Atheists normally skip the ‘evangelism’ step in favor of lies, gulags and firing squads, but this surplus professor err, associate professor of the Human Condition gave evangelism the good ol’ college try. As in, everything he knows about religion was taught to him in college by God-haters.
He begins by claiming victimhood, proceeds to explain how God-fearing people are no better than Godless people and ends by promising us a better quality of prison.
Are religious people more moral?
h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/religious-people-more-moral-170716231.html
By Dimitris Xygalatas, Assoc. Professor of Anthropology and Psychological Sciences, U. Connecticut, 13 November 2021
Yes, because we believe morality exists. That’s an important step in being moral. On that note, we begin the article.
Why do people distrust atheists?
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20211207155024im_/https://gunnerqcom.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/5u31q3.jpg?w=501)
A study we conducted, led by psychologist Will Gervais, found widespread and extreme moral prejudice against atheists around the world. Across all continents, people assumed that those who committed immoral acts, even extreme ones such as serial murder, were more likely to be atheists.
Although this was the first demonstration of such bias at a global scale, its existence is hardly surprising.
Quite so. The 20th Century is still in living memory. By the time the 21st Century is also over, I have every expectation that atheism will carry the death penalty across the entire planet.
Segue to Will Gervais’ research. I believe he’s Dimitris’ mentor.
h ttps://www.as.uky.edu/podcasts/meaning-life-will-gervais
During the 2013 fall semester, University of Kentucky students will have the opportunity to delve into questions that explore some of society’s most deeply held beliefs. The ambitiously titled class, “A&S 300: The Meaning of Life – Psychology, Evolution, Religion, and Morality,” will be led by Psychology Professor Will Gervais who has focused his research around this very topic.
In the class, students can expect to investigate the psychological and evolutionary underpinnings of religious and moral beliefs through studies of cognitive and evolutionary science. Gervais hopes to use this lens to encourage students to not ask questions around whether or not a higher power exists, but instead question why people believe what they do and the implications of that on society.
In this podcast, Gervais touches on these issues and how now more than ever, it’s important that we use the tools of science to examine the roles of religion and morality.
I highlighted the parts that makes religious people not trust atheists: the latter keep trying to eliminate the legitimacy of any and all belief in God.
End segue
Survey data show that Americans are less trusting of atheists than of any other social group. For most politicians, going to church is often the best way to garner votes, and coming out as an unbeliever could well be political suicide. After all, there are no open atheists in the U.S. Congress. The only known religiously unaffiliated representative describes herself as .none,. but still denies being an atheist.
So, where does such extreme prejudice come from?
“We atheists must deceive people into thinking we’re religious in order to seize the reins of worldly power from legitimate authorities. Meanwhile, why do they harbor such extreme prejudices against us?”
And what is the actual evidence on the relationship between religion and morality?
It is true that the world’s major religions are concerned with moral behavior. Many, therefore, might assume that religious commitment is a sign of virtue, or even that morality cannot exist without religion.
It does fit the observations of history. Even historical butchers such as Muslims at least believe in something other than their appetites.
Both of these assumptions, however, are problematic.
So are the moving goalposts. What are we discussing in this article?
- “Are religious people more moral?”
- “Why do people distrust atheists?”
- “And what is the actual evidence on the relationship between religion and morality?”
Being an atheist, Dimitris can’t help but throw squid ink when the question of good versus evil comes up. I would, too, if the recent history of my religion was mass graves of innocents across the length of Eurasia.
For one thing, the ethical ideals of one religion might seem immoral to members of another. For instance, in the 19th century, Mormons considered polygamy a moral imperative, while Catholics saw it as a mortal sin.
The unwanted boys of Mormonism are sufficient proof that the Mormons chose evil. Dimitris tries very hard in these arguments, to avoid the concept of an objective standard of morality.
Moreover, religious ideals of moral behavior are often limited to group members and might even be accompanied by outright hatred against other groups. In 1543, for example, Martin Luther, one of the fathers of Protestantism, published a treatise titled “On the Jews and their Lies,. echoing anti-Semitic sentiments that have been common among various religious groups for centuries.
Luther was right. USA should have listened to him in between WW1 and WW2.
These examples also reveal that religious morality can and does change with the ebb and flow of the surrounding culture. In recent years, several Anglican churches have revised their moral views to allow contraception, the ordination of women and the blessing of same-sex unions.
