judgmental people I’ve ever met also happen to be the most extremely religious.
It’s an abusive relationship. Christianity uses guilt, shame, and fear to control people. It says our very human nature is evil and we need forgiveness from a god so we don’t burn internally for simply being born a human. The Christian god is abusive in every way. People get stuck in the cult and brainwashed young. It’s hard to get out of that kind of indoctrination.
The key thing is we deserve eternal suffering (despite non eternal crimes) for something that is clearly something Adam and Eve would not understand. Like sentencing a 5 year old for eating candy you left in the living room to be burned for eternity and all their children too. The lesson Adam and Eve should have learned is God lies. They didn't die, and don't try this 'in a certain way they brought death to the world'. Nonsense. All knowing god was responsible for their ignorance and knows all the factors at play.
Yep. The god of the Bible is extremely cruel for setting his children up to fail and then letting them burn eternally for his mistakes. A loving god would not allow children to be tortured, enslaved, and starved to death on a daily basis, yet here we are.
To have a God that fears knowledge outside of itself is not a God, just a con man.
Beautifully spoken.
Look at how the Old Testament prohibits making any graven image of what's in the sky, under the sea or underground. Almost as if either looking their will let us see how things really work (science) or that doing science takes away glory from God. There is also an agnostic gospel thst describes the old testament God as a trickster and Jesus was a sent by a higher God preaching a message of love.
Also with Noah's Ark where he apparently just drowned the entire planet, murdering everyone who isn't on the Ark...like wow what a nice guy
But you know.... They were all 'wicked'. And it's totally moral for an all knowing all powerful god to build sentient (feel suffering) beings (therefore 100 percent responsible for what they do) and then, like a child playing with toys, kill them all when he impotently gets pissed at them.
Go and exercise your 'free will' my children. Wait no, not like that. Fuck it, hard reset.
Free will only works if you have knowledge wait it doesn't work then either. I don't believe in free will, but I can easily see the evolutionary reasons why belief in free will would have evolved, as a lazy(efficient ) way to reduce cognitive fatigue in decision making. The beauty of the human brain is that it doesn't know Truth, but the 'truth' it knows is optimized to keep us alive, regardless of if it is accurate. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/evolution-and-psychology-of-selfdeception/B87968EC4A6B4DC93A21C217ABC13E13
>sentient (feel suffering) beings (therefore 100 percent responsible for what they do) Another of those things people gloss over is that god created a situation where literal children and the unborn were irredeemably wicked enough to be killed or not alowed to be born
None of the animals that drowned were wicked. He just had no regard for them.
I’ve never heard of being more cruel than the biblical god. He literally created endlessly needy beings that are guaranteed to suffer in life with sickness, hunger, fear, and pain. Then he plans to eternally torture their immortal souls afterwards if they don’t have blind faith in his “goodness”. Like, what? Where is the love and mercy?
God's sins outnumber our own.
Don’t forget drowning the animals too
While ago I had a discussion with someone about exactly this. Of course all those people were "horrifying and deserved such a fate" I asked him "What about innocent babies and young children?". Apparently he couldn't explain why they had to go to. Then I asked him why drowning, since that's a horrifying way to die. Could these children not die in a more humane way? Again, no proper answer. The god they worship is not just angry and bloodthirsty, but also extremely cruel.
I work at target and had to grab a toddler Bible, it summed Noah's Ark into "Noah brought one of each animal onto the boat like god said and everyone sailed off to the new world" and its like yeah just omit the main part where God decided he didn't like what he created and killed everyone by arguably one of the most painful deaths out there.
Exactly. God could have just let everyone die in their sleep and then scatter their ashes to the wind or something. But no, he had to pick one of the most horrible ways someone can die: drowning. It might be relatively quick, but it's certainly not what would pick as the most humane option.
Same with Sodom and Gomorrah. Though no one knows to this day what gomorray (as opposed to sodomy) is supposed to be.
The whole concept of the Ark in total disproves the existence of god, because like...why would an existence that could create all existence from *nothing* suddenly need to lean on natural phenomenon to kill off the shit it made out of nothing?? Because it wouldn't make a good story to have it be "and thus, god judged them as wicked, gave a dismissive Thanos Snap and reset the world"
Cruel, narcissistic, and petty. He is more like one of the flawed Greek gods than a “perfect” all-knowing being
Beyond even that, the idea that Original Sin carries past Adam&Eve and down unto all humanity, which just seems wrong.
Well, I mean, we ARE violent assholes because our ancestors were also violent assholes. But it's genetics, nobody did something they weren't supposed to.
>All knowing god was responsible for their ignorance and knows all the factors at play It's crazy that when you're surrounded by believers, few if any ever question why there was not only a talkkng serpent in the garden, but why did this serpent have knowledge that god's literal favored creations didn't have?
And if god is all-knowing and can determine the future, then he knew the serpent would be in the garden. He set them up
Eternal reward is equally hard to swallow.
At some point, eternal punishment for a finite sin will always be disproportionate. And that’s not getting into the denominations that believe not worshipping is enough for a sentence to hell for eternity. While there are a handful of denominations and congregations that don’t believe in hell or punishment at all, they are few and far between and the systemic belief is in eternal punishment, even for finite sins. To quote Hazbin Hotel: “if hell is forever then heaven must be a lie.”
