Why Atheists Care About YOUR Religion

Videosift has been insufficiently godless recently, what with the election and all. Here to set it straight, gogreen18, who delivers a nice informative rant.
HadouKen24says...

To be fair, it's mainly monotheism that causes the problems she mentions. Non-monotheistic cultures rarely have things like holy wars. (Or at least this was true prior to the rise of Marxist-Leninism. Wars for Communism certainly seem like holy wars.) In fact, Roman religion frequently stopped wars; any bad omens in the ceremonies held before going to war were seen as a sign that the war would end in defeat, and there were always numerous opportunities for bad omens.

It's also rare, for instance, for non-monotheistic religions to cause major sexual guilt for natural impulses. Rome had temple prostitutes. India had the Kama Sutra (though years of British and Muslim influence have had a serious dampening effect on Indian sexuality). Casual nudity is a regular part of Japanese advertising.

While non-monotheistic cultures seem just as prey to cultural imperialism, they tend to be more tolerant of religious dissent. The religious pluralism of Hinduism and of ancient Rome is very well known, but the tolerance in ancient and medieval China is somewhat less talked about. Records indicate that from the 8th (if not earlier) to the 19th century, there was even a substantial Jewish population. Marco Polo confirmed that there were many Jewish traders in China in the 13th century.

Januarisays...

Oh yes... have to love a girl who decides to forgo showing her entire head and face in favor of her cleavage... How terribly convincing you argument is... Honeslty it's hard enough to be taken seriously at times without this kind of 'cheap' trick... can't stand girls like this.

BicycleRepairMansays...

>> ^Peroxide:
So religion caused the holocaust hey? ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer


Yeah, that debunks hundreds of years of Catholics, Muslims and other Christians demonizing and dehumanizing Jews as evil Christ-killing, blood-drinking baby-killers. Not to mentioned Hitlers own bizarre religious views, blending catholic mythology with Nordic mythology and mixing this superstition with his plan to fix Germany. If it wasn't for hundreds of years of seeding anti-Semitic thoughts by, and only by, religion, Hitler wouldn't have had half a leg to stand on, when he explained how his "personal lord and savior" Jesus Christ led him to believe that the Jews were the root of all problems in Europe

12568says...

Just proves that if you make shit up, make a video with cool music, show some cleavage and state things as fact (that are obviously not fact), you too can have a fan club and be hailed as hero.

Hitler could not be mistaken as and was not a Christian. His god was nationalism and the hate for the Jews. A hate that had no background in religion but common street rhetoric of the time. Someone had to be blamed for the loss of the first WW.

The much praised enlightenment and the "discovery" of evolution was much more an idea from which Hitler took it's page. Hitler used Evolutionary Theory to Justify the Holocaust. http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/hit.htm
You can deny the facts but does not make them true!
http://www.icr.org/article/285/

Now that is just one of the 'facts' that are beyond wrong. Research the crusades and some of the wars you mentioned and you will find that while people call them self "religious" doesn't make them so.

Grow up and research your "propaganda".

buzzsays...

Thought the music was over the top, but the final question was a goodie "Whay dont you?"...

klaqua are you trying to say that the crusades were not motivated/cause by religion??? I think that's a HUGE stretch to say otherwise...

MaxWildersays...

You might be able to conclusively prove religion caused some of those slaughters she mentioned, but it is incontrovertible that religion was a contributing cause or at the very least an excuse for them.

As for the holocaust, if Judaism was not a religion, their culture would be much more assimilated by the culture of the region, so that someone like Hitler would not have been able to target them as a group. He certainly could have targeted some similar cultural group without regard to religion, but he would not have had the built in antipathy toward Jews that was so prevalent back then.

And by the way, she had about a thousand other points that nobody seems to be questioning. Even if she is wrong on this single issue, how exactly does that make her point of view invalid?

zombieatersays...

>> ^klaqua:
Just proves that if you make shit up, make a video with cool music, show some cleavage and state things as fact (that are obviously not fact), you too can have a fan club and be hailed as hero.
Hitler could not be mistaken as and was not a Christian. His god was nationalism and the hate for the Jews. A hate that had no background in religion but common street rhetoric of the time. Someone had to be blamed for the loss of the first WW.
The much praised enlightenment and the "discovery" of evolution was much more an idea from which Hitler took it's page. Hitler used Evolutionary Theory to Justify the Holocaust. http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/hit.htm
You can deny the facts but does not make them true!
http://www.icr.org/article/285/
Now that is just one of the 'facts' that are beyond wrong. Research the crusades and some of the wars you mentioned and you will find that while people call them self "religious" doesn't make them so.
Grow up and research your "propaganda".


