• @yiliu@informis.land
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    1189 months ago

    Oops, now abortion is illegal and gay people can’t marry!

    Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences…

      • Cyrus Draegur
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        819 months ago

        it never negatively impacts others until suddenly it does. It’s insidious.

        • @Zozano@lemy.lol
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          209 months ago

          Also it can affect people in ways they aren’t even aware themselves.

          Fortune telling for example.

          My friends mum sold her house because the fortune teller told her some vague nonsense she interpreted to mean the end of the world was approaching.

    • @masquenox@lemmy.world
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      229 months ago

      Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences

      Considering how many edgelord atheists I’ve seen uncritically embrace the tenets of white supremacism I’m inclined to agree with you…

      • @yiliu@informis.land
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        349 months ago

        Just for fun, you should take a map of religious belief in the US by region, and overlay a map of racist beliefs and policies in the US, and note the overlap. I think you’ll discover that large coastal urban centers (where religious belief is lowest) are not hotbeds of white supremacism.

        I think you’re confusing a bunch of online trolls who pick opinions specifically to get a rise, with real, actual people in the wild.

        • @masquenox@lemmy.world
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          -229 months ago

          overlay a map of racist beliefs and policies in the US

          There are places in the US unaffected by “racist beliefs and policies?” Seems to me that white supremacist ideology is pretty uniform across the US - the only difference is that certain types and classes of white people pretend not to be. Is this what you are referring to?

            • @masquenox@lemmy.world
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              -79 months ago

              Imagine the privilege required to believe that white supremacism is only limited to those who expresses it overtly.

              • @TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works
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                99 months ago

                As a POC, I would rather live in a place where racists are a little more afraid to be open about it, than a place where the KKK and Nazis are visible and tolerated. It turns out that many of the places where racists are most tolerated are places in the Bible Belt.

                Yea, white supremacism is everywhere, but there are definitely levels to it.

                • @masquenox@lemmy.world
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                  -29 months ago

                  but there are definitely levels to it.

                  I never said there wasn’t - but there are a lot of (mostly white) liberals here that will seemingly only acknowledge the existence of white supremacism if it’s wearing a white hood or a swastika while ignoring the fundamental white supremacism US society is based on that enables the overt white supremacism in the first place.

                  • @Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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                    29 months ago

                    Seems to me that white supremacist ideology is pretty uniform across the US

                    Literally your words, what the fuck

              • @surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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                79 months ago

                Since you’re able to work a computer, I assume you’re competent enough to understand that two things can be bad, but one can be MORE bad. The South is currently more bad.

                Even if the North is “hiding it”, as you say from under the tinfoil hat, the fact that it’s hidden means the oppression is less bad.

    • @nikita@sh.itjust.works
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      199 months ago

      Yup.

      Sometimes I catch myself thinking that we are more modern than we actually are, that we have already moved past these issues. It’s important to remember that civil rights, feminism, and LGBTQ rights are not topics to be relegated to the history books. They are as alive now as they were in the 60s for today, like yesterday and tomorrow, is a constant fight for our rights.

    • @wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      149 months ago

      In my experience, people like that will be terrible with or without religion.

      The difference of “external man in the sky” vs “internal concept of my own rightness” for how they feel ok about their own actions doesn’t make a difference when they’re still a bigoted asshat at their core.

      • @yiliu@informis.land
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        119 months ago

        You think that something like 40% of the population of the US is voting for cruel and regressive laws just for the lulz, and it has nothing to do with their stated belief system?

        • @Archer@lemmy.world
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          29 months ago

          Yes. The cruelty is the point. Belief systems are a nice excuse for later. They would do that either way

      • There’s a pretty big difference though: when you’re absolutely convinced that your own inner voice that distinguishes right from wrong is inspired by, or at least approved by, the ultimate judge of the Universe, it’s going to be incomparably harder for you to accept that you are, indeed, being an unreasonably smug asshole.

    • @Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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      -29 months ago

      I think you missed the bit of the above post that specified that spiritual belief was fine WHEN it’s expressed in “a healthy way and it doesn’t negatively affect the people around them” - restricting abortion and marriage prohibitions both are violations of their actual premise.

      • MentalEdge
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        249 months ago

        I think they’re saying there is no such thing as harmless belief in the unreal.

        These people vote, raise children, form relationships and live life in general, interpreting reality with a fundamental distortion. I would agree that it’s hard to claim they won’t end up harming someone.

        • @Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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          -19 months ago

          See that I just can’t abide. So many people just want to cut other people’s grass that they can’t frame anything they don’t like as a fundamental problem to be addressed and rooted out of society as a whole. Everybody has “distortions”. You are stuck living your life through a fixed lense perspective. Your distortion might be privilege, it might be status it might be health or ability. Even the most idiotic person out there is not invalid and undeserving of happiness. What level of acuity you have is less important than whether or not you are kind. Why should belief in the unreal be any different if they still subscribe to the modern standard of what is kind?

          My time in the atheist community was very short lived because I was never atheist “enough” for not actually caring if other people believed in fairies. The gatekeeping and lack of tolerance for the legitimately harmless always felt like supremacist thinking where the rubric for acceptable to be afforded basic human respect was a coin slot’s width.

          • MentalEdge
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            9 months ago

            None of us live our lives doing zero damage. We aren’t omnipotent, and as such, we will hurt others during our lives. We can merely hope it will be an amount too small to matter.

            I would suggest that being raised atheist leaves you better equipped to understand the world in a way that more closely matches reality, and thereby enables you to more consistently avoid causing harm during your life.

            Does that mean every person needs to deconvert tomorrow? No. The process in itself can end up doing more damage than it’d be preventing.

            But it does mean religion can’t continue to be the default world view, if we are to improve as a society. For a better tomorrow, it does need to be phased out as quickly as it can harmlessly be achieved.

            That’s why we do have to care. Deconverting grandma doesn’t matter too much, but if a relative or friend is raising a kid to be religious, preventing that is worth attempting. Another zealot in a coming generation will do more harm than good.

            No kind person means to do harm, but unless you get as close to knowing reality as you can, that won’t always be enough. And even then, you’ll probably break some hearts and say things that cause someone somewhere to need more time in therapy.

            But you’ll certainly be more effective in realising the things you mean to do and say, if you don’t live life thinking prayers affect reality.

            As for you experience with atheists, you’re describing anti-theists. People who hold an actual stance against religion. It sound like you found some especially virtue signaling ones, bad luck.

            But an atheist is just someone who doesn’t believe, not some given type of person, ideology, or the nature of your relationship with the rest of humanity.

      • @yiliu@informis.land
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        9 months ago

        Oh sure, the religious people out there whose deeply-held beliefs don’t affect the way they think or feel or interact with other people are fine! It’s just those people who read the book they believe was composed by God Almighty Himself as a manual for human behavior and let it actually affect their behavior (and votes) that are the problem.