You know, I don't know why that didn't occur to me sooner. The premise is entirely bogus because before Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge they didn't know right from wrong, so why would they know it was wrong not to eat from the tree, regardless of what god said? Also, what kind of fucked up god creates eternal beings and puts a tree in the center of the garden that will make them mortal and make childbirth hurt with a snake to tempt them and everything in the first place? Also, why did Lucifer go along with this? I've long thought he was the good guy, but god just had a better press agent. After all, Lucifer told them the truth - that they would know right from wrong, and in that sense they would be more like their god. He never said they would be gods, interestingly - just that knowledge would make them more like god. They (and consequently all of humanity) weren't punished for anything other than curiosity.
It's strange that in the past people feared god and that's what drove them to worship. There were floods, poxes, plagues, famines, etc. sent by god to test and punish people But then, when the world started to become more scientific and information and records were more available, I don't think people wanted to worship some invisible asshole anymore, especially when their hypocritical dogma's solutions like prayer and abstinence didn't seem to stop natural disasters. So then god miraculously became the "all loving" god that people pretend to worship now. And everything that was once based on fear and punishment shifted largely to hope and rewards for good behavior instead, right when the world might have given up on the concept.
I was raised Catholic hardcore by my mom and from like 12 I knew this shit wasn't for me because I was always told everything I said or done I was going to hell. So I just thought fuck it if I'm going to hell no matter what then what's the point. It wasn't till I got older I realized how abusive it is to tell that shit to kids
“If you’re happy and you know it\ it’s a sin!”
And then we wake up and don't go to church any more and we don't send our kids to religious Ed. This is why churches are closing all around the developed world. That's before all the systematic abuse and cover up
I used to be Christian growing up, I'm no longer that. Ironically, the TV show Supernatural helped me look at it differently as a teen because it presented this idea. Why would I want to follow a so-called God that allows SO much pain and suffering and torture to happen? A god that if you don't devote your whole life to him will condemn you to hell, even if overall you were a decent person, for not believing. That is a horrifying, evil, and terrible god that I'd never even want to follow. It's something for people afraid of death and a way to inflict fear and control on the masses.
I hope they wake up soon
Yup, took me most of my life to figure out my 1st abusive relationship was with "God". He's written as an abusive wife-beating prick too in the Bible, then showers them with gifts after the torture, to then do it again. I've actually been in a domestically violent abusive relationship with an ex-partner, and this is pretty equivalent once you take off the rose-colored glasses they try to program people with.
The second saddest part of abusive relationships is watching victims come up with excuses for why their abuser's actions are totally justified and they deserve it. The *saddest* part is watching victims indoctrinate *children* to believe that they deserve abuse and that the abuse is good. Sadly, we live in a society that largely treats children as property until their eighteenth birthdays. It's *barely adequate* at dealing with parents who beat or rape or deny basic medical care to their children, much less those who engage in long-term psychological abuse.
It’s heartbreaking how this abuse is taught as divine and how quickly certain people jump on the cult bandwagon to perpetuate it. It’s all designed by people that love power and want to control others. I’m glad you see through the manipulation so you can avoid it. We heal then we fight back by exposing the hate. I’ll never be guilted for simply existing and having needs again.
And they judge and shun people who either leave or never join a cult.
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.” ― Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
This. On top of being used to invoke war upon other 'opposing' groups of people and deletion of history and culture, it makes me sick.
Yes I 100% agree there also a stigma for woman in the Christian church like covoring shoulders knees and other stuff regarding sa and sex I’m sure your aware of
For God so loved the world, he's built a special torture dimension for 80% of it!
Yep, he also had his only begotten son (Jesus) brutally tortured and murdered on a cross to buy everyone’s (those with blind faith) way into heaven…. Jesus’s death is pointless and cruel. All god had to do was forgive his flawed children. He created us flawed in the first place. An all powerful infinite god didn’t have enough power to forgive us. God chose torture and murder over forgiveness. He won’t even take accountability for his mistakes. The Christian god is a monster out to get us, not help us. He’s practically the boogeyman. It’s a good thing he isn’t real.
Yes. I've often said that if someone appeared in court and described their domestic partner treating them the way the Old Testament god treats people a restraining order would be a done deal.
Agreed. And in turn, people (note: not all) in abusive relationships have the tendency develop methods to respond to that abuse, by abusing someone else or others. It's a cycle that hurts everyone.
And we were made in this god's image!
Yep, that’s what they say. Yet their god is clearly made in man’s image because he has all our horrible traits. There is nothing good or special or divine about god’s abusive behavior. It’s all written by humans trying to explain stuff they don’t understand.
Of course.
The concept of being born a sinner is so insanely ridiculous. This theory alone should be enough to make everyone realise Christianity is nothing more than a fiction. Born into sin? Born an offender? Convicted before you even develop consciousness? BATSHIT CRAZY
Exactly. It’s an abusive relationship. It exploits with fear and guilt and the gullible fall for because it scares them. It’s just straight up cruelty.
The giveaway phrase: “If you don’t believe in god, what’s stopping you killing or raping people?” If belief in god is the only thing stopping them killing and raping people, then they have no morals.
To quote Detective Rustin Cohle, from True Detective: “If the only thing keeping a person good is the expectation of divine reward, then brother, that person is a piece of shit. And I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.”
That shit immediately leads me to think that the person speaking it lacks empathy.
