Why Atheists Care About YOUR Religion
tags:
Stumble ThisVideosift has been insufficiently godless recently, what with the election and all. Here to set it straight, gogreen18, who delivers a nice informative rant.
X Greetings! You are not currently logged in, but please don't let that stop you from voting up any videos you like. :)
|
| |||||||||||||||
religion,christianity,intolerance,rant,boy scouts,atheism,freedom,cleavage,boobs Why Atheists Care About YOUR Religion
Comments  playlists with this video Creationists are STUPID by kagenin
• Religion, Or, A Lack There Of by guessandcheck
who voted for this video Fjnbk
- enon
- EDD
- siftbot
x80 - EndAll
- Bruti79
who has this post bookmarked 13422
- 13280
- 13062
- chilaxe
Why Atheists Care About YOUR Religion Related Videos
| Watch this Video NextFriends O' the Sift Top New Videos by Vote                 Subscribe Top 15 Sifters of All Time Top 15 Sifters of the Past Week 12. Seric
(139 votes) Newest Appreciated Comments       | ||||||||||||||
It's also rare, for instance, for non-monotheistic religions to cause major sexual guilt for natural impulses. Rome had temple prostitutes. India had the Kama Sutra (though years of British and Muslim influence have had a serious dampening effect on Indian sexuality). Casual nudity is a regular part of Japanese advertising.
While non-monotheistic cultures seem just as prey to cultural imperialism, they tend to be more tolerant of religious dissent. The religious pluralism of Hinduism and of ancient Rome is very well known, but the tolerance in ancient and medieval China is somewhat less talked about. Records indicate that from the 8th (if not earlier) to the 19th century, there was even a substantial Jewish population. Marco Polo confirmed that there were many Jewish traders in China in the 13th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer
So religion caused the holocaust hey? ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer
Well they certainly didn't do anything to stop it. Pope Pius XII I think, something about never excommunicating Hitler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany
So religion caused the holocaust hey? ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer
Yeah, that debunks hundreds of years of Catholics, Muslims and other Christians demonizing and dehumanizing Jews as evil Christ-killing, blood-drinking baby-killers. Not to mentioned Hitlers own bizarre religious views, blending catholic mythology with Nordic mythology and mixing this superstition with his plan to fix Germany. If it wasn't for hundreds of years of seeding anti-Semitic thoughts by, and only by, religion, Hitler wouldn't have had half a leg to stand on, when he explained how his "personal lord and savior" Jesus Christ led him to believe that the Jews were the root of all problems in Europe
Hitler could not be mistaken as and was not a Christian. His god was nationalism and the hate for the Jews. A hate that had no background in religion but common street rhetoric of the time. Someone had to be blamed for the loss of the first WW.
The much praised enlightenment and the "discovery" of evolution was much more an idea from which Hitler took it's page. Hitler used Evolutionary Theory to Justify the Holocaust. http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/hit.htm
You can deny the facts but does not make them true!
http://www.icr.org/article/285/
Now that is just one of the 'facts' that are beyond wrong. Research the crusades and some of the wars you mentioned and you will find that while people call them self "religious" doesn't make them so.
Grow up and research your "propaganda".
klaqua are you trying to say that the crusades were not motivated/cause by religion??? I think that's a HUGE stretch to say otherwise...
As for the holocaust, if Judaism was not a religion, their culture would be much more assimilated by the culture of the region, so that someone like Hitler would not have been able to target them as a group. He certainly could have targeted some similar cultural group without regard to religion, but he would not have had the built in antipathy toward Jews that was so prevalent back then.
And by the way, she had about a thousand other points that nobody seems to be questioning. Even if she is wrong on this single issue, how exactly does that make her point of view invalid?
Just proves that if you make shit up, make a video with cool music, show some cleavage and state things as fact (that are obviously not fact), you too can have a fan club and be hailed as hero.
Hitler could not be mistaken as and was not a Christian. His god was nationalism and the hate for the Jews. A hate that had no background in religion but common street rhetoric of the time. Someone had to be blamed for the loss of the first WW.
