What's your general opinion of Christianity?

[osaka35]

Every holy book encapsulates some of the morality, philosophies, mythos, and propaganda of their time and general location. If it's one that sticks around for whatever reason, such as christianity, the evolution of morality tends to be retroactively applied to older text. Also, they just add or edit passages directly, decades or centuries later, to update the morality, philosophies, mythos, and/or propaganda, and passing it off as original. It is the way of things. Zero confidence in any religion based on ancient text. Any good in a text does not justify or prove the fantastical or the immoral.

I also can't believe in anything supernatural. It is by definition, beyond the natural. If it cannot be explained by our current understanding of the natural world, the supernatural is not the default answer. The default answer is "we do not yet understand the mechanism of how this happens. Give us time."

You can believe whatever you'd like. Doesn't make you right, but you're perfectly allowed to believe in anything you'd like.

 

[matthi321]

im too old to have imaginary friends

 

[FAST6191]

I will note three things
1) Christianity is a near meaningless term. There are so many incompatible interpretations of it that the word itself is mostly one used by politicians to appeal to old people. It does have a broadly accepted understanding at least in the English language though so I will go that, and spare us the Mormon, Islam and other peeps with their own extra books question for the time being.
2) Speaking of old people it is mostly their hobby these days. The kids mostly ignore it, probably why church attendance is so very low in the UK. To that end I would consider as well as the rest the group of people that do it.
3) Separate to this is the codified system of beliefs, typically written as a book (some are still oral traditions).

For 3) I have read every major religion's book, and no small number of minor ones. Fascinating things to read for historical reasons, for the history of philosophy and to give some understanding to the various groups that 2) above might encompass, I highly encourage anybody to read such things critically as well. Their merit as a general explanation of life, the universe and everything... fuck that noise. I am also so very glad that I am living in a point in history where a righteous (hah) response to "I find your remarks about my religion to be offensive" is "good".

With that said live and let live, though if you are going to challenge me to a philosophical debate then I am game. Also don't be surprised if your kids encounter me and find my approach to the world a better one.

Once you accept that your Body is basically a machine that's slowly degrading as time passes by you will understand that death is nothing to fear.

It might be that right now but with enough science I reckon I can see the heat death of the universe (or the great rip if that is to be a thing).

 

[The Catboy]

I tried explaining what that is to an old guy in my old church once. It didn’t go well.

As for me, I’m an ex-Baptist, currently Lutheran. I think the church as a whole has done a lot of good for a lot of people in more recent years, but they’ve had just as negative of an impact for a long time now, and honestly, the only thing that’s changed is whether or not they’re allowed to hang/burn/jail their perceived “opposition”.

I am actually a huge fan of the idea of churches or even just meeting areas in general, humans are social creatures that need other like-minded people around them. Despite what people want to believe a lot of churches have done a lot of good both big and small. For example, a lot of churches in my area offer free shots and fixing for pets and without preaching to anyone. They do this for the community because they actually want to help the community. There's also non-denominational Christian organizations who help out during natural disasters and other worldly issues, without preaching. Then there's the Satanic Temple fighting tooth and nail for religious freedom by challenging hypocrisy and also providing services like offering like free body guards to anyone who feels unsafe, still without preaching. Basically my point is, is that churches of all likes can and have done a lot of good. The greater issue of course is that focus is often on the bad. People talk about Christianity being anti-LGBT, while ignoring the growing number of LGBT friendly Christian demonstrations. People talk about the horrors of Islam, while ignoring just how small a fraction that really is. People demonize the Left Hand Path (Satanism, Luciferianism, etc.) while ignoring the fact that their fears aren't real and it's mostly a Humanist path. People are prone to their feels on the matters because of what they are exposed to.
On the notion of previous paths, I was actually raised in a non-practicing Catholic household. My family believed that what they practiced was good for them, but not for all. They believed in the simple notion that everyone was just trying to sleep at night and there was no perfect method to that sleep. Thus they simply accepted that their own believes worked for them and they are happy that way. As well they never discouraged anyone from finding their own path, so long as they slept conformability at night. This is still the mindset that I hold despite having my own believes because I know mind don't work for everyone and I am ok with that. Personally I just want people to find what makes them happy, so long as they aren't a harm to others.

 

[AtsuNii]

I believe in one thing and that is in myself, not a higher being.

