Haha, this proves that god is not a source of morality, and instead is a dictator. I've killed everybody I want to kill, which is nobody, even when god isn't there to stop me.
My dear brother, there ain’t no heaven. It’s all made up! All of it! You know why? Because someone figured that if you promise people that they’ll get a reward for doing certain things, and a punishment if they do other things, you basically get absolute control over them. To the point that you can tell them to give you their money in exchange for an absolution for their ‘moral crimes’ over the last week since their last confession, and they will! You see, people are dumb. We’re fucking dumb! You put fear of the unknown in our mind, and we’ll do anything to believe that there’s something in the unknown side. You tell them that they’re being watched all the time, and they’ll behave like good people. But no one’s watching… other than real people, that is.
So go now and be free from the constraints of only doing the right thing out of fear of not going to heaven, and do the right thing because you are actually a good person. Peace be with you.
The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want?
And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.
The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.
I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.
Not just that, but I've yet to come across anybody who has actually refrained from doing the bad thing they want to do because of some fear of God. They might be afraid of legal consequences, but belief hasn't prevented rape, theft, envy, murder, or anything else among even (especially) the leaders of the religious.
So no, not believing in God doesn't make atheists rapists and murderers, and believing in God doesn't prevent the devout from rape and murder.
We are extremely social creatures, and have had some intrinsic social instincts honed into us from eons of evolution. When it comes to our fellow tribemates, we generally give them the benefit of the doubt, even when they're total assholes. We see this in great effect when drivers in merging traffic will let other into their line, even though they are total strangers and are sharing a dear resource (a pathway home).
I suspect that most Christians, when they assert that only fear of God's justice (or even state justice) is what keeps them from murder that they really haven't put it to the test. We may be angry. We may desire, as Nietzsche suggests, to discharge our strength but we also are resistant to hurting the innocent, which becomes difficult when the enemy soldiers look like us (rather than different colored people with weird accents) and when we know they're our own countrymen, armies infamously refuse to fight and mutiny.
It's obviously more complex than this. We only want our tribe to be as big as our top 100 facebook friends -- what may be an instinct to keep COVID-19 from running worldwide -- and when it comes to large societies we have to practice putting principle over loyalty, which is why we're prone to fascist movements when we challenge the feudal / capitalist establishment.
And yes, some rare folk are natural soldiers and don't have to navigate feelings before killing. And rarer ones still are driven by sexual dysfunction or narcissism to ignore the interests of others, even killing as necessary. But these are very much the exception. Most of us, by far, are quite affable and have to be driven to desperation before we consider wrongdoing. The scary ones are elite deviants like the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. In 2021 their drug marketing campaign killed 80,000 Americans, and we expect even more in 2022 and 2023. More lives would be saved, more destruction and cost prevented _by multiple orders of magnitude) if the US law enforcement ignored petty crime altogether and focused solely on white collar crime. But that's a topic for another rant.
Christo-fascists openly revealing that they are genuinely terrible people held together with duct tape and faith in a genocidal God will never cease to be both hilarious and terrifying.
No, his fear of imaginary retaliation stops him from murdering. All he's saying is "if I could still get into heaven I'd be killing all of you." Doesn't matter that God is real or not, his imagination is keeping him in check (thankfully.)
This is actually what religion was meant for. Keeping those that believe it and are psychos in check.
As others are saying though, it looks awfully fake lol
I dunno if it's fake or not but the sentiment is real.
Ok, but can I break it down a bit?
The god atheist believe doesn't exist? Which god is that; all of them? The god described by "christians" that doesn't align with biblical context?
Which ever way you slice it i find it hard to believe this person's belief in said god keeps them from killing. Unless that god is preventing them from physically committing the act through some sort of psychic connection there is more at play than these people would admit.
There is a whole system of laws and a social contract that is way more intimidating then anything a hypothical god could impose. There is the human ability to empathize with others which would keep you from killing. There are also physical limitations and people are capable of defending themselves.
One could argue all these things were put in place by god. I think atheists would remain unmoved by that argument.
All that aside, christians, muslims, jews, etc have all killed in the name of god.
The thing is its simply not true. We know what Jesus is like. (🐪🪡💰) And yet most ministries in the 21st century see the right to property as central to Christianity rather than the duty to feed and clothe the destitute.
Behind The Bastards did a recent two parter on How Capitalism Ate Christianity, starting with the ministry of James W. Fifield Jr. that reinterpreted scripture to veer away from charity and mercy and towards the righteousness of capitalism. It was largely helped after WWII by the red scare in which the Soviet Union provided a fine example of the singular alternative.
So Christianity was repurposed into the Christian Nationalist movement that seeks to turn the US into a one-party autocracy with fascist features.
Why would Adonai allow His holy scripture to be subverted to serve plutocrats? In fact it is done all the time, and has been done to advocate monarchy, to endorse slavery, to oppose war, to endorse war against specific belligerents and so on.
Dan McClellan on his YouTube channel notes scripture does not feature univocality, inerrancy or divine authority according to scholarly consensus (which commonly runs contrary to what apologists might suggest). As McClellan notes the people of any era has to negotiate with the scripture to affirm their own morality, whether that's pacifism and charity or standing your ground and massacring degenerates.
But that is also to say the ministries will justify violence when it serves them, whether that's torturing POWs and massacring villages during the Iraq war or forcing conversions at swordpoint as per the crusades and holy inquisition. And yes plenty of Christians when told they need to load for bear and hunt the sinners will do so, especially if they're in precarity and fear for the security of their home, family, job, survival, etc.
I agree. But from a civility standpoint, if someone needs a bolt-on substitute for a conscience and do so voluntarily, I'm all for it. Good news is that vehicle stickers and t-shirts like this let people self-label which is really darn handy.
I want science, reason, and logic to prevail but clearly not everyone does okay with that.
My response is simply that I'm glad they still believe in an overseer that restricts their dangerous behavior. Some of us don't need that to be nice to others.
"I readwas told about in church saw the cover of a book about a zombie a long time ago. I now assume what the book PROBABLY said and I also hear a voice in my head based on those assumptions. I'm VERY afraid of the voice and also it loves me and it did the Holocaust - anyways, that's the only reason I'm not a murderer"