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If you were raised Christian, or just raised in the Christian soup of the US, and then you grow up to reject your religion, cool, good for you. But don’t assume that all religions are bad just because American Christians are largely batshit. Not everyone was raised in that soup. Assuming all religions are bad because yours was is actually still perpetuating Christian hegemony because it fails to consider that other faiths, with other practices, exist.
What I’m trying to say is, I have witnessed a particular pipeline from Christian to atheist to online anti-religion zealot from people who have never actually looked deeply into any religion besides the one they grew up with. And when they lambast all religions, I always want to say, dude, you’re just lambasting Christianity. Go ahead and be specific.
@fraying So much yes. All the yes. These people want to argue religion with me, a theologian, and get real angry when I reveal to them their ignorance. I understand they have been hurt by Christianity, but that's no excuse for sloppy research.
@rhiannongrant @fraying The most common one I see is faith. They 100% do not understand that there even are religions that don't even have the concept of faith, or dogma. They get super confused when you agree with them that's is a super bad idea.
@Oozenet @rhiannongrant @fraying out of curiosity, how do you define faith and how does religion without faith work? I'm in agreement with the general points here that a lot of atheist ex-Christians don't seem to understand that not all religions are the same as Christianity and/or necessarily harmful or evil and we should just leave people with non harmful beliefs alone, but my understanding of religious belief still indicates to me that there's faith involved — i.e. a choice to believe in something that imbues your experience of life with more meaning and wonder and explains and gives coherency to your life, despite it not being necessitated by any particular personal experience (since you can always come up with perfectly fine naturalistic explanations) or evidence (whether scientific or otherwise).
@anarchopunk_girl @Oozenet @rhiannongrant @fraying
Regarding how "religion without faith" works, if faith is defined as belief in a deity, there are a number of religions that are not centered on this. Buddhism, for example (though some Buddhists do recognize and/or worship deities). I identified as both a Buddhist and an atheist for a good 20 years.
As not all atheists have the same views about divinity, I wrote about what it means to me to be an atheist here:
https://funcrunch.medium.com/atheism-explained-713528c574d1?sk=12f70ab8a8cf4c63539b951f28ea5513
@funcrunch @Oozenet @rhiannongrant @fraying yeah I know Buddhists can be atheists, but I don't define faith as only being about believing in deities, so this doesn't help super much. Thanks tho
@funcrunch @anarchopunk_girl @rhiannongrant @fraying Defining faith as belief in a deity is perhaps the most common misconception that is prevalent among atheists from a Christian background. As you say in your article, you haven't done much investigation into other forms of deity, and thus other religions. As a result your concept of atheism is strongly defined by Judeo/Christian concepts of deity.
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@funcrunch @anarchopunk_girl @rhiannongrant @fraying
Faith, AKA dogma, is any set of ideas, concepts or beliefs that are considered unquestionable by the group. This occurs not only in some religions, but also politics and science.
Dogma is not present in all religions, not by a long way. It is absolutely present in Christianity and Islam, both requiring, at an absolute minimum, that one accepts their prophet unquestioningly as a true prophet of their god.
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@funcrunch @anarchopunk_girl @rhiannongrant @fraying
Dogma is more likely to be found in fundamentalist forms of religion. It usually occurs once a hierarchy of religious professionals comes to exist, and thus it is more about politics than religion.
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@Oozenet @anarchopunk_girl @rhiannongrant @fraying
I don't come from a Christian background. As I mentioned in my blog post and elsewhere in this thread, I was raised in a secular family by a Jewish father and a mother who had no specific religious affiliation.
@funcrunch @anarchopunk_girl @rhiannongrant @fraying From reading your article I inferred your mother had a Christian background, probably because you said she believed in God, which I took to mean the Abrahamic God, and since you said your father was jewish I figured she wasn't. The point still stands as the abrahamic conception of God is what I was referring to.
@Oozenet @anarchopunk_girl @rhiannongrant @fraying
Yes, my mother believed in the Abrahamic conception of God. But no, she did not raise me with any Christian-specific beliefs or rituals. Unless you count having a Christmas tree and presents, which in the U.S. had become pretty secular by the time I was born (1970) (and was appropriated from the pagan holiday of Yule in the first place).
@Oozenet @funcrunch @anarchopunk_girl @rhiannongrant @fraying self styled secularists sometimes have faith in non dieties that take on form and function of a deity like The State or The Economy and I hate to see it because it goes deranged ass places all the time.
One of the underpinnings of this whole convo though is the inescapability of a Christian conception of existential engagement, where even the philosophers that kinda set the secular tone of Western...everything were not without their Christian ecosystem to start with and their limits they wound up settling on and were known for