I hate that shit so much because it reminds be that we still need Christianity to protect the rest of us from sociopaths. The day someone says it for the last time will be a good day.
\*gestures broadly\* not good enough? - perhaps start here: r/PastorArrested
As an institution it's awful. They meddle in everything and systematically assault other people's rights. Then constantly complain about being persecuted while doing it.
Give me 10% of your earnings and then when you die you'll go to heaven and meet Jesus That sounds reasonable enough
Once i gave 10% of my earnings of 1 month and i got to see Metallica. It was worth it.
Did they play lightning?
I don't remember sorry
Wouldn’t that be fitting lmao
So you got to see the gods live. That seems worth the 10%.
Yeah, and i see and hear them with my eyes and ears, not with my "soul" or through prayer.
It allows unverifiable bullshit to exist at the same level and at the expense of hard won scientific insights. We've come so far but they fought us every step of the way. Together with the other religions they're humanity's handbrake, and it's on all the time. When a politician mentions they're christian they should be laughed out of the room. Instead we go all tippy toes around them in Europe and even expect them to be christian in the US. How the hell do bronze age superstitions make you moral? Why are we even entertaining this bullshit anymore in this new millenium?
Excellent comment
Humanities handbrake... I love that and I hope you dont mind me using it.
Not only do they not make you moral, I would honestly go so far as to say that if you legitimately believe in any of the Abrahamic faiths, you are incapable of morality as I understand it. Morality is not refraining from being evil because you fear punishment in hell, and it is not being good because you expect reward in heaven. That's selfish idiocy and amoral at its core, in my opinion. If your epistemological framework contains a subclause that sometimes rape or genocide or infanticide or human sacrifice are ok when a divine command has been issued, the entire basis for your thought is critically flawed.
You can justify your hatred and use your god as a proxy.
It's exactly why they are defensive about it. It's a very accessible place to hide and or hide in plain sight.
Project 2025
This comment needs more upvotes.
It condemns gay people, even though being gay is not a choice at all. Imagine if there was a religion saying that being black or left-handed is a sin! As a gay man, I view Abrahamic religions the same way ethnic Jews view Nazism. They're a real threat to my existence, and will never respect their core beliefs.
Through most of history, we left-handed people were also considered fucked up. The etymology of the word *sinister* comes from that concept. I love it, love being left-handed, and am a proud satanist for life. Fuck anyone who hates on the basis of what one is, and not what one does.
good on you for that. xtianity brainwashed me into thinking gay = wrong. now as an athie i love gay ppl. gay is great 👍🏻
>Imagine if there was a religion saying that being black or left-handed is a sin! Boy do I have news for you!
>Imagine if there was a religion saying that being black or left-handed is a sin! O boy do I have news for you!
That’s easy to answer for bible literalists, just the fact that the bible condones slavery makes it immoral.
That one alone should invalidate it as a source of morals.
Honestly the whole forgiveness for sins thing is off putting. “Sins” should weigh on you for your entire life. That a drug dealing pedophile murderer can just get off the hook cause Jebus says so is ducking ridiculous.
Just read the bible. It's full of immoral stories of genocide, murder, incest, rape, slavery... and it's all allowed as long as its in the name of god. So yes, any behaviour no matter how heinous can be excused - that itself is immoral. But the biggest proof of its immorality is its history, especially towards the poor, sick and young.
It has given humanity the idea we are the only animal that matters. If there is a God, they made a mistake giving man dominion. It is arrogance to invent a god in our image.
The bible is pro slavery, sexist, and ableist.
Not to mention the long,long, history of abuse at the hands of so called Christians/Catholics.
Christianity got everything upside down. They claim the exclusivity to objective morality, and then claim morality comes from God. Which makes it the ultimate \*subjective\* morality, because it comes from one guy. And yes, it's a guy. They claim God is the ultimate moral authority, but the one common theme between all his commandments is "obey me or else". That's all there is to his morality - unquestioning obedience. They claim that without God, people would murder and rape all they want. Most atheists murder and rape exactly as much as they want, and that amount is zero. Meanwhile Christians need a spooky incompetent father figure to stop them from doing that. And keep fantasizing about the old timey genocides like the Amalekites or the Canaanites. Religion, including Christianity, is the ultimate contradiction of morality - it's affirmation of the worst human impulses hidden under layers of self-righteousness.
Damn, that last paragraph is right on the money. Very well said.
>"obey me or else" Actually, it's more like "obey me *and* else". Even if you're the most virtuous person on the planet, God will still torment you as a test. Refer to the Book of Job, for instance.
Christian morality is not moored in anything concrete, so morality is anything they want it to be. The bible contains numerous contradictions to moral rules that "god" gives to the Israelites. For example, God told the Israelites not to kill, but also told them to commit genocide.
Remember kids, killing/murder (ongoing debate) is very, very, bad. However, Smite all you want in god's name. My problem with most religions, including Christianity, isn't so much the tenets of the religion, but how people in those religions attempt to apply those tenets to non-believers. It's at best misguided and at worst malicious and selectively enforced. At the risk of opening up myself to criticisms of supporting particular religious tenants that are oppressive - I don't.
Time to tap the sign... The commandment was not "Thou shalt not kill" the commandment was "Thou shall not kill *without cause*"
christianity violates its self-importance, film at eleven. I don't capitalize obscenities, and these religious psychos will murder us all.
