Whores, Drug Dealers have better Morals than Religious People

[Ramaraksha]

Was talking to my friend - or at least thought was my friend - the other day & he coolly informs me that unless i am a christian, me and my loved ones are going to hell and then he smiles and says - I am praying for you - as if he was doing me a favor! This guy with an advanced degree and experienced person - at least above 40 - thinks i will be thanking him when all i can think of giving him a swift kick you-know-where

How to explain this? How is it that educated, intelligenct adults are so quick and ready to throw the rest of humanity - women, children, babies, grandmothers - under the bus so callously, so easily? At least when a whore or a drug dealer loses her or his morals, they do it because of cold,hard cash - what do these guys get? Just a nice easy breezy promise of the easy life in heaven! How is it that intelligent educated persons cannot see thru these easy promises - any fool can promise the moon - a proselytizing religion making an easy promise of heaven just by joining a religion? wow! shocker! Of course they are going to make that promise - they want you to join the religion - these are carrot & stick religions - the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell used liberally - Heaven is the longest running and biggest Ponzi Scheme ever

As i have posted before, Heaven is a metaphor for childhood - a time when we had no cares, happy, played all day and were protected and sheltered. Does not even one person of these millions of believers ever wonder that Heaven sounds a bit too good to be true? You get the good life just because you joined a religion - works don't matter - if works don't matter then life doesn't matter? So then what is this Grand plan they keep talking about? Sit on our collective butts in heaven and take it easy? That is the grand plan?

And offering the easy life is all it takes for you to lose all your humanity, principles and ethics? You lose sight of the fact that these are people, human beings with loved ones, hopes and desires? There are freedom fighters here, people who have given their lives for their country, gave their lives while saving others - all that means nothing to your God? Just religion? No, this is not God saying but a religion shamelessly using God, using threats & unbelievably millions of highly educated can't see thru that!

It becomes a state under Hitler - the Nazis didn't care whether the jew was young or old, man or child, whether the person was a piller of the community, a person who helped the state become better - being a jew was a crime and you must now be sent to Gas chambers. The same sick ideas are being played here by so-called intelligent, educated people and to their own freinds! wow!

All one can do is step back and stare open-mouthed at the power of religion - that it can brainwash at will good, honest people and has done throughout the centuries - for you ever heard a christian or muslim express the thought that setting people apart by religion was wrong? Inhuman?

 

[Valjean]

Well, because the decision to damn is not your friend's, he can safely distance himself from it. He is not responsible.
As for his apparent Schadenfreude, perhaps that's just human nature. We're a tribal species and empathy for an outgroup isn't one of our strongest features.

 

[bilby]

Well, because the decision to damn is not your friend's, he can safely distance himself from it. He is not responsible.

Indeed. The will of the Fuhrer Lord is to be respected and obeyed, never questioned.

As for his apparent Schadenfreude, perhaps that's just human nature. We're a tribal species and empathy for an outgroup isn't one of our strongest features.

Hey, at least it isn't him in the pit of fire; and if he was to show a shred of sympathy, Hitler Jehova might very well decide to put him there to teach him a lesson.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I dunno about Schadenfreude. It's not that he enjoys your doom.
But he does enjoy being part of the 'in' crowd.

And we can only know we're in the 'in' crowd when we can identify the 'out' crowd.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

I dunno about Schadenfreude. It's not that he enjoys your doom.
But he does enjoy being part of the 'in' crowd.

And we can only know we're in the 'in' crowd when we can identify the 'out' crowd.

I think it is a bit of Schadenfreude. They seem to be quite happy about the idea of sitting up in Heaven while watching all the stupid atheists burning in Hell and saying "Ha ha! I told you so".

 

[ideologyhunter]

You have stated the riddle that gets me, too: the fact that these are often educated people, who should be capable of applying their analytical skills to these old folk traditions and texts -- and they won't do it! In one breath they'll be capable of rational discourse on some political, social, or technological topic -- they'll parse a good argument and perhaps support a counterintuitive conclusion. In the next breath, they'll parrot some idiotic old premise of Christian theology that should raise all the warning flags of the brain. Or they'll assume that everything Jesus is portrayed as doing or saying in the NT is a fact. No substantiation required. It's the weirdest disconnect.

