this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
87 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43939 readers
531 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think that a lot of Atheists oversimplify religion. (NB: I'm Atheist myself.)
"True" and "false" only apply to statements about reality (epistemic). And sure, religion has a lot of them: "God exists", "if you fornicate you'll go to Hell", "the world was created in seven days" etc. I think that most of them are false.
However a religion isn't just its epistemic statements. It's also morals, practices/rituals, and a community. Those things cannot be true or false, because they are not statements about reality. You need another ground to refer to them, as "good" vs. "bad" (deontic).
Yeah, but atheism does not mean nihilism. It doesn't even mean opposing religions in general. It simply means you do not believe in a higher (or multiple) being often referred to as "god".
Do I believe in the power of love? Yes! Do I spiritually put my family and friends over anything else? Yes! Do I believe that I need to help people, even though it is not beneficial for me? Yes! Do I believe that placebo works? Yes! ...
I'm aware - and that's part of my reasoning.
Atheism itself isn't even a whole set of epistemic statements. It's lack of belief in one statement. It doesn't imply any sort set of values (like nihilism, secular humanism, satanism... or even the ones from the religions), nor give you any practice (no mass, no "it's Salah time, drop what you're doing for a prayer"), nor it makes you part of a community (much more than "we don't believe in centaurs, we should hang around togerther" would).
And Atheists often transpose that into religion, oversimplifying it into "you believe in one or more gods". But religion was never just that, it's a lot more things. And most of those things can be good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, but not true or false.
I agree, but I'm not sure where someone stated something like this in this thread? Especially because the initial post followed a completely different logical reasoning.
OP asked "something many people believe but is not true". The other poster replied "religion". I'm showing that religion contains things that are not true, but religion as a whole cannot be true or false.