Faith

[lester1/2jr]

I'm sure plenty of Christians voted for Hillary too?

[RCMerchant]

I'm sure plenty of Christians voted for Hillary too?

But likely not many deep south bible thumpers and snake handlers.
I went to an Assembly of God as a kid-we had to-Mary Jo-(the step mother) made us. All that speaking in tounges s**t.
What a bunch of looney tunes. Babbling on Sunday, telling n****r jokes on Monday.
But others voted for Trump too-folks who fell for his lies. Honestly thought he was going to "make America great again."
Regular working class WHITE folks. You know few blacks voted for him.
Or folks who just plan didn't trust Hillary-I know I wouldn't trust her.
And likely rich guys like him who knew they would get that big tax break.
And Russians, of course.  

[ER]

I'm sure plenty of Christians voted for Hillary too?

But likely not many deep south bible thumpers and snake handlers.
I went to an Assembly of God as a kid-we had to-Mary Jo-(the step mother) made us. All that speaking in tounges s**t.
What a bunch of looney tunes. Babbling on Sunday, telling n****r jokes on Monday.

You make a good point, RC. The worst foes of Christianity are not atheists, they're believers who do not conduct themselves by the code they claim to follow. Religious hypocrites, in other words who find it easier to advocate an idea than to live up to it. You follow Jesus you live by the Golden Rule and you love others.

You live by:

Judge not, lest you be judge, condemn not, lest you be condemned, forgive, and you will be forgiven.

It was mainly because of those people, religious hypocrites, that I despised most evangelical Christians for so long, and didn't have much use for Catholic doctrines either, going to daily Mass in school and after school.....well, any priest hearing my confession got an earful.

Partly my rancor related to the fact I was young and the young tend to be areligious or anti-religious, partly I was extremely scientifically-minded and didn't catch on yet that science and God are not incompatible, some of the greatest scientists were religious, and there is also the truth that many mainstream scientists today are every bit as dogmatic and closed-minded as some people of faith.

I also had a light bulb go off in my head one day that, hey, you know, most Christians aren't actually out there burning books and bombing abortion clinics, a lot of them, like my almost father in law, are running soup kitchens and free stores, and doing good work every day. I gazed around at my fellow agnostics, and some of the atheists I knew (atheism is a philosophy I have just never gotten, it's so closed-minded) and I saw people who tended to be selfish and selfist.

So I matured and lost a lot of my venom toward Christians long before I ever took the step of defining myself as one, based more on belief than any church-attendance. (I go to church to be with my daughter and some other loved ones. If my daughter ever wants to stop going, I'll stop too.)

After all, to say you hate Christians is to say you hate 4/5th of Americans and about a quarter of the world. Not even Hitler spread his hate that broadly.

(And, hey, I'm just replying to my dear friend and fellow sci-fi fan RC, not continuing this thread after I said I was done. Uh...yeah.)

[lester1/2jr]

RC- why deify politics? I don't judge people by what mark they make on a largely meaningless piece of paper every 4 years.

ER- do you ever watch Dateline. There are sometimes "Christians" who kill their wives because they don't want to get a divorce because of their alleged standing in the community. You know right away when you hear the ridiculous 911 call the guy is guilty

[ER]

I've watched Dateline a few times over the years. Lotta a***oles in the world, mate.

[RCMerchant]

RC- why deify politics? I don't judge people by what mark they make on a largely meaningless piece of paper every 4 years.

Because the Trump agenda is not a moral agenda. If you don't judge people by they're morals-what DO you judge them by? They're taste in music? What type of beer they drink I mean-..? 

[lester1/2jr]

RC- Hillary's agenda wasn't moral either. the point is we weren't put on this earth solely to vote in US presidential elections.  it's just politics what matters are our families and communities and our own lives.

[RCMerchant]

RC- Hillary's agenda wasn't moral either. the point is we weren't put on this earth solely to vote in US presidential elections.  it's just politics what matters are our families and communities and our own lives.

I said already I didn't like Hillary either.

As for the rest-yeah-I know all this. My family and friends have nothing to do with my politics.  In the REAL world I worry about the weather or what I'm going to cook for dinner more than politics. I just discuss it here because it's something to discuss.
But who wants to discuss pork chops and saurkraut? Because that's what I made for dinner. With green beans.

[lester1/2jr]

right. I guess in general I get having faith, I get not having faith and I get being somewhere in between. I get that religion has caused a lot of harm I mean obviously fundamentalists in particular are wreaking havoc one place or another all the time. AND I get the idea that not having A faith as a sort of base can lead people to become communists or scientologists or basically turn other more recent, less proven things into religion (anyone ever see Kumare? about the fake guru guy)

it was the idea that "Christians put Trump in the White house and I hate them for that" that someone said that kind of blew my mind.

