you've made me pull out my debate stickmathexpert9981 wrote:
words
Basically, unless you have solid evidence for your claims, anything that is not fact should not be believed and furthermore, can be potentially be dangerous.you do this thousands of time a day every time you look at pictures, even ones of people and things you've seen before and are intimately acquainted with. hundreds of millions of judgements are drawn by your subconscious every day, made with nothing but instinctual earnest. you are a machine that disseminates and coagulates seemingly arbitrary patterns into things that "mean" something - all at the behest of a part of your being that you cannot even control.
Simply going to church and representing the masses of people that the pope (or any religions leader) has managed to deceive is just continuing the destructive cycle that can lead to homophobia, lies, and manipulation.strawman it up, baby. clearly since homophobia has been insinuated with religion in the past, that means that all religions (ESPECIALLY CHRISTIANITY SNARL) are homophobic and thus are bad. first step in critical thinking is really important: correlation is not equal to causation. this will take you far in life - embrace it, and you'll laugh at silly notions like the one you're putting forward instead of being ridiculed by them.
The number of people that become raised to believe that "fags should burn in hell" will increase if religion continues to grow; religions encourage and practically breed discrimination, and unless religion itself fundamentally changes this will never change.imperative assertions with absolutely no basis. do you know what we call things like this? we call them prejudices. blanket assertions about discrimination in large society groups is nothing new and by far nothing specific to religions, even if the ethos of some may ardently encourage it. i invite you to actually sit down and read some literature on human group formation in social environments, and you'll see that a lot of things are the way they are fundamentally because of people, not because of the structures and the grouping they create.
personally, for me, religion is a significant part of my life. i am not a regular attender to religious services nor am i particularly pious or devout, but i was raised by parents whom were struggling to escape from the clutches of the jehovahs witnesses and as such, had a very 'neutral' aspect of Christianity taught to me from a very early age. i was taught the core teachings, jesus died for our sins, so on, so forth, with none of the secular associational stuff such as the trinity or any other debated aspects. my father simply sat me down and told me how he saw and felt the world, and how his faith was a massive part of that. my father is very scientifically oriented - his faith has never once interrupted that. he once worked as an industrial chemist and still kindles a deep love for science and chemistry in general despite not being able to work in it anymore due to health issues. i have overarching conversations with him about many different developments in my own field (psychology) and ones I dabble in for shits and giggles.
from all those conversations, and infact, everything i've ever learned, one key aspect stays with me. how immeasurably complex yet startlingly specific almost everything in this planet and perhaps universe is. there are links upon links upon links and then more links where you wouldn't even expect to find links. everything ties itself to everything else in ways that defy belief. the world's systems are so unbelievably convoluted and unspeakably complex to the degree that they self-regulate passively with no intervention required whatsoever.
asking me as an intellectual individual to believe that this all arose from absolutely nothing and is completely a product of chance and iteration is ridiculous - significantly less ridiculous than the idea that another divine or otherwise supernaturally powerful entity created and designed the foundations of the incredibly complex organic systems that underpin our planet and our species' survival in an otherwise toxic and unforgiving universe to our form of life.
believe what you like about religion. i don't really care and the fact that i don't care probably won't matter the tiniest bit to you, and that's great. rail on it for people being stupid and using its bounds as a means to achieve their own means, the same way people argue about governmental structures and how they are often abused for the benefit of the few at the expense of many. rail on it for being a product of opinions and ideals thousands of years old in a world decidedly different and foreign from our current one in every way. rail on it for promoting prejudice, slaughtering kittens and stealing candy from babies because you are too dense to see past group markers like mostly everybody else and are too happy to continue with your kneejerk reaction to everything pertinent religion because you too, like the religious fanatics, are too caught up in their prejudices which seem "internally" correct to sit down and actively contemplate and discuss a matter in depth.
tl;dr - correlation != causation, group affiliation != individual attribution