I don't mind people having religons. As long as they don't start rubbing it in my face.
If they do, then I kinda do have a problem with them however. Im not gonna bother people with it, as long as they wont bother me

 

[SG854]

 

[HamBone41801]

I was wondering when somebody would bring this up.

 

[the_randomizer]

And here I thought this thread was made solely for the purpose of pissing on people who had different beliefs, silly me.

 

[Attacker3]

Nietzsche has been misunderstood by atheists, but there is one thing that is understood by all. God is dead. The Enlightenment era has destroyed the belief of God, and that we are the murders of him. "Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?". And we must. At this point we've fucked up so hard that in order to actually keep any type of morality created from divine order, we must become gods in ourselves to do so.

If you look at atheists like me, most of them fear death and are quite nihilistic in nature. But this is not all bad. Nietzsche had said that it could be a way for humans to advance beyond anything we could possibly imagine if we were confined by a Christian god. So we made our choice, and we'll experience centuries of nihilism in despair just for the chance for ourselves to become gods ourselves, in some way, some how. Perhaps the internet will be a way for us to become connected, all the time, and we'll all merge together to create a singular entity like in Evangelion or Serial Experiments Lain, or something like what Alex Jones explained to Joe Rogan with an AI created out of humans becoming a neural network. Who knows, maybe we'll become gods that way, or maybe we'll just find more and more ways to escape the idea that we are alone until something just happens.

Not a good tradeoff in my eyes, but some people might be able to ignore it long enough to only experience the nihilism and despair when close to death. I envy you. I hope God comes and fucking kills all of us and codemns the non-believers to hell like me, because at least in hell we'll know we weren't alone all those years.

 

[SonowRaevius]

At least from my personal experience with religious folk, most of them are quite hypocritical, have never read their own holy texts, are extremely judgmental, and often cherry pick the fuck out of what rules are and aren't allowed.

Christians, just as an example, will quote things about the old testament constantly, but the moment you quote something else from the old testament that disagrees with their way of life they go on a rant about how "Those are just old/antiquated/outdated rules that don't apply to a modern society".

That being said, not everyone who believe in their religion are bad and try to use it as some kind of propaganda machine for hate, some actually take the good lessons and saying and try to promote piece, love, and community between everyone. Sadly, again this is my experience, those people are far and few between and it really doesn't help that the other crowd is so much louder.

 

[wormdood]

And what did Satan ever do that was so wrong?

nothing . . . he gives a home to all the soles the "loving" god refuses to let into his kingdom

 

[Deleted User]

For 3) I have read every major religion's book, and no small number of minor ones. Fascinating things to read for historical reasons, for the history of philosophy and to give some understanding to the various groups that 2) above might encompass, I highly encourage anybody to read such things critically as well. Their merit as a general explanation of life, the universe and everything... fuck that noise. I am also so very glad that I am living in a point in history where a righteous (hah) response to "I find your remarks about my religion to be offensive" is "good".

Mate, I opposed that comment on the grounds that they were commenting on a religion which they clearly hadn't a good understanding of.

With that said live and let live, though if you are going to challenge me to a philosophical debate then I am game. Also don't be surprised if your kids encounter me and find my approach to the world a better one.

Sure. Not sure if it's off-topic or not, but I'm up.

To begin with, (if we're doing this now), I would like to understand your viewpoint a bit. I think we can both agree that the major problem with a belief of any type is when it's taken to the extreme. Not just Christianity, but even Athiesm. Assuming that, why exactly is your 'approach to the world' better?

 

[Searinox]

Hello. I was raised as a Christian and became an atheist secular humanist. My opinion of Christianity is very poor indeed.

 

[lafleche]

A lot of what I feel has already been said.
Want to add that what we call Christianity is something which has been made up during the first council of niceae in 325 in where parts of the Bible/gospels were deleted, the date of Easter was set and so on.
So all we know from the bible was done long after Jesus died and power hungry men decided what was good for us.
The quran is even newer....
so when people say: this book was made or dicatated by God/Allah or whoever are delusional. These books were made by men (with sometimes hidden agenda's)


Stephen Fry was once asked what he would say if he was confronted by God at the pearly gates of heaven,
Fry replied: “I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about?
“How dare you? How dare you create a world to which there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right, it’s utterly, utterly evil.
“Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world that is so full of injustice and pain. That’s what I would say.

