Anti-theist

The church is a major supporter of the war. As with churches and war everywhere this church has aligned itself with the war lord. And this is a christian church. They're supposed to turn the other cheek. I would rather have no one killing me especially for some centuries old land grab claim. But this church is on the front lines of the propaganda war, urging it's believers to go kill at the pleasure of the Tsar.The church is despicably evil.

I agree that AZPaul3 is anti-theist. I'm not. I have rejected theism for my own life, but I don't try to impose that on others. Wars are complex and have complex causes. Human greed is often one of those causes. Blaming it all on religion might be too simplistic. There's a point of agreement.

No, religion is not solely responsible for war. As nwr said war has a lot of causes. If religion is not directly causing the war they are a major player in supporting and recruiting for their war lord’s benefit.If religion were to vanish would that end war? Of course not. It just won’t be available as a shield to hide the war’s true purpose. It wouldn’t be available to incent the populous to hatred and bloodshed. The war lords would have to find less insidious and more direct reasons to force mobilization. And the people will not be swayed by appeals to fantasy. It would be much more difficult to sustain war.No, Anger doesn't do anything. It is not a useful emotion in this case. My objection to religion, as I have often stated, is such thinking causes you to believe in falsehoods and then to act on those falsehoods to make war on humanity.People can believe anything. But if the fantasy of religion is no longer a part of our headspace then fantasy will not poison our real world decisions. We can only be better off as a species by basing our futures on reality.

You have always been a believer.

This is a continuation of the discussion that AZPaul and I were having in the 2024 US Presidential Election topic. Message 173 was AZPaul3's last response to me. I'll point out that neither WWII nor the Vietnam War had religious justifications, and yet they were sustained quite effectively. You don't seem to be making any coherent statement about war and religion apart from the assertion that warmakers often attempt to justify wars on religious grounds. Once again, you're not telling us anything about religion. You're just telling us you've been defining it in the most puerile, reductive way conceivable and you demand that everyone else take your tendentious definition at face value.The idea that religion is all about believing in the literal existence of a literal being called God or the literal truth of fairy tales such as the Garden of Eden or Noah's Flood just keeps the God-is-God-ain't debates chewing up bandwidth. And if you've acquired a taste for that kind of low-hanging fruit, there must be plenty of Scripturebots and fundies online on whom you can vent your immature wrath.The fact is that religion is all about the personal and communal construction of meaning. It's a way of life, not just a suite of claims about the world that you affirm on a provisional basis. You're fixating on the literal truth value of these claims not because that's what religion is, but because that makes it easier for you to accuse literally billions of complete strangers of being delusional and amoral without any qualms about the propriety of doing so.You & I aren't religious because we didn't get anything out of religion and don't need religious language to make sense of our experience. It's not because we're right and religious people are wrong.

That clumsy attempt at slight-of-hand won't make Penn & Teller lose any sleep. You can't just silo off science from any consequences of its development and application. If a religious person said religion is all love & lollipops, we'd have every right to laugh. And denying the downside of scientific and technological progress is just as absurd.Science doesn't just "discover" things in some random way, it needs motivation and funding by sponsors whose aims usually have much more to do with profit and domination than the epistemic horizon. You can't separate what we know about atomic energy from the deliberate and costly process that created the knowledge, or the geopolitical context that motivated its creation.

I might not be getting you're meaning. Are you saying there are a lot of religious nuts out there not worth arguing with? If so, then moving on to this paragraph: If you ignore the religious nuts and only include the reasonable and rational people then there's no one to discuss with. How do you argue with someone who says, "I believe Jesus is the Son of God, delivering His love and providing a path to salvation. I have no proof of this, but it's what I believe and it is important to me. It doesn't matter to me who else believes this. What's important to me is that I believe this and that I do my best to follow the path of Jesus."But if they add, "Oh, and by the way, the Earth is only 6000 years old because the literally inerrant Bible says so," now you've found someone you can discuss with.--Percy

