@ HumbleThinker

***tree shambles out of the forest, bows***

Very well said. Very honest. Thank you.

And yes, as an atheist, anti-theist, and anti-religionist, I do take offense when someone says my atheism, anti-theism, and anti-religionism is a world view. I shall be the first to admit that the word "belief/believe" is actually a very apt description of my "unbelief" in that a deity does exist.

Here is a copy and paste of a short essay I wrote elsewhere.

According to my world view, the fact that you have different beliefs and views than I do is not wrong. What is wrong in my world view is that you Religious Absolutists feel it is your moral imperative to force your beliefs system onto others who refuse to believe your beliefs. What is wrong in my world view is that you Religious Absolutists firmly believe that ALL humans are worthless, sick, immoral, wicked demons. That none can be good, moral, ethical, and treat others as being worthy of being treated as equals without some form of Sky Faerie and/or Magic Lich Virgin telling them how to live their lives and what they can and cannot think. Most Religious Absolutists believe I deserve to be tortured by having my flesh seared off my bones and regrown only to be burnt off again and again and again for all eternity if I do not believe the same way they do. As if the threat of your Hell makes your bullshit smell any sweeter. And obversely, as if your enticement of Heaven is any sweeter. Read “Is Heaven Really Good?” This is applicable to any religion espousing they possess the ultimate truth of an afterlife which cannot be proven to exist.

In my world view, I can ascertain and evaluate what is truth. “How do I determine truth?” you may ask. Simple, with objective hard empirical evidence, logical and deductive reasoning and analysis, rational and analytical thought, critical thinking, cogitation, empathy and sympathy, and reasonable arguments.

How do you determine truth? Simple, you run to an obsolete Bronze Age religious text full of pure savage immorality.

I can look at anything, and say, “that is right,” or “that is wrong.” But according to your world view, or should I say according to that obsolete Bronze Age text, I am incapable of determining what is right or wrong, good or evil, truth or lie. You cannot seem to derive any reason of your own to think anything is wrong except by what your book tells you. “That is depressing to say the least,” said Godless Cranium, to which I wholly agree. It is so sad...

Absolutists are clearly incapable of defending their moral beliefs without relying on some other immoral religious text. Moral beliefs should be defended and explained by rationality and reasoning.

Why is it that you feel that ONLY you have the right and can make an account for what is right or wrong? In your world view, how exactly can you know what is absolutely true? You saying that an obsolete and immoral religious text tells you, makes no sense to me whatsoever. And relying on that obsolete and immoral religious text also informs me that you are purposefully mentally retarding your mental faculties to the point that you are incapable of thinking for yourself.

You seem to be telling me that you can look at an event and intuitively know what is true, or right and wrong, or good and evil, just because you have memorized an obsolete religious text, or memorized only that which you have cherry-picked out of it. Yet I see Religious Absolutists doing the most heinous crimes, such as the rape and molestation of children, blowing up innocent people, past and current, at least once a month in the news. It seems I can never turn on the news without seeing a story, once a month, about a priest having raped and/or molested children, or a Muslim blowing up innocent people. And these news stories have been going on for the last three to four decades. Then you wonder why I no longer watch the news.

There are myriad different Religious Absolutist divisions (30,000 to 42,000 in all the Abrahamic religions!), and none seem to agree on how to interpret your obsolete text. Yet you want me to believe that you know the ultimate truth in any given situation. Why should I not be able to form an opinion on what is right and what is wrong? You Religious Absolutists do it all the time. Even if it goes against your obsolete text. What makes you so damned privileged? As Christopher Hitchens once said (paraphrased), “Since it is preposterous to believe all religions are true, the only final answer is that they are all wrong.”

How do you Religious Absolutists determine that raping someone, or beating someone in the street is wrong when your Bible is full of rape and murder and genocide and torture and abuse and slavery? Justifying any kind of violence is easy using your Bible. Especially if you buy into William Lane Craig’s bullshit known as Divine Command Morality.

Divine Command Morality. The belief you Religious Absolutists and Apologists hold onto that says that anything your God commands is good, regardless of its actual moral implications. This is the biggest pile of bullshit I have ever heard. I found these two formal definitions for Divine Command Morality: “Morality is dependent upon God, and that moral obligation consists in obedience to God’s commands.” And from Wikipedia: “A meta-ethical theory which proposes that an action’s status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God.” In other words, if “God” tells you to perform an ethnic genocidal cleansing, then it is morally good. To which I would say, BULLSHIT! The Divine Command Hypothesis is the most monstrously immoral thought ever thunk.

