Euphoric atheists

[AnOminous]

Really? Because religion helped spur the agricultural movement, music, art, forms of writing, the alphabet, poetry, social hierarchies and keep population in check.

Not to mention funding science.

 

[Adamska]

Really? Because religion helped spur the agricultural movement, music, art, forms of writing, the alphabet, poetry, social hierarchies and keep population in check.

You can also say it founded basic sanitation, since many of the more boring laws in Leviticus cited animals that commonly invited illness and food poisoning when they banned them for consumption. Despite pork being delicious, until it was properly cooked or the animals kept in health, it was a big source of illness.

Plus, many early scientists got their drive from religion, wanting to find out how and why the universe works to better understand God.

Besides, what have any of these idiots done anyway?

 

[Hat]

Interesting how these people can never seem to decide whether religion is a complete waste of space that does absolutely nothing or if it's an active force that is directly responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened.

 

[Adamska]

Interesting how these people can never seem to decide whether religion is a complete waste of space that does absolutely nothing or if it's an active force that is directly responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened.

Whatever they need it to be to shitpost poor quality images I reckon. They wish they could outdo actual propaganda with this schlock.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I wonder how salty euphorics would get if you told them that God is love, love exists, and therefore God exists?

Excuse you, why are you so salty?

One possibility (which I think I mentioned earlier) is that religion of any kind seems to naturally involve humility and community, which the stereotypical egotistical and antisocial neckbeard struggles with.

 

[Pigeon On A Stick]

Really? Because religion helped spur the agricultural movement, music, art, forms of writing, the alphabet, poetry, social hierarchies and keep population in check.

Don't forget that Muslims advocated the concept of the round globe. It could be utilized to find the direction and distance from Mecca.

 

[sugoi-chan]

Interesting how these people can never seem to decide whether religion is a complete waste of space that does absolutely nothing or if it's an active force that is directly responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened.

Or when they take it one step further. It's both a flock of sheeple who do nothing but pray to a magic invisible sky fairy or they're a cabal of sinister geniuses bent on controlling the world's thought and scientific output to a degree that makes the Illuminati look like a book club.

Not to mention funding science.

And in the case of Europe specifically, being science for the better part of a millennia. During the Middle Ages, theology was science.

 

[ChurchOfGodBear]

And in the case of Europe specifically, being science for the better part of a millennia. During the Middle Ages, theology was science.

And this is where they really need to brush up on their history and get some perspective. The Middle Ages (a time Euphorics love to harp on as being religion-centered), started because of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Or, as you might want to put it the entire structure of civilization and society up to that point. It's really hard for us to imagine a decline in the structure of government like that, but it would be as if today every major government (US, UK, China, etc.) just closed up shop and let the people fend for themselves. Would it be chaos and anarchy, with power struggles by local bigwigs trying to grab a bigger piece of the pie? Yes, and that's exactly how it went down then, and it lasted for hundreds of years.

Christianity moved into the void (since it was the only structure large enough, old enough, and powerful enough to do so) and helped maintain some semblance of order. The church was a poor replacement for a governing empire, but it was all that was left. So to fault Christianity for "trying to control european society" or "trying to control science" is really divorced from the reality of the situation. Fact is, if it weren't for Christianity, Europe would have declined much faster and much farther after the fall of the Roman Empire. As it was, it took almost 1,000 years between the collapse of the empire and the establishment of the modern nation-state, which for all intents and purposes meant government had regained the level of sophistication it had pre-collapse.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

The Middle Ages (a time Euphorics love to harp on as being religion-centered), started because of the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Reminds me of this one euphoric chart that claimed that had it not been for Christianity, we'd be colonizing the galaxy by now or something. The chart assumed that scientific progress would've continued unimpeded after the fall of Rome, and that there was no progress in science before the Renaissance due to Christianity.

 

[sugoi-chan]

Reminds me of this one euphoric chart that claimed that had it not been for Christianity, we'd be colonizing the galaxy by now or something. The chart assumed that scientific progress would've continued unimpeded after the fall of Rome, and that there was no progress in science before the Renaissance due to Christianity.

This is The Chart:

and I capitalize it because it and its variations are actually an in-joke among historians and history nerds.

 

[Linako 2.0]

God is love, love exists, and therefore God exists?

*tips fedora
But love is just a chemical and not really relevant

 

[autisticdragonkin]

Don't forget that Muslims advocated the concept of the round globe. It could be utilized to find the direction and distance from Mecca.