Then you are missing the major issue. Religious thinking, twisted and fanciful and fake, is so instilled in society that appeals to kill on religious grounds, whether specifically stated in the articles of war or not, have been fantastically successful in prosecuting war.Vietnam is a sore point. I was there, in country. I was also there at home both before and after my tour where the conservative law-and-order anti-commie crowd waved their flags and their crosses and held community prayer vigils assuring the nation god will grant us victory. If you were there at that time the nation was all Vietnam and god. Billy Graham in the Oval Office. Evil incarnate.Don't you lie to me telling me Vietnam was not religiously, immorally, maintained by the church. I was there. I lived the god damn fucking reality. And yes, Nam was that bad and, yes, I am that scarred. How wonderfully apologetic for absurd thinking. It makes you feel good. Makes you happy in life. Basing your life's meaning on a lie. I won't tell you are not going to heaven.I am not concerned by the little old woman who feels warm and fuzzy huddled in her Jesus blanket. I'll fetch her a hot toddy and kiss her on the forehead. I am concerned by the movers and shakers, the priests and popes, that lead the organized religions into these evils. We can leave granny out of this. Of course it is. Between fantasy and reality only one of them is right. Idiot. I demand nothing. I can't demand anything. The religionist demands society act in accordance with their creed. The apologist demands to be held on equal footing with the priest.I teach. I spout. I demand not a damn thing. I can't even demand that you read my missives. What the hell good is demand?What I do is I cite three major issues I find with religion. Let's go through them.Religion requires a belief in the supernatural. Do you dispute this?I'm not talking the Sunday Socialite out for some social bonding. I'm talking the priests, the laymen, the acolytes, the pious masses that fill the pews every service. I am talking the true believer. Religion requires the believer to accept the supernatural as real. Example: you must believe in the afterlife and the power of god to take you there.And in believing so the priest has established his precedents for disconnecting from reality. There is no longer a distinction. Fantasy and reality fold into one.Religion requires the believer to act in accordance with the fantasy. Do you dispute this?You must face east to pray and you must eat the cracker. Do onto others. Do not suffer a witch to live. The others must repent of their original sin or have it burned from their souls. In practice through the millennia it was not the believer deciding the action but the priests, and beneath god's holy banner you obeyed.Finally, the combination of these two, the requirement to believe the fantasy and the requirement to act within the fantasy, has caused no end of evil for the human species.The history of religion and religious action is filled with violent bloodshed and death. More so than any other philosophical structure ever devised. Do you dispute this?By discarding reality for fantasy the priests easily justify the blood, the war, to a blind populous that accepts this as authorized by god. That is evil.So, what is your apologists view of the evil that is religion?

random way? WTF?Science discovers. It does not make political or social policy. You are reaching well out of your depth. When you look at history, and present society, religion, which does make political and social policy, is neck deep in using all the tech out there. Science presents tools. Societies make use, and weaponsize those tools. And religion is right down there with the rest us apes. Yeah, ya can and yeah, we do. My knowledge of physics is not the moral cause for you wanting and using a bomb.

I look at it a little differently. Religion *can* be good, often has been good, but when push comes to shove, when the pressure is on, religion tends to side with the devil. Jonestown. The pope's cooperation with fascism. Waco. Creationism. Racism. Jimmy Swaggert. Jim Bakker. Peter Popoff. Actually, almost any televangelist. The list goes on and on.The way I see it isn't that religion is straight out evil. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. It's just that too often it's not.There are many things in the world that are both good and bad, but many of them are a net good. I'm not sure whether in the overall scheme of things religion is a net good or a net bad, but I am sure that when it's bad it can be very, very bad.The reason religion can be so bad is because it isn't run by God. It's run by people, and we all know how bad things can get when things are run by people.There's a little TV show called Young Sheldon, I don't know if it's much watched, but the most recent season contained an apropos religious lesson. Mary was a devout member of the church, worked for the pastor for years, but when it became known that her son was having a child out of wedlock and Mary stood behind the young couple she was forced out of the church at a time when she needed it most. That's religion. In practice "Judge not that ye be not judged" becomes "Judge early and often." Religion's motto should be "Hypocrites of the world unite!"--Percy

I find this to be symbolically significant.

That looks like a frog on her head. Am I missing something?

Cookie monster on the head and that toilet seat halo.

I cheated by looking at the image source, but I was thinking it looked like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I didn't notice the toilet seat.Moose

As with all religious thought the interpretations of whatever images may appear to your mind are personal. FSM is as significant as cookie monster. I do not judge. Ramen.