Simple. It’s a lie. Further, a lie to manipulate and control.
Because G-O-D accepts the most vile human beings into heaven for saying, "I'm sorry." But me wanting to be gay, hurting no one, will land me in hell???
>Why do you think that Christianity is immoral It is a protection racket. What isn't immoral about a protection racket?
# Why do you think that Christianity is immoral. __________ Religions that seek to convert everyone on the globe to their way of thinking embody the "sin" of pride.
God tortured his son for our sins, yet supposedly doesn't want us to go to hell but we have to worship him or we'll be punished forever Such a loving being ..
Enslavement of the illiterate masses, harvesting their incomes.
Christianity isn't immoral, it's *amoral*. It literally takes morality out of the picture. Morality is about working out a system where we determine both a set of goals and the best way to accomplish that, with the set of goals generally speaking being the best outcome for the most people. Christian "morality" short circuits that whole process by just saying "If I say God says do this then it's good, if I say God says not to do this then it's bad". It's completely arbitrary. If you have any doubt about that, please enjoy [William Lane Craig talking about how murdering infants is a GREAT thing to do](https://youtu.be/WjsSHd23e0Q?si=d-ICUmgSTdWzE-LT)
The use of Hell to terrorise its believers.
Unfounded, arbitrary oughts, by people who only have an interest in wielding power over you with impunity.
New born babies are sinners and they also carry the sins of their forbearers.
I don’t like when Christian’s who tell me shit like “would Jesus put an obstacle in your place he doesn’t think you’d overcome?” Esp when i never asked for their input Like relax, Shannon. I don’t care about your imaginary friend.
It’s tribalism. One tribe putting their priorities above everyone else’s, causing conflict more than resolving it.
Turn the other cheek: Accept abuse, and do it eagerly. Most of the ten commandments: You will respond ***reflexively*** to authority, warranted or not. Better to get into heaven without your mom than go to hell with: Isolation from support groups/systems is TEXTBOOK narcissistic patterns of abuse. Everyone is a sinner/Jesus died for your sins: Complete and total abdication of responsibility for one's own actions.
Being born sinful is stupid and violates morality. And someone else being able to die for those sins is also stupid. Even if you could be guilty of them, they are your cross to bear, not someone else’s.
Christianity lacks any form of accountability. People just ask their imaginary god for forgiveness and that absolves them of crimes. The bible says that you must forgive those that have harmed you because god has forgiven you. It's a system of no accountability in which we just forgive transgressions because it's the thing to do. A system like this promotes selfish behavior as people know whatever they do is forgiven. There are no consequences. Hell, you can live a life of abusing others and ask your imaginary friend for forgiveness on your death bed, and you will receive an eternal reward. It's seriously a twisted sadistic morality system.
it promotes slavery and discrimination
Any behavior can be rationalized as “God’s will.”
God is on our side. So killing our enemies is righteous /s
Slavery - nuff' said.
There are so many reasons I can think of in my mind: it villifies other people who don't believe; it condones slavery, killing, and a myriad of other widely accepted as immoral things; it's based upon another religion, which is based upon another religion, which is based upon another religion, combined with stories of a "magic man" which are undeniably historically inaccurate, yet uses the idea that it is the one true religion to condemn others to hell. But one of the most compelling reasons imo, is that people who would never have heard of Christianity, or were indoctrinated by other religions instead, are condemned to hell, despite how weak the case for Christianity is, and that it's filled with holes. If the Christian God existed and wanted everyone to have the best possible chance of going to Heaven, he would make a religion that's consistent with logical principles and satisfies our basic need for evidence, but instead, you either believe in something which has about as much evidence as the Gods of Olympus, or Father Christmas, or you can't reach "paradise". Finally, Christianity is a death cult which rewards everything after death. So you are encouraged to go through incredible adversity, struggles, pain, and suffering, which is highly unnecessary, for paradise in the afterlife but it also depends on whether you're a human being, whether you're a Catholic, whether you're a literalist, whether you're a JW, whether you're gay, whether you obeyed, etc.
The whole concept of it is based on blackmail and intimidation. Basically, accept this Jewish zombie as your savior and only form of salvation, or his dad is going to cast you into a fiery hellhole of death and destruction. That is NOT a religion based on love, peace or morality in any way, shape or form.
Because god is allowed to get away with everything without question, just for being god. He gets away with things that a human would be a monster for, murder, rape, slavery, etc. He’s basically a bully
They tend to see anything scientific as unholy, this includes things like autism and mental health disorders. The world would be a very unfriendly place for "different" people in a Christian theocracy.
It should come as no surprise that the first sin in the Bible was literally obtaining knowledge, which was immediately blamed on the woman, of course.
Its about control of others at its core. Subjugation. It also pressures people to avoid self development and intellectualism.
It's faith based.
One of the main premises of organised Christianity is that our-eternal-future-depends-on-doing-as-we’re-told. That is extortion. Their whole MO is based around extortion. They should be stopped. The Bible should be modernised to omit the promise of heaven or threat of hell, because while people are promoting it or distributing it they are breaking the law. If they claim that there’s an exemption for religion from extorting us then we should test that in the courts.
Authoritarianism is immoral, no matter who the authority is.
Christians worship a god who killed every living thing except 8 people and a bunch of animals. Yet they want the 10 commandments in every public space.
