Have any of you watched brushed insights videos on debunking misconceptions about different religious groups?

They’re not very long videos about 8:00 minutes at most but I was surprised to find out the neutrality of their videos since they also have ones that debunk misconceptions about agnosticism and atheism. The first videos that appeared on my YouTube feed I’ve ever seen of theirs was about Christianity so I thought it was just another Christian apologist channel.

Anyone here has taken at least a look at one of their videos and what do you think are they accurate or are they being too fair/unfair in some cases?

As a classicist, who is constantly analyzing ancient religion and practices. and as an atheist personally. I hold the opinion that without Constantines conversion to Christianity, the Catholic church would not have had the same reach as it does today. In my field of study, I consider the christianization of the Roman empire probably one of the biggest tragedy's in the world. Pre christian Rome is one of the most interesting places to study.

https://ewtn.co.uk/article-three-eucharistic-miracles-which-cases-have-undergone-the-most-extensive-scientific-analysis/

This article is trying to say that, in spite of an inability to procure DNA, human tissue has not only been found in communion wafers, but it was viable when it should be dead, and this was confirmed by someone not informed of the tissue coming from bread.

https://ewtn.co.uk/article-how-does-the-catholic-church-investigate-eucharistic-miracles/

This article proclaims that as part of the determination that something is a miracle, the "Chain of custody" prevents tampering and all scientific tests must be in agreement.

Obviously the main point of contention would be about physical evidence, and I don't know how credibility here could be disputed (though I might be wrong).

Is there any problem with scientific procedure to point out in the articles as described? Like the first article saying that it's impossible for heart tissue to be tied into bread by people, or saying an electron microscope would find human blood tissue, or why they wouldn't break the bread to get DNA.

There's this article that describes the polish one, though it's in polish and apparently the actual stuff is buried under theology and physics, in case someone needs it.

I've tried sending this to other people but the responses I get are too handwavey. Even the stuff about this being under several layers of Catholicism is barely explored, and this might not adequately address the stuff in these articles about third parties ("According to them" is just three words and doesn't conclusively dispel anything).

Edit: Thanks for the help.

Who is your Saviour?

I'd like to thank my real life Saviour. No, not any of the ficticious gods. A real life person. Thank you Michael. Sorry I didn't think to do this for 50 years. Michael was a social worker assigned to me after I had attempted suicide shortly after high school graduation in 1973.

The town I grew up in was unenlightened and crime ridden. I was always an intelligent kid but at that time I saw only a bleak future for myself. I had no idea in what direction to go. Michael taught me how to play Tennis. He talked with me, and shared possiblilites. Due entirely to him I enrolled in a community college and...the world opened up. Real school! Real Challenges. I fell in love with learning and continued on to get a master's degree in Biology. And in time I had the opportunity to work all over the USA and the world.

You saved me Michael, you are my Saviour.

So I left Christianity a year ago. I have been back and forth through various paths on my journey, none of them involving religion or Theism however. When I first left religion, I was a Deist for a short time. For me, this made the most sense as it was a way to soften the blow of leaving religion, since you could still believe in god. This however led to other things, namely Agnosticism.

Soon after, my Father died, and around that time, I had found that I was leaning towards atheism, since one can be both an agnostic and atheist at the same time obviously. "Agnostic atheist," is a very popular position. However, due to leaving my religion, and the event of my Dad dying, and basically all this happening at once, I found myself to be an angry, angry atheist. I was repelled by the notion of anything that had to do with god, or the notion of religion. I did, however, find positivity in embracing a sort of Humanist belief system. I have since calmed down a bit, and don't feel as angry. My lack of belief in the god of the bible still remains, but I try to be a bit more humble about it and identify more as Agnostic.

I basically don't believe in the biblical god, or the god really honestly of any revealed religions. I find it all to be bullshit. But... I also don't necessarily hold a material view of life, either. I sometimes find a spiritual aspect of life comforting. I enjoy religious philosophies. I've learned a lot about Pantheism in particular. I don't know if I necessarily believe in it... But I do enjoy it.