The much praised enlightenment and the "discovery" of evolution was much more an idea from which Hitler took it's page. Hitler used Evolutionary Theory to Justify the Holocaust. http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/hit.htm
You can deny the facts but does not make them true!
http://www.icr.org/article/285/
Now that is just one of the 'facts' that are beyond wrong. Research the crusades and some of the wars you mentioned and you will find that while people call them self "religious" doesn't make them so.
Grow up and research your "propaganda".
Wow, there are so many errors in your argument, it's kinda funny.
First of all, your first source that you site to argue that Hitler used evolution to justify the Holocaust comes from a far-right Pentacostal Christian website...this is the website that also decries the seperation of church and state and describes abortion as "The great American holocaust"... not exactly a balanced viewpoint there. Your other "source" is just as bad - 'The Institute for Creation Research'...c'mon dude, seriously? You're going to need a lot more than that to convince me.
Let's set a few facts straight here:
1) Hmm...#1...oh yeah, Hilter was a deeply devout Catholic! How about some quotes, yes?
"I say: my Christian feeling points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me towards the man who, once lonely and surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews and called for battle against them."
and
"I am deeply moved to perceive that his tremendous struggle for this world against the Jewish poison was most profoundly marked by the fact that he had to bleed on the cross for it..."
2) The Nazi party was officially Christian and the majority of members were Christian! Their political policy was to make Christianity the state religion of Germany.
3) R0SENCRANTZ is right. Pope Pius XI signed, and Pope Pius XII negotiated, a concordat with Hitler that gave the church immunity while they supplied the Nazis with money and legal protection for their acts. Pope Pius XI also signed a similar one with Benito Mussolini.
4) Some of the most antisemitic European political and social movements of the 1930's and 1940's were Christian parties.
5) The role of atheists and freethinkers during that time? Well, only 1.5% of the German popluation was self-proclaimed as such, and as stated by Stewart W. Herman Jr, an American clergyman who lived in Nazi Germany during the rise of Hitler, "The athiests may immediately be discounted as exercising any perceptible influence on German religious thought today...[their influence] has been suppressed completely by the new regime which places 'godlessness' in the same category with anarchistic Bolshevism."
This was mostly taken from an article by William Sierichs, Jr., an editor for a newspaper in Louisiana. He has a degree in journalism from LSU. The article is not online, but a similar one can be found in 5 parts from a professor in sociology at the University of Wisconsinhere.
Critically acclaimed books by professors in sociology, history, and anthropology contributed to this article. Authors such as:
Moshe Herczl, Randolph Braham, and David Kertzer.
This is the logic:
Hitler was atheist and was bad. Therefore atheists are bad.
You cannot confirm the cause without establishing the same link between the cause and effect of both situations.
In Hitler's case, there is a link: He had ultimate power over the people and no accountability to peer criticism. Most religions carry these same ideas, which is why they also have these bad histories.
Albeit, there are more operatives in these situations than I'm addressing, such as the "them and us" phenomena, or genetic and epigenetic traits of Hitler, or Hitler's childhood. The list goes on.
So religion caused the holocaust hey? ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's religion didn't cause the holocaust, Adolf Hitler's beliefs caused the holocaust. Whether or not Hitler's beliefs about Jewish extermination were due to religion or not has been a topic of debate among much smarter people than myself. This wikipedia article has a lot of information on the topic.
My point is, pointing to Bonhoeffer doesn't prove that religion didn't cause the holocaust, it proves that Bonhoeffer's blend of religion didn't cause the holocaust.
This is the logic:
Hitler was atheist and was bad. Therefore atheists are bad.
This is of course entirely correct, the same goes for the argument "Hitler was a catholic, therefore Christianity/Catholism is bad" This is also a fallacy, for roughly the same reason.
