China: Putting Muslims into concentration camps for reeducation away from Islam - Polidicks

If beliefs are inherently bad, what of the thousands of charitable organizations and people around the world that work through their faiths? Majority of the largest faiths in the world have charity and kindness as one of the main tenets of belief and while many may ignore them, there's also huge swaths of faithful that do. Is this "inherently" bad?

Well, do these people contribute to charity because they fear punishment from God or because they expect to be rewarded for it, or do they do it because they're good people with ethics?

The thousands of charitable non-religious organizations that do charity work and donate without the need for the people in need to listen to a sermon or proselytizing are better. ISIS and other religious terrorist organizations give charitably as well, but they use the same tactic to spread their beliefs. When Harvey flooded, Joel Osteen's Megachurch didn't take in people despite it being a tall building out of floodwater. The thing with religious charities also is that they often has no legal requirement to open their books to public scrutiny, so we don't know what they do with that money. And the charity work they do is somewhat overshadowed by their track record with women's reproductive rights, gay rights, stem cell research, science education and child abuse in the form of religious indoctrination. Don't forget that UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross and many others are secular organizations. I didn't say beliefs are bad, I said unfounded beliefs are bad. I believe in most the same things you believe.

What exactly does it matter? Does a homeless man getting food in a soup kitchen really care why someone is charitably giving him food?

You can get more good out of people by having a punishment in place rather than trusting them to do good by themselves, especially children. Religion doesn’t necessarily matter, rules don’t necessarily matter, but consequences matter; they get the more people to behave than a reward or egotistical system.

If you help someone with the expectation of a reward at the end, it isn't really charity, is it?

So why do more secular countries have higher societal health on average? The more progressive Euro nations for example have more lenient prisons based on rehabilitation not punishment, and I'm almost entirely sure those systems work better than American prisons do in every measurable metric. This post reeks of naive ignorance. I'm not saying that to be mean, it just doesn't match with what the world is actually like.

Prison is a consequence for one’s bad actions. I posit that the majority of people stop themselves from performing bad actions because there exists a system of consequence (IE: jailtime and fines), not that people are good for the sake of being good. If the rule of law was nonexistent, I theorize there would be a large uptick in crime.

You apparently would be surprised to know that not all religious sects teach that the goal of charity is to "store up treasure in heaven." Some of them simply tell people to go out and be loving to their fellow human beings, because god loved them first. Progressive christianity, for instance, is often focused around the idea of bringing heaven to earth by improving the world around us, instead of just waiting until jesus comes back to fix everything and send all the bad people (read: Non-christians) to hell. Unsurprisingly, these progressive christians generally lean left and support the same stuff most facepunchers support.

We've got people losing their shit over immigration! What makes you think we can solve the problems of some other country, a country with a history of genocide no less, when we can't even suppress the Alt-Right movement within our own country? NA and the EU are in a fragile state right now, and one wrong move could send us spiraling down.

Your view of religion is entirely too pessimistic. We all know Joel Osteen and those other raving capitalist church scams are scumbags, nobody's saying all religious institutions and practices are great. But you can't name a few bad examples and reasonably conclude that religion is then inherently bad. Many religious people I know are also some of the kindest people I know, stand for progressive ideals, and get shit done for the community. Recovering opioid victims often turn to religion to find a community and a purpose, and put discipline and structure back into their lives. If in your experience religion has been a very negative thing, that's unfortunate, but know that it's not the case everywhere

Belief in an afterlife can be an inherently comforting thing for people. It's mostly the extra noise that comes with religion that many people have an issue with. Like Enslavement, burning gays, stoning women, beating foreigners, mass genocide, rape, torture, etc. Religion as a concept in a community can lead to very positive things such as building up a public fund without taxation. The ISSUE is that there is a huge number of corrupt people that use it to scam money directly out of people in the name of god, or to manipulate and control people. Instead of going back to the community its used to build mega-churches and buy yachts. Religion itself isn't the issue. It's how its applied. And a majority of religion (in the US at least) is applied by terrible men so that they can get away with theft, child rape, fraud, tax evasion, and all sorts of horrible shit. If it wasn't religion, people would and actually do, use something else to control people. Just look at marketing scammers and pyramid schemes. If religion didn't exist, corporate style marketing scams would take its place.

I've never really understood the idea that there's something wrong or immoral about getting rewards for being a good person. It seems like a pretty good system to me. Honestly, it just seems like a way for someone to feel superior.

You seem to be completely missing the point, not that that's surprising. If you do something good expecting a reward then you didn't do it simply because you're a good person. Doing something charitable when there is no expectation of any sort of benefit to you though means you're legitimately doing it because you're a kind person. It's really not a difficult concept but a lot of people don't seem to be able to wrap their heads around it.

God ALMIGHTY ATHEISMO, do you have to be such a stereotype?