Wow, there are so many errors in your argument, it's kinda funny.

First of all, your first source that you site to argue that Hitler used evolution to justify the Holocaust comes from a far-right Pentacostal Christian website...this is the website that also decries the seperation of church and state and describes abortion as "The great American holocaust"... not exactly a balanced viewpoint there. Your other "source" is just as bad - 'The Institute for Creation Research'...c'mon dude, seriously? You're going to need a lot more than that to convince me.

Let's set a few facts straight here:

1) Hmm...#1...oh yeah, Hilter was a deeply devout Catholic! How about some quotes, yes?

"I say: my Christian feeling points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me towards the man who, once lonely and surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews and called for battle against them."

and

"I am deeply moved to perceive that his tremendous struggle for this world against the Jewish poison was most profoundly marked by the fact that he had to bleed on the cross for it..."

2) The Nazi party was officially Christian and the majority of members were Christian! Their political policy was to make Christianity the state religion of Germany.

3) R0SENCRANTZ is right. Pope Pius XI signed, and Pope Pius XII negotiated, a concordat with Hitler that gave the church immunity while they supplied the Nazis with money and legal protection for their acts. Pope Pius XI also signed a similar one with Benito Mussolini.

4) Some of the most antisemitic European political and social movements of the 1930's and 1940's were Christian parties.

5) The role of atheists and freethinkers during that time? Well, only 1.5% of the German popluation was self-proclaimed as such, and as stated by Stewart W. Herman Jr, an American clergyman who lived in Nazi Germany during the rise of Hitler, "The athiests may immediately be discounted as exercising any perceptible influence on German religious thought today...[their influence] has been suppressed completely by the new regime which places 'godlessness' in the same category with anarchistic Bolshevism."

This was mostly taken from an article by William Sierichs, Jr., an editor for a newspaper in Louisiana. He has a degree in journalism from LSU. The article is not online, but a similar one can be found in 5 parts from a professor in sociology at the University of Wisconsinhere.
Critically acclaimed books by professors in sociology, history, and anthropology contributed to this article. Authors such as:
Moshe Herczl, Randolph Braham, and David Kertzer.

12548says...

The Hitler argument is just a logical fallacy. It's called affirming the consequent.

This is the logic:
Hitler was atheist and was bad. Therefore atheists are bad.

You cannot confirm the cause without establishing the same link between the cause and effect of both situations.

In Hitler's case, there is a link: He had ultimate power over the people and no accountability to peer criticism. Most religions carry these same ideas, which is why they also have these bad histories.

Albeit, there are more operatives in these situations than I'm addressing, such as the "them and us" phenomena, or genetic and epigenetic traits of Hitler, or Hitler's childhood. The list goes on.

MaxWildersays...

Please stop talking about Hitler! It is the tiniest of tiny parts mentioned in this video. The weight of the rest of her points, which are totally valid, carry themselves without needing the holocaust for support.

omnistegansays...

>> ^Peroxide:
So religion caused the holocaust hey? ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer


Dietrich Bonhoeffer's religion didn't cause the holocaust, Adolf Hitler's beliefs caused the holocaust. Whether or not Hitler's beliefs about Jewish extermination were due to religion or not has been a topic of debate among much smarter people than myself. This wikipedia article has a lot of information on the topic.
My point is, pointing to Bonhoeffer doesn't prove that religion didn't cause the holocaust, it proves that Bonhoeffer's blend of religion didn't cause the holocaust.

BicycleRepairMansays...

The Hitler argument is just a logical fallacy. It's called affirming the consequent.

This is the logic:
Hitler was atheist and was bad. Therefore atheists are bad.



This is of course entirely correct, the same goes for the argument "Hitler was a catholic, therefore Christianity/Catholism is bad" This is also a fallacy, for roughly the same reason.