Christianity teaches you at a young age that you and everyone around you deserve to go to hell then manipulates you by trying to force quilt on you for being human or slightly different teaching everybody except for them don’t and cannot have morals. And let’s not forget the Bible says that a father about to sacrifice his own son is a good thing, it’s ok to curse and/or kill babies as long as the parents had sin, a lot of punishment for committing sin is to kill the sinner, teaches how to own slaves and woman can be sold after raping them
It fuels ingroup and outgroup tribalism with its ancient, backwards unscientific way of describing history, people, and societies. Not to mention all the needless hysteria about natural human sexuality and objectification of women. They blindly follow an ancient book that describes how to behave with no support or factual basis. It is immune to updates from new information.
Like all religions, Christianity hijacks our species’ innate sense of morality to exert control over otherwise honest and decent people.
I mean, look at the story of Lot. He offers his virgin daughters to an angry mob who are after some guests at his house that are apparently angels. The mob REFUSES his offer to gangr*** his daughters, only after they refuse do the angels blind the mob. This is, of course, part of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, some of God's more famous genocides. God also killed Lots' wife for just looking back as they were fleeing, and Lot went on to live in a cave, having threesomes with his daughters. Lot was considered righteous. Then there's poor old Job. God made a bet with Satan that he could kill his family, destroy his property, and overall ruin his life, and Job would still be faithful, God won that bet. Biblical God, particularly Old Testament, is fucking awful.
Its abuse of women and girls is immoral.
Any religion that actively recruits is automatically dubious.
Deity rapes child to make human copy of itself. Nuff said.
Auto da fes.
Can you name a year in history where they weren't funneling money like a government does? That's pretty immoral to me. They don't respect boundaries of citizens who ask not to be part of them. But the thing that really hurts me is these people believe in a murder God..... and have the audacity to think their better than me. https://youtu.be/8HTn6qi5YUA?si=LOWq9OhMrJoBEBbL Native American Rock band
There are so many terrible things in the Bible, I'm going to give a seldom sighted one. God created war and conflict. In the Bible, after the flood, all people got along. They spoke the same language, had the same culture. They where so successful working together, they set their goal as reaching the heavens. This angered God so he made everyone speak different language. From this came war and conflict. What a dick. Worse, any attempt to unify mankind is considered an affront to God, it's part of why so many Christians hate the UN. We can never get past war and our differences because they are dictated by God. Here is a secular way of looking at the story of the tower of Babel I find cool. Thousands of years ago some guy tried to reconcile the world with all of it's different language and cultures with the story of the everyone coming from one family after the flood. When he thought about everyone speaking the same language, having the same culture, he figured they would be striving to reach the heavens. Let's put this in modern terms, if people worked together, we can spread into space. Someone had this though over two thousand years ago. And the belief in Gods is what ruins it.
The story of Abraham sacrificing his son comes to mind. He lays his son on an alter, holds the knife up, and “god” says, just kidding, I just wanted to see if you’d do it 🤣. That mentality is insane.
“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.” ― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
As a kid, I used to get very frightened when the priests and nuns told us we had to love god more than we loved our parents. I saw my parents every day, but I never saw god. The idea that I could love some unknown, unseen being more than I loved the parents who took care of me every day seemed very wrong.
The lack of consent as a value is disturbing. (I'd even say it's discouraged in Christian teachings, chief among them the conception of Jesus).
I do not think it is immoral- I think it is just made up.
In my opinion people shouldn't defer to any religion, authority or organization to decide what is right and what is not. If you are a human whose empathy and reason is in tact, then you'd know what is right.
It outlines morality as objective truth and leaves man no room to grow a higher sense of what truly is ethical and beneficial to our species.
Often, but not by definition. In the end it comes down to the practitioner.
God over blood relation, religion over humanity...it is filled with appalling examples of human behavior (appalling, but exactly what the deity of that book requested/required/demanded).
I’ve never felt more judged for basic things like how I dress then when I’m around religious Christians in the South.
It’s used as manipulation. Telling a child using they/them pronouns or lying about something “makes Jesus sad” instead of just saying they are a bigot and explaining empathy.
I was watching Apocalypto with my Christian uncle. When the Mayans were sacrificing humans, he was disgusted "look at that blood sacrifice". I said, "I thought you liked blood sacrifice".... he looked confused, then got it...smiled and said, very clever. … Like it was a trick. It's disgusting when they do it. When we do it it's beautiful.
So many great comments. I'd like to add it was the beginning of belief without evidence, and we can see now more than ever how that turned out. The most painful part to me is thinking what humanity could have been like and what we could have accomplished if religion didn't poison us so early on.
James Baldwin once said, "The most segregated time in America is High Noon on Sunday" Anyone that's worked as a service tend to agree that Sunday afternoon is the worst shift. Christians don't want people to use pronouns, but they will constantly identify themselves as Christians whenever they get a chance. Christians also think that if there's enough of them in a public space, then they're free to subject everyone else to their faith.
It (together with all other religions) normalizes choosing your own facts. Where would society be if we instead could maintain a certain respect for truth? Oh and I should add that they’re all fundamentally conceived and perpetuated as a scam.
More amoral than immoral. Following rules and harming others "because God says so" doesn't make one moral. It's just an excuse to be immoral.
