Hating Religion on Insufficient Grounds
I think you are asking what the cons are of basing "our" culture off Christianity. The first fallacy of your question is the fact that much of Western pop culture IS based off of religion. Pokemon is based off of Shinto, collecting spirits, and includes figures from various religions including Hebrew figures and Greco-Roman gods.
How on earth do you get the idea that Pokémon is based off of Shinto? And in what way does Shnito feature "collecting" spirits? I looked
on Wikipedia and found nothing like that. (And I thought you said you could form a
credible argument against Pokémon?)
Among other things, modern religions are growing distant from the progressive world; the religious who reconcile with all these new ideas, the liberal Christians, have to embrace a growing suspension of belief and a rationalization of their holy texts when objectively looking at the world today. We have landed on the moon, raising the idea of why the bible only mentions creation of the earth; we have discovered that animals change, which goes against the traditional idea that animals as they are now came from the Garden of Eden, and we have held women as equal, when in the Bible, Eve was derivative of Adam.
The above actually makes me question whether you've actually read Genesis. Though celectial objects are not the focus, the sun and moon are clearly implied in
Genesis 1:14-19, and then there's also the express mention, "He made the stars also" (v.16).
I've emphasized repeatedly that even as a biblically-literal non-evolutionist, I believe living things were not created
exactly as we see them today, that there are some minor changes. Some breeds of dogs, for example, are less than a
century old!
Of course these weren't in Eden! Multiple finch species? These similar finches probably came from a (slightly different)
finch!
Regarding your implication that women are not viewed as equal in the Bible, I'd suggest
this article.
And yes, I hold atheists to the same standard - if you don't want to be ridiculed, don't be obnoxious.
Wow. That is a very mature statement. That's one way to avoid being on my "top ten worst debaters" list. (That last part was sarcasm.
Sorta.)
Again, there's nothing inherent about religion that promotes hostility towards other religions (except maybe the Judaeo belief that Jesus was not the messiah) - its the way people interpret and manipulate religion to further those hostile ends that is the problem.
Now that's just a downright outstandingly high level of tolerance. You just don't see that much anymore. Very commendable!
I shall tell you the reasons why I hate religion.
The first reason is simply that religion assumes its own truth. Religion does not operate on falsehoods or maybes, to instill worship it must provide a divine, and thus infallible, mandate. This is absurd. To claim absolute knowledge of the divine, a knowledge based on ancient texts and second-hand reports, and to expect people to believe in this so-called 'evidence' is utterly mind-boggling in its stupidity. I have no problem with ideas of the divine existing, I could quite happily be a deist for instance, but I accept that as a fallible, mortal, far-from-divine being I have no real knowledge of the divine (if it even exists) so I make no claims about its nature (except to claim that its nature cannot be known, or most likely is not known). Religion is a system of interpreting divinity, a divinity that I believe cannot be interpreted or known about precisely because it is divine and we are not. And yet religion asks of us, nay, demands of us, that we do believe in a purported nature of the divine, it gives us laughable evidence for this belief and tells us that if we exercise our critical judgement and admit to the lunacy of such beliefs we are punished, whether it be a punishment on this earth or a divine punishment in the next.
(Emphasis added)
Ahhh, second-hand reports? That's an untruth. Even the extremely radical Jesus Seminar believes that some of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament are actually His words. I've actually examined their book,
The Five Gospels (which tried to validate the second-century gospel of Thomas--containing very little of historical value), and I can tell you how they don't consistently follow the proper rules of historical criticism
which they themselves acknowledge.
For example, because of the Criterion of dissimilarity, the Jesus Seminar accepts that Jesus said something very like, "There is nothing outside of a person that can defile him by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles him" from
Mark 7:15. (See
The Five Gospels, page 31) Because of the Jewish emphasis on ceremony and eating the right foods, this is dissimilar enough to be authentic, not borrowed from some other Jewish rabbi. But they don't accept His statements claiming to be the Son of Man (a claim to deity because of an Old Testament reference), despite the fact that others did not claim such a title! In doing this, they reveal that they have assumed that Jesus did not claim to be deity, depsite the fact that this is circular reasoning.
So, there's no doubt, even by really skeptical scholars, that Jesus said and did some of the things in the biblical Gospels. Secondhand reports? Try again Tim.
I blame how often the Bible gets mistranslated throughout the years as now, no one really knows for sure if these are the true words of God. I tend to distrust both extremists and atheists because they both try to convert you to their beliefs and what they believe is right. This is why I wish I never want to be a human.
Sorry--the idea that the Bible gets mistranslated so much isn't an issue because of the ancient manuscripts available in the original languages. These can (and have) been examined by Christians, Jews, people from entirely different religions, and secular people. People nowadays can translate out of the original languages with much greater knowledge because of textual criticism (though some very conservative Christians balk at any sort of thing).
If you want to see an example of an atheist cheating in his analysis of a New Testament manuscript, see
the webpage linked in my sig.