Apparently I need to go back to bed and shut down all social media, because this is the dreck I’m getting now on Bluesky.
Created by @darwintojesus, posted by @markwillworship
I can’t resist, let’s look a little more closely at the supposed contrasts in this illustration.
The average atheist pretends to understand science, while the average Christian understands science
. I’m an atheist who has an advanced degree in biology and teaches evolution, and I guarantee you that the average Christian apologist does not know the first thing about science — I’ve been debating them for a few decades. All I have to do is point out that this illustration was created by a fanatical Christian who thinks Darwin is to science as Jesus is to Christianity.
The atheist doesn’t believe in right and wrong while the Christian believes in right and wrong
. Atheists do believe in right and wrong, they just reject the unthinking authoritarian right and wrong, the rule-following idea that Christians have that they already possess absolute inviolable Truth in their mish-mash of a Bible.
The atheist secretly hates god while the Christian loves god
. Nope. God doesn’t exist. We don’t feel much of anything about the invisible man. Now Christians, on the other hand…
The atheist doesn’t care about evidence while the Christian cares about evidence
. The one thing about most debates between Christians and atheists is that the atheist will spend most of his time asking for evidence to back up the Christian’s assertions, while the Christian will gish-gallop all over the place, making a whole series of baseless claims. These debates get boring and predictable.
See also the atheist refuses to defend his atheist worldview while the Christian defends his worldview
. This is not true, the two approach this concern from two different angles. The Christian thinks a recitation of dogma is a defense, while the atheist expects to give and take evidence.
The atheist has no purpose while the Christian has a real purpose
. All purposes are constructed frameworks we use to explain why we do what we do. Atheists have them, they just don’t accept that they are fixed and absolutely assigned by a deity who communicates them to us through an old book. Christians real
purpose is an arbitrary bit of nonsense, to serve God
, which is dangerous and destructive since that God is observed by following a lot of out-of-date rules that don’t apply to the society we live in.
Then the whole image collapses into scattershot nonsense because the artist couldn’t think of comparable contrasts.
I’m not particularly terrified of dying, I’m sort of resigned to the reality — but I will resist it even as I know it’s inevitable. I don’t believe that Christians are unafraid of death or ready to die and go home
, they will fight it as hard as I will.
I don’t think I’m just an evolved fish. Fish are pretty amazing organisms. I respect my lineage, I don’t deny it like the average Christian does.
I do understand the moral argument
. That’s just the idea that a moral norm is an objective truth that is only explainable as a command from a God, or a kind of created instinct. I understand it, I just reject it.
I don’t want to be god. Can Christians ever get it through their thick skulls that we don’t believe in gods?
I’ll add another label. The average Christian believes in pious bullshit
and readily lies about others
.
I’m on Bluesky every day as a reader, not a commenter.
I don’t get that sort of xian misinformation.
Then again, it is easy to block accounts on Bluesky and I block most right wingnut accounts the first time I see them.
It is very easy to customize your feeds on Bluesky so I get a lot of Resistance to Dictatorship, cats, comics, and rock music.
FWIW, Bluesky is the first social media besides Freethoughtblogs and the late Patheos that I have found entertaining and worthwhile.
I get enough right wingnut content on the three mainstream media news aggregators I follow,
I want one place that is just interesting and entertaining.
You missed the most obvious difference. The atheist, apparently, is a zombie while the Christian, apparently, is — well, not quite sure, either a lumberjack or a sailor, but at least something very manly. Braiinnnsss!
We atheists don’t “understand” science because we have the gall to assume materialistic reasons for phenomenon and completely disregard the existence of
magicmiracles.@ 2
I just wouldn’t be Christianity without toxic masculinity.
It’s my experience that faith is the act of putting oneself above reality. It’s borderline solipsism, thinking reality (including any proposed deities) is subject to the limits of your own imagination.
If such a study could be done, it would be interesting to know if religion has a positive correlation or a negative correlation, or no correlation at all, with simply being a decent human being., I doubt such a study could be done since it may not be possible to well-define “decent human being” or to objectively measure it. But if anyone figures out how to overcome those two hurdles, it sure would be interesting to know. My bet is there would be no correlation at all.
The “moral argument” bit seems weird to me, because religion is so often in conflict with morality. In my experience, theists tend to fall into two basic categories:
– The ones who have a true moral center and therefore end up rather unorthodox.
– The ones whose morality really just boils down to a glorified “might makes right” argument.