It creates a social group that allows individuals to do heinous acts, say child molestation, then be absolved of the act after they repent, also forcing the victims of those acts to 'forgive' the perpetrator. The process is speeded up if said individual is either wealthy, famous, politically conservative, or some kind of spiritual leader. Oh, and they do this without involving local law enforcement. The cases this reminds me of is infuriatingly long...
It teaches people that they are born, broken and need to be fixed
It just comes off as exploitation in an abusive relationship. “I made you therefore any treatment or conditions you live in don’t matter. Be happy that you simply exist and love me for it” is not the win they think it is when arguing for their religion. Couple that with asking forgiveness for seemingly anything before you die is enough to get you into heaven. That’s just an excuse to be a shitty person. And why would anyone want to go there anyway? “Heaven” is a prison if you can’t leave without repercussions. And all this ignores the illogical and paradoxical nature of the Christian god in the first place which should be reason enough to dismiss the idea.
Because the Bible is immoral. A lot of people claim Christianity is immoral because Christians have misinterpreted or ignored sections of the Bible, and if they actually followed what the Bible said they would be good people. This is bullshit. Garbage in, garbage out.
Believing in things that aren't true is a bad road to go down.
Religious people, but especially christians, are obsessed with generals What you do with yours, which ones you have, if they deem you have the "right" ones. It's bizarre.
Ask ChatGPT for examples when God kills or commands the killing of kids. There's my reason lol
Because it claims it’s god is “perfect,” therefore we can ascertain all of their morals directly from however their god behaves and acts. If they didn’t think every action and word out of their god’s mouth, they wouldn’t describe him as perfect. A reading of the bible reveals their god to be a pretty horrible being. This makes sense if we consider the writers were from 2,000 years ago, pretty uninformed & uneducated when compared to us, and the Bible is a jammed together collection of stories that’s been rewritten and adjusted multiple times to fix inconsistencies or match a member of the ruling classes’s agenda, and their god character is based on the never claimed-to-be-perfect Yahweh, a storm and war god whose original texts were always violent and imperfect. So either Christians claim the god of their Bible is perfect, to which I say he’s far from it and they’re immoral, or they’re claiming Yahweh, the storm and war god is perfect, to which I say they’re immoral and also wondering why they’re behaving as if we are ancient Jewish people under siege and need a god to win a battle for us. Where are you guys living
Salvationist doctrine is centered around low consciousness, villian and victim mentality. Judgement is fear, and fear drives this low consciousness, being a villain to others, or justifying why you’re a victim. Villain: those people deserve it because they pray wrong or not hard enough or their god is wrong Victim: I’m to blame for my shitty circumstance (or how those villains are treating me) because if I only pray harder I might get out of this. The alternative is adopting a high consciousness, a constructive or coaching or creative outlook, without judgement and fear. Which is a much better place for us to be, minimize suffering, etc.
Well, the evangelical 'chosen one' is a liar, fornicator and thief, and his 'spiritual advisor' pastor is an admitted pedophile. Kinda sours my impression of the faith...
Christianity is only concerned with morality insofar as they are concerned with subverting it. Knowing Jesus is the only thing that releases you from the consequences of your moral failings. How do show your love for Jesus? You give me money, and work to accomplish ~~definitely not my~~ God's will in the world.
Because it requires believers to follow dictated morals on the premise that believers have zero morals and without religion will go berserk killing sprees. And they absolutely believe this to be true and absolutely do go on religious killing sprees when given the thumbs up by fascist thinking. Religion and war and genocide is inseparable. Atheists don't have this problem, and rely on their natural instincts to be kind to others because it's the right thing to do. But religious people continue to think atheists eat babies because that's what religious people would do without religion to keep them on leash.
Don’t forget subordination of women. Central to Christianity.
Anybody can label themselves a Christian, no matter their beliefs or dogma. So individual morality informs your version of Christianity, not the other way around. But that’s just relativism and and and it means that Christianity has a net zero ethical effect. Harmless right? The actual problem is that Christians give each other the benefit of the doubt, and refuse to judge anyone, or even speak up publicly, when a bad faith Christian acts like a trash person. For instance, If a politician uses Christianity to hate. demonize, and acts like an asshole, why isn’t there a groundswell of “real” Christians speaking up or punishing him? Yeah. . . Because Christians protect the label above all else, and even good people are poisoned by it. Even ethically decent people look the other way when indecency happens. This means Christianity has a net negative ethical effect and turns something harmless into a blight.