They invented trigonometry for this purpose too

 

[Adamska]

They invented trigonometry for this purpose too

They also invented Algebra, and our number system to boot.

Add in how the religious leaders were the ones to preserve the knowledge of the Classical world, and wallah, you just filled the Gnostic Atheist's strawman with enough holes to make Emmentaller.

 

[TowinKarz]

Not that it didn't have huge holes to start with, just putting quantities on an X and Y axis doesn't make you smart.... neither of those values are given any testable DEFINITION, level of science as measured by , what? Number of professional scientists? Number of scientific papers produced per year? Percentage of economy devoted to science? It's clearly nothing but opinion.

Not having testable values makes for very poor science, don't it? :p

 

[Abethedemon]

This is The Chart:

and I capitalize it because it and its variations are actually an in-joke among historians and history nerds.

Right, because the Islamic Golden Age and the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics never existed. Also, Universities totally weren't invented.

 

[Slowboat to China]

OK, obviously the chart is a joke, but here's the thing that stood out to me: what exactly do they mean by "science"? Because if there's anything my history spergery has taught me, it's that different areas of practice advanced at different times and even went backwards. To say science was a straightforward upward slope from the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Romans is hilariously inaccurate.

To use one example field: medicine. A lot of ancient cultures were a bit shit at it, due to having no theory of sepsis etc., but the Greeks essentially headlocked medicine for a long-ass time thanks to Hippocrates. They gave us such charming notions as "wounds will always produce pus, so if a wound isn't producing pus, make it" and "this man has had a hemorrhage, we need to bleed him more." And Hippocratic doctrine lasted for a long-ass time. So medicine is kind of a flatline for a while. Meanwhile, architecture reached heights (heh) under the Egyptians that the Greeks couldn't really match, so that's a downtick, and then it ticked up again with Rome for a while. And the Greeks fucking loved astronomy, while IIRC the Romans were kind of meh about it and didn't exactly set the astronomical world on fire.

And that's not even counting the various advances--especially in military technology and art--produced by Constantinople and the Holy Roman Empire.

So yeah, when they say "I fucking love science," what kind of science do they mean?

(Disclaimer: typing this without sources, so I may have gotten some shit wrong. Mea culpa.)

 

[ChurchOfGodBear]

So yeah, when they say "I fucking love science," what kind of science do they mean?

Obviously, the kind of science that's used exclusively to argue over how God doesn't exist. Because, you know, if you don't believe in God, then analyzing his nonexistence is definately the best use of your time. Much more so than advancing technology, curing diseases, or understanding the origins of our universe.

 

[brainiac3397]

To be fair, what these people ignore when they worship science is that science was quite fucked up for sometime. I mean all that bullshit about miasma and healing people by bloodletting? Let's not forget scientific racism and that whole pseudo-science craze only a century or so ago.

For all the hoopla they make about "modern science", fuck ups are not exclusive to religions. Hell, with modernity, some weird ass religions/cults began to pop up(cough scientology cough).

 

[moosesgalore]

Everything at its basic forms in science is very much operative absolutes that are not given a lot of attention. If you reduce science to the core of observations the whole system is a bunch of axioms that are necessarily known not to be absolute facts (and that doesn't matter too much). These axioms are operationally true for observational and experimental purposes, but involve a lot of circular reasoning. Any constant or axiom in science today, however, is no longer treated as absolute fact but as theory; in other words, as something reliably true but perhaps not fully understood on other vectors of interpretation. So the entire concept of thinking science answers every question about everything certainly contrasts harshly with these people's lack of social skills.

tl;dr euphoric athiests are the A-logs of corrupt religion

They also invented Algebra, and our number system to boot.

Add in how the religious leaders were the ones to preserve the knowledge of the Classical world, and wallah, you just filled the Gnostic Atheist's strawman with enough holes to make Emmentaller.

The Greeks or Indians invented algebra; Musa al-Khwarizmi simply found old Greek and Indian texts and revitalized with notes and commentaries as well as translating them. This is not to say he was not talented, but saying he "invented Algebra" is a bit of a stretch. It's common to take the most eloquent expression of a certain inventive idea and make that the genesis of it, but in fact many of the concepts he refined were older. Progress is often many small steps before a big leap; historians tend to retrofit everything into convenient narratives.

 

[Mrs Paul]

Really? Because religion helped spur the agricultural movement, music, art, forms of writing, the alphabet, poetry, social hierarchies and keep population in check.

Funny to create their stupid meme, they used one of the greatest works of art of all time -- a religious one. Go figure.