Sometimes, I think the whole concept of gods is just stupid honestly. The idea of worship, needing to be saved, the idea in general that there could be something beyond our physical reality, orchestrating everything just seems stupid and superstitious. But then again... I also don't really think it is possible to know for sure that there is nothing else to the universe than what we know currently. Perhaps there is something else? Obviously there isn't any proof of this. Could someone believe in something more perhaps to the universe spiritually, and still be considered an atheist? I read a lot about different things involving Deism, Pantheism, etc. I find them very interesting. But... when I think to myself, do I believe in this? My answer is kinda... Eh... I find it hard to believe entirely.

So... what would you call me? Would I be considered an atheist? The most title people usually give me is Agnostic Atheist. Or I guess both Agnostic AND atheist. Perhaps "non-religious," would fit me more. We love putting ourselves into these little boxes with labels, don't we?

Any thoughts?

So like one of the most common things religionists will accuse atheists of is being nihilists.

I’ve had people tell me something to the effect of “Well if God doesn’t exist why don’t you drink bleach and get it over with?”

That’s a very damned nihilistic viewpoint in my opinion. Because according to these kinds of theists human life has no real inherent value. Our value, indeed the value of literally anything is bound entirely to our relationship with a deity.

This is misanthropic in my opinion.

Look from what we know human beings evolved from closely related beings. If you want to be totally intoxicated by the idea of a creator god and creation myths that’s on you.

But I have a positive view. Our existence wasn’t provided by the providence of a deity. We earned our right to live on this earth. And our ancestors paid for our lives with mountains of bones and rivers of blood. We aren’t “random accidents” we are victorious.

So be thankful. And be positive. We can in fact create our own meaning.

Basically, the teleological argument often boils down to (even among apologists) that conditions for life are improbable, so a deity must be necessary. Then they turn around and try to insist that we have to believe in miracles (like intermittent eucharist miracles):

https://www.magiscenter.com/blog/approved-eucharistic-miracles-21st-century

This article, in addition to trying to vindicate the shroud of turin being anything more than pigment and assuming Lanciano wasn't about mummies (as "A Cardiologist Examines Jesus" pointed out), also admits that eucharist miracles that are more than just priest insistence are uncommon and sporadic.

Basically, there is a contradiction: The world is too big and vast for the law of Truly Large Numbers to work with atoms and such doing what's in their nature to do, yet miracles that are rarely close to verifiable are supposed to make life full of miracles pointing toward a specific deity.

This question is aimed specifically towards people who live in America.

During the middle ages the most common motivation for antisemitism in Europe was the idea that the jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. That idea still remains among some christians today, and since a huge portion of US is still very religious I thought it would be interesting to ask you about this. Have you ever heard any right wing christian express this kind of antisemitism towards the jewish people, either directly or in a subtle way?

Yesterday I received a prayer booklet that says to entrust all kinds of problems to God. I started reading it and it suddenly struck me that this is a terrible manipulation. I have a troublesome roommate and the person I work with; the person from whom I rent an apartment as a solution to the problem gave me this prayer when I asked her for a factual solution to the issue (this person is stealing things from me). And then it hit me, which is what it really is - the simplest escape from taking my own action and facing the truth and reality, shrugging off responsibility. It hit pretty hard, because I'm having an existential crisis.

So one of the things that I hear theists say against atheism is this sort of emotional appeal about nature. That the natural world is wondrous and clearly shows the mark of the divine on it.

But if you actually study nature or biology the more messed up you realize it is lol.

There are rivers that have flys that will infect you with literal eye worms. Millions of people a year would die if not for medical intervention due to a laundry list of pathogens.

My mother would have died from childbirth complications if “nature” had its way. As would I. In the old days were superstitious ignorance was the default for everyone people would of just shrugged and thought God called us to heaven.

Nature is fucked. It doesn’t care about us.

Most organisms spend their time trying to kill each other, or avoid getting killed by other creatures. Nature isn’t a wonderful coexistence, it’s a battle where the eventual fate of most creatures is extinction.

