EDIT: HMMMMM. So it would appear my framing of this question is flawed thanks to my simplistic understanding of religion and other such ineffable philosophical things my non-arts-major brain gets very confused by. I may take a while responding to comments while I have a serious think about what I really mean.
So most arguments I've seen for being religious use some very flawed arguments. Unfortunately, so do most arguments against being religious, and this bugs me (I'm always more annoyed at the flaws of "my side"). One of the main flaws in both(*) is an assumption that either you're christian or you're an atheist: thus if you can poke holes in atheism people must automatically convert to christianity, and if you can poke holes in Christianity you've proven atheism is the best choice.
And a lot of the time the "Christianity" people are criticising is a straw man anyway, based either on fairly extreme denominations or just particular annoying individuals.
So I thought I'd go through all the things atheists tend to say "all religions" do and see how many are actually true of all religions.
( Read more... )
So most arguments I've seen for being religious use some very flawed arguments. Unfortunately, so do most arguments against being religious, and this bugs me (I'm always more annoyed at the flaws of "my side"). One of the main flaws in both(*) is an assumption that either you're christian or you're an atheist: thus if you can poke holes in atheism people must automatically convert to christianity, and if you can poke holes in Christianity you've proven atheism is the best choice.
And a lot of the time the "Christianity" people are criticising is a straw man anyway, based either on fairly extreme denominations or just particular annoying individuals.
So I thought I'd go through all the things atheists tend to say "all religions" do and see how many are actually true of all religions.
( Read more... )