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So… It’s better to live in the matrix, gotcha.
For some people it is. Hell, there’s even a character in the actual movie who thinks so.
Yeah, and he doesn’t mind killing other people for that
Which shows he would have been better off living in the Matrix considering how badly he reacted to leaving it.
this guys stuff is great. heres a bit more
Throwing a stone is a dick move. Now he’s imperfect Pete!
Dick move… But not a sin! Still perfect pete!
So weird to see more than one-third downvotes, when all the comments are atheist-supporting. Maybe many read this comic as anti-atheistic (“what a jerk he is for making his poor mom unhappy!”)?
I think it’s hard to read the comic itself as anything but anti-atheistic. Or at the very least, anti-vocal-atheist.
At some point you need to ask yourself what you’re releasing people from when there is no (low-effort, low-pain) failsafe individual thought structure to give their life meaning… :'/ so I get both sides…
What’s her replacement meaning vocabulary? Was that part of the talk? Was she an animist or a christian?
delivering someone from a lifetime of sexual and gender oppression, and eliminating their need to tithe a portion of their income to an organization that hides and protects pedophiles and rapists?
Mom’s on the floor weeping with joy.
Not every member of a church experiences those things first hand.
lucky! they still subsidize the activity if they tithe tho.
Not every church sends their tithe to the Vatican. Not all christians are Catholic. And not every church has paedophiles.
But I condemn all that do. It’s horrible. Disgusting and despicable. I have two kids, and it drives me insane to think someone would consider doing that to them. 😡
Yeah, there are exceptions in every group
I would go as far as to say that experiencing any of those things is the exception.
One panel away from being Loss.
Soo what is the message here? Atheists are incel neckbeard basement dwellers and god is as real as one of their mother?
It’s about atheists who make atheism their whole personality.
In other words, “anti-theists” instead of just atheists.
Most people whose personalities revolves around being anti-something are insufferable. It’s far better to be for something than against something.
Like, I grew up Mormon, and left when I grew old enough to think for myself. Among my friends who also left the church, there are two major categories: the “post-mormons” and the “anti-mormons”. The anti-mormons are miserable to be around while the rest of us decided we’d rather build our lives around what we love, not what we hate.
This 100%, craft beer drinkers can be just as insufferable when they get someone to “enjoy” a sour for the first time
Probably a better description/label tbh
If anything then, the post is depicting antitheists, not just atheists
The message is it’s fucking funny to think about this situation.
That no matter how righteous you believe you are, there are ramifications to your actions with religion. It’s very easy to understand and be comfortable with those beliefs, but with others you are quite literally messing with their identities who they are.
My family is deeply religious. I personally don’t care if they believe in God or not. I focus on individual teachings, that gay people aren’t evil, that they can be religious and believe contradictory things to what others believe, that it’s all deeply personal
There’s also ramifications to ruining one’s religious beliefs, as this comic shows.
If you’re going to completely and utterly destroy someone’s entire outlook on life (and afterlife or whatever), I’d argue that you have a moral responsibility to help them transition and be there for them. Not be a total asshole like the dude in the comic.
A good addition, I agree. I know my mother draws her strength from the church. Without it I’m sure she would be depressed at home. It would require someone showing her how to be self reliant and grabbing satisfaction from that to get her going again
Soo what is the message here?
That proselytizing about atheism without considering the needs and character of your audience can be just as bad as religion doing the same.
Love is more important than being right, and the son in the comic very clearly didn’t show any. As soon as he proved his point, he left to go celebrate with his friends rather than spend time with his mother. He failed to show her that just because there is no big sky god doesn’t mean that is no love.
Not shown is the mother hatefully oppressing others due to her religion.
Religion can be both helpful to those that follow it while also causing those same people to do or support horrific things in its name.
Not shown is the mother hatefully oppressing others due to her religion.
Yes. Exactly. “Not shown”. That’s not part of this comic. You’ve brought it in all on your own. You’ve missed the point of the comic if that’s what you’re focused on. Everybody here knows that religion can harm people. That’s not the point of this comic. The point is that the way the son character went about his goals was exactly as destructive as the way that religion does. It was a warning to ensure that your discussion include love for the people behind the discussion, and not just hate for them for being wrong.
It was a warning to ensure that your discussion include love for the people behind the discussion, and not just hate for them for being wrong.
I think I’ve gone over twenty years with this being the exact thing that bothers me and have never been able to articulate it as well as you just did in one sentence.
