Meh for me it was the child fucking.

I don’t agree when you say “racism and homophobia”. American Christian values are racism and homophobia and misogyny.

You can be all of those things and be Christian.

Oh I was raised by bigots. Both full narcissists. Its why democrat and republican mean nothing to me. My democrat dad switched to a republican without changing one racist bigoted opinion. Made sure everyone knew how generous he was. Only he was generous when no one was around to see. Then he was cruel and mean. When I stopped being his victim he disowned me. Of all those christians he was hanging around ninety percent of them were just like him. They were incrediblly mean to people and always justified it using the bible. If their afterlife were a real thing then they wouldn’t be that way. The reason why they can be that way is that they know its all a scam. If jesus ever existed that jewish dude wouldn’t be someone they cared for.

I long for the day they are taxed for their donations and then we will see how christian they are. Whats left might be worthy of my repsect. But I doubt it.

Yeah so I was raised in a reasonably devout household, and I’ve never really been able to resolve this.

Its related to the fundamental attribution error - we judge others by their actions but ourselves by intentions. Except its more than that because religion creates this us vs them dynamic, where anyone who is “us” has good intentions, but anyone who is them does not.

Let’s suppose a “good” person is one who performs acts of altruism, has integrity, and a high level of emptiness self awareness.

In my experience these “good” people are a small part of any group. Any race, creed, city, social group, whatever.

With that in mind, I don’t think religion makes people good - rather its a system of beliefs that allows people to perceive themselves and their friends as good.

Really I think this explains why religion is so prevalent. Ultimately being “good” isn’t a very good gig. Imagine doing destitute because you’ve spent your life performing acts of altruism. OTOH if it merely allows one to form a cohesive group of “good” people, i can see how that would be perpetuated.

I only realised this after I was well past my “Angry Atheist” phase: There are good verses in the Bible and there are also bad verses. Most of the Christians cherry pick. How they cherry pick depends on who they are. In my opinion, there aren’t any real or fake christians. There’s only good christians and bad christians.

It’s like the challenge was how to hold in one’s mind “being Christian” and simultaneously going down a checklist of actions and words listed as defining Christianity and doing the exact opposite. Though, By 320 CE, that was the status quo.

Jesus’s whole way at talking truth to power was to acknowledge and show compassion for those marginalized and hated by the Romans and the Pharisees. His main problem with the Pharisees was literally the hypocrisy of them saying they follow the laws of the religion, and then not doing any of that. It was dangerous to call them hypocrites due to their political power.

Sound familiar yet?

It’s almost like those words mean exactly the opposite. Like with Doublespeak.

“If Jesus was here, he would join the front lines”, my incredibly Catholic relative that needs to re-read the sermon on the mount.

After decades of arguments, the best I managed was slightly changing the language used. Now around me my dad calls black and brown people Democrats instead of slurs. Thinks he’s damn clever too.

Grew up in the south before social media existed. It’s the cause of a lot of problems, but this one predates it by a wide margin. It definitely made it worse, but there is no greater hate than Christian love.

No one forgot how to be nice. They just dont have to be online, because they know they can get away with being a cunt. Social media has outed a lot of people for being cowards.

Don’t worry. There’s plenty of other diseased religions in other areas!

Then when someone close to me came out as trans, I didn’t even blink or feel weird about it.

Calling bullshit on that, mate. Anything out of the ordinary, you are going to be curious about. People blink and feel weird when someone swaps playstation for xbox. If you had said that you didnt hate them just because, that would fine. But this “I totally didnt blink at something Im not used to” is a cheap virtue signal.

I dont care who you are, or what the issue is. If some suddenly isnt who you thought they were in some way, youre going to blink. Youre going to have questions. Wanting to understand things isnt bad. And honestly utterly fucking sick of every single person on the internet pretending that they arent the same human being that the rest of us are. If nothing else, youd at the very least be worried about them because of all the stories you hear about shitty parents disowning their kids for being LGBT. But not you, you didnt even blink…

You don’t know Jesus. Man was savage. Cursed a fig tree for no reason. Hates money changers.

It wasn’t open to interpretation.

And yet, 2000 years later, here we are.

The problem is that you actually read the Bible. These “Christians” never have. They interpret all right but read…nah.

You know how the Romans collected taxes in there less “Roman” providences? They have rich guys a contract to basically raise taxes and the rich guys payed up front what was owed for their division of it. Then they were allowed to collect taxes beyond what they paid the Romans to make a profit. This is mainly why they were hated so much. Many people might imagine some official going around and collecting taxes fairly, but the reality was they were operating much more like a Mafia extorting protection money out of people, and taking more then most people owed, often to peoples ruin or near ruin. You can also imagine how nepotic this becomes. People who have loyalty to the dominant ruling class would often catch a break, while those disfavored by the dominant faction would often be harassed.

It was open to interpretation from the very beginning. Exemplified in the fact that the four canonically approved gospels (we will ignore all the non-canon gospels) are contradicting each other in various ways.

Fine if you choose the interpretation in your comment, but perhaps it would be even better not to let your life be ruled by what random persons made up in their fan fiction 2000 years ago?

It was also a huge plot point of the Bible.

That’s not just Americans that do that… That’s pretty much anywhere with any religion.

And don’t forget, those are the people who tell us atheists that “without the Bible, where do you get your morals from?”

Well, we can see what these biblical morals are - you mentioned it: homophobia, racism etcetera. It makes people hateful, while claiming it is charity and compassion.

Religion poisons everything.

“If God created everything, then who created God?”

There’s a lot of places where one can poke holes into faith/the concept of a God, but I don’t think this is one.

The reason being that God’s existence doesn’t actually change anything about the question or the answer. You can rephrase it as “If everything came from the Big Bang, what came before the Big Bang and what created the preconditions of the Big Bang?”

So you could use the same argument to “disprove” literally any world view, including science, or even hypothetical scenarios like the simulation theory (“If we live in a simulation, who is running the simulation?”).

But you can not only “disprove” every potential answer to “where does everything come from”, but you can also rephrase the question to “If atoms are made of quarks, what are quarks made of, and what are their components made of?” or to “If there’s an end to the universe, what is outside of it?”

If you are smart enough though, you will see that none of that is actually disproving anything, because if you rephrase the question further it becomes “Why don’t we know everything?” and that’s a rather simple-minded question to ask. One befitting of a 7 or 8 year old, but not really of an adult.

Before the circumnavigation and the discovery and charting of all of the world, people also didn’t know what was on the other side of the planet and still it would have been dumb to doubt what we knew (e.g. that the British Isles existed) only because there were large white spots on the map elsewhere.

The answer that any person who has thought about it and not rejected the idea is: If a being that has created and shaped our universe exists, it exists (at least partly) outside of our universe. Like a programmer doesn’t have to follow in his life the limitations of his code in programming, such an entity’s existence would be so far outside our modes of thinking that “who created him?” would simply fall flat as a question.

To begin to answer such a question one would have to have some knowledge of the plane of existence where the divine resides, and as that is outside the realm of what we can understand through physics and the natural world we live in, the question becomes unanswerable.

The question then becomes, can something exist on another plane of existence? The answer is of course, we can’t examine anything outside our universe, so, the answer must be, we don’t or can’t know.

I suppose then, the next question becomes, do you want to believe that there is something /someone outside the natural universe that gives meaning to our existence?

Christianity (and most religions) always has been a way for people to cope with their fears and guilt. ‘what happens after we die?’ -> ‘its heaven dont worry’. ‘Am I a bad person?’ -> ‘no Jesus died for you dont worry fam’

It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.

My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.

A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.

I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.