What is your general attitude towards those who believe in religion whether they are jewish, Muslim, Christian etc etc.
Do you get on well with any religious friends and neighbours?
Have you ever thought of believing in a religion at some point?
If you do not like the faiths, why?
If you DO, also why? Does this come from your family? Maybe something went bad during your life?
I get that Lemmy might have the same stereotype in Reddit that there are loads of atheists, but there's a good reason why despite criticism of religion, it is still here.
P.S. I am not religious or anti religious in any fashion, I am agnostic.
Imagine if that person did all the same things they do, but without the label of "religion" being attached.
Charity? Awesome! Habitat for Humanity is an explicitly Christian organization and does great work. In my neighborhood, the local Lutheran and Quaker churches give out free food to the poor, and they don't sneak any Lutheran or Quaker cooties into it. If you're good to others because you think God wants you to be good to others, that still really does count as being good to others.
Prayer? Okay, take "religion" off of it and they're meditating, thinking, or talking to themselves. That's good. Unless they're thinking and talking about torturing their neighbors eternally, or something creepy like that. (But even then, better to keep those fantasies to yourself than to act them out in public.) Die Gedanken sind frei — thoughts are free.
Going to worship services? Okay, they've got a weekly social event where they sing songs and listen to speeches. Sounds great, unless the songs are about "everyone outside this room is a terrible person and deserves to suffer forever" and the speeches are about hate politics. If they're about how wonderful it is to be nice to each other, or being brave and standing up against oppression, or something else that would be positive even without the label of "religion" on it, great!
Dietary rules? It's okay to have preferences, distinct cultures, cuisines, and so forth. For that matter: my family isn't Jewish, but when I was little, we ate kosher beef hot dogs, because my mom expected the rabbis would care about the meat being sanitary. (Unfortunately in retrospect, kosher slaughter is, shall we say, not clearly better than secular slaughter.)
You aren't born religious. You are indoctrinated. I grew up in a cult. It wasn't nearly as bad as cults get, but it has its own insane ramblings "teachings"
I escaped my indoctrination because I took it too seriously. I wanted to adhere perfectly, which resulted in finding out how convoluted and hypocritical it is. It is impossible.
So in my confusion, I started to look more critically at the hows and whys. The result, religions all use the same dirty tactics to get people to believe. False promises, comforting lies and empty threats that will seem real to those who were taught magical thinking.
I reject religion.
But I cannot hate people who are religious for just being religious. They were a child when taught, or an adult so downtrodden they needed a fairy tale to continue life. Or perhaps just are a bit naive. It's a slippery slope. So... I can't blame people. I get it. I know what it's like and it saddens me the older people get, the less likely they'll ever escape the mental constriction religion brings.
I sure as fuck hate a religious person for commiting hate crimes. They can go to hell.
All religions are made up.
No one has ever proven that a "god" or supernatural entity exists, no one, ever.
It's all mythology, fiction and "supernatural" nonsense. Ghosts, angels, demons, gods, spirits, pick a name, pick a flavor, none of it is real. It's like insisting that Harry Potter, James Bond, Tinkerbell, Captain Kirk or Superman are actually real living people / spirits / entities, and they have the ability to control you now and after you die.
Just because you, or someone claims it's real does not make it factual.
You are allowed to believe in whatever you want to, but you are NOT allowed to force others to believe that same thing.
If you truly believe in your "religion", you would research it in every way possible, reading pro and con information to get a balanced understanding of what you decided to believe in.
You will learn where all the stories of your religion originate from, and that will actually decide what you choose to believe in.
Religion is a lifestyle choice.
Growing up in religious circles I kinda learned that there's no good in religion. Surely there's good religious people, but they spread the evil word the same as those who want to bring the oppressive shit onto others.
Religion has never been good for anything but for controlling masses
Mostly I find them annoying. I mildly understand the need for human meaning as it kind of, tends to come up later at night, or for the elderly, or when life really sucks or you tend to even just be really really bored right.
I also understand some of the benefits, right, like. As much as people will despise to admit it, you don't get, say, the number zero without the Muslim science guys, and you don't get science without the enlightenment which stemmed out of some weirdass Catholic Christian theory guys. and then everyone's all like, oh no well you can't attribute that to the Catholics and if anything they hampered progress, and I'd say, well, maybe, maybe, but also maybe science sucks as we commonly understand it and maybe also you can't really divorce any part of things from their cultural context, or else things get fucky.