Faces of Atheism was considered pretty cringe, and for the most part it was (as would have any “faces of x” group been on Reddit), but the idea behind it wasn’t made in isolation.
Your typing here says you’re still tired.
That looks like a healthy cry. She will go through much self reflection and come about as a better person.
Nope! She has spent her life with a religious as her backbone and now will seek it as a crutch with greater desparation. Trauma…survival mode…etc…
Basically… my reaction to hearing the good word of Atheism was to cling to New Age as hard as possible and believe the Skeptics were just miserable and calling anything inconvenient to their beliefs “Psuedoscience”
That lasted… a while… thankfully I’m not on the Spirit Science train anymlre
Now I’m a Buddhist and am learning to be cool with the temporary nature of existence and am looking forward to rebirth in the Pure Land.
The Problem with New Atheism is that humans need hope and hope isn’t something Dawkins offers.
That sounds like a wonderful journey of reflection.
My personal view is that hope as a foundation is complete bullshit. My foundation is, in the most positive version of nihilism, “ultimately, nothing matters.” I look at it as a clean slate. You get to decide what is important to you and persue it! I study all of nature to find purpose or meaning. I take joy in human ingenuity. I take sorrow in callousness. I appreciate what I have and want better for everyone.
Hope is a fine outlook but not something to lean on. It can kill motivation when expecting some ‘other’ to fix things. That can reward the callous and hamper ingenuity. It does not drive people to be better but can drive them to follow depraved systems of belief when they are promised post mortem reward or punishment.
An awful lot of the neckbeards from the comic in these comments.
I’m sure you’d feel more secure with the 9gag comments, they love this type of stereotype (as well as others)
Lemmy is a wretched hive of
scumneckbeards and villainy…And on lemmy in general
You mean from the comic depicting neckbeards? So weird
I didn’t realize neckbeard atheists oppressed and killed so many people compared to religion, thanks to the author for opening my eyes
There’s a difference between religion and faith. Faith is belief in a higher power. Religion is an institution that exploits faith to opress people. This neckbeard atheist didn’t thwart religion, he just destroyed his mom’s faith. I have my doubts that his mom was doing a lot of oppressing.
Sorry you were downvoted for pointing out hypocrisy.
I get it. Never grew much hair on my neck but I went through an edgy Internet atheist phase. I saw myself as a champion of science and rationality, leading poor deluded people to the light.
I got better, but it took time.
The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
Werner Heisenberg
That’s a beautiful quote thank you
neither of those definitions are correct…
They are sufficient for the topic at hand.
No, incorrect definitions are never sufficient. That is just making up stuff
It is not. Those are, roughly, what those words mean. I could use more precise ones, but this isn’t a serious philosophical discussion with serious people so the effort would be wasted.
Substitute whichever words you prefer, there’s a difference between an individual’s personal belief in a higher power, and the institution which exploits that belief to oppress. Half-baked semantic objections do not make you clever. Engage with the content of the argument.
Is one of these murderous religious people in the room with us right now?
Actually yes religious justifications for violence are fairly common, the comic is stupid
Fight people who use any belief to justify being shitty to others.
Yes, fight religion. Fight it with logic, science and facts. Otherwise you’ll get people like RFK jr, and a whole bunch of sick and potentially dead children. Or you might end up like the middle east, dead in the name of god.
If you are an adult and that is your reaction to understanding that god isnt real then you need serious psychological help.
“If you have a deeply emotional reaction to your entire worldview being shattered in your middle age and having everything that once brought you a sense of comfort, however manufactured, suddenly ripped away from you, then you need psychological help.”
At least your brain-dead snark somehow still brought you to the correct conclusion, unintentional as it may have been.
Ofcourse if you think that peoples practical view of the world is strongly dependent on religion, then that would be your reaction to my comment. I just dont believe that this is true. At least in my experience with people old and young, no matter the ethnicity or religious background, barely anyone is so deeply religious anymore that their understanding of reality depends on belief in god.
This comic just doesnt make any sense in large parts of the world where people live either completely secular or only vaguely influenced by religion.
Yeah, I agree with your statement. Not in a degrading way though. I know people whose lives have been so difficult, agonizing and full of abuse. Religion is what got them through those times and gave them hope. I am an atheist too, a very radical one at that, but I can imagine these people would have similar reactions if their only source of spiritual comfort was aggressively denied.