How I reason that raping or beating someone is wrong, is because I can sympathize with the victim. I can even empathize with the victim, because even I got my ass whooped in the street once for no other reason than my car died in the wrong part of town, and for nothing more than what I did not have in my wallet.

I do not want to live in a biblical-based society full of rape and violence because I want to be safe. I desire for my friends, my family, and my loved ones to be the safest they can be within human possibility by having laws that help to protect them from rape and assault. I believe that ALL human beings have integrity, dignity, and worth. I do not need a silly Sky Faerie to tell me that. I can arrive at that truth with my own cognitive abilities. Should I list them again? Empathy, rationality, logic, reason, deduction, critical thinking, sympathy, analytical thought, and the greatest one of all, LOVE.

I cannot think of anyway how I shall ever understand why you Religious Absolutists find this so hard to comprehend. Such is just one of myriad reasons I find ALL religions like yours so damned repugnant and disgusting. It teaches me that I cannot be good to others without some form of special permission from your Sky Faerie. And, to get that special permission, all I have to do is to kneel and bow down and kiss its ass. This robs me of my self-worth, my dignity, my self-esteem, my mental faculties, my morality, and teaches me that all human beings are wretched and wicked things, needing an imaginative Sky Faerie to heal them. Why is it that you can make judgment calls and dictate what is right and wrong, and I cannot?

As Godless Cranium once said, “If I bought into that argument, I would be just as deluded as all of you.”

Regardless of what any may say, “Morality is subjective.” It has always been subjective, is subjective, and shall forever be subjective. There is no such thing as objective/absolute morality. What you Religious Absolutists refer to as “objective/absolute morality” is nothing more than the great majority of individual’s subjective morality agreeing with all others as being something “good” for the society of all. Then the religious leaders decide that moral issue becomes the “objective/absolute moral law” of your imaginative Sky Faerie. Proof not one Religious Absolutist is ever capable of an original thought. And since you know you are incapable of anything original, your do as Jesus says and steal it like a thief in the night. When you say you imaginative Sky Faerie dictates objective/absolute morality, you are actually saying it is actually dictating tyrannical totalitarian edicts. Not morals. Think Critically about it.

And my biggest hurrah, thanks for the honesty. Honestly.

rmfr

EDIT: finished cleaning up language since I copied this from a text file and did not bother proofing it more than half way thinking I had already cleaned it up. Thanks HumbleThinker.

PS — Required Definitions

Religious Absolutist – anyone belonging to and possessing an inexorable belief in any religion, due to their absolutist beliefs, and is truly applicable to any inexorable religious believers, especially the worst subset, Apologists.

The difference between a Religious Absolutist and a Religious Person is that the Absolutist completely believes the Bible is inerrantly correct and will not accept any evidence that truthfully proves their beliefs are completely incorrect. A Religious Person actually believes science to be true and views the Bible as basically a fairy tale, excepting the very few true truths it does hold. Basically all a Religious Person is doing is trying to find an answer to the need of the spirituality they feel. An Absolutist is perfectly willing to kill, perform physical torture, and/or psychological terrorism, against a godless heathen in order to save his/her soul, regardless of the cost or morality. A Religious Person is actually rational about their beliefs and what they hold to be true. Atheists and Religious Perons can read many books and still feel they have a lot to learn. Absolutists barely read that one book and feel they know everything. And the worst Absolutists of all, the Apologists. The Apologists go to only religious universities and earn degrees proving they have cherry-picked memorizations of the Bible in order to argue against Atheism. Some of the worst are Ken Ham, William Lane Craig, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Joel Osteen, Eric Hovind, Sy Bruggencate, and many many others.

Religious Absolutist Apologist – a dastardly subset of the Religious Absolutists who practices apologetics, which is the assumption of presupposed conclusions that have nothing to do with reason and rationality and actual information, creating irrational excuses and whatever conflicting ideas justifying their baseless assumptions, regardless of what the true facts are, using beguiling dialectical semantics, distorted and perverted data, emotional whiney-ass pleas, due to an indoctrination conditioning that is so ingrained they never question the veracity of the nonsense they offer, or why they need to defend their faith at all.