To be irritated by religious views...

[Frume]

I know I'll get flamed here. Of course it goes without saying that you are entitled to believe whatever you believe. And I understand that sometimes people turn to 'God' because that's their last hope. But..

My example that prompted me to write this...

I was on Instagram and catching up with a poor girl that I follow. She is 19 and has battled cancer 3 times. The page is updated by her mum and she says things like:-

'In Him we trust to heal his child'

'This is all part of His plan'

'He knows what he is doing'

Something good happens & then it's, 'God is good' or 'Thank you to Our Father in Heaven for making our prayers come true and healing his child'

Ok. Sure, that was it.. or probably science

The general 'Thoughts and prayers' when there is any kind of disaster. Because obviously that's all that's needed in a time of crisis.

YANBU. I know that humans(And I include myself in that) are illogical creatures but I still cannot understand how people can believe in God. I can see some appealing, beautiful and fascinating aspects of religion, but overall I see it as detrimental. (Also ghosts, homeopathy, psychics etc) I have a few friends who are believers but I could never be with a partner who was anything other than Atheist.

The idea of a research scientist having “God did it” as a hypothesis in every experiment is a bit alarming.......

I never understand the argument that some scientists are religious. Scientists are still human therefore they are often illogical and flawed like the rest of us. Science isn't flawed, the facts are the facts, whether or not we've discovered all of them, but scientists are undoubtedly fallible.

Also many of the scientists frequently prayed in aid are from a time when not being a Christian would mean no job or worse....

Nope definitely not trendy vicar here although I was brought up in a Christian household albeit not devoutly so, had a look at being a jehovas witness but that required me to suspend my powers of belief even more than I was to be an Anglican so I gave up trying and accepted the atheist I was becoming, the more I was exposed to religion IRL I became more of an anti theist although I hate having to use the names because it inplies that being of faith is the default position when it certainly is not, I don’t have to describe myself as an anti plumber or an anti Tory (albeit I am one )

Sorry for all the typos I have fat thumbs, well of me actually but the thumbs I type with lol

I occasionally forget about England's medieval Sunday shopping laws and go to the local supermarket on a Sunday afternoon, which is normally open 24 hours a day, only to be told NO we are closing because you know, Jesus.

It really pisses me off that men in dresses dictate that I can't do my shopping just because they believe in a sky fairae and want to enforce their delusions on the entire country.

If you believe you shouldn't buy food on Sunday then don't buy your food on a Sunday, don't force your restrictive ideology on me.

I’d like to go back to all shops being closed on a Sunday because it gave shopworkers protected family time.

"The idea of a research scientist having “God did it” as a hypothesis in every experiment is a bit alarming......."

Well it would be, but that's more an absurd reduction than something you think is actually happening, isn't it.

There's no practical difference in reality, that much should be obvious, any more than a surgeon who operates on you is likely to go home mid-operation and pray instead.

Yes, one doesn't have to be religious to see the advantage in that. I care infinitely more about retail workers with school aged children being able to spend some time with them over the weekend than I do about people only being able to shop for six hours a day, on one day a week.

I’d like to go back to all shops being closed on a Sunday because it gave shopworkers protected family time.

Indeed - for many people in generations gone by this was the only reason they got any family time or any rest.

I haven’t read the full thread but based on OP’s initial post I do get what’s she is saying.

A woman I know had a child with a complex heart condition and needed surgery when she was 5 years old. The surgery was very specialised and risky and the operation took about 9 hours.

Thankfully the little girl survived the operation and the parents took to Facebook and extolled endless praise on God for saving their child’s life. “We knew God was looking down on her, we knew he would keep him safe, there’s no more proof in a God than the fact he saved our daughter” etc etc.

I remember thinking to myself, “Actually it was the surgeons and a whole team of specialised medics that saved your daughter’s life” but there was no mention of them.

Sunday because it gave shopworkers protected family time

Yip, ban shop workers from earning for 1/7 of the week and force them to spend it with their family. Will this include a ban on churches, busses, trains, cinemas, restaurants, play areas etc opening so this 'family time' is enforced?

Why not close them all on Saturday as well and go back to medieval England when their was one religion to rule them all.

‘one religion to rule them all‘

One Eucharist to bind them?

I don't think medieval priests were missing out on much family time by working on Sundays...

Honestly though, in these discussions we invariably have people painting the ability to work on Sundays and then days like Easter Sunday and Christmas as some kind of right that's being restricted, like there are gazillions of workers champing at the bit to be able to do it. That's disingenuous. I don't doubt there are some who'd prefer it and for whatever reason can't or won't access work in one of the roles where full Sunday hours are available. But if you've ever worked in sectors like retail, call centres and hospitality, the shifts on the days when fewer people are working are the ones that can be hardest to fill and get fucked off the most. It's because of schools as much as anything. You could be the least Christian influenced person on the planet, but if you have school aged children in the UK they're going to be off on the Christian holy days.