HOWEVER, as I tried explaining before: The triangular unholy mess that is the three major monotheistic plagues, Christianity, Islam and Judaism and all its sub-species, are central to creating the whole mess. Infact, you could say these religions are what made the Jews a distinct "race" in the first place. The propogation of these ideas for hundreds of years is what led people to believe that Jews were somehow this hive-minded entity that could be praised or, more commonly, blamed collectively as if they were a single individual, hence the insulting referrence "The Jew" when referring to a whole group of people. You only need to look at parts of the islamic world to see how Jews are still demonized as ritualistic murderers and that they drink the blood of baptized babies (or palestinian babies, depending on which fantasy you subscribe to) and all sorts of nonsense. As I previously stated, the idea that Jews can be blamed collectively for something is absurd. But Judaism, on the other hand, is not without blame, this idea, this religion is at times just as poisonous as Islam and Christianity, and it is partly responsible for the death and suffering of thousands of people, the idea is central to establishing the idea of the "Jewish race" as a distint entity. "The Jews" are not to be blamed, even partially, for their own holocaust, but Judaism is. Some people are unable to make this distinction, and that problem frequently comes up when I try to say the same thing about Islam, whenever I critize that retarded idea, people assume I think all muslims are retards, which I , for the nth time, do not, just like "the Jews" they are not a collective mind, but individuals more or less infected by a poisonous idea.

Aemaethsays...

One thing I'll mention in regards to this rant is that her issues with religion aren't really about religion or anything to do with God. Instead they are about the institutions that purport to represent God. Religion is like gun control: just because you don't like the way one person (or many) use it doesn't mean it should be banned. I realize some are for gun control for that very reason, it's just the closest parallel I could draw.

siftbotsays...

Tags for this video have been changed from 'religion, christianity, intolerance, rant, boy scouts, atheism, freedom' to 'religion, christianity, intolerance, rant, boy scouts, atheism, freedom, cleavage, boobs' - edited by doogle

Peroxidesays...

My point, should i restate it, is that generalizing all religions into one "categorization," exactly the same, and each as capable as the next of evils; is MISGUIDED.

That would be equivalent to me saying that because Hitler embraced evolution, all evolutionists embrace Hitler ( which by the way, i embrace. Evolution that is, not Hitler)

STOP GENERALIZING

13150says...

Honestly, this video strikes me as just as much propoganda as anything you might hear at a televangelist's church. Religion is just an excuse for the closed-mindedness of certain people. Not all Christians, Jews, or Muslims (and, let's face it, THOSE religions are what the ignorant little girl means when she says religion) are closed-minded, but those who are closed-minded make the most noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the squeaky wheel gets noticed. There are many people who are devoutly Christian/Jewish/Islamic without being closed-minded extremists, and there are plenty of people who are devoutly atheist who are decidedly closed-minded, kind of like little miss cleavage. Spiritual views do not automatically determine whether one is or is not an ignorant fool, even though BOTH sides have extremists who think otherwise.

9058says...

I agree with you Peroxide that generalization is a bad way to go, i guess its more of a defensive reaction, much like the assumption that if you arent religious you must have no morals, like sodomy, and drugs. Atheists are starting to boil over and much like any other movement they use generalization as a way to mobilize it. I dont particularly agree with the method either but the only reason i dont equally equate the two (theists generalizing atheists and vise versa)is that not nearly as much bad has come from atheists. Not saying they are squeaky clean though, hell we are human, we are all capable of the greatest good and worst evil. Maybe its because they havent been given the chance to rule. Who knows, let atheism dominate for a while and they might cause just as much destruction, we will never know though.

HollywoodBobsays...

>> ^Peroxide:
My point, should i restate it, is that generalizing all religions into one "categorization," exactly the same, and each as capable as the next of evils; is MISGUIDED.
That would be equivalent to me saying that because Hitler embraced evolution, all evolutionists embrace Hitler ( which by the way, i embrace. Evolution that is, not Hitler)
STOP GENERALIZING

Oh Please, it's fair to lump religions as she does. It's not generalizing when the negative aspects of religion she points out can be attributed to the vast majority of religions. And news flash, every religion is as capable of "evil" as every other, be it exploitation, exclusion or indoctrination.

I'll tell you what I'll accept that she was unfairly generalizing if you can name a single religion that doesn't exclude people, doesn't have a history of violence, doesn't indoctrinate its youth, doesn't exploit its followers and doesn't throw rational thinking out the window.

LordOderussays...

Generalization or not, she has some very valid points. In fairness, I think I would have liked it better had she pointed out that most religions denounce violence. It's usually religious extremists that cause all the trouble and violence in the world. I know people that are Catholic, but don't believe that Creationism should be taught in schools. Whenever anyone takes something to an extreme, it can cause trouble. Religion just seems to have a way of magnifying that because it seeps into every aspect of life.

