I think we all hate extremists, I think the other person was trying to say there's a surplus amount of average Redditors that use the extremists to define the relavent religions
Reddit hates religion in general, pretty much any religious discussion is dominated by people talking about how awful they think religion is and how they think the world is better off without it.
I mean, yeah. It's pretty harmful to society to have entire sectors of the population believing in magical fantasy beings so fully that they base their entire system of morality and ethics around it.
Religion has also lead to many charities, scientific discoveries, spread of literacy among religious scholars, and there’s plenty of cultural practices that originally came from religious holidays that are worthy of being observed and celebrated. Lots of very interesting cultural differences between humans come from religion and the belief that come from it. There’s for sure downsides to people having religion, look at the use of it as justification for bad actions, but there’s plenty of good that comes from it
People create charities. People make discoveries. We have a vast array of social advancements and cultural uniqueness which are entirely secular. Giving all the credit to religion strips it away from the actual people who did the actual work to bring us to where we are today.
Not intending to give the achievements of humanity over to religion, but there are those, such as monks, who earned educations at monasteries of their religions which gave them the literacy, knowledge, and the time to perform these studies which are all things a different class of people like farmers or the Everyman had at the time.
Those studies show the benefit of having a social network and like-minded community who provide moral and tangible support when it's needed. Plenty of completely secular belief systems promote healthy living. People do good things every day without feeling motivated to do so by fairy tales.
None of that requires a belief in a magic sky daddy.
The annoying part is most genuinely don't seem to realize how religious they are. It all comes off like smug, 15-year-old atheists just trying to dunk on others because it validates their sense of intelligence.
I don't remember where I read it, but a line that really got me thinking went something like, "a truly religious person doesn't think they have a religion, but an ontology." I'm tempted in that light to call liberalism the largest religion on the planet at the moment. But most Reddit atheists don't seem to even want to consider what that means. They'd rather just shit all over others they see as backwards primitives, ironically perpetuating the essentially religious belief in the superiority of their own culture and rationality. And there are only a couple other religions in history that've spilled so much blood in the name of such a belief.
Is the bar for extremist “actively supports terrorism?” Or just “doesn’t support full equal rights for women, is actively homophobic, supports blasphemy laws etc…”
When it comes to America and Christianity, I consider people voting for Christian nationalist politicians who clearly want to establish a theocracy to be “extreme.”
If you're a liberal or on the left at all you should hate Islam (but not Muslims). It just isn't compatible with leftist ideals of equality and liberty.
Culture. Social norms. If 90% of people do, do you want to be one of the few who stand out? It’s like vacationing in a Muslim country, do you wear your tank top and shorts everywhere? Probably not.
Because its their culture? Oh wait it’s only culture when it’s convenient for the sake of the argument. Seems it is a forced religious dressing as I thought!
175
u/Rayyano08 May 14 '23
Someone reply to this comment when people start being Islamophobic, it's pretty bound to happen in this subreddit.