This still falls under the mantra of doing charity because religion told me to. Being kind to people isn't a charity, it's an expectation. Being LGBT tolerant isn't a kudos, it's civil. If you need religion to tell you to do these things, or reinforce you for doing them, you aren't a good person, you're doing it for favor. When religion is the driving force behind your good deeds, you're doing it out of a fear of God. That's the entire premise of faith.

Honestly, from an atheist : if you go around saying "all religion is evil, why can't you all be rational like me", just stop and learn a bit more about it, It's not just people mindlessly fearing some all powerful entities. Just like you don't want them to force their religious values on people, let them practice their faith in peace. And who cares about the motivation behind charity. The outcome is exactly the same. If faith motivates people to be charitable then faith is great, i'll take it over cynicism any day.

This is still missing the point. I actually largely don't disagree with you, even on the specific point I quoted. The point is simply that being charitable simply because your religion tells you to rather than because you are a kind person does not make you a good person.

Fuck you, Emporer Pooh.

Well no of course if the law didn't exist there would be an uptick in crime (as defined by the rule of law that no longer exists) but you changed the language. Prison is a consequence in every system, but it's a punishment in the US and it's rehabilitative in Europe.

Belief in god does not necessarily mean a "fear" of god as defined in fundamentalism. Nor does it mean that you have certain expectations in the afterlife because of your good deeds. Progressive christians don't even necessarily have a solid definition of what the "afterlife" even is, since they've largely thrown out biblical literalism in its entirety. So neither of these criticisms can be applied. Honestly, I can't wrap my head around why you think the belief in a creator being is by default a bad thing. What is the difference between god telling you to be good, and Mr. Rogers telling you to be good, beyond that one of them supposedly created the world, and the other was just a man. If the former belief inspires you to do bad things, fair enough - but men and women throughout history, not all of them religious, have also inspired people to do awful shit. It's like you can't wrap your head around the idea that some people view god as a fully formed individual that loves everyone whether they believe in him or not, and that's the reason they chose to worship him; not because of any expectations that they'll get some golden palace in heaven, or fear that god will torture them eternally if they slip up.

I can't answer for Revenge282 but the difference for me is that Mr. Rogers always had reasoning behind his telling you to be a good person. The Bible has a habit of directly connecting doing good things to entering Heaven rather than just doing good things because you're a good person. Thus making it a matter of a reward or simply out of fear depending on the individual, both of which cheapen the act in my opinion.

Well, yeah, no arguments there. That's why biblical literalism leads to things like chrisitans "loving" gay people by telling them that they need to stop being gay. But that really doesn't apply to progressive christians, or most progressives of any relgiious sect. Their belief is largely the same as your hypothetical: that the god they worship is much better than anything that has been depicted to the letter in a thousand year old book. While they might believe scriptures might hold some truth, they also acknowledge that they were ultimately written by flawed humans held down by the comparatively regressive ethos of their time, and that we have advanced much further in our understanding of what it means to be moral. Some, of course, would questrion then why they even need to believe in god, if they are essentially choosing on their own what to believe instead of ascribing to any specific text. Personally, as someone who is mostly agnostic but still partially leans into the deist camp, it can sometimes be comforting to believe that there is someone working behind the scenes to try to bring humanity and the universe to a better place. I'm not even sure if that means he's all powerful. Perhaps he's simply a higher being that came into existence along with the universe itself. Or perhaps the universe itself is this higher being -- there are people who believe the universe is conscious and is trying to move itself in a positive direction. Who knows - but regardless, at this point I'm sure not trying to be a better person because I'm afraid that god will send me to his persona torture chamber if I don't measure up. And neither are all religious people.

hmm... i think we should be clear and say that it's faith-based thinking that is inherently bad, not religion itself.

There's a bit more to religion than "beliefs in the afterlife"

There’s nothing wrong or immoral about receiving a reward. Doing something “good” only so you can have the reward is self serving, and should be openly acknowledged as such. That’s it.

For people who claim to see nuance, you're making this out to be far too black and white. People do good and bad for all kinds of reasons. Anyone choosing to do good purely for no other reason than an overwhelming sense of goodness is rare, if not non-existent. It may very well be impossible to separate the unconscious selfish desires in us all from the action we choose to do. Having a reward for doing good recognizes this fact. It recognizes that many people, if not all people, NEED incentive to do good. We are not pure unaffected minds who can become paragons of goodness. We're humans. I'm perfectly fine with people doing good things because it gets them a reward. In fact, I would much prefer such a system over one that just demands people do good for goodness sake, and that's it.

For someone trying to call out others on not seeing nuance, you're sure exceptional at failing the same thing. Nobody is condemning people for doing good things. They're simply stating that doing good things with the expectation of a reward or to avoid a punishment does not make one a good person. (Note: Does not make one a good person, not "makes one a bad person," since you seem very likely to manage to take that from what I said.) Doing a good deed with no ulterior motives is what makes one a good person.

I'm disputing the very idea that you can draw a nice easy line between the two things. There may very well be no such thing as doing good with literally zero ulterior motives.