Lol, Religion

[Ancient History]

I didn't want to clutter up the politics threads with stuff about insane American religious-political nonsense, nor did I want to clutter up the wikipedia thread with one link to Dominionism and leave it at that. Instead, here is a shiny new thread where anybody can share and discuss any wacky/disturbing nonsense they find in any religion! Equal opportunity WTFs? all around.

So yeah, Ted Cruz is into Christian Dominionism, a variation on the prosperity gospel which basically equates being rich with being blessed by God. So if you're a billionaire, then you are one of the Chosen People, and if you aren't a billionaire yet then you haven't prayed hard enough - but if you do, then soon you too can be one of God's bankers!

If this all sounds like a Pat Robertson scam, well you're not wrong.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Christian dominionism does have one positive feature to it: it's poisoning and uprooting the tree of Western Christianity faster and more effectively than the combined efforts of atheists and deists for the past few centuries. And not just the fundamentalist branches, either, but the moderate ones too.

Yes, Ted Cruz, tell us more about how God wants you to deprive people of birth control and starve children to give Mitt Romney another fucking tax cut. I'd love to see the United States go majority irreligious in my lifetime.

[Maj]

I, for one, totally encourage Randian Christian Theocrats to get together and start their own country. Far, far away from me.

[Cynic]

I"m not going to post anything of substance at the moment but a word of warning.

We've had topics back in the day that laughed at other websites/people for their idiocy. That sort of thing kinda came to an end because of the abuse potential of those threads. Let's try not to get to the level.

[Username17]

Bachmann meanwhile, has this to say:

“Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand,” Bachmann continued. “When we see up is down and right is called wrong, when this is happening, we were told this; these days would be as the days of Noah."

-Username17

[Ancient History]

I really don't want to bash Christians in particular, but I want to bash Oprah Winfrey for this one: http://io9.com/oprah-pisses-off-atheist ... 1445600667

Although I love this comment:

Nyad: I'm an Athiest, and I think things are awesome.

Oprah: God is awesome. You can't be an atheist and believe in awesome

Nyad: I'm pretty sure I can.

Oprah: No, you're not an atheist.

Nyad: I really am.

Oprah: God makes things awesome, how do you live with your tiny view of the world?

Nyad: I'm awesome.

Oprah: You poor, foolish thing. How do you get up in the morning?

[nockermensch]

So the people who condemned D&D as satanic in the 80s are now acting as a doomsday cult that moves armies and pursues policies to make the world end faster.

They're not just RPG villains, they're cliche RPG villains. There's some military-grade irony at work here.

[nockermensch]

I really don't want to bash Christians in particular, but I want to bash Oprah Winfrey for this one: http://io9.com/oprah-pisses-off-atheist ... 1445600667

Although I love this comment:

Nyad: I'm an Athiest, and I think things are awesome.

Oprah: God is awesome. You can't be an atheist and believe in awesome

Nyad: I'm pretty sure I can.

Oprah: No, you're not an atheist.

Nyad: I really am.

Oprah: God makes things awesome, how do you live with your tiny view of the world?

Nyad: I'm awesome.

Oprah: You poor, foolish thing. How do you get up in the morning?

cracked.com's David Wong had a go at this a while ago. See Point #1 from this article.

It's retarded to think that religions have a monopoly of awe, but we're still learning to tap into that without evoking religious imagery. It's hard for me to rewatch Cosmos these days and not think Carl Sagan was a mystic. The guy talks as if he had experienced a Personal Revelation when he realized we're made of stardust, and how rare and precious life is.

[Maj]

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
My fault for deleting the post Orion was referring to without deleting Orion's post so it looked like he was responding to Maj. Carry on.
[/TGFBS]

Rather than seeing this as a negative, we need to rejoice, Maranatha Come Lord Jesus, His day is at hand.

My knee-jerk response to this was, "Why is she talking about peanut butter?"

I really don't want to bash Christians in particular, but I want to bash Oprah Winfrey for this one.

Why? Diana Nyad showed up to be interviewed on a TV program called "Super Soul Sunday" - a show that explores "themes and issues including happiness, personal fulfillment, spirituality and conscious living." Discussion that tries to dig deeper into what a guest believes beyond just the word "atheist" should absolutely be expected; it was part of the reason Nyad was on the damn show.