After that, it’s just a question of how honest they are about which group they belong to and how clever they are with word games to obscure what they’re actually saying.
…wear the same shoes, but one in Goth colors and the other in cheery blue and yellow. And a Christian apparently doesn’t wear socks, but I can’t tell if that’s different from the atheist. Also, atheists smoke and may currently be undergoing chemo.
PZ: You’ll always get this sort of dreck whenever/wherever you show any presence. They hate you because they’re secretly afraid they’re wrong, they can’t defend their worldview, they have no purpose (other than cowardly trolling), they don’t understand right vs. wrong, they pretend to understand science, and they want to pretend they know what their god is thinking.
I admit, I don’t know what ‘the moral argument’ is. Is that the one where the most moral thing to do is suspend your own judgment and unquestioningly take orders from someone else who has a lengthy history of murder, genocide and rape? Yeah, I don’t understand that.
Also, Christian:
BELIEVES IN TALKING ANIMALS
HAS BUTT UGLY HAIR
REDUCES PEOPLE TO NINE OR TEN CHARACTERISTICS
WEARS UNNECESSARY WATCH LIKE A DORK
TALKS TO THE CEILING
COMMITS MORE CRIMES ON AVERAGE THAN ATHEIST, BUT IT’S OKAY BECAUSE HE ASKS A DEAD GUY FOR FORGIVENESS
ASSUMES MORAL SUPERIORITY DESPITE ACTIONS
PROBABLY HASN’T ACTUALLY READ BIBLE
Did I forget anything?
That is so delusional and absurd. Everything about the assertions in that image are so disgustingly wrong. Xtian terrorists live in an ugly, murderous, insane, fantasy. These brain-dead, logic denying, superstitious sphincters are pushing us down the death spiral.
@ 10
This is where Willam Lane “Sophisticated Theology” Craig swoops in and Jesus-splains to us that since Gawd is the ultimate embodiment of good, nothing he commands can be evil. So all that “murder, genocide and rape” mentioned in The Bible. Yeah, they supposedly had it coming.
Indeed, it’s “evil” to second-guess Gawd’s perfect and omnibenevolent plan.
PZ wrote: I need to go back to bed and shut down all social media
I reply: I hope you will. As I’ve stipulated many times, the major social media is mostly TOXIC crap spewed by knuckle-dragging drooling xtian terrorists and empty-headed social influencers.
I have to disagree with you there – the watch is the one thing the Christian has got right. A watch is far quicker and more convenient to consult than a spyphone, and isn’t constantly reporting your wearabouts and activities to Google/Apple.
Well that’s obviously wrong. I’ve had people give me books claiming to be about self-help but that were actually just more recent and fanciful fiction about Jesus. They did nothing for me, by the way, as their only self-help advice was to pray more.
I don’t think the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer would exist if Christians had a real purpose, either. Part of that struggle as I understand it is to climb your way out of a bad situation by finding or building a new purpose for your life.
This whole graphic is nothing more than a lazy attempt to pat themselves on the back without expending any effort. If atheists didn’t exist they’d find some other group to demonize and do the same thing.
I’ve never known the “Average Christian” to be a man sporting a beard. My guess would be that the “average” Christian Is a woman. The Christian men I’ve known generally don’t have beards. Also, the average Christian may not Caucasian.
@freeline:
Honestly, my expectation on the results of any hypothetical study like that would be ‘no correlation at all’. Most Christians are just people trying to get by as well. The thing is, most Christians also don’t make a big point of announcing to the world that they are Christian with a capital C and then trying to use that to claim that they are better than you; part of the problem here is an availability bias, in that everybody hears the loud self-important idiots, but the number of just general ‘good Christians’ who actually put their beliefs out there is a much smaller percentage.
This is especially true in the U.S. where generations of faith going back to at least formation of the Southern Baptists (explicitly as a way to use the Bible to justify owning slaves in the U.S. South) have actively tied religion to politics in ways that don’t occur to the same degree in many other countries. These people worship an authoritarian mindset that they’ve crudely painted Jesus over top of because they saw religion as a way to enshrine power.
(I’m in Canada… and while in many countries like England that actually had state religions the end result was the religion becoming empty platitudes that everybody ignored, Canada (which like the U.S. has no state religion) in some ways took more the German route of religion being something that most people just don’t talk about because we’ve seen too many examples of the mess caused by people with strong beliefs clashing with each other. Sadly there is a strong thread of U.S.-style evangelism in our Conservative parties as well. Fortunately Trump-and-team’s insistence on the ’51st state’ rhetoric has really lessened the average Canadian’s patience for anybody who talks like that, and the Conservative party that a couple of months ago looked likely to win the next election looks a lot less likely to win now.