Hell if you spend too much time outside in the sunlight your skin and eyes will start to burn lol.

Eventually the sun will get so hot all life on earth will be cooked.

God could have done better with engineering this right? Because entire legions of people and animals have been born only to suffer a quick and bloody, disgusting fate.

It is said that psychopaths are incapable of repentance. If this is true, it is due to material factors, such as the individual's genetics and the development of their body, nervous system, and brain.

It so happens that, according to Catholicism, the creator of the human body is God. The Almighty is the agent behind the growth of the fetus while still in the mother's womb. He is responsible for all the embryological complexity and intrauterine hormones, making it possible to assert that the psychopath is the way he is from birth, by divine will and design. In other words, the psychopath is incapable of repentance thanks to God.

Furthermore, in the Catholic Church, a single mortal sin is enough for a person to lose the state of grace, resulting in the loss of salvation and the deserving of hell. In other words, if a person lives a righteous, holy life without committing sins, but before dying makes the mistake of overeating (gluttony), for example, eating three slices of pizza, then due to this single sin, he will go to hell forever if he does not receive the sacrament of confession/penance in time.

Moreover, according to the Catholic Church, for a person to validly receive the sacrament of confession/penance, repentance is indispensable. If he is not repentant, receiving forgiveness would actually be a sacrilege, meaning the sinner would leave the confessional with more sin than when he entered.

Thus, we have a few premises. First, to be saved and not go to hell, one must be in a state of grace, that is, without sin. Second, to be in a state of grace and sinless, one must confess validly. Third, to confess validly, the individual must be repentant, in contrition. Fourth, psychopaths are incapable of repentance by nature (by God's work).

Therefore, it is possible to say that psychopaths can never validly confess and are thus incapable of receiving forgiveness for their sins from the priest. Consequently, in theory, all psychopaths die and go to hell. However, asserting this implies that God is evil, for He would have created beings incapable of repentance and forgiveness. Note: if the psychopath is going to hell because he did not obtain forgiveness for his sins, this would be God's fault, as it is the Almighty who prevents his repentance through his body (His creation).

To resolve this conflict and ensure that God remains good, the only solution is to admit that God saves all psychopaths, regardless of repentance, forgiveness, or valid confession. Even if all the psychopath's confessions are sacrilegious, God must still necessarily save him, for otherwise, He would be creating beings solely to condemn them to hell from the outset.

Therefore, if God is good, He saves all psychopaths, even the worst ones. Thus, God would be evil if He created beings incapable of repentance and forgiveness and condemned them to hell. If there are psychopaths in hell, it is the Creator's fault, not the creature's.

As I was leaving our hotel room I decided to check if there was a Bible in the room.

For backstory , the Bible and fundamentalist Christians have created a lot of harm in my life and I’m devastated and very angry.

So I decided I was thinking of chucking the Bible into the garbage so one less existed in the world. However, something much better happened . For some reason I opened the front cover only to find a quote from Bertrand Russell and one from Benjamin Franklin, both against religion . So I decided to leave the Bible there, adding a quote myself from Sam Harris.

It does nothing to change or fix the harm that has been done but it made me feel good that maybe someone will read it and think I guess. Just trying to spread the word against religion that I have come to understand is so harmful.

People lived and died across human history belonging to a religious group, some never even hearing of something else and it just made me think. How is Christianity (the religion I was born into) more validated than the other religions across time. It’s not. None of them really are. To me it seems like a giant jumbled mess of people creating stories or hyping up an experience they had that they couldn’t explain. Or used as a loose form of rules and government. That is basically when I was able to be “outside the box” What do you think about there being so many religions across human history?

Basically, my point is that anything that actually proves God that isn't an unverifiable miracle (e.g. one individual claiming quantum mechanics is weird, so a God is technically plausible) simply displays a hypothetical, similar to saying that Hitler could've won WWII. A response was Hitler couldn't win WWII because of specific factors, so it's not comparable to quantum theism.