[Olivia Bauer]

Religion is almost entirely toxic. If I were in the Middle East they'd be arguing over whether to behead me for not believing in their invisible sky Daddy or throw me off a building for wanting to stick my dick in another Man's ass. Meanwhile they engage in beating women and slitting the throats of living animals as a part of religious ceremony.

In the US we still have retards like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee trying to force their religious morality on me by trying to take away my right to marry a man and lying about how this country was founded on "Christian Principles".

We have conmen like Kent Hovind and Ken Ham straight up lying to people and indoctrinating children to not believe actual verifiable science in favor of their ancient book of fairy tales that said that one man crammed a bunch of animals in a boat and survived a world flooding that magically left behind no evidence of it happening.

The Catholic Church actively fought against scientific advancement and oppressed Europe for many, many years. As well as ruining Uganda by sending missionaries there to spread their bulls**t, leading to the deaths of many gay people.

Donald Trump has suggested I'm "Unamerican" because I don't believe in God. (And here I thought the US had freedom of religion, silly me.)

Jack Chick was a thing until he (Thankfully) died in 2016.

In Salem Massachusetts all someone needed to do was call you a Witch and you'd be killed.

And American cinema has been stuffed full of low quality (and often immoral) "Christsploitation" films such as the increadbly mean spirited and strawmanning "God's Not Dead", "Old Fashioned" which glorifies dysfunctional relationships, "Fireproof" which tries to force sexual purity by depicting internet porn as a drug, "God's Club" which suggests you should throw out your depression meds cause "All y'all need is Jesus" and the unbelievably awful "Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas" which tried to justify the commercialized nature of Christmas while allowing Kirk Cameron to spew s**t he made up as well as padding it out to feature film length with a slow-mo dance scene.

If someone else wants to be religious, that's fine, but keep me out of it. Don't use religion to tell other people what to do. You do you, I do me.

[indianasmith]

But if we did not have Christianity, we would not have -
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
the great Gothic Cathedrals
Most of the classic works of Renaissance artists
the Red Cross
the YMCA
the Salvation Army
the Scientific Revolution (Isaac Newton, Descartes, and most of the founders of modern science were devout Christians)
the works of John Milton, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and countless other literary greats
nearly all classical music
the Gregorian calendar
and the list goes on and on and on.

It's easy to focus entirely on the negative.  Christianity's legacy in the world has many positives as well.

[ER]

Religion is almost entirely toxic. If I were in the Middle East they'd be arguing over whether to behead me for not believing in their invisible sky Daddy or throw me off a building for wanting to stick my dick in another Man's ass. Meanwhile they engage in beating women and slitting the throats of living animals as a part of religious ceremony.

In the US we still have retards like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee trying to force their religious morality on me by trying to take away my right to marry a man and lying about how this country was founded on "Christian Principles".

We have conmen like Kent Hovind and Ken Ham straight up lying to people and indoctrinating children to not believe actual verifiable science in favor of their ancient book of fairy tales that said that one man crammed a bunch of animals in a boat and survived a world flooding that magically left behind no evidence of it happening.

The Catholic Church actively fought against scientific advancement and oppressed Europe for many, many years. As well as ruining Uganda by sending missionaries there to spread their bulls**t, leading to the deaths of many gay people.

Donald Trump has suggested I'm "Unamerican" because I don't believe in God. (And here I thought the US had freedom of religion, silly me.)

Jack Chick was a thing until he (Thankfully) died in 2016.

In Salem Massachusetts all someone needed to do was call you a Witch and you'd be killed.

And American cinema has been stuffed full of low quality (and often immoral) "Christsploitation" films such as the increadbly mean spirited and strawmanning "God's Not Dead", "Old Fashioned" which glorifies dysfunctional relationships, "Fireproof" which tries to force sexual purity by depicting internet porn as a drug, "God's Club" which suggests you should throw out your depression meds cause "All y'all need is Jesus" and the unbelievably awful "Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas" which tried to justify the commercialized nature of Christmas while allowing Kirk Cameron to spew s**t he made up as well as padding it out to feature film length with a slow-mo dance scene.

If someone else wants to be religious, that's fine, but keep me out of it. Don't use religion to tell other people what to do. You do you, I do me.

Remember, untempered science brought us the forced sterilization of Negroids peoples, in the United States, in the twentieth century, the eugenics-based aborting of Jewish, Slavic, African, and other "lesser" offspring by Margaret Sanger, the Darwinian-influenced ideas of racism-cum- survival of the supposedly fittest in Nazi Germany, the US Army radiation experiments on human (and again, black) test subjects, the horrors of the pre-frontal lobotomy and other psychological mad-scientist run amok atrocities, often done with such ignoble goals as (well into the 1970s) curing homosexuality, and before that there was the  Victorian fad of forced clitorectomies to cure the defect of the female orgasm, in the hallowed  name of progress for medical science. And let us not overlook how science, the thing that in its positive sphere gave us good things also has killed millions on the battlefield through the development of everything from mustard gas to souped-up biological agents, to the Vickers machine gun. Science is the other hemisphere of human destructiveness in action.