Need one for Average New Atheist: Thinks wokeness lurks around every corner, latches on to right wing talking points, mad at Maori, hates rock music after mid 1960s, flirts repeatedly with lab leak origin for COVID…
Also, the person who wrote these captions is not “the artist”. These figures are standard — in my day we’d call them “clip art” — used in countless memes, drawn only once.
…hates Palestinians…can’t imagine who you are thinking of.
Never seen that.
Just block whatever dipshidiot dropped that. They want attention. Starve them.
Ah! Okay.
@darwintojesus is apparently a parody account. So that one is fine. I can’t find @markwillworship at all; not on Clearsky.app or on BlueSky so it might be an account that’s on one of my subscribed blocklists. (A ton of apologist accounts overlap with MAGA.)
But it seems this is actually a meme parody.
As for the “afraid of dying” bit… I resolved that one for myself 25 years ago. I was told that I either needed cardiac bypass surgery, or I’d be dead in 6 months. Since the surgery is not without risk, I realized that death from surgery didn’t frighten a bit. The possibility of brain damage from the surgery was the frightening part. So…I have no fear of dying. I’ve been living on borrowed time for 25 years. At this point, the goal is to survive another 17 years to carry out my late wife’s final wishes (to try to be around until all the grandchildren are adults). After that…I just don’t care.
If my late wife’s beliefs are correct, I will tear the afterlife apart seeking her. If my beliefs are correct, all that is left of her are the memories of the living and the words she wrote.
Nemo: I remember when you had to walk through three feet of snow to buy clip-art on CDs. None of it was as lame as that rubbish in the above post.
The idea that existence has “meaning” or “purpose” never made sense to me. Why would the supposed ruler of the universe want me to be an autistic loser with emotional problems born into a family of right-wing jerks and working a low-paying job? Mysterious ways? Surely the omnipotent and omniscient ruler of the universe can explain them to this mere mortal. Free will? That concept throws a monkey wrench into the whole “purpose” thing.
Of course, if you doubt this this meaning-of-life bullshit, YOU are somehow the asshole.
Re: Akira MacKenzie @ #26…
There is something to be said about the character of an omniscient, omnipotent, creator of the universe who permits a disease like ALS to exist and doesn’t–if not eliminate it–at least inspire researchers to find effective treatments–if not outright cures–for it.
Says they love you, but campaigns to take away your basic human rights because you don’t have the right sexual orientation or gender identity.
If you’re looking for purpose in life: don’t. Purpose is something that is imposed on you. Cows’ lives have purpose. Theirs is to provide meat and dairy to their masters, at the expense of their own health and wellbeing, whether they like it or not. Cows have no say in their purpose.
Meaning is something entirely different. Meaning is something you derive from something. Or should I say: assign to? Anyway, it is something you choose to do. Most people derive meaning from their relationships with others, from beauty and art, from labor that is satisfying etc.
If you derive meaning from posting lame memes made of fallacies in a futile attempt to demonstrate your superiority, well, good for you, but I’m not impressed.
My dog does what he does without seeking meaning, and he’s a happy pooch.
(I can manage that, too. Meaning is for those that need meaning)
John Morales @30
Should I then not try to find meaning in your reply? Oh snap, that kinda rhymed.
Hemidactylus, I do get your drollery.
Semantic shift; meaning in reference to purpose vs. meaning in reference to existence.
(Why vs. How)
—
Me, I have no issue with people who either feel they need a purpose, not even with those who fancy a “purpose” as a nice thing, though of course it’s not necessary. Me, I don’t go to that bother.
The average American Christian is not in this good of shape. They’re generally obese as the Bible Belt and the Stroke Belt greatly overlap. These are delusions put into meme form.
John Morales @32
You could have left it at semantics— meaning as in words on a page or my subjective interpretation of what you were getting at. From there, as a sort of performative contradiction in there being a lack of meaning at all, one can build out to the contrast of proximal versus distal (or ultimate) I assume you’re getting at. How versus why is important in biology per Ernst Mayr. Ultimate concern was important to Paul Tillich in a theological context. Meaning if useful to a person is more localized and a bit ephemeral than that. There’s no meaning to the universe. One can find meaning in words on a page though that gets into those arcane locutionary terms (or intent versus impact). One can find meaning beyond mere words, like in art, relationships, work, play, etc. Seeking meaning in the universe itself is an act of Rorschach blotting.