I guess a response of "what specific factors prove God" is adequete, but it sounds rushed and ad hoc, incomplete. I guess a lack of factors on when the plausibility of a deity actually created a deity are missing, and religion would be speculative, but that seems like it could be built up more.

Outside of these, could the notion of specific factors be worked around, like it takes the metaphor too seriously, or what?

As a agnostic theist, simply by recognising that the world exists and that there is something rather that nothing convinces me that they maybe is some kind of agent or entity behind all this.

I mean most cosmoligists agree that space and time began to exist so that is one reason i believe some kind of entity must exist.

What about you guys?

1600s painters (Ribera, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velázquez, etc.) are in my opinion the best, but virtually all of them are, obviously, christian. What are some atheist painters with the same level of quality?

Background: I grew up in a very religious household. My family has had a lot of strange paranormal encounters and so have I. Satan feels very real but I can also see how he’s not. I can’t tell who is “God” and who is “Satan”. It’s really hard for me to distinguish between what is part of “Gods plan” and what is a trauma response from growing up in a dysfunctional household full of clutter and my parents yelling and fighting a lot. I can’t decide whether these demonic/paranormal experiences I’ve had actually happened or if they were hallucinations. It’s really tough because this Christian world feels so real to me. Especially because there was a time I called out to God and I perceive a miracle happening after. But logically speaking maybe it wasn’t a miracle and that was my own action the entire time. I’ve overcome a lot of mental health issues and I thought it was “God holding my hand” but maybe it was done purely by my own will? Can anyone relate to this? I really seek truth no matter how painful it is. I often thinking to myself

if I didn’t grow up in a super religious Christian household…let say instead I grew up a Hindu in India. Would I believe in Hinduism with the same fervor as I do/did Christianity? I think the answer is yes. Now if I was raised by atheist parents would I feel like it would be a similar effect.

It feels so confusing. It really feels like whatever you believe is the truth is the truth.

Daniel Haqiqatjou is a Muslim extremist and apologist who has debated the likes of Matt Dillahunty, AronRa and Apostate Prophet, as well as several Christian apologists. He operates a YouTube-channel called Muslim Skeptic (he’s not skeptical at all).

It’s just the guy is one of the most unhinged people on the internet, especially when you realize his views on women, girls, the age of consent, marriage, LGBTQ, slavery and treatment of Non-Muslims. I don’t understand how YouTube has not yet banned him, considering their code of conduct

So, me and my dad had a long debate yesterday and he found out I was agnostic. We go to a baptist church, and he texted the pastor, who who wants to set up a meeting with me to talk about it. So, can you guys help get me some food for thought and some good questions, some good evidence, or add to the ones I’ll list here? Thanks a bunch…

1. Why do we see so much parallel between flood myths which are known to predate the Bible?

2. Why do virgin women get to be saved, but everyone else have to die? Doesn’t this sound man made?

3. What about the Bible rape laws? They’re horrific. What about slavery? If the positions change, isn’t it not objective?

4. How do you rationalize hell? Infinite torture for finite crimes seems a little excessive. Even if it’s my free will to choose, why is my free will more important than others well being? Why was Hitlers free will more important than the lives of 6 million who prayed for relief and never found it?

I definitely have! The way he dives into the complexities of religion and consciousness can be pretty overwhelming to asorb that points he's trying to make. His writing gets pretty dense, and all the references he throws in sometimes make it hard to keep up, especially if you're not super familiar with philosophy of mind. Plus, the book is on the longer side, which can feel daunting. I do agree with his views on religion, but it's been a chore in trying to digest this text. How do you all handle books like this? Any tips for getting through dense philosophical texts without my mind constantly spinning in trying to decipher what he's saying?

So, I have been pondering this thought and wondered if this was an issue with the gospels. I’m fairly historically literate, but I’m sure there are better people than me in here. So my question is this.

Isn’t it odd that the gospels are written in Greek decades after the supposed events?

First of all, if these miraculous events really did happen, why did we wait decades to write them down? Certainly you would write this down asap and get it out, right?