On the other hand I find them annoying and I find that all to be totally null and void because the vast majority of people are just using it as an opiate to placate literally all of their anxieties about the world with a bunch of meaningless thought terminating cliche style statements, and even actively reinforce their own participation in some of the worst aspects of their own culture and society even at points in which they really don't want to or know that it's horrible and is causing them pain.
I just don't support dogmatic thinking and indoctrination, especially when it creeps into politics, which is inevitable at the scale of the most popular religions.
In theory I have no problem with other people's faith, but in practice it degrades the critical thinking capacity of our population and, paradoxically, the moral capacity as well. That's a net negative in my opinion.
Charities exist without religion. I think religions often teach good moral frameworks, though very traditional. But those come with a huge caveat that you cut out a big hole in your brain for the belief that God exists and cares about how you behave. That one idea leads to so much trouble, from false prophets to normalized misogyny and hatred of gay people.
I'm atheist. My mom is a devout catholic (and raised me that way) and my dad is an atheist Jew. I never truly believed and mostly think religion is dumb, but I'm fine with everyone believing or not as they see fit. I'm not fine when others' religion is forced on anyone else - e.g., abortion restrictions, the 10 commandments being displayed in Louisiana classrooms.
personally, i don't get, like, at all. i don't care what nonsense folk put their faith in, so long as they don't use it to justify being a dick, or try to justify others being a dick. maybe they get some pity/sympathy from me, to a point, cause they probably got brainwashed when they were a child, or otherwise in a vulnerable state, and maybe some amusement depending on how 'out there' their counterfactual beliefs are.
i generally get on well enough with my religious friends, but it's not a topic that comes up much in real life.
i don't usually care for organized religion, but that has more to do with my anarchism than my atheism.
this all goes equally whether we're talking about conventional religions, modern conspiracy theories, new-age mumbo jumbo, or what-have-you.
I’m an ex-Christian, the more I read the Bible, the more it doesn’t make sense. But I respect others choices to believe in their higher power, whatever that may be that makes their life work. Double points if they respect back. They all can’t be right.
I used to be fence sitter agnostic but Qanon has made me deep on the athiest side. I don't care what ones religion is but I don't want to hear about it. Its fine to mention it but if someone is always talking about it then I will avoid them.
I respect the fact that people believe. They even can form their own clubs as far as I'm concerned. Forcing those beliefs onto other people is something I do have an issue with.
For the don't-anger-the-sky-daddy religions, roughly the same as having a crazy aunt who gives 10% of her shit to a psychic or Trump. I haven't experienced the be-one-with-the-universe religions being as exploitative, but I guess those wack Theravadan Wats don't pay for themselves.
I myself am Christian and have never had trouble getting along with others no matter their religious beliefs. The only conflict is when someone thinks their religion or religious precepts should be made law; I have no tolerance for that.
Despite the claimed ostensible "good" Religion can supposedly bring...
We're literally in the middle of a mass extinction event and facing our own extinction and belief in this religious horseshit precludes people from caring or believing in man-made disaster.
We're literally facing our own extinction because these people can't be fucked to face up to reality instead of playing cult games of "but I'll have everlasting life after death so who cares what happens to the planet!"
I don't give one flying fuck what "good" it can do for an individual, it's going to be the downfall of human fucking civilization.
Whatever "good" it brings is destroyed and overshadowed by the cult like behavior that would worship corrupt figures like Donald Trump and who choose to live in a false reality simply because it is more comforting.
Same way I get on wih other people who have imaginary friends, I just ignore them and worry about the inevitable indoctrination (aka abuse) of their children.
I don't hold belief against people so long as they act appropriately toward others.
I have some positive and negative opinions toward particular religions based on their foundations and practices.
I kinda long for a sense of spiritual community, but I can't make myself have faith in something I don't believe, no matter how nice it seems. So that kinda sucks
Do you get on well with any religious friends and neighbours?
Yes.
Have you ever thought of believing in a religion at some point?
I was quite religious in my youth.
If you do not like the faiths, why?
I believe that they limit human growth and enable the "evil" that they pretend to protest.