Furthermore, I don't think that atheist is a well understood term. Religious people tend to believe that atheism is a rejection of all concepts of God and spirituality. Yet atheists seem to use the term to describe rejections of religious definitions of God, while including some definitions that are spiritual. Nyan stated she believes in spirits and souls, just not along the lines of a conventional codified belief. A lot of non-atheists don't understand how that can be atheism. On this very message board, I have tried to explain my personal beliefs - in no uncertain terms do I consider myself an atheist. Yet, after trying to explain myself here, I was called an atheist. I actually think that Oprah was pretty canny for understanding there was more to the word and Nyad's beliefs, and trying to get clarification.

I don't understand why asking questions trying to understand what someone's saying - and/or equate it to your own personal experience - is a bad thing to do. I don't understand why people are just expected to know what's acceptable and appropriate - or how to phrase things so that they come out acceptable and appropriate - so they don't cross some invisible line of offense. If you don't understand what offends or doesn't offend, then asking about it will comes off tactless, regardless. That just leads to a fear of discourse, not greater understanding.

After watching that clip, it seemed tome that atheists were offended because of - what I perceive as - one stupid half a sentence out of the entire interview. The headline I got out of it was, "Oprah Winfrey is an Atheist" because she seemed to agree largely with what Nyad was saying.

[Kaelik]

Discussion that tries to dig deeper into what a guest believes beyond just the word "atheist" should absolutely be expected; it was part of the reason Nyad was on the damn show.

I actually think that Oprah was pretty canny for understanding there was more to the word and Nyad's beliefs, and trying to get clarification.

I don't understand why asking questions trying to understand what someone's saying - and/or equate it to your own personal experience - is a bad thing to do.

Well for starters, because none of these are questions:

Oprah: God is awesome. You can't be an atheist and believe in awesome

Oprah: No, you're not an atheist.

Oprah: You poor, foolish thing. How do you get up in the morning?

So yes, I imagine most people would be offended by someone telling them their worldview is shit and they aren't allowed to be happy, and that they are stupid.

And none of that shows Oprah being aware their is more to the word atheist, in fact, it looks a lot like the opposite, she believes the word is so narrow that it only applies to sad idiots who are wrong.

So yes, I don't think it is fair to ask why people are mad at Oprah for digging deeper when she explicitly didn't actually do that.

Oprah: God makes things awesome, how do you live with your tiny view of the world?

And this is extremely offensive, and any idiot could tell you that calling someone's view of the world tiny is offensive, because it 1) means wrong. 2) means wrong in a way that is actually intended to be offensive.

[DSMatticus]

Those "quotes" are from a comment parodying Oprah (hello Poe, dear old friend). Oprah said other stupid, offensive things and the comment is actually a pretty fair paraphrase of the discussion, but she didn't say those specific things.

Attempts to characterize the discussion as fair inquiry are still wrong, because it wasn't. It was just "Oprah Winfrey doesn't know what word means and refuses to accept the idea that people can believe the universe is cool without believing in at least one type of magic fairy, possibly abstract." That makes zero sense, and is incredibly offensive.

[Orion]

Having watched the clip, I have to say that the other woman wasn't making much more sense than Oprah. After IDing as an atheist, she went on to say something like about humanity as a whole being "her definition of god", which is what initially prompts Oprah to try to pigeonhole her as a deist. Later,nor no apparent reason, atheist swimmer lady says she believes or at least accepts personal testimony from people who see ghosts or recall past lives.

[angelfromanotherpin]

House stenographer goes bibbledy on the floor.

Apparently she claims to be a prophet. Good times.

[RobbyPants]

I didn't want to derail the politics thread when there's a perfectly good religion thread here...

When people believe they're desperately losing, they get increasingly vocal and active. There's some geocentrists still knocking around, and all they do is howl about the perfidy of science manipulating you into...some end.

Seriously. Geocentrists. They've been disproven for, like, six hundred years now. But they howl, and they get mocked for it. Because that is, I'm increasingly thinking, the appropriate response to epically wrong ideas--make fun of them by demonstrating how wrong they are. Make it entertaining, make it funny while you demonstrate the errors. If people don't take geocentrism, or trick-down economics, laissez-faire economics, or biblical literalism seriously, those concepts won't be able to get a foothold, ever.

