Are all atheists this ill-informed about religion?

[Delicate]

You apparently chose to skip replying to me, in order to attack what you thought you could deal with. Okay, so I'll address your claims here more directly.

I've heard the myth repeated as if it were a religious mantra. But not once has it been substantiated. In your case, it's flat-out misunderstood. How can I simplify the claim so you can understand it? Let me try.

That there are apparent wide and important differences is not being denied. What is being denied is that these are differences of core doctrine. Rather they are differences in peripheral doctrine or practice. 

That some like to worship God with ethnic instruments and others do so with electric guitars might appear to be a wide and important difference, but it's merely one of peripheral doctrine or practice. It's not a difference of core doctrine. Even the difference between "God wants us to be poor"-ism and prosperity preaching might appear to be a big difference, but it's not a difference in core doctrine. 

I happen to agree with you about this. There's just one problem...I'm pretty sure no one here has ever brought up the issue of electric guitars versus other means of worship, nor cared a whit about small details of doctrine on that level.

If you could provide an example of when we ignored a core doctrine in favor of a peripheral doctrine, as you claim, I'd appreciate some context. Right now it looks like a strawman, a distraction from addressing our real claims that I have watched you ignore time and again, while blaming us for doing the same.

And yes, this applies even to the wars of religion in Europe. For example the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland was not fought over religious doctrine, but over issues like home rule, where the division along sectarian lines was predicated on the fact that most Protestants feared Catholic-majority rule, and thus resisted Irish home rule. 

I agree with you about this, as well. In fact, I wrote a whole paper in college, for one of my senior history courses (my Minor was in History, focusing on medieval and ancient warfare tactics and technologies) about how even the Crusades could be shown to be over economic issues, largely to do with which group had control of lands that were vital to extracting taxes for "protecting" critical trade routes in that area, which just happened to have dozens of holy shrines along the route for the average religious traveler to $ight$ee as they went.

On the other hand, my paper also pointed out that even though the motives of the Key Players™ in the religious warfare games were obviously motivated by factors other than religion, the foot-soldiers in those wars would not have been possible without a striking difference in religion that marked "us" as Righteous Ones, while "the enemy" were demonic, inhuman things worthy of destruction. So to speak.

And it's also clear that some wars, even if they have economic motives behind some of the key players, are almost entirely over those sorts of "they are the Enemy" religious conflicts. Examples would include the extermination of the French Hugenots, the expulsion of my Catholic Cajun ancestors from Acadie (Nova Scotia), and a list of wars I refer to as "the Heresy Genocides", such as the actions against the Arianists, the Gnostics, the Ebionites, the Marcionists, the Cathars, and the Docetists (wiped out in the more-well-known Albigensian Crusade)... and many more.

Before you make claims like the one you just made, educate yourself about history a little bit more. History is usually more complex than we initially think it is, humans being what we are, and your claim that just because there are motivations for religious wars other than the religion itself it must mean that we can ignore the religion as a driving factor strikes me as either intensely naive or intentionally deceptive. Saying that because the South had many economic and philosophical differences with the federalist North which had little to do with slavery, and that those reasons were probably more powerful in motivating the South to go to war than any form of religious ideology in the minds of the Senators who declared secession and war, is to ignore that maintaining the system of slavery and white supremacy was foremost in the minds of almost anyone in the South who put his hands on a rifle or a cannon. I consider their beliefs (and the deaths of those who died) to be tragic, as I feel about those who accept religious explanations for "why we really really need to go to war, man" handed down to the cannon fodder infantryman over the millenia. To deny the religious motivations of the foot soldiers in any case where religion-driven culture leads people into these battles is to try to wipe history clean of every man, woman, and child who has had a piece of metal run through them by a person with the name of God on his lips.

So what's the upshot? Two things: (a) Differences that appear to be important in terms of cultural behavior or preferences are not significant doctrinally, and (b) a lot of the conflict being pinned to Christianity in particular does not involve Christianity or Christian beliefs but rather cultural and historical associations, of which members who call themselves Catholic or Protestant have no idea what their religion teaches. Not to mention © your whole story about holding onto social purchase is total atheistic fiction for which no independent evidence exists.

So what you're arguing is, in fact, hot air.

Intellectually-serious atheists beware.

As I've written elsewhere, we are less concerned with what your core doctrines are claimed to be than we are with "where the rubber meets the road" (or more accurately, where the metal meets the flesh) contact-point between our lives and the cult-ure of Christian society. Also, it tells me that you either missed what I wrote at the end of the previous page, or else you're deliberately ignoring what I cautioned you about.