HOWEVER, as I tried explaining before: The triangular unholy mess that is the three major monotheistic plagues, Christianity, Islam and Judaism and all its sub-species, are central to creating the whole mess. Infact, you could say these religions are what made the Jews a distinct "race" in the first place. The propogation of these ideas for hundreds of years is what led people to believe that Jews were somehow this hive-minded entity that could be praised or, more commonly, blamed collectively as if they were a single individual, hence the insulting referrence "The Jew" when referring to a whole group of people. You only need to look at parts of the islamic world to see how Jews are still demonized as ritualistic murderers and that they drink the blood of baptized babies (or palestinian babies, depending on which fantasy you subscribe to) and all sorts of nonsense. As I previously stated, the idea that Jews can be blamed collectively for something is absurd. But Judaism, on the other hand, is not without blame, this idea, this religion is at times just as poisonous as Islam and Christianity, and it is partly responsible for the death and suffering of thousands of people, the idea is central to establishing the idea of the "Jewish race" as a distint entity. "The Jews" are not to be blamed, even partially, for their own holocaust, but Judaism is. Some people are unable to make this distinction, and that problem frequently comes up when I try to say the same thing about Islam, whenever I critize that retarded idea, people assume I think all muslims are retards, which I , for the nth time, do not, just like "the Jews" they are not a collective mind, but individuals more or less infected by a poisonous idea.
That would be equivalent to me saying that because Hitler embraced evolution, all evolutionists embrace Hitler ( which by the way, i embrace. Evolution that is, not Hitler)
STOP GENERALIZING
My point, should i restate it, is that generalizing all religions into one "categorization," exactly the same, and each as capable as the next of evils; is MISGUIDED.
That would be equivalent to me saying that because Hitler embraced evolution, all evolutionists embrace Hitler ( which by the way, i embrace. Evolution that is, not Hitler)
STOP GENERALIZING
Oh Please, it's fair to lump religions as she does. It's not generalizing when the negative aspects of religion she points out can be attributed to the vast majority of religions. And news flash, every religion is as capable of "evil" as every other, be it exploitation, exclusion or indoctrination.
I'll tell you what I'll accept that she was unfairly generalizing if you can name a single religion that doesn't exclude people, doesn't have a history of violence, doesn't indoctrinate its youth, doesn't exploit its followers and doesn't throw rational thinking out the window.
Also, someone referred to her as using a cheap trick by showing cleavage. I fail to see how wearing a somewhat low cut shirt invalidates her argument. If I had to guess, I'd say the fact that she was close to the camera and leaning forward a little bit was more for dramatic effect, not to get her rack on Videosift.
The Hitler argument is just a logical fallacy. It's called affirming the consequent.
This is the logic:
Hitler was atheist and was bad. Therefore atheists are bad.
Actually, it's a hasty generalization. Affirming the Consequent would be more like this:
All atheists are bad.
Hitler was bad.
Therefore, Hitler was an atheist.
However, speaking of the fallacy of hasty generalization, I'm starting to get very tired of people saying that all religion leads to these horrible consequences. This is not true. If you look at history, you will find it is a specific type of religion that leads to warmongering and intolerance: monotheism.
I will repeat that. It is MONOTHEISM that causes all these problems, NOT religion as a whole.
Caused by monotheists:
Caused by non-monotheists:
The video mentions the Kalinga War started by Ashoka, ruler of the Mauryan empire, as a war caused by religion, but there's absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Everything points to it having been instigated purely for the sake of imperial expansion.
In fact, Ashoka suffered crushing guilt when he saw the horrors his war had brought about. He then converted to Buddhism and renounced war, committing himself to the promulgation of Buddhism and the prosperity and well-being of his people.
So, I've got a list of 14 wars waged in the name of monotheistic religions, and just one war waged in the name of a non-monotheistic religion. (And if you look at the history, it was only labeled a religious war well after it had begun to curry popular support; it wasn't started religion, though it probably would have ended sooner without it.)
Consider that for most of the world's history, most people weren't monotheists. Monotheism didn't really grab a significant chunk of the world's population until the 8th century or so. Even today, almost half of the world's population believes either in no God or in more than one god. Were non-monotheistic religions, to generalize, disposed to holy wars and religious conflicts, the numbers would bear that out. But they don't.
Heck, let's look at religious conflicts going on right now. There are 24 listed conflicts, and only 2 of them were instigated by non-monotheists.
The facts are pretty clear. Non-monotheistic religions, on the whole, don't really cause holy wars. Almost every monotheistic religion, on the other hand, does cause holy wars. The only exception that comes to mind is Mormonism, which hasn't had a chance yet.