That’s not Christianity changing. That’s atheists deceiving their way into the churches and sabotaging belief in God and God’s teachings.
And then Dimitris bitches that Christians don’t like or trust atheists!
In any case, religiosity is only loosely related to theology. That is, the beliefs and behaviors of religious people are not always in accordance with official religious doctrines. Instead, popular religiosity tends to be much more practical and intuitive. This is what religious studies scholars call “theological incorrectness..
Nobody but a cloistered, ignorant academic would use such an absurd and improper term for ‘sin’ or ‘evil’. Dimitris has been fed all the right answers during his personal Long March through academia and now is Credentialed to explain to people he doesn’t respect that our beliefs are no longer legitimate, and if we’ll just let our guard down and listen to him, then we won’t hate him for attacking and discrediting us anymore.
It’s no wonder that most atheists prefer the jackboot heel to the well-informed debate.
Buddhism, for example, may officially be a religion without gods, but most Buddhists still treat Buddha as a deity. Similarly, the Catholic Church vehemently opposes birth control, but the vast majority of Catholics practice it anyway. In fact, theological incorrectness is the norm rather than the exception among believers.
That doesn’t prove that the religious and the Godless are the same. It proves that the Godless sometimes masquerade as religious… which Dimitris has already admitted to.
For this reason, sociologist Mark Chaves called the idea that people behave in accordance with religious beliefs and commandments the “religious congruence fallacy..
Again, a term that nobody but a cloistered atheist would use. A Christian believing what the Bible says is not committing a “religious congruence fallacy”.
Segue
h ttps://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/7981/Rain_Dances_Posted_Version.pdf?sequence=1
How does the religious congruence fallacy shape the scientific study of religion? Most obviously, the religious congruence fallacy has inspired a search for religious influence on behavior that religious congruence implies should be there, and the most common form in which the religious congruence fallacy appears is when we explain behavior by connecting it to religious affiliations, practices, or beliefs that seem consistent with it and from which the behavior is thought to derive. But decades of research devoted to proving that religiosity is consequential in ways that congruence implies has produced a confusing hodge-podge of mixed results. This should not be surprising. Mixed results are exactly what we should expect if religious incongruence is ubiquitous.
Translation, people who claim a particular religion often do not act in tight accordance with that religion. Chaves’ fallacy is an observer assuming that because somebody identifies as, say, Christian, they will act in accordance with Christianity. That is what we Christians describe as the fallen nature of Man. What we should do is often not what we actually do, hence the need for a Great Physician to correct that flaw.
That is also the Fascists’ motivation in coercing the vaxx mandates. They see people refusing to get vaxxed for health or moral grounds and choose to “avoid the fallacy” of assuming we mean what we say. By increasing the pressure upon us, we can be forced into compliance regardless of the moralizing noises we make… and the rare few holdouts will be acceptable losses.
Well, then. Let the world watch and see which of us Christians is a shit talker! I am curious, too!
Interestingly, Chavens proceeds to describe how religious people can train themselves to believe in what they preach.
I want to be clear about something I am not saying. I am not saying that religious congruence is impossible. I am saying that it is rare, and much conventional practice does not appreciate how rare it is. Religious congruence is rare because achieving it in a specific situation requires one or more of three conditions.
Congruence can be achieved through conscious cognitive effort. We can analyze our different ideas. relations to each other and to action, and we can try to reduce recognized inconsistencies. But this does not come naturally, and it is hard to do. That is why it is rare. Congruence also can be achieved through social rather than cognitive effort. I can consult a religious leader about what my religion demands in a specific situation, and I can act according to his advice, thereby achieving congruence through deference to an authority.
“I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you.” Psalm 119:11
Congruence also can be achieved socially through immersion in a homogeneous religious culture or through intense involvement with an all-encompassing group. But this sort of deference to religious authority or enveloping religious culture is unusual. Mark Regnerus studied religious influence on teenage sexuality, but I think he makes a point that is more generally true when he says that religious influence occurs only when people are embedded in a .a network of likeminded friends, family, and authorities,. and that such embeddedness is “relatively rare, [encompassing only] a small segment of American adolescents, excluding even most religious adolescents. (Regnerus 2007:203-4). Sacred canopies exist, but they are rare.
They are rare by the malicious acts of our government since 1965. They want the entire world miscegenated in order to prevent people from holding shared beliefs that might be in violation of State Narratives.