Also, someone referred to her as using a cheap trick by showing cleavage. I fail to see how wearing a somewhat low cut shirt invalidates her argument. If I had to guess, I'd say the fact that she was close to the camera and leaning forward a little bit was more for dramatic effect, not to get her rack on Videosift.

HadouKen24says...

>> ^zensunnione:
The Hitler argument is just a logical fallacy. It's called affirming the consequent.
This is the logic:
Hitler was atheist and was bad. Therefore atheists are bad.


Actually, it's a hasty generalization. Affirming the Consequent would be more like this:

All atheists are bad.

Hitler was bad.

Therefore, Hitler was an atheist.


However, speaking of the fallacy of hasty generalization, I'm starting to get very tired of people saying that all religion leads to these horrible consequences. This is not true. If you look at history, you will find it is a specific type of religion that leads to warmongering and intolerance: monotheism.

I will repeat that. It is MONOTHEISM that causes all these problems, NOT religion as a whole.

12359says...

The girl has a point. I believe she could have said it a bit less dramatically though. She made herself sound condescending. Though, i suppose it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around! Somebody has to be condescending to the condescending theists of the world.

HadouKen24says...

To buttress my point, here's a list of holy wars divided between monotheists and non-monotheists.


Caused by monotheists:


  • Crusades in the Holy Land.


  • Crusades in France (aka Albigensian Crusades)


  • Northern Crusades against Baltic pagans.

  • 16th century French Wars of Religion.


  • Taiping Rebellion.


  • 2nd Century battles for the Holy Land.


  • Muslim Conquests of Arabia.


  • Muslim Conquests of Asia Minor


  • Muslim Conquests of Northern Africa.


  • Muslim Conquest of Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal)


  • The Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.


  • The 30 Years War.


  • Saxon Wars of the 9th century.


  • Conflicts of Bosnia and Kosovo. (The media didn't really report it, but the wars were as much about Christianity versus Islam as anything else.)


  • Protestant-Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland





Caused by non-monotheists:
  • The Second Sino-Japanese War.




The video mentions the Kalinga War started by Ashoka, ruler of the Mauryan empire, as a war caused by religion, but there's absolutely no evidence that this is the case. Everything points to it having been instigated purely for the sake of imperial expansion.

In fact, Ashoka suffered crushing guilt when he saw the horrors his war had brought about. He then converted to Buddhism and renounced war, committing himself to the promulgation of Buddhism and the prosperity and well-being of his people.


So, I've got a list of 14 wars waged in the name of monotheistic religions, and just one war waged in the name of a non-monotheistic religion. (And if you look at the history, it was only labeled a religious war well after it had begun to curry popular support; it wasn't started religion, though it probably would have ended sooner without it.)

Consider that for most of the world's history, most people weren't monotheists. Monotheism didn't really grab a significant chunk of the world's population until the 8th century or so. Even today, almost half of the world's population believes either in no God or in more than one god. Were non-monotheistic religions, to generalize, disposed to holy wars and religious conflicts, the numbers would bear that out. But they don't.

Heck, let's look at religious conflicts going on right now. There are 24 listed conflicts, and only 2 of them were instigated by non-monotheists.

The facts are pretty clear. Non-monotheistic religions, on the whole, don't really cause holy wars. Almost every monotheistic religion, on the other hand, does cause holy wars. The only exception that comes to mind is Mormonism, which hasn't had a chance yet.

Atheists, please restrict your ire appropriately.

jwraysays...

>> ^Aemaeth:
One thing I'll mention in regards to this rant is that her issues with religion aren't really about religion or anything to do with God. Instead they are about the institutions that purport to represent God. Religion is like gun control: just because you don't like the way one person (or many) use it doesn't mean it should be banned. I realize some are for gun control for that very reason, it's just the closest parallel I could draw.


She's not arguing for banning it.
Faith = (believing in something without adequate evidence) = risk
It doesn't always turn out bad, but it turns out badly more often than rational thought. Faith is to reason as gambling is to thrift.

And ceteris paribus it's better to not only know the truth but know the evidence behind it.

She's not saying all religious people are the same, but all of their epistemologies contain the same flaw (faith) and 90% of the support for anti-homosexuality and TV-censorship is rooted in religions (not just the wing-nut fringe of religion: even the Catholic Church and several large protestant denominations are officially anti-gay. The Bible clearly says homosexuality is an abomination, and anyone who would swallow that with blind faith rather than thinking carefully about it is dangerous).

