"As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.' Michael Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you.' If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.
It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness."
“When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, Into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust.”
Except the fear of an imaginary monster with an imaginary torture chamber, and the sadomasochistic narcissism of simultaneously thinking you’re literal dirt and have a hotline to the creator of the universe.
Barbecue sauce is the source of great joy, and without It, there is no joy to be found. There is no joy in the nation, and tragically, there is no joy in a generation that is rejecting barbecue sauce.
Rectal probing aliens are the source of great joy, and without Them, there is no joy to be found. There is no joy in the nation, and tragically, there is no joy in a generation that is rejecting rectal probing aliens.
Eric, the god-eating penguin, is the source of great joy, and without Him, there is no joy to be found. There is no joy in the nation, and tragically, there is no joy in a generation that is rejecting Eric, the god-eating penguin.
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Define “joy” as being derived exclusively from your particular fetish.
Lament people who don’t participate in your particular fetish as joyless.
Circular.
This works for any other word too. “Love,” “morality” and “peace” by religions; “justice” and “rights” by politically motivated ideologies.
(RNS) — Several new studies are challenging the idea that being an atheist leads to poor health.
By: Bob Smietana
Published: Mar 4, 2021
(RNS) — In recent decades, a number of studies have found that being religious can be good for your health.
People who regularly attend services are less likely to smoke, may be less likely to use drugs or be obese and may live longer than those who don’t attend services. Those findings have led some to conclude that, if religion is good for you, being an atheist will be bad for your health.
That’s not exactly the case, said David Speed, professor of psychology at the University of New Brunswick in St. John, Canada.
In a new study called “Godless in the Great White North,” published in the Journal of Religion and Health, Speed looked at data from a Canadian Community Health Survey and found that atheists may be just as healthy as devoted believers.
“If you compare the health outcomes for those two groups, they are really similar to each other,” said Speed.
Speed is one of a number of social scientists who are rethinking the connection between religion and health. Past studies, they say, have focused heavily on the health of very religious people while treating atheists and other nonbelievers as an afterthought.
That’s a mistake, Speed argues, in part because nonreligious people are not all the same.
Atheists, he said, are different from agnostics, who are different from the religiously unaffiliated, or so-called nones. And some of the benefits of being a part of a church or other faith group — including social support and behavioral rules that can be beneficial — aren’t exclusively religious.
Religious people, for example, are less likely to drink heavily or use drugs, because their religious beliefs discourage those activities. But other groups also discourage drug and alcohol use, he said, pointing to the so-called Straight Edge movement that began among punk rockers in the 1980s.
Some people — include Speed himself — simply aren’t interested in using those substances. Whatever the motivation, these groups see abstaining from alcohol and drugs as important.
“The religious framing is irrelevant,” he said.
Many of the benefits of religion are also linked to stronger social support networks. That is one area where religiously active people do have an advantage over atheists.
“One thing that religion does really well is facilitating social networks,” he said. “If you go to services, you are building a social support network.”
By contrast, he added, “there isn’t the same support structure for atheists.”
Still, it’s important to be clear that the health and well-being benefits are linked to faith groups’ social support, not spiritual belief, said Speed.
In some cases, belief in God might actually be bad for your health, particularly when that belief is shaky. A 2020 study published in the Review of Religious Research found that “doubting theists” — those who believe in God but are less certain about those beliefs — reported poorer health outcomes.
Because of the growth of the nones in the United States, researchers on that study wanted to look more closely at subgroups in that population. They separated out self-identified atheists and then divided the remaining unaffiliated theists into two groups: “theistic nones,” who had a strong belief in God, and “doubting theists,” who were less certain in their beliefs. Then they looked at health outcomes for the latter two groups.
“The results suggest that the level of certainty in beliefs about God or a higher power are an important factor among religious nones for predicting health outcomes,” according to the study.
Joseph Baker, a sociologist of religion at East Tennessee State University who worked on the study, argues that nonreligious Americans should not be treated as a monolith. He said atheists, agnostics and the nones should be treated as separate groups by researchers.
Baker, who studies secular Americans, also said that atheism can give people a strong sense of identity and a clear set of values, which may help with their well-being, even if they don’t have the same kind of built-in social support that religious people do.
America’s changing religious landscape — in which about 1 in 4 Americans identify as nones — will present challenges in the future. As organized religion declines, researchers are asking what will fill that social void.
“The challenge for secular individuals is to think consciously and seriously about where they will find community — and organize accordingly,” said Baker.
Speed hopes that more research will be done about the question of religion and health. And he hopes that more researchers will spend time studying atheists and other nonreligious people.
“Atheists, in general, are understudied,” he said. “And when they are studied, they are not studied well.”
@dudewholikeseurobeat You are hateful. You worship a murderous blood-god, make stupid excuses for its immorality, insist any human who does not concede to its blackmail is deserving of eternal torture, claim this atrocity is “good”, pretend that having these beliefs about other human people being deserving of eternal agony is virtuous, and then complain about the tone of the people who point out how horrible, immoral and sociopathic this is. And demonstrate your god can’t even exist in the first place every time you describe it.
Your priority is your villainous imaginary god and the feeling associated with your superstitions. Mine is human wellbeing, which is not served by primitive blood-soaked fables of monsters from the sky that condemn all humanity for merely existing. You worship a god that hates humans, and think I’m “hateful” for finding this appalling.
Your god makes torture the default, then makes applauding it mandatory. Imagining (literally) that such a vile creature exists, is “good” and then worshipping it is anti-humanity. You’re so terrified of this abominable, fictional monster, that you’re willing to corrupt your own morality to make excuses for it, at the expense of real people. Instead of simply recognizing that this villain isn’t there at all. That’s what’s hateful. To yourself as much as everyone else.
Meanwhile, you refused to take “no” for an answer when I declined to debate or discuss with you.
As I said before, you truly are exactly the type of person Xtianity wants you to be. Someone I will never be.
TheraminTrees: Losing Faith - My departure from theism.
The journey out of religion is as unique as the individual, but there appear to be many common themes. You’re not a freak, you’re not crazy and you’re not alone.
The magic trick, once explained, can no longer deceive.
Note: the brother he mentions happens to be QualiaSoup.