That's a shame @Frume - it's a sad but often common case that a weakened immune system will allow the cancer to keep coming back.

I can only hope she's getting proper treatment. If when the time comes it brings her comfort to think she's going to heaven though - that's fair enough.

Pinochet, Hitler, Idi Amin all religious, and Stalin trained as a priest.

People knew the earth is round since the ancient Greeks, possibly longer.

Of course religion causes war, its probably a factor in more wars than it isnt.

Nope definitely not trendy vicar here although I was brought up in a Christian household albeit not devoutly so

That's interesting. It was the other way around for me. I was only in church twice - at 11 for one grandfather's funeral and 18 for the second grandfather's funeral. None of us kids were even baptised. My parents believed (I think - there was a bible in the bookcase) but never mentioned it to us. Very laissez-faire!

According to this Stalin had lost any faith he may have had before training for the priesthood:

www.marxists.org/archive/murphy-jt/1945/stalin/01.htm

He was still in this junior school when he read Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. The fact alone tells much concerning his swift progress towards maturity. When a boy under fourteen reads books of this kind he has begun to take life pretty seriously and has a native capacity for using his mind. But in Stalin’s circumstances it has another significance. It is certain he did not receive the books from his teacher or his boy friends. He had, in fact, made contact with the wider world, where there was a library into which the winds of western thought had blown ideas of vast import

The effect of these books on Soso was profound. They destroyed whatever religious ideas he had derived from his mother or his school training. Yaroslavsky records in his reminiscences how a boyhood friend was shocked to hear young Stalin say, “You know, they are fooling us. There is no God.”

“How can you say such things, Soso?” exclaimed his friend

“I’ll lend you a book to read; it will show you that the world and all living things are quite different from what you imagine and all this talk about God is sheer nonsense,” answered Soso as he urged his friend to read the works of Darwin.^

Stalin's terrible regime which included the banning of religion had nothing to do with being religious.

I think shops should be open on Sunday - why not?

Jewish people have Saturday as their Sabbath and they seem to cope despite the shops being open.

WhatisFreddoingnow So I take it that I can call Atheistism smug, arrogant heathen bullshit

Don't know a lot about heathenism, but I would guess most aren't atheists, and non-religious atheists certainly aren't heathen.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathenry_(new_religious_movement)

FiddlesticksAkimbo The problem is you'd have to also lump us atheists in with hindus, muslims, rastafarians, satanists, believers in wotan and neptune. We all think that you're wrong, and we all live lives that will send us to hell by the teachings of your church

Depending on the form of satanism that's might not be true and many under the neo-Pagan umbrella may take the view that all paths are equally valid, while disagreeing with the "One True Way" concept in certain belief systems. I have come across Christian Wiccans for example, Wicca has no problem with this, mainstream (and most non-mainstream) Christian and Christian based faiths would, but if an individual can figure out a way it works for them then best of luck to them.

It was a myth that people used universally to think the Earth was flat. Educated people have always known it was round-ish.

It really pisses me off that men in dresses dictate that I can't do my shopping just because they believe in a sky fairae and want to enforce their delusions on the entire country.

On the other hand I'm rather glad that when DH has worked 12 days in a row 1 or 2 of days were a bit shorter than the rest and that he got to spend a bit of time with DS. Shop work is crap, why begrudge people having one working day that is guaranteed to be a bit shorter?

DH is an atheist btw, but he's happy as well to have one day a week where he's home before 7pm.

I understood that the Jesus narrative was just another version of many similar older stories about death and resurrection, a chosen man who does miracles with disciples etc.

This narrative was around towards the end of the last century but has been soundly debunked. Mystery religions have very little to do with Jesus, in fact evidence points towards the opposite - that mystery cults in the 2nd century onwards actually lifted some of their practises from Christianity. A couple of people who weren't even scholars spread these myths about the similarities between say, Mithras and Jesus, and people took the lists as gospel, but there is no evidence whatsoever in most of the claims. Most historical and theological scholars have dismissed them out of hand. No gods were actually resurrected - at the most they were resuscitated, having died in hatred and bitterness. They were based more in primitive fertility cults, with the rebirth to symbolise the seasons, rather than claims of a historical resurrection of a person. There is no evidence from early texts or pictures that they were resurrected in the sense Jesus was - any suggestions of this come after mid 2nd century.

In addition to this, there is absolutely zilch evidence that the mystery cults were known of or had any influence in Palestine at the time of early Christianity. Where did the material come from for the gospel writers to concoct a myth based on these, if they weren't aware of them? Even if they were, the Jews would have abhorred the practices of the cults, which included child sacrifice, temple prostitution etc. There is simply no way the early Christ followers would have wanted to base their new made-up religion around these beliefs and practices. Instead of being another such, it vehemently opposed them, with early Christians saving children from prostitution and sacrifice. The reason no similarity exists is because Christianity is what it has always claimed to be - that Jesus is God incarnate, and was raised from the dead. And the concept of the son of God dying an atoning death voluntarily for others is utterly unique to Christianity.