Attitudes Toward Atheists & Beliefs About Atheists

Discussion in 'Religion' started by StrangerInAStrangeLand, Oct 15, 2017.

  1. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Take the ritual out and you describe predation. But it won't have any relevance to comparing religion to non-religion and it certainly isn't relevant here.
    Are you seriously claiming the consumption of meat and industrial food production are all done by atheists?

    Put the ritual back in. It is the very crux of the matter under consideration.
     
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  3. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Which "they"? Different religions have different but equally strict, rules regarding the corpse. Some parts are usually burnt for the deity, while the rest is eaten by the priests and/or distributed to the beggars that invariably hang around sanctified premises.
    Because these are of value to their owners. Hence the concept of 'sacrifice'. The OT lays out all the terms and conditions for the Hebrews of that time https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Leviticus-Chapter-7/#29
    I imagine the Druids and Huns had their own rules.
    Yes, often. But in most cases, it wasn't about valour; it was about duty, penance, fortune-telling or favour-seeking.
    Funny coincidence, that people who eat meat offer meat to their gods and gods who like meat let their chosen people kill animals. Huh.
    Which would be valid if theists only killed for sacrifice, refused to work in any aspect of domestic livestock production and unanimously shunned
    while atheists ate all of the meat raised and slaughtered for human consumption. It would be much smaller market.
    Winner?

    Oooooh, how cute is that?

    So, you still don't get the meaning or purpose of sacrifice.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/beef-companies-file-petition-against-lab-grown-meat-startups-2018-2
    Stop waiting. Civil ceremonies and secular proceedings with no ceremony are just as legally valid as the church versions.
    Have been for some time.

    Did you have a point to make? Or was all this just smoke?
     
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  5. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    You should probably start referencing what you are talking about. I was under the impression you were talking about kosher, halal, etc.
    If you want to talk about cultures of great antiquity, I'm not sure how that's going to make your argument stronger.

    And bears and tiger's aren't valuable?

    Do they still do this, or is it a bygone tradition?

    It seems to be more about low hanging fruit, to beg the mixed metaphor

    It's more about regulating bad habits. People will eat meat regardless, so overlaying it with rituals regulates it. Take away the ritual and it just becomes a user demand market that gets out of control.

    I don't follow?
    If you want to talk about animal sacrifice in relation to religion, you are (popularly) talking halal and kosher (and also hindu and buddhist practices, but they are probably not worth mentioning considering current company).
    As far as I am aware, there are no regular meat eating restrictions popularly associated with mainstream christianity (previously, as in two or three generations back, Catholics used to refrain from eating meat on fridays, but that appears to no longer be mainstream even amongst catholics .... 7th day adventists are to varying degrees vegetarian).

    Anyway, are you trying to talk about lapsed practitoners or something (one's who don't care respectively for halal/kosher) or something else?

    The development of the meat industry, sans ritual, sans restriction and sans species just makes it more streamlined and efficient.

    I assumed it was the one's who don't have a dangling thing spurting blood on their conscience. Or was there another reason you focused on animal sacrifice, aside from its inherent cruelty?

    Oooooh, how cute is that?

    Even now it's difficult to ascertain what you are meaning because you are ducking and weaving between normative descriptions of antiquity and contemporary religious affairs.

    Relevance?

    I know.
    Does it come as some surprise that they also skimp on the rituals?

    If you were trying to make some point about theists undertaking numerically more religious ritualistic "whatevers" compared to atheists, one would think the very use of the words "atheist" and "theist" would be sufficient to determine that these things are not big in the daily planners of atheists.
     
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  7. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Preferably on topic.
     
  8. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

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  9. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    2,701
    I was suggesting that removing meat eating from traditional religious contexts paves the way for greater demand and greater production. I thought that may be relevant because you seemed to initially suggest there was some barbaric element to animal sacrifice. From subsequent discussions, it appears this may not have been your intention.
     
  10. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    Nope. The demand long predates human ideas.
    Greater production is an economic development, not an ideological one.
    The comparison was between religious practice and atheist practice.
    My post was in a context had nothing to do with diet: that whole line on food-preparation was added by you.
    I notice you ignored the first line, regarding human sacrifice.

    Having given you a fair trial and ascertained that you're just another disingenuous apologist, who resorts to the same tiresome tactics of changing the subject, distorting word usage, deflection, obfuscation and conflation of unrelated concepts, I have lost interest.
     
  11. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    2,701
    Ok.
    Pity you had to leave before you began to make sense.
     
  12. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    1) You are mixing religious and atheist again - the thread topic gets lost every time you do that.
    2) It doesn't. Traditional Christian contexts have proven just fine for all manner of high-output production and high demand, as have other traditional religious contexts in China and India and so forth.
    You were confusing sacrifice with slaughter. Still are. That's going to muddy things quite a bit in a thread addressing atheism.
     
  13. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    2,701
    If there are prohibitions on eating meat according to time, place and circumstance, you add to issues that diminish consumption.
    If there are prohibitions on producing meat according to time, place and circumstance, you add to issues that diminush production.

    If it's really your thing, you can read up on meatworks that face backlash for not doing the proper leg work to label their goods as kosher or halal. It seems to be endemic to these industries that not just animals, but corners be cut.

    In regards to cutting not just animals but corners in meat consumption, you see that with many forms of contemporary christianity, where the distinction between lapsed practitioner and practitioner is so blurred that many sincere practitioners are oblivious to standards that were seen as central just a few generations ago.