Amen to that.

 

[FAST6191]

To begin with, (if we're doing this now), I would like to understand your viewpoint a bit. I think we can both agree that the major problem with a belief of any type is when it's taken to the extreme. Not just Christianity, but even Athiesm. Assuming that, why exactly is your 'approach to the world' better?

Some I speak to seem to have a "I was raised and then I reached the age of reason" story. In my case, and in the words of a favourite song, I started out with nothing, still got most of it left.
Anyway I quite like this life business, as do most that experience it, and like it to be the best it can be for me. Praying and religious morality then seemed far less effective than trying to understand how the world works and the rather less contradictory and easier to understand morality of the modern world. Worse still was the controlling bent that many religions seem to go in for. To finish it off I learned something of psychology, economics and general argumentation and it seemed the religions that survived employed suspect methods or were artefacts of all three -- for economics a classic one is noted as those religions with many gods split their population and thus are primed to be overtaken with those with a singular god and a singular mission and singular set of overheads.

Extremism, and possibly fundamentalism as they tend to go hand in hand, is a major problem but I would not say it is the major problem. The low level moralistic undercurrent a lot of Christians and recovering Christians (same for many other religions, though the effects and approaches vary somewhat) exhibit and its effects on raising kids. This guy ( https://www.youtube.com/user/TheraminTrees/videos ) does lots of stuff I would +1 here -- raising kids to believe, the nature of gods if they are supposed to be all loving, all knowing and all powerful, the creation of less than sceptical mindsets (it is often noted that father christmas/santa claus is kind of god lite, I notice similar things for other aspects).
Similarly, and putting aside the semantic argument of "atheism is not a belief but the absence of them" for a minute despite it being very relevant here, I am not quite sure what extremist atheism is. Black metal church burning? USSR style imposed atheism? I have never seen anybody blow themselves up or take a pop at a medic screaming "IN THE NAME OF NOTHING!!!!".

 

[radicalwookie]

I believe in my Black & White creature

 

[antiNT]

Calling someone stupid because they believe in God is unnecessary, maybe you don't believe because you have no proof or whatever, but the religious people are not convinced that God doesn't exist, their right to believe is as legitimate as yours not believing.

 

[mightymuffy]

Calling someone stupid because they believe in God is unnecessary, maybe you don't believe because you have no proof or whatever, but the religious people are not convinced that God doesn't exist, their right to believe is as legitimate as yours not believing.

Thread title: 'What's your general opinion of Christianity?'
People calling someone stupid because they believe in God: their general opinion.

I suspect you believe in God judging by your comment? Well, good luck to you on that one! Christianity stems from a book of fairy tales/words of a government in power trying to keep the population in line - in this case, The Bible, for the Jews, but of course isn't solely the Bible: each religion is just the same.
But I would say it's nice, certainly for the older folk, to think their loved ones are up there floating on clouds playing on a harp 'looking down on them', so personally I wouldn't call any of them stupid ....it's a crock of fukkin shit of course, but not gonna call anyone stupid.
My general opinion of course, like was asked for.

 

[antiNT]

Thread title: 'What's your general opinion of Christianity?'
People calling someone stupid because they believe in God: their general opinion.

I suspect you believe in God judging by your comment? Well, good luck to you on that one! Christianity stems from a book of fairy tales/words of a government in power trying to keep the population in line - in this case, The Bible, for the Jews, but of course isn't solely the Bible: each religion is just the same.
But I would say it's nice, certainly for the older folk, to think their loved ones are up there floating on clouds playing on a harp 'looking down on them', so personally I wouldn't call any of them stupid ....it's a crock of fukkin shit of course, but not gonna call anyone stupid.
My general opinion of course, like was asked for.

You have your beliefs and I have mine

 

[brunocar]

Before anyone flames me with examples of the Old Testsment, keep in mind that it was made when God was playing favourites with the Jews. It took place in a completely different culture that is now invalidated by the New Testament as mentioned In John, Romans, and others. From Jesus and onwards, Christians were supposed to follow the two commandments: Love your God with all your heart soul mind and strength, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Idk about you, but that sounds like a good philosophy no matter where you look from.

So, now. Opinions?

the new testament is just fan fiction and god is just a dick in the original.