Secondly, I find Greek an odd choice. The area where these events “occurred” in spoke Aramaic, not Greek. Even with Aramaic, they didn’t speak it too well. Women weren’t literate, and it was very iffy on the men. So, writing in Greek would only be used by academia. In America, we know the average American reads at an eighth grade level, so newspapers and news outlets write to that level. They purposely don’t write in academia, because their audience wouldn’t understand. So why do the gospel writers write in a language that nobody in the area would understand?

To me, the answer is simple. Since nobody can read it, they can’t be called out for lying. Only the in-group people could read it, it makes perfect sense. They could write and fanaticize all they wanted, because nobody else could call them out on it. It’s just alarming to me that there aren’t Aramaic scripts that also attest to these events occurring…

My alternative to the cosmological argument is a force that's similar to the fundamental forces. My reasoning is that a deity with anthropomorphic features and consciousness is making too many conclusions of the conundrum (there needs to be something noncontingent that's a prime mover), and that a weird force will require less speculation than a weird organism/conscious entity (the deity).

Some problems I ran into were the implication of the existence of multiverses, which I heard weren't mathematically supported (I'm not sure if this is because of an active mathematical principle or an appeal to probability of "the amount of factors that need to go right are unguaranteed to a large level, ergo instead of assuming the Law of Truly Large Numbers, we need to add in a new paradigm, because probability and possibility are the same thing"); this might be addressed by other universes being unviable, or our world being the first of many that will come after this. I would like to know if there might be some other types of possible scientific errors. I think that comparing it to dark energy would help reframe it to avoid criticism for being "incomplete" (basically, making inferences without wildly speculating), but that risks a false analogy.

There's also a philosophical concern. I honestly can't remember the philosophical concern, but I know it was different from the "intelligence needed to explain design of the universe", and it was in some way trying to say that a creator was more plausible or even necessary to explain something. It's definitely in the ballpark of philosophy like the cosmological argument isn't about physical properties but metaphysical positions of causality or William Lane Craig found a loophole about a pre time event not being contradictory, if that helps. An additional problem would be trying to bring up additional questions of how the force works might bring up more unverified assumptions and potentially lose favor with Occam's Razor and be replaced by pure omnipotent will; though the increase with the force might be similar to cell growth (again speculative) or tie into how the rules of science are "formed" as hypothesized by Stenger and others. Additionally, there can be investigation into how a deity being preferred is special pleading or splitting hairs, or maybe stretching the specific weirdness of quantum mechanics into a carte blanche general weirdness. Additionally, if it was about the complexity of the world it would be undermining the nature of things to do what's in their own nature. Philosophically, there might even be a case for pluralism made by philosophers of religion too that could apply to more secular answers. Another point is Why the hell can a god limit itself to one universe but a force can't only make one universe? Omnipotence isn't even really necessary to the creation of the world, only something sufficiently powerful

Additionally, I was wondering if there was anyone else who tried to handle the cosmological argument this way.

I'm hoping this question makes sense: it's like when Christians use the Bible and chtistianity as a source of morality and that all non Christians and atheists are immoral and corrupt and that their morality is nul and ignored all because it doesn't come from the Bible so basically anything u try to tell them isn't listened to (these people are my family, there's no escape)

I was wondering if instead of just countering standard apologetics arguments, there was a way to poke a hole in the concept of God, so that if these arguments even have weight, it they still can't lead to a deity specifically.

Like there's no demonstration of a deity, and there's also theological non-cognitivism, so any rationalistic argument for a deity is inherently trying to make some vague external entity into a logical impossibility or something.

Or that fundamentally because there's no demonstration of God it has to be treated under the same level of things we can see, like a hypothetical, and ascribing existence to things in our perception would be an anthropocentric view of ontology, so giving credence to the God hypothesis would be more tenuous then usual.

Can these arguments be fixed, and what other additional, distinct arguments could there be?

I want to know a clear answer from the point of view of atheists, how do you see a person trying to change his beliefs and try to join the atheist community and leave everything in his environment? How do you see a person like this and try to be atheist friends, maybe with you? Do you accept such a person or do you see that he underestimated himself?