[Rev. Powell]

But if we did not have Christianity, we would not have -
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
the great Gothic Cathedrals
Most of the classic works of Renaissance artists
the Red Cross
the YMCA
the Salvation Army
the Scientific Revolution (Isaac Newton, Descartes, and most of the founders of modern science were devout Christians)
the works of John Milton, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and countless other literary greats
nearly all classical music
the Gregorian calendar
and the list goes on and on and on.

It's easy to focus entirely on the negative.  Christianity's legacy in the world has many positives as well.

I don't think you can take credit for, for example, Beethoven's symphonies. It's quite a leap to take to assume such a talent wouldn't write great symphonies if there were no Christianity to inspire him. (Yes, the lyrics to the "Ode to Joy" would be different, but he also might have written an even greater symphony in praise of pagan ideas or abstract concepts). There's a big difference between "people who professed Christianity did great things" and "Christianity is the sole reason people did great things."

Now, you have a better case for the idea of public charities---that is more specifically Christian in origin.

[Svengoolie 3]

Ok I'll say that I do not hate all christians in america. Some are not bad. But I do hate a lot of christians in america and they dohappen to be prominent.

The things I really hate about the christians I do hate is that most of them fall into the conservative camp and I hate them for their arrogance and hypocrisy, and I will cite examples of this.

When christians decide to defy the law and the government, they think they're heroes standing up for freedumb and libirdy.

When people who are not christians defy the law and government, they are "thugs" and "anarchists" and"socliaist/communists" who need to be crushed.

When Kim Davis defied the law and refused to issue same sex marriage certificates in kentucky, she was a hero.

When Susan Mcdougal defined the law and refused to help ken starr persecute bill clinton, she was a "criminal"

When Kim Davis was arrested and jailed, she was being persecuted.

When Susan Mcdougal was jailed for vastly longer, she "deserved it".

When anti choice protestors block abortion clinics, they're heroes.

When OWS blocked wallstreet, they were "socialist terrorists".

When anti choice protestors are arrested and jailed they are victims of persecution.

When OWS was beaten, gassed, shot at and trampled "they deserved more."

When Cliven Bundy and his bunch pointed rifles at federal law agents they were heroes.

When a 13 year old black kid is gunned down by police while playing with a toy gun in a park bu police he was "stupid and got what he deserved".

When that guy Lavoy finicum was killed while in possession of a rifle during thyat bondy standoff he was murdered by a fascist state.

When an unarmed black man is murdered while sitting in a car obeying police orders, he "did something to deserve it."

When Nazis march and protest, they are exercising their rights.

When BLM marches and protests "they're terrorist thugs who hate police."

The chrtistian right in america thinks everyone else's xxxx stinks but theirs smells like lilacs. And they don't stop to look at their own hypocrisy or take a good strong whiff of their own xxxx because they don't think like that. They have "faith" that their views are right and therefore anything they do no matter how hypocritical is Ok because their "faith" tells them that. They don't think, they just have "faith" because if they thought about it they might realize their xxxx stinks too.

As is, people of "faith" deny the reality of human influenced climate change because their "faith" tells them that their god controls the weather and not man and it's "arrogant" to think otherwise. People of "faith" deny scientific data and evidence because it disagrees with their "faith". They don;t believe the fact that bacteria are evolging into antibiotic resistant forms because of overuse of antibiotics  evolution is something people of "faith" don;t believe in no matter how much proof there is. Poeple of faith may very well help wreck this planet and create a disaster of unimaginable scale and duration because they don't believe in provable facts, they believe in "faith".

So, yeah, I kinda hate them.

[indianasmith]

Wow.  Basically, all your hates are bundled into politics.
I may think some people are wrong, politically, but I don't hate them for being wrong.  Life's too short for hate.
And frankly, I see a lot of stereotyping built in there.  Conservatism is a broad philosophy, and not all of us are in lockstep on all the issues you describe.
I find that some liberals can be just as irrational and hateful as conservatives.
Frankly, I think the country would be a better place if we talked more and shouted less.
Ironically, I'm an old school Reagan conservative who has never voted for a Democrat Presidential candidate in my life - but last night I got flamed as a "libtard" on social media because I refuse to bow down and worship at the altar of Trump.

It's a free country, believe what you like.  But life is easier when you don't automatically lump people together.