Are Safe Spaces for Religious Millennials Justified?

[Eric the Green]

(08-11-2021, 05:05 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(08-11-2021, 04:26 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(08-10-2021, 06:16 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:

(07-11-2021, 10:12 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-10-2021, 05:19 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: I mean more not befriending them as much or marrying them. Also separate places to socialize and separate clubs. There won't be any more Christians in my generation if we don't do this.

You already have the perfect gathering place: church.  Any place in the public sphere is open to all, and private member-only-"clubs" are more elitist than what you have in mind.

I think if atheists are allowed to be intolerant to religious people and state their non belief in God as a fact, I shouldn't have to be tolerant of the atheists. Also if they are to become the majority of my generation, technically I am a minority and they are the ones oppressing me.

The only atheists who were really-bad people were the Marxist-Leninists who were awful for reasons other than rejection of religious faith. 

I suggest that you take a look at the writings of Bertrand Russell, who rejected religion for very different reasons than any political fanaticism. There's much to find fault with with Christianity, such as that almost all of the Nazi war criminals were of Christian origin. Add to this some horrible deeds done in devotion, most infamously the Inquisition. To be sure, the Roman Catholic Church fully repudiates the Inquisition today, bit it cannot undo the damage. In case you think that the Anglican communion is innocent, then consider how well it served the despot Henry VIII who adopted the same savagery against Catholics as the Inquisition did to non-Catholics. The Crusades are nothing suited to Christian pride. 

I saw some Jewish literature refuting Jesus as the Messiah on multiple grounds, and the harshest is that Christians have done horrible things. A religion that could truly improve people would not churn out so many bad people. Oh, yes, there are good ones, but their goodness is following Jewish moral laws in ways that, should such behavior be the norm, will get them to Heaven -- the Jewish Heaven, the only one that exists. They will convert at the gate. (I certainly don't want to go where the Nazis are!)  

Christians in Europe and the Americas were involved in one of the greatest crimes ever against Humanity in the Atlantic slave trade. Add to this the mistreatment of Native populations of the New World... Never show pride in any connection to the Crusaders (Kill them all -- and God will sort it out!). Oddly, the Catholic Church (which now repudiates this) encouraged the Inquisition for devout reasons. Need I remind you of all the people of Christian origin who did the absolute worst on behalf of Nazism?  

To be sure, I have much good to say of Quakers, who proscribed slavery quickly as an abomination and rejected militarism as a horror. I did one of those tests at BeliefNet that tests what one's beliefs are and matches them to the closest religious tradition. The three best matches for me were 

1. liberal Quakerism
2. Unitarian-Universalism
3. Reform Judaism

I was not brought up in any one of those traditions. Oddly my parents were antisemitic.. well, if one is to rebel against one thing, that is one of the best things to rebel against.

There is no objective morality under atheism. If you take atheism to its conclusions, you are just a bunch of random cells created randomly and there is no objective value for anyone's life. The Nazis views were very social Darwinist. It was based on what they thought was survival of the fittest and they culled the fittest through murder and thought it was evolution. The goal was ultimately to create a master race through forced evolution. They said they were Christian but their actions reflected more of a secular view. Society based morality is also secular. Christianity also inspired the abolitionists but somehow only bad things get attributed to Christians and all the good things to atheists.

There is enough blame to go around among religions (especially Christianity) and atheism. 

Christianity is basically materialist; seeing a battle between spirit and matter, God and Devil. It is also authoritarian and socially conservative, meaning the faithful are deserving and the infidels are to be converted or killed. To say "only bad things get attributed to Christians and all the good things to atheists" makes me wonder what planet or nation you live in, Aspie.

I understand that Germans in the Nazi era belonged to an ancestry that was Christian for about 1000 years. But the Nazis were as Aspie says social darwinists and had gone over to materialism. The Nazis were the ultimate social conservatives, but authoritarian, exclusivist Christianity did not prevent this but paved the way for it. Atheists can believe in ethics, but I agree with Aspie that morality is dimmed by materialist atheism, for even though atheists can still have good ethics and believe in principles, the culture that materialism has spawned over the last 3 centuries is increasingly immoral, and moral relativism is not a sufficient basis for ethics.

Neither atheists nor Christians/Muslims have to be authoritarian social conservatives. That is the main problem with both of them. We need to question authority, not submit to it routinely and blindly, and to value all people and all beings, not to pit religious or racial/ethnic groups against each other and conceive and establish superiority of one over the other, or to conceive of Nature as only something material to be conquered and used for our own devices.

I would say a full and ethical life requires going beyond seeing ourselves and other beings as a "bunch of random cells created randomly", OR seeing our group as spiritual and/or virtuous and other beings as material and/or unworthy. Just how one conceives of divinity does not have to be the traditional, exoteric, authoritarian Christian or Muslim way, or the way of denial. To be spiritual but not religious is a step beyond both.