I was seriously blown away when I was exposed to this for the first time about two months ago. I was at a Christian apologetics forum, and stumbled onto a thread entitled something like "Six facts science continues to get wrong", or some such. I thought, "this will be good", and damn, was it!

One of the six entries was gravity, complete with a bunch of pseudo-scientific quantum mechanics to explain why gravity wasn't real, and how Newton got it all wrong. I thought "Gravity?! WTF? I thought everyone but the roadrunner knew about gravity."

It all started to make sense when I got to the heliocentrism entry. There were two of these guys at this forum, heavily pushing for geocentrism. They both really bought into Tycho Brahe's alternate cosmology that had all the planets revolving around the sun (because we've seriously known about this for centuries based on the phases of Venus and the shapes of orbits), but that the sun (and the rest of the planets, consequently) revolve around the earth. So I think "That's stupid. That's completely disproved by gravity and... oh, right... they don't believe in gravity."

So, any time they seem to reject a very obvious, and seemingly innocuous bit of science, there is always some greater narrative to it. They reject relativity and/or the speed of light in a vacuum being constant? Probably has something to do with calculating the age or the universe, or explaining how we can see light from stars more than 6,000 light years away. They reject the standard understanding of rates of radiometric decay? What uses that? Radiometric dating, of course! One of these guys had some complex gorilla math that showed that even though the universe looked to be about 14 billion years old, using his "correct" method, you actually ended up with just under 6,000. Imagine that!

The confirmation bias is strong in this one.

[nockermensch]

Robby, it's fucking 2013 and we still have Flat-Earthers around. Believing the Sun is the center of the universe is not any more outraging than believing that everything was created 6000 years ago.

[ishy]

But these people are just trolls, right?

[TiaC]

But these people are just trolls, right?

I envy your faith in the basic good of humanity.

[RobbyPants]

But these people are just trolls, right?

I don't know if that was directed at Nocker, me, or both, but I will answer anyway.

Both of these guys were very well researched regarding their pseudoscience. Of course, it didn't make any of their beliefs correct, but they have a huge amount of information garbage they could draw from to talk about anything that they felt ran contrary to a literal interpretation of the Holy Bible. I never asked them what they thought about the firmament.

That being said, one guy would go into full troll mode if I backed him into a corner regarding the second law of thermodynamics and evolution. He honestly didn't know how to respond to that, but felt he had to say something.

[Ancient History]

I love Mormonism because it is pretty much everything terrible about a religion rolled into a ball, going downhill and at quite a good turn of speed, possibly aflame and aimed at some fragile property like a one-room schoolhouse. There is so much insanity involved, and so many hackles raised, that even the persecutions are fascinating:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_E ... e_Order_44

[RobbyPants]

So, last weekend, I ran into some moron who straight-face claimed that there would be no typhoons if everyone in the planet accepted Jesus. He then said "become part of the solution."

I asked him if he seriously believed that there would be no natural disasters if the entire population of the planet suddenly became more credulous, but he has not responded.

[TheJerkStore]

I, for one, totally encourage Randian Christian Theocrats to get together and start their own country. Far, far away from me.

Doubtful. They'll get our hopes up and promise they will when they don't get their way, but they never do, the teases.

[Whipstitch]

My personal hope is they throw in with Patri Friedman and the seasteaders.

[nockermensch]

So, last weekend, I ran into some moron who straight-face claimed that there would be no typhoons if everyone in the planet accepted Jesus. He then said "become part of the solution."

I asked him if he seriously believed that there would be no natural disasters if the entire population of the planet suddenly became more credulous, but he has not responded.

It's funny how evangelicals believe that A) Christ will return once the world is thrown into chaos AND believe that B) forcing their form of morals on everybody will fix the world.

[Stahlseele]

Wait . . doesn't this mean he wants everybody to believe in christ to stop chaos and thus stop christ from coming back because of no chaos for him to fix? O.o

[RobbyPants]

Wait . . doesn't this mean he wants everybody to believe in christ to stop chaos and thus stop christ from coming back because of no chaos for him to fix? O.o

No no no. That's not a contradiction. It might look like one, but rest assured it's not because of [reasons].