So they do need serious psychological help, but not because they are stupid to react that way, if that was what you meant.
That was very insightful. Thank you, gay_sex.
To be fair, a lot of people need serious psychological help and get God instead.
Religion is often used as cognitive dissonance to avoid dealing with trauma.
This might be a popular opinion here on Lemmy but this is definitely NOT really rooted in reality.
Conceptually going from belief in a something you earnestly want to believe in to being proven it’s wrong will shatter who you are.
This is not much different than learning your partner is cheating on you or that your parents aren’t actually you parents and they hid it from you, or something like that.
Yes believing in religion may be absurd but c’mon this take is pretty off
Or finding out Santa isn’t real!
Hey look, it’s the guy in the comic.
Seriously, if you are an adult and lack the empathy to see that it can be a traumatic experience to completely dismantle one’s sense of identity and community, then you need serious psychological help.
Totally random question chud: how do you feel about support for drug addicts?
Is one of these murderous religious people in the room with us right now?
No they’re just ruling some of the most powerful and genocidal despotic countries in human history.
Sharing your beliefs with family is pretty common. Would you not want your relatives to reflect the way you see the world?
Just because it’s going against the generational direction doesn’t make it somehow wrong.
Nor is making a relative upset necessarily wrong.
Now, freed from the expectations, worldview, and belief systems of a religion, she is able to choose her own way of living?
I don’t really see how this is a negative. Religion gives easy, comforting, often bullshit answers to difficult questions. Who are you supposed to be? What’s the right thing to do? How should you treat others? What happens after I die?
Now, freed from the expectations, worldview, and belief systems of a religion, she is able to choose her own way of living?
In the same way that throwing a child into the ocean is “free to learn how to swim”, sure. You can’t go to all this work to convince someone you are right, and then as soon as they start listening and agreeing with you, abandon them to despair. If you want to help someone see the world more clearly, you also have to show them how to handle this new world, especially if it’s your own family you’re trying to help.
I do agree that abandonment is cringe.
On their own journey, I’d be wary of introducing my own biases.
I feel that easily could’ve been excluded from the comic either for the author’s narrative, or simply to keep it a 3 panel. Could also just be alone time to process.
?
The last panel is ambiguous about whether the woman is having an emotional breakdown and lying on the ground in tears, or if she was killed by her son and was crying as she died. Both would work as someone being “convinced” their religion is wrong, as being dead would “convince” you about god.
I think it’s the former, but i see the latter.
Honestly I initially interpreted the comic as a joke about the dichotomy of how the son would feel good about it but it’s a lot of emotional processing for the mother.
The last panel isn’t ambiguous. She’s emotionally shattered because her fantasy was destroyed.
Genocide is worse than murder but murder is still bad
Where did murder come into this?
Around the time religion started.
It didn’t. I’m using an analogy to show that criticising atheists like this does not mean I support religion. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Gotcha
Them religious zealots with their evolutionary biology and eugenics!
Is the mother supposed to be sad about religion being a sham or sad that her child doesn’t believe? The comic is too ambiguous to me because the 1st and 2nd panel heavily imply a caricature of atheism often spread by religious people who feel powerless in their own lives.
Even other atheists or agnostics use that caricature of reddit atheists. It’s less so atheists and more like atheists who make atheism their whole personality
Sad that the existential dread of not existing after death makes life pointless.
she ded
i think it’s more her grieving the fact that a big chunk of her life was a lie
Nobody said reality was all smiles and rainbows. However, it’s entirely possible to find happiness without believing in fairy tales so you can sleep at night.
It’s possible but unfortunately when people have spent their entire lives with religion being their (seemingly) only source of happiness, it can be really hard for them to find a different source.
Im an atheist and I listen to The Lord of the Rings audiobook so I can sleep at night. Reality is fucking awful and I like my fairy tales.
Yes! Exactly this! So many atheists love fantasy and sci-fi. Why not? It is wonderful to have some magic in the world. We just know the stuff is made-up.
If those who share such things with us, demand crazy shit from us, we call that out for being toxic fandom or corporate enshittification and go away, if we please. In religions, that is just another day.
And also I don’t see how life looks better while believing in a greater power. Starting with people going to war and desolation all the time in the name of their god…
And her son completely failed to demonstrate any of that. She presumably spent her life trying to take care of her kid, (the quality of which can only be guessed at, but she cared enough to listwn to his points about atheism) and as soon as her child shows her a new way of thinking he completely abandons her without giving her any ways of handling it.
