Are all atheists this ill-informed about religion?

[The Grand Nudger]

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. 

Deny all you like...and when you're done, what will have changed?  Will you have resolved sola scriptura?  Will you have a definitive christology?  Will you be able to comment upon the availability of redemption?  No, no, and no.  

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. 

Instrument choice doesn't measure a blip on my radar.  I don't care, and you don't care...so why are we discussing it?  

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. 

You betray your opening statement in the conclusion, but why should it matter - have either of us been discussing Ireland?  No. 

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.

Since it's a political history of campaign ideology in public elections, the information is freely available to anyone who wishes to view it.   Is there some requirement for you to waive away a political reality?  Should these groups fail to serve their collective interests, is there some shame in accomplishing that goal?   

 Is adherence to scripture unimportant?  Is christology unimportant?  Is redemption unimportant?

[Wyrd of Gawd]

One doesn't need more than a sixth grade level of understanding of Christianity to dismiss it.  It's holy book includes stories that even a third grader would question.  The unreliability of it's holy text brings into question the entire religion, as well as its god.

Do any religions have believable fairy tales?

[Esquilax]

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. 

So... I just want to be clear here: the length and breadth of your argument is "atheists are ill informed about religion because it is my personal opinion that the differences they see aren't a big deal"? Really?

Because, see, when I see different denominations arguing about what it takes to get into heaven, my first thought is not "this isn't a big part of christian theology."

[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?

[Chad32]

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 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.



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.


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.

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?

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.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

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?

What part of the core doctrines do you think we either don't grasp, or don't address? For just a moment, we'll pretend that all Christian faiths agree with the Nicene Creed (here, I'm using the shorter Apostles' Creed; since you claim that the core beliefs are unchanging, you should have no problem with this), generally considered to enumerate all the core doctrines of belief, and see what you thin it is we don't know or discuss:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

This would be, oh, every single discussion we have on cosmology and evolutionary biology, and the complete lack of evidence for divine influence on what is now clearly a very natural process, even if we're not 100% certain of how two of the major events in this chain happened, yet. But hard to argue that we don't discuss it.

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, 

Good grief, I can't even tell you how many discussions I've seen over the ridiculousness of the claim of a God that has a half-God child, that a woman got pregnant and gave birth as a virgin (and including the fact that the prophecy to which they were referring, in Isaiah, to establish Jesus' sovereign claim in their story, is a total mistranslation of the word alma, for young woman, when Isaiah uses betulah, the actual word for virgin, several times... but not there), and so on.

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; 

Mountains of posts on this subject, particularly regarding the historical evidence of Jesus (or lack thereof), including the claims regarding Pilate in Tacitus et al, and the writings of the early church fathers on the evolving view of this event.

he descended into hell; the third day he rose again from the dead; 

This one we don't discuss, much, though I certainly have seen the "rose from the dead" issue discussed.

he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; 

Not much to debate or discuss, here, other than the fact that none of the non-apostle "witnesses" to this ascension seem to have bothered to tell anyone, or write it down where it could become a testable early relic of the church prior to the 20-years-later crafting of the foundational documents of this religion.

from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. 

Again, not much to discuss here.

I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.

Since I'm not sure if you do actually believe in the holy catholic Church, I'll leave this one alone as potentially doctrinaire, but will note that the concepts of life everlasting and the forgiveness of sins are among the most common topics, here.

In short, if you have a different idea of what constitutes these "core beliefs" you speak of, and why we would or should discuss them in some manner other than our current discussions on these points, we're all ears... but if you're just going to sit there and claim we don't talk about core beliefs, but only doctrine, then you are clearly delusional.

[Ravenshire]

Just stop.  The differences are wide and important...to say that they aren't is to say that the message of salvation and the means of salvation and any differences any two sects have on that count are unimportant.  It trivializes the entire affair, and anyone who cares to delve into the issue will realize that you're bullshitting them the minute they hit the google button. 

It's clearly a severe enough problem for christians to have been killing each other the world over for their differing interpretations from the very moment we have a history of the cult, and up to the present day.  In your case, perhaps not...but have you ever wondered -why- "christianity" put on a monolith given it's long history of predation and oppression on the basis of doctrine and schism?

Because the numbers weren't looking good.  It became clear, in the past few decades, that they would have to fly the same banner if they wished to hold onto the social purchase they'd individually built, but which they had all been collectively eroding with their constant bickering and bigotry.

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. 

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. 

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.

I must point up that you had to ignore all the posts mentioning differences in core doctrines order to make this intellectually dishonest post.

[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.

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.

Don't flatter yourself. There aren't "hundreds of posts" lined up in queue for you to answer, and furthermore, there aren't many different points in them. A skilled debater could handle several posts sharing the same point in one post.

Your overweening pride is, I'm pretty sure, a mark against you on your little god's tablet. And lying is also low on his list of things he likes you to do.

Hope that works out for you.

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?

Unless you're accusing him of murder, you're comparing apples and oranges, because there are many minor trespasses against the morality inculcated into us from our parents which are readily forgiven on the basis of doing better the next time.

Or do you think your son should spend life in prison for shoplifting an apple?

This is a silly line of reasoning., especially considering the condescension you've served up heretofore. Surely someone of your brilliance can come up with something better than such a sloppy comparison. There's a big difference between being a jerk and being a murderer. If you cannot fathom it, just ask. I'll be happy to delineate it.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

People who think God cares deeply about my genitals sure like to jump right to that "you committed a murder" equation for sin.

You and your holy book are the only sources of info I have for the desires of this particular God... and it is no less ludicrous when you say that all the things that are "sins" are equal to murder, for which we must pay a penalty that is just and right, than if I came up to you and said "You snarfled my graftim, and now you must pay!"

Like it or not, your "free gift of salvation" comes with the price of "confessing" that God is one's Master. Complete submission, no less, is what a master requires. This is no simple question, to be considered lightly. And yet, when we consider the entire story of the Master being proposed to us for consideration, we must look at a few factors, whether you want to call them peripheral or not:

1) Master expects certain behavior of us, which Master's adherents say we all fail to live up to.
2) Master can only give us The Gift if we first accept him as Master.
3) Master seems oddly concerned with where I put my genitals, and in general appears completely made up to correspond to human psychology.
4) Master will torture me, out of some warped sense of justice, if I find the claims of the followers to be too silly to follow.
5) Master's secretaries are infallibly "inspired", even though any honest reader of those writers' work concludes that they were not whom they claimed to be, and can see that the writers are not more than an usually-ignorant variety of follower.

You may see this as a "personal relationship" with one's master, but we see it very, very differently, and your willful blindness does not endear you to us or anyone else with a skeptical or rational approach.