You found meaning at least implicitly in using your dog as an example of what you were trying to convey. The meaning I took may have differed from the one you gave. It happens.
I assume you find meaning at least unconsciously in posting to blog comments or you wouldn’t be doing it.
“You found meaning at least implicitly in using your dog as an example of what you were trying to convey.”
What an idiotic thing to say, Hemidactylus, in particular given my clarification.
Put it this way, I asked my AI bubbly friend:
“‘Meaning’ as purpose for one’s life refers to the overarching goals, values, or aspirations that give an individual a sense of direction and fulfillment—essentially, the “why” behind their existence. In contrast, ‘meaning’ as an explanation about one’s life involves the interpretation or understanding of events, actions, or circumstances within a person’s life—essentially, the “what” and “how” of their experiences and narratives. While the former focuses on future-oriented intent and personal motivation, the latter deals with retrospective analysis and contextual understanding. Both forms are deeply intertwined, as the explanations one finds about their life can shape or reaffirm their perceived purpose”.
(I’m finding out that mindless mechanical stringing of words they do appears to be much better at grokking me than your average ape. It doesn’t need meaning in its life, either)
My dog does not find meaning at least unconsciously in rolling on the grass in joyous abandon.
(It just likes to do it)
…
It is rather stupid to imagine that whatever one does perforce implies it is done to find meaning; that is called ‘begging the question’, that is, assuming your conclusion.
(Is that why you do it? You find meaning in circular reasoning?)
“Idiotic”?
I see you’re driven to drop discourse to insults. I guess that gives you a semblance of meaning in your life. You should work on that. What you intended came across as water off a duck’s back. Not biting the hook to digress into that sort of thing you crave, what gives your life meaning, not mine. Ugh!
“I see you’re driven to drop discourse to insults.”
You are, again, mistaken.
I literally wrote: “What an idiotic >b>thing to say, Hemidactylus”.
I am talking about what you said, not about you.
(Different things)
What I intended sailed way over your head.
Right, right. My meaning in life is anything whatsoever I do that’s not needful for my actual existence.
Again, that’s a very stupid claim, inasmuch as it presumes your conclusion while ignoring what I am telling you. Might as well claim part of my life’s meaning is liking chocolate but disliking beetroot — that makes exactly as much sense as saying it’s about commenting on blogs.
“Ugh!”
Bah.
@38 I guess there’s no purpose in your years posting to a blog with such apparent drive and dedication. Just rando impulses toward nothing…not even a penchant for pedantry? No connection toward others, not even the host? A dog sniffing the grass?
You don’t need to guess when I’m telling you, Hemidactylus.
For the last time: far as I’m concerned, meaning of one’s life is for those that need or like such a meaning.
You sound exactly like goddist types getting weirded out because I lack a god-shaped hole in my psyche, or even religious types imagining I must be religious about not having religion.
They can’t grok one can get by without being religious or goddist in exactly the same manner you can’t get I need no purpose or meaning for my existence. I just am, like my dog, like my cat, like basically anything except a deluded ape who can’t accept reality as it is.
For some, it’s an existential crutch. For others, it leavens their leaden days.
For me, it’s but an abstraction. Not needful.
@ Morales
Dude, you don’t seem to be drawing the lesson from this you should. X-D
(I find mindless idiots relate to me better than others…)
Also, “I said what you said are the words of an idiot, but I didn’t call you an idiot” is Olympic level hair-splitting.
“Also, “I said what you said are the words of an idiot, but I didn’t call you an idiot” is Olympic level hair-splitting.”
I insulted some words, and therefore I insulted the person.
Categories matter; fucking them up is what’s called a category error.
I know, Bobiferator — for you, everything is personal.
Not for me.
Rememeber David Marjanović? Like me, he dealt with propositions.
—
To what lesson do you refer, and whence this alleged needfulness?
(Your vagueries are so very feeble I could deal with them in a myriad manners)
—
PS
Heh heh heh.
One can’t be an idiot and also mindless.
(But one can utter such a stupidity and imagine themself clever, as is quite evident)
I’m intrigued they have identical taste in shoes.
I did Sunday school, and I swear they never revealed Yahweh had a disconnected throwback.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=624004934605423&id=120021158337139&set=a.187371318268789