 

[Bronzeage]

I don't know if drug dealers have better morals than religious people, but in my city, they have helped hundreds of people learn whether there is a life after death, or not.

 

[Syed]

Whores, Drug Dealers have better Morals than Religious People

where did your moral come from? Whores, Drug Dealers?

 

[Achwienichtig]

Three thoughts cross my mind.

1) The shear amount of time and energy our culture has put into studying theology and Biblical text for the past 1600 or so years (measuring from Augustine) is a sign that, on a whole, Christianity is an educated religion. I don't mean that it's a the truth. I mean that there is a very intellectual culture within Christianity. Very often, the question is not one of rationality. It is usually more an issue of what people take as their starting point.

2) Are you sure your friend wasn't joking? I know of many Christians who have a sense of humor about hell. Usually the jokes happen between people of different denominations. My baptist friend and I used to also joke about such things (I was Catholic). "Too bad you Catholics aren't saved," he'd say to me. "If you do go to heaven, it's because the Catholics got you there," was one reply. Anyway, just a thought.

3) I never thought belief in hell was too far a stretch to begin with. I mean, once you believe in a loving God, you already have to ask why people die from cancer, why children are raped and killed, why there's so much pain in the world, etc. If you can believe that a loving God is compatible with that, then I don't see how belief in hell is all that different. I think for most Christians its just one more in list of bad things they're happy not to have to experience.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Also -- I hope this relates to the OP -- how many Christians and Christian denominations really believe in Satan? Isn't the old boy passé in a lot of churches? Do the majority of church-goers in the U.S. attend a church where the pastor warns them about Satan's wiles? I'm not willing to attend any churches to find out, but in the distant past (40 + years back) when I was in a church and actually heard a sermon (mainly in Presbyterian congregations) I never once heard a pastor reference Satan.

 

[Jokodo]

Whores [...] have better Morals than Religious People

Yes, and farmers. Waiters have better morals than religious people. Farmers have better morals than religious people. Commercial sailors have better morals than religious people. Hairdressers have better morals than religious people. With the obvious qualification that there's always going to be a significant overlap between any of those vocational groups and the category of religious people, all of these are probably true, and none of them is a particularly strong claim.

If you want to make a strong claim, you may want to go with "Lawyers/politicians/bankers have better morals than religious people".

(There may be better ways to express this, but I do indeed object to the use of "whore" as exemplifying an immoral group of people. There's nothing unhonourable, let alone immoral, about "whores" per se.)

 

[excreationist]

Also -- I hope this relates to the OP -- how many Christians and Christian denominations really believe in Satan?....

https://www.barna.org/barna-update/...at-satan-or-the-holy-spirit-exis#.U2m5A6Ixhlo

Barna.org is good for religious statistics.

...Four out of ten Christians (40%) strongly agreed that Satan “is not a living being but is a symbol of evil.” An additional two out of ten Christians (19%) said they “agree somewhat” with that perspective. A minority of Christians indicated that they believe Satan is real by disagreeing with the statement: one-quarter (26%) disagreed strongly and about one-tenth (9%) disagreed somewhat. The remaining 8% were not sure what they believe about the existence of Satan....

 

[Underseer]

The heaven/hell thing is not evidence that Christians (and Muslims) are immoral. The heaven/hell thing is part of how those two religions scare people into staying in the religion should they ever have any doubts. The heaven/hell thing is stupid, not evil, particularly when they try to use threats about hell to convince you that their religion is true.

The main problem with religion isn't morality, it's that it presents people with a bad epistemology. Once you train people to do a bad job of separating true from false (say, by telling them that it is virtuous to form conclusions without sufficient evidence [the definition of faith]), they will make bad decisions. If they make bad decisions, then their moral decisions will also be slightly worse.

Religiosity correlates with violent crime rates, infidelity rates, alcoholism rates, rates of unprotected sex, divorce rates, and a whole host of social ills. I don't think this is the result of lower morality, but of poorer decision-making skills and less forethought. They've been brainwashed into doing a bad job of knowing true from false, and thus make bad decisions. Such bad decisions could easily explain some or most of the above correlations.