Are all atheists this ill-informed about religion?

[Delicate]

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.


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?

My parents ask me to live morally, and not be a jerk. Your god demands that I dedicate my life to him, because anything less is evil. If it was just about being a good person, then I have that covered without professing christianity or reading through the bible. Or following any particular religion at all.

I suppose the core doctrine is Jesus and his death/resurrection. If it's just wars over that, I suppose christians don't wage war with each other over it. They will wage war against jews and muslims over it, despite all three groups following the god of Abraham.

I must preface every post with the point that I can't respond to every single of the hundreds of posts begging for my attention. I have limited time, and prefer to respond to the most interesting and substantive posts. If I've missed one or two of those, feel free to bring them to my attention. This message is more to SnakeOilWarrior than to you, Chad.

But I agree with one thing you say, and disagree with the other. Where I agree: Christians don't wage war over core doctrines. In fact, they don't even wage war over peripheral doctrines. Rather, people who affirm Christianity often wage war for sociopolitical or economic reasons, and use the banner of Christendom as a convenient cultural icon. This says nothing about the militancy of Christian belief so much as about culture.

So where do I disagree? I disagree on the underlying assumption that "My parents ask me to live morally" is an adequate moral standard. We don't live up to such a standard infallibly, and this is a far bigger problem than it seems. We admit most crimes ought not to get a mulligan; you won't give the (hypothetical) murderer of your parent a second chance at life because people make mistakes. You want him to rot in prison! So you're unwittingly being a hypocrite when you so easily excuse yourself and expect punitive measures against others. Unless you do believe everybody deserves as much latitude as you give yourself. Do you?

But that's not the only problem. The other problem is "Your god demands that I dedicate my life to him, because anything less is evil." doesn't sound like Christianity at all. Rather it sounds like an amusing misrepresentation.