I remember the huge fad of atheism that struck a few years back and led to the psychological liberation of a huge number or subjugated people. It was an inevitable eventuality of the rise of internet usage. It seemed to be mainly impacting Americans, but mass outbreaks of enlightenment also struck other western nations such as Ireland (where I'm from), freeing people from a society dominated by patriarchal oppressive and highly abusive social regimes.
Of course there was then a backlash to the backlash and now forces of liberation are ridiculed on the western internet. Liberalism has held sway and the institutions of oppression still maintain power, particularly in the USA. This continues to enable massive human suffering, for example with America's latest genocide, enabled in part by apocalyptic Christian death cults.
I'm not very familiar with the details but I understand that the Christians are in cahoots with the Zionists in destroying some Muslim place of worship to bring about the end times. And there's some cows mentioned in a thousands of years old book that need to have the right colour coat and stuff.
But of course, as usual, they're not true Scotsmen religious people... etc...
tl;dr Religion is a net negative influence in the world. Trying to suppress it is counterproductive and will never work, meanwhile it's going to kill us all.
Religious or not, I don't care. What matters is their personality. (except for jehova's witnesses, every time I've interacted with them it made me think they're some sort of cult rather than a religion, so not sure if this counts.)
When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don't generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn't really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in "heaven"(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it's a really nice thought that I don't want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.
The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don't want to take that aspect away from anyone.
I'm a Pluralistic individual. I believe everyone has a reason to believe. But I think the way someone believes is very telling about that person's personal values.
Ergo, I don't care what a person's religious beliefs are, I care what that person's values are. I believe that is a much more honest approach that doesn't needlessly alienate anyone or stoke petty, tribalistic behavior.
I am Anti-theist, If anyone brings up religion around me I will not hesitate to tear it down.
These people are playing make belief and if affects my life, I have to live in a world where people make decisions based on some imaginary sky friend.
I will not play nice for the sake of someone feeling good about their bullshit.
If a person is smart an has personal opinions about everything or if they are a person of power I won't trust them. Because how can I prove they are a true believer and not a liar or sociopath?
If a person is average human who thinks what the crowd thinks then I won't care.
I'm greek orthodox, my family, is greek, and the religion comes with it
I get along with all amd you should too, religious or non-religious shouldn't be a question, a party is a party. Get messed up and regret it in the morning
The only one's I don't really like is protestants but thats because of my racism against british people I think quite a few of the protestant demoninations strangle the meaning of what it means to be a christian.
Although surprisingly, I've known anti/atheistic people who gave me meat on several occasions during fasting (where we go basically go vegan) even though i reminded them about it before they even started cooking.
One of the biggest mistakes faith has done is try and influence things outside of the church espically in modern day schenanigans like politics. The church should be the peaceful escape from the outside world, not the opposite
From how I see it, my religion is beautiful, provides me an undescribable sense of peace, and I know the people who are at my parish are people i can depend on if i ever need help
Attitude: I generally don't care unless they try to tell me what to do based on their religion. This is generally never a problem, I've had more vegans and environmentalists bother me.
Getting along: we have some high faith denomination of Christianity here. I've worked with a few and generally don't notice unless they drop something heavy on their foot and don't swear.
Thought of believing: not since I was 12 or something.
Do not like faiths: I acknowledge they can create a sense of community and belonging. I have a dim view of the dogma that tends to come with them.
I hate the ignorance that edgy kids have about religion, having exposure only to a very very very narrow sample and extrapolating to infinity. Not every religious practice opposes truth, or oppresses and exploits its practitioners. No more than every political practice does. Religious practice is an expression of our innate humanity. You cannot just get rid of it, any more than you can get rid of any fundamental human need. What is important is finding safe, healthy, ethical and helpful means of expressing it.
How do you know that science is not a believe like the other ? My answer is in challenge it with other believe systems to explain reality.
Of course some things make a lot more sense with science methodology, but to be faire, te main point of religions is not to explain gravity.
I consider other believes as opportunities, no to explain to others, or to be taught by others, but making both and strengthen us all.
However, we shall to care do not confuse religions and believes. A lot of people took part in religions and do not believes, and others believes and do not took part in a dedicated community. This is a different topic.
Communities are generally a good thing, but hierarchy lead to abuses. This true in every organization, religions include