RE: Serious question about thoughts on theists
May 15, 2023 at 4:04 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2023 at 4:15 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(May 15, 2023 at 3:00 pm)Kingpin Wrote: Do you find yourself blanket/generalizing all "theists" in the same vein? All who believe a God exists is silly, moronic?
Why don't you ask yourself that? Is every Muslim or Scientologists or Hare Krishna stupid?
I don't think that all religious people are stupid.
I guess I could divide religious types into three groups:
1. Misinformed
Some people have just been fed wrong info about the world and once they learn/ read that stories from their religious book did not and could not happen and that their reasoning is wrong they abandon religion.
2. People who have some materialistic gain from religion
They don't really care what's true or isn't true, they just follow the money. That can be anyone: a politician who claims that god chose him; a religious leader who collects money; some guy who has a harem because he convinced women that he is chosen by god; a theist lecturer who talks and writes about religion to make a lot of money, etc.
3. Dumb people
Some people are just that: stupid. To them, basic stuff is simply too complicated to understand and they resort to simple explanations (the world is flat, the world is 6000 years old and created by a wizard using magic, etc).
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