A third, and probably more important, way that religious congruence can be achieved is through experience that forges internalized, automatic responses to situations so that religious schemas spring automatically to mind in certain situations. When internalized responses or schemas are firmly in place, religious congruence can occur without cognitive effort or social control. Internalization promotes what social psychologists call heuristic processing and what cognitive psychologists call connectionist or parallel processing. Whatever the labels, the basic idea is the same: some human information processing is .implicit, unverbalized, rapid, and automatic, [and some is] explicit, verbalized, slow, and deliberate. (D.Andrade 1995:180).
“Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” -Colossians 3:9-10
Internalization promotes the former. Internalization is the most powerful route to congruence, but it too is difficult to achieve. Roy D.Andrade (1995:144) notes that there is a trade-off between how easy it is to learn a schema and how deeply that schema is internalized. Serial or systematic learning–the proposition-based, verbal kind of learning–is relatively easy. But the knowledge gained through serial learning is difficult to internalize in ways that allow it to shape our behavior without having to go through the laborious process of calling content to mind and consciously deciding what it implies about action in a particular situation. Learning that leads to heuristic or connectionist processing, on the other hand, usually is much more time-consuming. It can require hundreds or even thousands of experiential repetitions–not, importantly, mere verbal repetitions–to make a response to a situation automatic and largely unconscious.
This is where shit talkers come from. They learn the lingo and rituals but like the plant with shallow roots that Christ spoke of in His parable, when the hard times come they reveal the person never intended to go all the way.
Christ is jealous. He doesn’t want just your butt in the pew for every Sunday. He wants you 24/7.
Man, we Christians are 2,000 years ahead of these experts!
End segue
This discrepancy among beliefs, attitudes and behaviors is a much broader phenomenon. After all, communism is an egalitarian ideology, but communists do not behave any less selfishly.
QED, his Step Two of writing this article was to claim that the religious are no better than the Communist. This despite the total lack of Christian death camps, Buddhist Killing Fields or International Hindu-Sponsored Terrorists.
Social scientific research on the topic offers some intriguing results.
When researchers ask people to report on their own behaviors and attitudes, religious individuals claim to be more altruistic, compassionate, honest, civic and charitable than nonreligious ones. Even among twins, more religious siblings describe themselves are being more generous.
But when we look at actual behavior, these differences are nowhere to be found.
Researchers have now looked at multiple aspects of moral conduct, from charitable giving and cheating in exams to helping strangers in need and cooperating with anonymous others.
In a classical experiment known as the “Good Samaritan Study,. researchers monitored who would stop to help an injured person lying in an alley. They found that religiosity played no role in helping behavior, even when participants were on their way to deliver a talk on the parable of the good Samaritan.
In another classical experiment, Christians are not calling for the mass starvation of people who accept the Pfizer Vaxx… but atheists are already locking us dissidents out of society completely, everywhere in the world, in hope and expectation that we’ll starve for refusing it.
Segue
Moroccans protest mass vaccination rules; some skirmishes
By Tarik El-Barakah, AP, 27 October 2021
RABAT, Morocco — Demonstrators took to the streets in cities around Morocco on Wednesday, some clashing with police as they denounced the country’s decision to require coronavirus vaccination passes to be allowed to work and enter public venues.
The decision came into effect Oct. 21 and stipulates that Moroccans must provide proof of vaccination in order to enter their workplaces. In a statement, the government has said employers have “direct legal responsibility” to enforce the decision.
The pass is also required to access indoor services such as restaurants and banks as well as domestic and international travel.
“Why do people distrust atheists?” Because THIS!!!! This is happening everywhere in the world… this agenda of “no jab, no job”. Morocco. Austria. China. Australia. Canada. South America. UK. France. Everywhere.
The world government must have UNITY! Comirnaty = RNA Comity.
End segue
Religion and rule of law
Not all beliefs are created equal, though. A recent cross-cultural study showed that those who see their gods as moralizing and punishing are more impartial and cheat less in economic transactions. In other words, if people believe that their gods always know what they are up to and are willing to punish transgressors, they will tend to behave better, and expect that others will too.
Such a belief in an external source of justice, however, is not unique to religion. Trust in the rule of law, in the form of an efficient state, a fair judicial system or a reliable police force, is also a predictor of moral behavior.
