Comment on Jesus hates American "Christians"
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days agoAccording to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
A large number of people who attend religious ceremonies don’t even believe in the deities or take things literally, they are there for the community.
And these people are people who attend religious ceremonies, not Christians.
Same as someone attending a meeting about Atheism doesn’t become an Atheist by attending the meeting but by being convinced that God doesn’t exist.
Person B is an idiot who doesn’t understand words because atheist is a simple label with a singular meaning.
Is that so? A lot of agnostics call themselves atheists. In general, if you ask atheists specifically about what they believe, quite a few of them actually describe agnosticism, as in they do not firmly believe that god doesn’t exist, but rather believe that there’s no basis in believing that god exists.
glorkon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The difference between atheism and agnosticism has no practical meaning to the vast majority of unbelievers.
You can’t positively state that something does not exist. You can’t logically be 100% certain there is no God. We know that. So if you love going by definitions, yes, most unbelievers are agnostics, not atheists.
So why do we keep calling ourselves atheists? Because we view the likelihood of God’s existence as so infinitesimally small, the difference between agnosticism and atheism becomes negligible. If we rate the odds of God’s existence at 0,000000001% we can as well just call it zero.
In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yes, you do, that’s what the whole thread here was about.
And you mistake my position on belief as well. I am mostly agnostic.
And yes, the difference between agnosticism and atheism is huge, except if you are too uneducated to understand the difference, which makes it weird that you have such a strong opinion on the matter.
glorkon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
No, I’ve never told anyone what to call themselves except Christians. I don’t care what denomination or special kind of Christians they insist on being.
But now that you’ve started the Ad Hominems, calling me uneducated instead of explaining the “huge difference”, apparently you’ve run out of arguments. Or knowledge. Or both. Someone who claims to be an expert on logical fallacies like the No True Scotsman should also understand that you’ve sunk very low if you need to resort to Ad Hominems.
So you just stopped being as respectful to me as I was to you during the whole discussion and now I’ve lost interest in talking to you. You proved yourself undeserving of my time. Good day.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
So you can’t see a difference between “I irrationally believe that God doesn’t exist even though there’s no proof against it” and “I don’t care whether God exists, there’s no proof for or against it, and it doesn’t matter to me”?
Atheism is being religious about the non-existence of God.
Atheism is believing that black swans are impossible, because all swans you have seen so far are white.
Agnosticism is the logical conclusion based on the knowledge we have. Atheism is just another religion.
If you can’t see the difference, it’s hard to continue the discussion.