uriel238 comments on Brb I have to hand out pamphlets and go door-to-door

[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

I've seen a number of problems that come with self improvement and behavioral changes through faith:
~ Let go and let God; very often God doesn't come through, and that can feel like a betrayal and become a relapse.
~ Religious faith often comes with ideological baggage. Mainline and fundamentalist Christianity, for instance, have ingrained prejudice against women and LGBT+ folk, and depending on the faith, persons of color.
~ Institutions that engage in faith-based group support such as 12-step programs are covers for labor exploitation cults, and those who have benefited from those programs are then pressured to provide free labor to their program elders. That's exploitation and abuse.

Now, I don't have figures from trustworthy sources regarding the positive-outcome rate of faith based recovery programs. I don't know if longitudinal studies exist that are not by sources with an agenda, so I'm relying on personal experience, which is therefore anecdotal. But from what I've seen, depending on faith as the foundation of your recovery is risky.

This isn't to say 12S programs are worthless. In fact they use a shotgun approach and offer several pillars of support, many of which do not depend on the second step. But 12S programs are run with an ulterior motive, so it has a similar risk as sending a troubled teen to seek counsel in a youth ministry. Buyer beware.

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[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago* (3 children)

Thank you for a well thought out, reasonable, balanced and accurate take.

The point is more that the motivations and impacts of removing faith from people can lead to unexpected outcomes, and I agree that faith based redemption isn't a guarantee, nor the only solution to undesirable behaviour.

Thus, instead of creating a more reasonable atmosphere for atheists, this campaign was just throwing stuff out there and just seeing what happened. Which isn't exactly a noble way of achieving things.

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[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

The new atheist movement was a response to two things.

One, the 9/11 attacks, which demonstrated just how severe a threat suicide terror attacks facilitated by religious conviction could be. And...

Two, the rise of fundamentalist Christianity as a political force in the United States and the UK. Before the 9/11 attacks George W. Bush announced he would stop enforcing the rule that tax-exempt churches were not allowed to endorse specific candidates or referendums, and Protestant Evangelical churches immediately started preaching how to vote. (I don't know the specific mechanisms of religion in British politics, but it was a concern expressed by Dawkins as early as his 2002 TED talk.)

Dawkins was also specifically frustrated at (rather novice) attacks on biological evolution from Christian and Islamic organizations, who sought to change how science was taught in schools to adhere to their respective dogmas.

The new atheist movement was facilitated by the early internet, largely to raise awareness of specious religious arguments (against science, against LGBT+, against abortion access, in favor of corporal punishment, and so on) and also to assist nontheists, agnostics and philosophers to better define what they do or don't believe.

Also, atheists were (and still are) distrusted, more so than rival religions. Anti-atheist propaganda by religion-affiliated political organizations was sometimes put up on billboards and in schools. One of the missions of the new atheist movement is to counter prejudice against atheists that continues on to this day.

Since then, the new atheist movement has also a subset that helps religious victims of abuse deconstruct their faith. It turns out we have a whole lot of those coming out of Christianity and Islam, alike, and that seems to be the movement with the longest tail, and has only grown since major figures of the NAM have revealed their less-than-savory natures.

(Dawkins' arguments are robust, regarding atheism and addressing the religious debate sector. He just is an extreme dick, and has revealed himself to be so on social media.)

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[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 point 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

I agree with the majority of the things you are saying, however, the distinction between New Atheism and existing secular frameworks, ideals and organisations is the aggression, counterattacking nature that emboldened a callous attitude in it's followers. People of varying religious perspectives were able to participate in processes like the enlightenment and emancipation, and governments formed around that time aimed to replace the power of the church but not humiliate followers.

There are documented posts of edgelords who took that shit too far that illustrated the picture of a fedora wearing edgelord saying things like "oh my science" and trying to get people to abandon their faith, who were not toxic with their faith.

That's what the OP is complaining about, and the response that atheists don't congregate or proselytise is not correct.

No one particularly says "fuck the Quakers and humanists" or "Fuck the UN" because of their secular stance. Secular, interfaith dialogues take place, and instead of respectful inclusion in that, new atheists were more interested in holding up and bringing disproportionate attention to the Finsbury park imam with the hook hands who was preaching all kinds of hate.

Just fucking report him to the cops man. There are many other mosques in London that are basically an apartment over there that some guy runs once in a while for the benefit of the community to get together and celebrate an event, who has a fucking day job.

Or saying that torture was necessary and not even that bad, which is awful for human rights, and then literally throwing in the towel because he couldn't handle it when they did it to him. Abu Hamza

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[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 months ago

Heh, I'm reminded of a handful of right-wing pundits who asserted torture is not that bad in 2003 shortly after the revelations at the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal turned into the CIA extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program. They volunteered to be waterboarded by SERE and cracked inside minutes. The whole US torture program affair is even worse given that before the George W. Bush administration, interrogation techniques used by the US were based on the Hanns Scharff methods, which don't involve torture or any kind of coercion at all.

But my position on the risks of mores founded on religious dogma come from witnessing the rise of white Christian nationalism, which is the result of a deliberate effort to reshape Christian morality so that it's entirely unrecognizable compared to a basic reading of the bible, hence we have major religious figures asserting:
~ wealth accumulation is good
~ leaving the poor and the sick to languish is acceptable
~ tolerating LGBT+ folk is abominable
~ casting out the immigrant is righteous
~ waging aggressive war can be just.

I haven't been able to read that into the bible, and yet the churches in power here are eager to prosecute anyone who disagrees.

It's a clear demonstration that the alleged word of God can be corrupted to any purpose, and it raises a philosophical question of why our creator would provide doctrine that could be so easily misunderstood and deliberately perverted. Despite the Protestant value of Sola scriptura, the Christian is forced to choose what ministers to believe, what scholarly opinions to accept, what interpretations to accept as canon, and what passages to prioritize over others. And for most Christians, they default to whatever values they were raised with.

Dan McClellan points out the bible is neither inerrant, nor univocal, nor inspired. Also that, from the beginning, the bible has been reshaped to fit local customs and serve as a proof text. We see this in how slavery is given full-throated endorsement in both testaments, even though it is proscribed in post-enlightenment society.

We have to, as a collective, figure out on our own what our values are. Very commonly, divine command theory serves to bypass rules of reciprocity and avoidance of harm in order to serve hierarchical agendas. And history has borne this out time and again.

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