HadouKen24says...

Really, the problem isn't "faith" in general, but what their faith is in. When your faith is in a single omnipotent God who will eventually judge everyone by a single arbitrary set of rules, the result is spiritual and intellectual fascism.

As many atheists have rightly pointed out, such a God isn't worth worshiping even if he's real.

The problem isn't faith. It's fascism.

jwraysays...

I appreciate your point. But the problem is that faith is the Trojan horse through which bad ideas can sneak in. What are the odds that they randomly choose the right things to have faith in?

A gullible person who you've convinced to behave well may be better off than a gullible person who somebody has convinced to behave poorly, but ultimately they're better off not being gullible, and doing the right things for the right reasons.

HadouKen24says...

It's really not that simple. The world is not straightforwardly divided in to gullible people and non-gullible people, or people of faith and people without faith.

Nor is faith random. People choose to believe particular religions because of something that faith does for them--some perceived need it fills. Clearly the consequences of being wrong are weighed to some extent in the process, or Pascal's Wager would not seem so convincing to so many theists. It has been, I think, not made sufficiently clear to most people that the consequences of being wrong that God exists are far more dire than being wrong that the gods exist.

Ultimately, your argument commits the "slippery slope" fallacy. It is not the case that acceptance of the suitability and appropriateness of certain kinds and degrees of faith necessarily entails the acceptance of all kinds of faith.

jwraysays...

It's not a slippery slope argument. Faith is believing in something without a good reason. Believing in something without a good reason increases your risk of being wrong. Social norms accept some types of faith and not others. But collectively, people believing in things without good reasons increase the risk of social norms being wrong. This gives us problems with theocracy, sexual repression, antihomosexuality, antiabortion, antiatheism, etc. Fifty years from now much of that will be disdained as segregationists are disdained now.

Any one of the following points is enough to refute Pascal's Wager:

*If a god exists, and he is such an asshole that he would send people to hell for doubting his existence, then he is unworthy of worship.

*One cannot simply choose to believe something that one does not actually believe.

*It's not a binary choice, but a choice between atheism and thousands of different religions. What about all of the other religions, which if true, would punish you for choosing the wrong religion? It's all bullshit anyway. Whatever probability you assign to the truth of each religion, I can make up another false religion with an even worse penalty for not believing in it.

HadouKen24says...

But collectively, people believing in things without good reasons increase the risk of social norms being wrong.

Without people taking that risk, however, nothing gets done. Any statements you or I make about economics will be to some extent faith-based. And yet if we don't make any decisions about economics, we will be unable to be good citizens.

The major problems only really arise when faith-based ideas are taken as dogma not to be questioned. This is why monotheistic religions, with their emphasis on divine authority, cause so many problems. It is also why there were so many problems caused by Russian Communism. (For a time, statistics was banned in the USSR because some party leaders thought it was anti-communist! It significantly held back scientific progress.)



Any one of the following points is enough to refute Pascal's Wager:

Right. Pascal's Wager is a bad argument.

Nonetheless, many theists find it convincing. Why? My answer is that their faith in a particular religion is informed to some degree by consideration of the consequences of being wrong. Which was my point.

budzossays...

Bad semantics. You cannot choose to believe. You either belive, or you don't, but to choose one way or the other is insincere. In other words, if god's so omniscient, he'll know if you're faking.

In my opinion about a quarter to half of all people who say "yes" when asked "do you believe in God?" are actually answering the question "Would you like to maintain your existing social and family support network?"

jwraysays...

>> ^budzos:
Bad semantics. You cannot choose to believe. You either belive, or you don't, but to choose one way or the other is insincere. In other words, if god's so omniscient, he'll know if you're faking.
In my opinion about a quarter to half of all people who say "yes" when asked "do you believe in God?" are actually answering the question "Would you like to maintain your existing social and family support network?"


Ah but then half of their social network is also faking it for social reasons.

Deanosays...

Indeed, *cleavage.

Still she has a well spoken argument. Again though I think we need a tag to indicate inappropriate/unnecessary use of music. Heck, let's make that a channel!

Ryjkyjsays...

I love, peroxide, that you can question the cause of the holocaust by citing an article about ONE PERSON and then tell people to stop generalizing.

What a glaring, over-the-top, completely-and-absolutely-the-definition-of-hypocritical comment.

And you're supposed to be open minded?

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