@evograd didn’t ask anything of the sort, so your whataboutist response is even more baffling. @evograd responded rather politely to an absurd question.
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As I have said many times, the nuns I had in parochial school in the 1960’s were great teachers of math and science. I thank them for that and feel bad that they were subject to the abuse of the priests and bishops.
Perhaps a Catholic education was the norm in New Jersey in the 1960s. But the world is vastly different in 2020. I don’t see the Roman Catholic Church doing much of anything positive in the world today. I watched Christmas Eve mass live from the Vatican on Thursday afternoon New York time. I saw a Pope saying mass in the huge St. Peter’s with less than 200 people in it. It had all the same rituals that I remember so well, but it all seemed more empty and useless this year. The Catholic Church is no longer the moral, hopeful, humanistic force it once was.
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Perhaps this is true, but I’m honestly skeptical. Do you have numbers for this? First, in America for example, in most surveys doctors are at least just as religious as the population - in fact slightly more. A lot of the medical doctors, nurses, lab techs, and researchers are religious individuals.
Second, it is hard to compare the amount of human suffering minimized by doctors compared to clerical workers like pastors and priests. They simply very serve different roles: physical vs. spiritual and psychological. But don’t underestimate the role of religion worldwide (not just in the West) in helping people make sense of suffering and maintain community during this time.
You are correct that this is embarrassing for many (mostly American) Christian pastors who did engage in COVID conspiracy theories and the like. They should be criticized. But there’s more to Christianity and religion than a certain subset of American evangelicalism. Not everyone does this.
The proportion of non-religious people in 2050 is actually predicted to slightly decrease. See The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050 | Pew Research Center. We’ll see if COVID does anything to these projections.
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My point is not that atheists are literally asking that question verbatim in this thread; rather, atheists are failing to acknowledge that Christians understand and process the relationship between God and suffering differently than they do, and asking these loaded questions that imply Christians don’t care about suffering (because their God is powerless to stop it) is deeply insulting.
Sure, I can see how Michelle’s question could be insulting. Have you ever considered how a lot of Patrick’s posts on how Christianity is “powerless” can also come across as insulting? Do you see how pitting a dichotomy between “secular science” and “superstitious religion” and connecting that to the pandemic can be deeply insulting? There are many Christian doctors, nurses, and researchers on the frontlines right now, who are being sustained in what they do by their personal faith. Presumably many of them would be deeply insulted that their work is being credited to the successes “secular humanism” and being used as a cudgel against Christianity.
Now, of course there are plenty of atheist doctors and nurses too who are also on the frontlines and don’t feel a need to have religious faith to sustain them. That’s fine too. But why use the question of faith to divide and blame? We’re all in this pandemic together. Yes, go and criticize those pastors and politicians who engage in COVID denialism and conspiracy theories. But that’s not what all Christians are doing right now.
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Covid has changed everything. The post Corona world will be vastly different. Hope I live long enough to see some of it.
You might want to slow down a bit. It was @Michelle’s insulting question to which @evograd was responding, not Valerie’s.
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Thanks, I’ve edited that.
I have a lot of respect and admiration for all doctors, nurses and healthcare workers regardless of their religion or non-religion. Dr. Collins, Dr. Fauci and all those developing and delivering the vaccine deserve all our thanks and gratitude. Who I don’t have respect for are all the Christian pastors, priests, bishops, and TV preachers who have done nothing but to make the suffering worse for their gullible flocks.
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In this thread? I must have missed it. I haven’t seen anyone imply that Christians don’t care about suffering, just confusion at Rana’s suggestions about God’s role in the pandemic, and in the timing of the pandemic in relation to vaccine technology development.
Yes, and I would agree that they’re a little insulting, even if I tend to agree with the general point.
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“Confusion” is an extremely charitable way to describe it. Do the following statements, for example, imply merely honest, innocent “confusion”?
When I read the above statements, the implication of the above statements are that 1) The core of the Christian story has no human empathy or compassion, but is barbaric, 2) Jesus, the being whom Christians worship as God, cares more about self admiration rather than helping people.