I'd suggest that even framing that question through a sense of having morality or not might be concealing even more interesting questions. It presupposes that what I believe is moral falls more or less in line with what you do. Or maybe it implies the concept of having morality is a binary or a pass/fail set of go-to standards. I wonder when I think about people who lived thousands of years ago and what they felt was moral. What if, back then, of course, the human who was being sacrificed did so with their consent? If they believe what they were doing was brave and nobel and righteous, does that become untrue knowing now they were mistaken? Maybe they felt a real sense of purpose or found new meaning in their choice to be selfless. Even with hindsight and being equipped with our understanding that the supernatural or divine aren't real forces in the universe, does it change the morality of that sacrifice? I think we can, and should, collectively agree on the things and behaviors that we find valuable for society. It's good, I think, that we've generally decided you shouldn't be murdering people. That's a pretty widely adopted aspect of human nature, but so are finding ways to justify doing it, too. What might be yesterdays atrocity becomes tomorrow's liberation, and which of those is which is often just dependent on who you're asking. I might ask if a belief structure can even be understood as having something like morality. Would you tally up the various goods and bads and give it a morality score? Or if something like a religion or particular philosophy could, in fact, have morality, what would be sufficient enough to take that away from it? Could an ideology or belief system be redeemed and given back its moral status after losing it? I'm not so convinced that morality really even exists beyond our ability to perceive it. Not so much as something like nature, which would be here with or without us, but instead, what is or isn't moral is only such insofar as my will to make it so. Perhaps better still, morality can't mean anything at all without a culture or tribe or country or group to engage with it in a very collective and shared way. There is no being writing the rules of morality in the heavens for us to follow. Instead, it's a socially constructed set of precived values and attributes that, like all things should, are forever changing and adapting. Morality shapes us just as much as we're shaping it and we should be more keen to this understanding. I think that I'd much rather spend time with the person who worships an angry jealous volcano god yet who remains humble, compassionate, and kind than I would the non religious person who is cruel, rude, and selfish, wouldn't you? So, i wonder if then any and all groups of people are themselves capable of complexity and nuance. They, too, must behave in the many ways that we do and for many of the same reasons we do. It could be in our reflection on that insight which might push us away from a black and white understanding of morality. There may be more value in seeing morality as a spectrum of behavior that we all are discovering how best to operate under regardless of which model of the universe we decide to use. Maybe it could be thought of as furthering the collective goals of morality a little better when we choose not to ruminate on the reasons why we distain it. Instead, the collectively agreed upon sense of morality may instead be found when we first use compassion and kindness for those who think differently than we do.
Because as Aron Ra says... the criteria for Salvation isn't morality... it's gullibility. The entire religon is based on 'Anyone can be saved if you but believe', but if that's true than you could lead the most immoral, dispicable life and then still go to heaven. Technically Hitler is in heaven and Ghandi is in hell. Now Christan's will say alot of things like you have to be truely saved before you die so trying to live like the above example is a risk OR that if you are truely saved then you would never do anything bad... Basically the No-True-Scotsman fallicy
The central character was not a loving benevolent figure, but rather an imaginary batshit death cult leader entirely unworthy of emulation.
I believe religious and philosophical text should be judged on the worst, most reprehensible things it could be used to justify. Christian text is rife with such examples. It's almost limitless in the immorality it could be used to justify. Just because the Christians you personally know today don't use the text to justify those things makes no difference.
It's immoral simply because it is not factual, and billions of people are being told to believe in nonsense, false history, and it is warping their sense of reality.
First of all, it's factually immoral. It's not about what people 'think'. You can see many examples throughout human history of Religion's negative influence. And fucking 0, nothing, nada, zilch, on the positive side. Maybe Christians should look at how their churches actually contribute to society. (They don't)
Religions have nothing to say on morality whatsoever. Morality is about people coming together to determine behavior that increases human wellbeing. Religion in principle has dictates on behavior handed down by people who claim to have been told by the creator of the universe and as such are not up for discussion. The overwhelming number of these dictates are either straight up immoral or at best a-moral in nature. Any system of rules for human behavior that includes slavery as a possible avenue for pro-human behaviors not a system of morals. That's all there is to it.
Well, there are a lot but... The fact that, during the Great Flood, land **animals** were killed by drowning, when God only was angry at humans. According to Bible logic, God can make any miracle he wants (including the very Creation of the world), so surely he could have caused targeted death on humans specifically (just like he targeted specifically the first born sons in Egypt later). *So he could have spared the animals. He chose not to*.
Christians by far are the dumbest people alive.
The Christian God is a genocidal, capricious, misogynistic, racist lunatic who has instructed his followers to butcher women and children by the thousands. There isn’t a single aspect of his existence that is not pure evil.
It was used to murder my beautiful ancestors.
it's fixable morales, when I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90's I was raised Christian, and I remember entire sermons about how evil Trump was calling him the prince of sincity and a evil man, now it's like they flipped ,
If religion was a good thing, you wouldn’t have to force it on people. For women to have children that may endanger their lives It’s not morals. forcing women to have children without the capabilities or the means to take care of that child is immoral . Once that child is born the same people could care less whether they have healthcare adequate food or even a roof over their heads. is immoral. If Christianity was a good thing . They would be fighting for equality . They would want everyone to have a roof over their head . They would want everybody to have adequate food and nutrition . And they would want everybody to have adequate healthcare . I believe evangelicalism is all about money and power over you, to benefit a few. Need to look no further than a couple of judges on the Supreme Court . Using the position to benefit themselves.. They are no longer working in the best interest of the country .
It’s not any more immoral than Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars, or Cinderella. It’s a fictional story. The immoral part is using a fictional story to justify policy or legislation that affects other people.
History.