Atheists, please restrict your ire appropriately.
Martin Luther, father of protestant Christianity, wrote On The Jews And Their Lies which was a major influence on Hitler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom#Ancient
But your Grandma who goes to a bland church every Sunday had nothing to do with it.
One thing I'll mention in regards to this rant is that her issues with religion aren't really about religion or anything to do with God. Instead they are about the institutions that purport to represent God. Religion is like gun control: just because you don't like the way one person (or many) use it doesn't mean it should be banned. I realize some are for gun control for that very reason, it's just the closest parallel I could draw.
She's not arguing for banning it.
Faith = (believing in something without adequate evidence) = risk
It doesn't always turn out bad, but it turns out badly more often than rational thought. Faith is to reason as gambling is to thrift.
And ceteris paribus it's better to not only know the truth but know the evidence behind it.
She's not saying all religious people are the same, but all of their epistemologies contain the same flaw (faith) and 90% of the support for anti-homosexuality and TV-censorship is rooted in religions (not just the wing-nut fringe of religion: even the Catholic Church and several large protestant denominations are officially anti-gay. The Bible clearly says homosexuality is an abomination, and anyone who would swallow that with blind faith rather than thinking carefully about it is dangerous).
As many atheists have rightly pointed out, such a God isn't worth worshiping even if he's real.
The problem isn't faith. It's fascism.
A gullible person who you've convinced to behave well may be better off than a gullible person who somebody has convinced to behave poorly, but ultimately they're better off not being gullible, and doing the right things for the right reasons.
Nor is faith random. People choose to believe particular religions because of something that faith does for them--some perceived need it fills. Clearly the consequences of being wrong are weighed to some extent in the process, or Pascal's Wager would not seem so convincing to so many theists. It has been, I think, not made sufficiently clear to most people that the consequences of being wrong that God exists are far more dire than being wrong that the gods exist.
Ultimately, your argument commits the "slippery slope" fallacy. It is not the case that acceptance of the suitability and appropriateness of certain kinds and degrees of faith necessarily entails the acceptance of all kinds of faith.
Any one of the following points is enough to refute Pascal's Wager:
*If a god exists, and he is such an asshole that he would send people to hell for doubting his existence, then he is unworthy of worship.
*One cannot simply choose to believe something that one does not actually believe.
*It's not a binary choice, but a choice between atheism and thousands of different religions. What about all of the other religions, which if true, would punish you for choosing the wrong religion? It's all bullshit anyway. Whatever probability you assign to the truth of each religion, I can make up another false religion with an even worse penalty for not believing in it.
Without people taking that risk, however, nothing gets done. Any statements you or I make about economics will be to some extent faith-based. And yet if we don't make any decisions about economics, we will be unable to be good citizens.
The major problems only really arise when faith-based ideas are taken as dogma not to be questioned. This is why monotheistic religions, with their emphasis on divine authority, cause so many problems. It is also why there were so many problems caused by Russian Communism. (For a time, statistics was banned in the USSR because some party leaders thought it was anti-communist! It significantly held back scientific progress.)
Any one of the following points is enough to refute Pascal's Wager:
Right. Pascal's Wager is a bad argument.
Nonetheless, many theists find it convincing. Why? My answer is that their faith in a particular religion is informed to some degree by consideration of the consequences of being wrong. Which was my point.
In my opinion about a quarter to half of all people who say "yes" when asked "do you believe in God?" are actually answering the question "Would you like to maintain your existing social and family support network?"
Bad semantics. You cannot choose to believe. You either belive, or you don't, but to choose one way or the other is insincere. In other words, if god's so omniscient, he'll know if you're faking.
In my opinion about a quarter to half of all people who say "yes" when asked "do you believe in God?" are actually answering the question "Would you like to maintain your existing social and family support network?"
Ah but then half of their social network is also faking it for social reasons.
Still she has a well spoken argument. Again though I think we need a tag to indicate inappropriate/unnecessary use of music. Heck, let's make that a channel!
What a glaring, over-the-top, completely-and-absolutely-the-definition-of-hypocritical comment.
And you're supposed to be open minded?
TITS OR GTFO.