Can you see how these implications are deeply insulting, at least as insulting as atheists being insulted by Michelle’s question?
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I’ve already said yes, and I don’t know why your only response to me commenting on a question from Michelle that I perceived to be insulting is to hound me to comment on Patrick’s posts. I’m not Patrick, I’m me. It sounds like the person you should be confronting with your concerns is Patrick. (I note that I still haven’t seen a comment implying “Christians don’t care about suffering”, btw.)
Perhaps you just really want me to be consistent or something - to call out all insulting comments not just the one I did? Well I’m sorry but I just skimmed the thread and Michelle’s comment stood out to me so I made a quick comment on it. I apologise for not composing a comprehensive response to every single comment in this thread that I might find objectionable.
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To be clear, I’m not accusing you at all. After all, Michelle didn’t direct that question to you, but to Patrick. So I thought that once you accused Michelle of being insulting, it is fair game to bring up other responses of Patrick which were equally insulting. Thus, I have been talking about the interactions between atheists and Christians in this thread in general.
I honestly think the comments by Patrick which I quoted have that connotation. If you don’t think they imply that, perhaps we just have irreducibly different perceptions, possibly influenced by the fact that one of us identifies as Christian and the other not.
That is indeed my point. Sometimes on this forum, I see a tendency by certain atheists and skeptics to criticize and insult Christianity and Christians with utter impunity, but immediately complain of being insulted and offended when similar tough questions are asked of atheists (such as how morality is grounded non-theistic philosophical systems). My statements are meant to counterbalance and call out that tendency.
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Do you feel that I’m guilty of that tendency? Otherwise, I don’t know why you would choose to respond to me rather than to Patrick or even to no one in particular. I made a single comment directed at Michelle about Michelle’s own words. Your response was to make a comment directed at me about Patrick’s words.
I don’t think you can make the judgement, based on a single comment of mine in this thread, that I’m engaging in criticising/insulting Christianity but then complaining when atheism is criticised/insulted. I skimmed the whole thread, I saw a single comment that I decided to reply to with what I thought would be my limited time (I originally intended to go to bed after making the comment). A single event is not sufficient to make any conclusions about my biases. Or are you drawing from my history in previous threads? Do tell.
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I don’t know if you are generally guilty of this tendency. I haven’t interacted with you much regarding religion or other topics here. And to be clear, I’m not necessarily complaining about your specific behavior in my above comment - I actually have mostly other posters in mind.
That being said, nobody - not Michelle, not any bystander, not even other Christians - directly called out Patrick’s statements on Christianity being barbaric as insulting, even though they clearly are. (I think Valerie and Michelle have been remarkably irenic in responding to Patrick’s statements.) But a Christian asks a single question on morality in atheism, and within an hour an atheist immediately accuses her of being insulting.
Thus, the problem is not necessarily with you in particular, but with the general atmosphere of the thread and the forum. I do not know for sure if your decision to respond in your thread was influenced by this general atmosphere. But I saw it as being consistent with it. If another atheist besides you had made the same accusation of being insulted, I would have replied in the same way.
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I agree, claiming to be insulted (which seemed to be the response of at least 3 atheists) doesn’t answer the question about where morality comes from in a naturalistic framework.
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Did my comment say “I’m offended by this question!” and just end there?
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That’s a long way of saying “I wanted to comment on what I perceive as a general problem on the forum”. I reiterate my point - why did you decide to single me out? Not me personally, but me who made a single comment on the thread?
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As you said, I wanted to call out a general problem on the forum, and your comment happened to be consistent with that general problem.
Was my single comment more consistent with this perceived problem than, say, Patrick’s multitude of posts?
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Yes, people think that death is bad. But where does that idea come from? Where does love come from? Why do we miss our loved ones when they are gone? Perhaps that feeling points to the idea that people should not die. Could that sense that death is wrong point us to the concept of an eternal future for us where there is no death?
From a naturalistic point of view, shouldn’t we just think that death is a good thing: its a natural process that allows the next generation to go on living? After you have reproduced and passed your genes onto the next generation, isn’t it OK and right for you to die?