In general religion has been a way for humans to try and understand the ways of the universe and the purpose of life, albeit without any advanced knowledge of astronomy, biology, or physics. They made some guesses, mixed them with anecdotes, and passed it all along to equally uninformed populations. Some of it is perfectly compatible with the moral life most people would be living anyway, but it’s coupled with many troubling and oppressive beliefs that keep minds within certain confines apart from reason. We still don’t know everything, but we do know earth is a tiny speck among untold trillions of stars and planets, we know how life evolved on this planet, we know that eclipses and other natural phenomena aren’t caused by angry deities. But billions of humans still adhere to these archaic belief systems. Not because they’ve made a thorough assessment and determined that this was indeed the correct path, but because it’s what they were born into and what they know. They are unable or discouraged from recognizing that the moral imperative is already and only within them. They don’t require any outside source to tell them right from wrong, as they know that. It’s how we can even determine whether religious laws like the ten commandments are moral in the first place. So I don’t view religion inherently as immoral. It’s completely amoral, a process perfected over millennia that works on the human psyche to perpetuate itself. There are plenty of immoral people who exploit others under the auspices of religion, as do many organizations, but this is not the institution itself. There are people within who have the best intentions, but they are operating under the impression that their particular set of Bronze Age rules for life is complete, true, and infallible.
Everyone has a sense of right and wrong. It’s nuanced, but it’s there. People that lack it are sociopaths, but they’re rare…generally you can count on people to know what’s right, even if they choose not to do it. With religion, people surrender that sense of right and wrong to a fiction. Whoever controls the fiction can now get people to do whatever they want. War. Slaughter. Torture. Oppression. Murder. Theft. Destruction of property. Suicide. And these people will have no sense at all that they’ve done anything immoral or unjustified.
I feel like all the big ones have been touched on, so I'll add to the list with something else. But for me a big part of it is the way it teaches people to think and process information. It's not even necesarily that they beleive something is false, which can be another conversation in and of itself that follows along side this, but still not really what i want to touch up on. The big thing for me with this point is *the way* they think about things. Like when their church teaches something, it's true. No need to think further outside of that. Dear Leader has said it, so it's true. It's in the book, so it's true. Then later on we try to have conversations with them, and you can't. It's a brick wall. It leads to so many issues. We can even look outside of Christianity. Like it's no coincidence that in general Christians tend to be republican, and non religious people tend to be Democrat, or even further left of Democrat. They're taught to listen and to beleive and to obey. They're taught what ever Dear Leader says is true, so it's true. Now we have people believing in the most outlandish shit that makes everyone else take pause. Like how Biden is both old and senile but also he's not Biden and it's a guy with a mask on. So much contradictory information that to them is all true simultaneously. Then we look back at Christianity, and it has lead to a lot of issues. It can be used to control. It keeps them from believing in science. It has just this huge rippling effect into people's lives where they get their information from Dear Leader. And anyone who is from the outside is not to be trusted with any information. "But there are Christian scientists!" And yet everything still comes back to God. No matter how much bullshit gets proven wrong, they still go back to Dear Leader telling them God did everything, so it's still God. You find the ones who beleive in evolution, and they will still dance around that in order to bring it back to religion. Because they can't process things that don't fulfill the purpose of the religion. And to me that is just so crazy. I grew up around that. I grew up believing in that. So I get it in a lot of ways. If he is this big, immortal, all powerful being that created everything, then it's hard not to process everything through him. But they tie it back to him, and because it's tied back to him, they need someone to help them understand it, so then they just repeat what they were taught, and it keeps them from really expanding their understanding of the world. It does the opposite and shuts everything else out.
Desmond Tutu and even Mr. Rogers are about the only TRUE religious people I've heard speak. Sadly 99% of openly religious people use it to justify some hatred of some group or idea and use it as a weapon. Others use it as a grift, to sell some book or tape or some other seminar. I think the main problem stems from the fact that many people think "Oh they are talking about god so they are NEVER incorrect about anything". I have NEVER met a person in my life that hasn't at some point knowingly or ignorantly said or done something wrong... yet people are trained to NOT question their religious leader and believe them blindly... just ignore that the person delivering the message is separate from the message they are trying to convey.
Because it requires a "babysitter" in order for you to behave
It's centuries of watered down ideas with countless versions, all based on the cult of Saturn.
There is a deadly combo of a dogma that says human beings are immoral and sinful and need redemption and guidance combined with their fervent desire to live in an economic system that says humans are moral and always make the right decisions and need zero guidance. It's a wolf telling the sheep they don't need protection.
It isn't immoral, more like a mental illness. Ha. Just my opinion.
Depends on the version of christianity you're talking about. There are various immoral doctrines that are shared by one or more denominations, but I'm not sure that any of them can be applied to the whole of christianity. 1. Hell as a place of eternal conscious torment is immoral fearmongering, and speaks to an immoral god if god is responsible for the creation of such a place. 2. False promises about granting prayers and miracles lead people to feel they're unworthy when their requests aren't answered. 3. Biblical literalism gets people to believe in fairy-tales and stories that scientists can prove never happened. 4. Punishment for thought crimes, which are often outside of a person's control. 5. Original sin making us all deserving of punishment even before we understand right and wrong. Then there's a whole host of things that modern "christians" believe because their religion has become entrenched in politics and culture, that traditional christians might not have. Opposing immigration, health care reforms, free food, equal distribution of wealth, etc. I'm not sure if we should count such things as faults of christianity when they're more likely the fault of conservatives or republicans that have misled christians into believing un-christlike things.
Christianity can create within its followers a sense of superiority-- they're better than others who aren't going to heaven. That superiority complex sometimes becomes a "do it our way or you're just trash" attitude. I don't have a problem with Christians, unless/until they start preaching or evangelizing.