I don't have the kind of time to spend hours responding to every trivial (and maybe even marginally substantive) post. The idea that I didn't respond to your post because I couldn't deal with it is amusing, but untrue.

On the matter of peripheral doctrines, nobody who I've seen moan about the diversity of doctrine even knows enough to draw a distinction between peripheral and core doctrines. Most atheists here, even the self-proclaimed "ex-Christians" are oblivious to the difference, some even after I've pointed it out. So what's my argument?

1) Nobody has explicitly invoked peripheral doctrines, at least from what I've seen. 
2) But in the real world, the vast majority of doctrinal diversity is, in fact, peripheral. 
C) So if these uneducated atheists are commenting about doctrinal differences, odds are, they are talking about peripheral differences. 

So where does this leave us? As I've said, most atheists here are too uninformed to draw the core/peripheral distinction. If they're talking about differences in general, they are likely going to be talking about peripheral differences. If you want to suggest they are talking about core differences, where's the evidence for it?

That said, I appreciate your awareness of the issues I've raised. From the distinction between core and peripheral doctrines, to the false ascription of religious motives behind sectarian conflicts, it's nice to see an atheist with a foot in the real-world, as opposed to just mindlessly eating out of the unfortunate armpit of academia that New Atheist propaganda has become.

You raise a substantive point about religious motivation of foot-soldiers when you say "the foot-soldiers in those wars would not have been possible without a striking difference in religion that marked "us" as Righteous Ones, while "the enemy" were demonic, inhuman things worthy of destruction. So to speak."

But contrary to your claims, reams of evidence suggest foot soldiers don't need religious doctrine to have this view and to do inhumane things. From Rwanda, to Nazi Germany, to the Russian front in WW2, Nanking, even up to ISIS today, the appeal to religion seems to be superficial, operative for sociopolitical gain, while the actual motivations of the footsoldiers bear very little resemblance to religion in general, and Christianity in particular. To illustrate with one of your own examples: one pretext involving the conflicts involving the Huguenots involved Protestants destroying Catholic iconography and provoking reprisals. Another was King Henry II, sincere in his Catholicism, oppressing the Protestants. But there's nothing in Christian doctrine justifying this behavior in either case. Sincerely wrong adherents of a view don't say anything about the actual view any more than someone who kills in the name of white power somehow says something about white people in general.

In short, there's a lot of evidence contrary to your claim, which I'm sure is an important element of the atheist mythos; the evidence I've cited shows religion is not and does not need to be invoked to justify man's inhumanity.

Thus blaming religion is only possible by cherrypicking the data.

Like I said elsewhere, this whole bugaboo of interpretation is far bigger an issue in the mythology of atheists than in the real world. In the real world, the vast majority of Christians agree on all the core doctrines. If there's any diversity, it's because of peripheral interpretive differences or cultural differences. 

It's just not as severe a problem in the real world as atheists imagine it to be.

But your basis for rejecting Christianity is very interesting. When you say you can't be completely devoted to him, do you mean you literally cannot, as in it's impossible, or do you mean you just don't want to be?

And yet there have been wars over these interpretations, despite everyone agreeing on core concepts like Jesus being the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Light?). That seems pretty severe.

I suppose I could devote myself if I ignored all the stuff I don't like, but there's a pretty good bit to dislike. Killing an innocent person or animal someone how makes up for someone doing bad deeds. Slavery is fine, within certain limits, but homosexuality is a death sentence. The idea of someone ruling over my life at all is pretty weird for a guy who grew up in a country that's supposed to be a representative republic. Despite so many christians living here. The person in charge of my country doesn't rule me. He's supposed to be working for me, and every other tax paying citizen.

The book has outdated belief systems, and skewed morals. I'm supposed to dedicate my life to someone that I'm supposed to believe in based on faith, because of what he's going to do to me if I don't. I can understand why I hear christianity is dying, because it's really hard to sell that to someone who isn't in a vulnerable position.

See my above response to TheRocketSurgeon. Notice the distinction between core and peripheral doctrines. Now tell me which wars, exactly, have been over religious interpretations? Or, you know, you can just express a little freethinking skepticism towards the views you tend to swallow without questioning.

In fact, how much #freethinkingskepticism have you shown towards all these intuitions you hold? Just because, for instance, you live in a representative republic, and it's foreign to you to have someone who created you and sustains you to ask you to live morally and not be a jerk, somehow it couldn't possibly be that nothing's wrong with you and your notions of what's normal?