    In a religious context, they are popularly one and the same.
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    For as much as I pick on dumbassed atheistic questions for being tinkertoys in shitswamps, what the hell does that circumstantially apologistic inquiry even mean? We're, what, twenty-seven hundred years later, and Salih is still the smart one in the room?
     
  15. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    2,701
    That the notion of animal sacrifice outside of a culinary context appears neither dominant nor persistent.
    Being kosher or halal with a tiger or bear has apparent added work, health and safety issues. It appeared this lesson was learned quite early in the piece.
     
    Last edited: Aug 5, 2018
  16. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    It sounds more like you're thinking of a modernist stereotype of primitivsm akin to the American Christianist panic about Satanism thirty-some years ago.

    Meanwhile, Jeeves↑ did answer you:

    The response, of course—

    —was disappointing. If you cannot figure out that predators hunted and killed are not as much a sacrifice as food, then it is hard to figure what to tell you.

    To the other—

    —go ask a rabbi about cheese.

    No, seriously; if you're not a Jew, it's really, really complicated, so go ahead and look it up yourself instead of asking people you don't respect to figure it out for you.

    But, to the beeblebrox—

    —you really don't seem to have a clue what you're on about.

    Eating meat as a bad habit is a notion of later vintage. And this is an interesting thing that arises among moral vegetarianism, though I admit I haven't encountered this clumsy a version of it for over a decade, but still, moral vegetarianism is a really messed up joke: Consumption of meat has not selected out of the species; trying to will selection, as such, is dumb enough as it goes, but it really is for nothing better than personal aesthetics, as problematic as it is megalomaniacal.

    Try it this way: You answered↑ a ten month-old post↑, and instead of just running with the most obvious examples of ritual human sacrifice in history, you chose instead the ahistorical moral vegetarian rant↑ requiring, say, the Jebusites or Quraysh to be twenty-first century cosmopolitans. Bacon cheeseburger? Tattoo? Anal sex? Go live in the desert for forty years, with thousands of other people, and tell me about sanitation; maybe stuffing a sheep bladder with cow stomach, chicken parts, and ground up pig gland isn't the best idea while you're out there. There is a thesis, for instance, about British accents, and hog wallow parasite worms, and now you know where the U.S. "Southern" accent comes from, or some such; regulating livestock handling isn't about a "bad habit" of meat consumption, it's about not wrecking a society with disease.

    Meanwhile, in an Abramic world, if God hadn't meant for people to eat meat, we would not eat meat. In a more evolutionary world, well, the human impulse to pursue particular proteins most abundantly found in other animals has not selected out.

    There is a personal joke in it all, because, as a statistical matter, this version of moral vegetarianism is one I typically hear overlapping a range of atheistic sociopolitical outlooks. I'm more accustomed to anti-atheistic considerations of dietary law and food custom having a clue about the dietary laws and food customs, since those under discussion are, generally speaking, theistic. That is to say: (1) The last time I encountered a comparably clumsy moral vegetarianism, it happened to be an atheist who was saying it; (2) if he was to parody a theist making fun of atheists, he would actually sound kind of like you, which is mere coincidence, or else some arcane thesis I cannot presently construct or discern, about the boundaries and nature of some abstract data set.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    That's not your claim.
    Your claim was that culinary practices emerged from a pre-existing and larger context of animal sacrifice.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    And if none of this has anything to do with theism, you are once again wasting bandwidth.
    Every religion on this planet distinguishes sacrifice from slaughter. Especially the theistic ones.
     
  19. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    That doesn't explain why there are a stack of injunctions regarding the consumption and production of meat products.

    Make up your mind.
    Is it "every" or "especially"?
     
  20. Musika Last in Space Valued Senior Member

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    2,701
    Actually my claim is both, but perhaps a dominant emphasis, vice versa, of your allegation.
    Its not so much religious traffic lights being installed around meat eating, but the practice of meat eating demanding the installation of religious traffic lights. I say both, because once the traffic lights are installed, it tends to engineer habits within society. Of the later, it is only a tendency, since there is the possibility (even to the degree of the development of sects and religions) that practice vegeterianism within the practice of a broader category, and still retain their identity (for instance, one can be termed a "vegetarian christian" and not be seen as displaying behaviour contrary to christianity).

    It is just like the manner that a government regulates a legal drinking age. It doesn't reflect an inherent interest of the government, but an inherent interest of the population they are charged with governing. Such " traffic lights" don't engineer a requirement for drinking in order to be an adult, but it popularly gets interpreted as such So there is also an added element of when such regulations are implemented, to a certain degree, it also perpetuates behaviour amongst the citizenry.
     
  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Which is not what happened, apparently.
    This is why I don't trust fundies with political power. They don't understand representative democratic government - they don't get it, at a basic level.
    It's both. They do not conflict.
    So start a thread. Nobody's stopping you. It's one of the oldest themes in the Marxist analysis of religion, as well as the scientific investigation of religion, so there's plenty to discuss on a science forum.

    Meanwhile, returning to this thread - - - - attitudes toward atheists, beliefs about atheists, vegetarian atheists maybe?
     
  22. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    4,885
    From Tiassa Post 153
    Not sure what this has to do with attitudes & beliefs about atheists.

    Jews do not believe in eating dairy products & meat at the same meal. This prohibition was due to a line in the Torah: “Thou shalt not stew the lamb in his mother’ milk.”

    The above actually referred to a pagan practice of boiling lamb in milk & sprinkling it over land to make it more fertile.
     
  23. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    4,885
    BTW: I am an atheist goy married to a non-observant Jew.
     

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