And indeed, when the rule of law is strong, religious belief declines, and so does distrust against atheists.
QED, Part Three: Dimitris argues that atheism is better than religion in fostering a docile, centrally-controlled population.
But that was never the goal of Christianity. Christ came to save souls, not build efficient governments. The latter is not the goal of most other religions, either.
Scientific evidence suggests that humans . and even our primate cousins . have innate moral predispositions, which are often expressed in religious philosophies. That is, religion is a reflection rather than the cause of these predispositions.
But the reason religion has been so successful in the course of human history is precisely its ability to capitalize on those moral intuitions.
Once again, we see the tired, old, discredited assumption that humanity is inherently good and the elimination of a small, small handful of troublemaking dissidents will surely lead to Utopia or Worker’s Paradise or whatever the current term is for Hell Upon the Earth… “vaccine of love”, likely as not.
According to psychologist Ara Norenzayan, belief in morally invested gods developed as a solution to the problem of large-scale cooperation.
Early societies were small enough that their members could rely on people’s reputations to decide whom to associate with. But once our ancestors turned to permanent settlements and group size increased, everyday interactions were increasingly taking place between strangers. How were people to know whom to trust?
Religion provided an answer by introducing beliefs about all-knowing, all-powerful gods who punish moral transgressions. As human societies grew larger, so did the occurrence of such beliefs. And in the absence of efficient secular institutions, the fear of God was crucial for establishing and maintaining social order.
In those societies, a sincere belief in a punishing supernatural watcher was the best guarantee of moral behavior, providing a public signal of compliance with social norms.
Today we have other ways of policing morality, but this evolutionary heritage is still with us.
Dimitris’ dangerous lack of education is manifest in his belief that “do unto others as to yourself” came from “survival of the fittest”. But he’s unable to believe otherwise without committing a Narrative Violation. Everything MUST have been primordial evolution, otherwise there exists a transcendental space alien that one might call ‘God’!
He’s also stupid to simultaneously believe that 1. evolution is a natural, inevitable, unguided process and 2. evolution is what atheists do once they seize power.
Although statistics show that atheists commit fewer crimes than average, the widespread prejudice against them, as highlighted by our study, reflects intuitions that have been forged through centuries and might be hard to overcome.
You see? It is not the Communist’s fault that he is forced to starve, enslave and murder us all for fun and profit. It’s our fault because we refuse to abandon Christ Jesus for Klaus Schwab, who promises to apply ‘morality’ directly to microchips implanted in our brains.
That is not metaphor or exaggeration. The injections have already begun.
I keep trying to wake up from reality. It’s too absurd to be taken seriously anymore.
One day, by the promise of Christ my Savior, I will.
In closing, the atheist life path is well-defined. It begins at “there is no God” and ends at “we must kill God again”. Dimitris began at “religion came into existence only as an early stage of human moral evolution”, continued through “Communists are the real victims” and ended at “it’s time to get rid of obsolete religion entirely”. And he wonders why the religious do not like him.
It is hard to evangelize one’s religion when it consists of nothing but destruction, ego and the State-sanctioned persecution of malcontents. The best that Dimitris could do was raise the question then change the subject.
“I highlighted the parts that makes religious people not trust atheists: the latter keep trying to eliminate the legitimacy of any and all belief in God.”
Gunner, I wish you had highlighted this part too: “Gervais hopes to use this lens to encourage students to not ask questions around whether or not a higher power exists,”
But I get it – highlighting the entire thing wouldn’t make sense.
This was very thought provoking. But it also causes me to wonder why some atheists will do anything to justify their own good morals. My brother, for instance, became an atheist some years ago (deconverted from Christianity/Churchianity), but he still holds to good morals. In fact, as far as I can tell, he has (oddly) not used his atheism as an excuse to abandon his morals; instead he has performed some shallow mental gymnastics to justify his morals in spite of his atheism. I can’t explain that behavior.
That’s a very common behavior and it’s a major reason that first-generation atheists can believe humans are naturally good. They themselves have a moral upbringing and like a house with a foundation suddenly removed, they can still live in that comfortably for many years.
But that’s the first generation of atheist. The second generation, carefully raised with no moral foundation, they don’t turn out as nice. Which makes the first generation go looking for the problem, with the presumption that the problem isn’t them casting away the fear of God, which prevents them from ever finding the problem.