Whew. Must have been hard work carrying all those assumptions in.
Name three.
There are two big ones, both of which imply other assumptions like she didn’t argue or tell him he was going to hell or a ton of other negative stuff that religious people tend to toss out when someone anknowledges atheism in their presence.
She presumably spent her life trying to take care of her kid
she cared enough to listwn to his points about atheism
People are far more receptive to listening to someone they trust over someone they don’t. It therefore follows that the mom was far more likely to have trusted/respected her son enough to hear what he had to say than the opposite. It’s all the same assumption.
But sure, let’s go with the alternative; she’s a complete asshole who used religion as her crutch to do horrible things to her son all her life, and her son finally talked her into realising that she is the monster who has been causing issues this whole time. This is its own assumption too; we don’t know what their relationship was like.
Her son, after showing her how horrible she has been her whole life, runs off to celebrate this victory with his friends, and leaves her to cry on the floor, alone.
He cared more about being right than anything else, including helping her through this discovery or damn, even just calling someone she trusts to talk her through it.
So the point of the comic stands regardless of this assumption. The son abandoned his mother after turning her worldview over completely. The consequence of that was his mother lying on the floor, devastated. (Whether she deserved it or not)
Does anyone really deserve that? Did you enjoy having to figure out what to do with yourself when you realised that it’s entirely likely that nothing outside of this single life exists, all on your own? Would you have appreciated a friend or family member walking you through the way to handle that?
A little bit of empathy goes a long way.
Or they just talked it over calmy and respectfully and she didn’t break down crying until well after he left and the reality of all of the time she wasted not being herself because of being told her natural attraction to women was a sin hit home. The son is happy when telling his friends because his mom can be herself!
Or he could be an evil, heartless athiest like you apparently want him to be.
I mean, I guess that’s one interpretation. If you go with those assumptions, the takeaway is that, what, changing changing your views can be devastating? Where’s the value in that? ‘Big worldview changes can be stressful’ is not at all a valuable takeaway from this.
My point really has nothing to do with his atheism. Obviously he cares too; he wouldn’t bother talking with her if he didn’t care. My point is that there are better ways to care, and it’s worth keeping them in mind whenever this sort of situation comes up.
I’d be happy knowing our family wasn’t financially enabling organizations that hide and protect rapists and pedophiles.
YMMV.
I mean, the celebration was not unwarranted. It’s just that he left quickly enough that all the emotional breakdown happened to her while she was all alone, instead of with him there to support her.
With how sad and empty my geriatric mother’s life is, the last thing I’m going to do is take away her imaginary friend.
Me at 13 discovering I wont see my loved ones ever again and there’s nobody’s hand on my shoulder holding me up:
Me when I try and pet a cat but they run away.
Religion may be a lie but it’s a comforting lie and that helps a lot of people get through their daily life.
Thing is it shouldn’t be comforting to anyone if they really take the details seriously. You could do as much damage really educating someone about Deuteronomy and other fun parts of the Bible and ultimately leave them in a worse state than finding a way to make them an atheist.
We forget an atheist is just a non-theist. Someone who doesn’t believe in any specific canonical god. I’m an atheist with a genuine faith the universe has more in store for “me” (whatever that is; I don’t believe it’s necessarily or eternally “ynthrepic”) than a mere human lifetime given what we know about the universe as a whole and how mysterious and seemingly fundamental consciousness is to it all. That gives me some relief and comfort from the existential dread. More than I could possibly get from Yahweh and his totally uncompelling biblical heaven and hell dynamic.
Most people I know who are religious don’t take the bible very literally; most haven’t even read it. The comforting lie is stuff about the after-life, heaven, and a caring universe.
And that’s great so long as it’s a source of comfort and not dread. The fear of God and hellfire is real. We need people who carry faiths to recognize that this is by definition an uncertainty for which no real evidence exists, when it comes to consequences in the real world. Maybe that’s a contradiction to some, but it doesn’t need to be.
You’re forgetting that some people have coping mechanisms for life around systems containing a kind god that’s there looking after them, and will reunite them with people they desperately hope to see again when they die.
Your coping mechanism is hoping the universe is magical and mysterious and has something more for you when you die. You’re not an atheist, just a non-denominational theist with a different hope for continuing on after you’re dead. I hope it brings you comfort, but don’t shit on people who have a different post death comfort they hope for.
