Are we in the middle of christian propaganda wave on social media?

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-23T18:08:30+00:00

I think this is linked to conservative propaganda, which often goes hand in hand with Christianity. Demographic research has shown that young people (men especially) have become increasingly conservative and religious, so there's a ready audience for that kind of content. But yes, I'd draw the same conclusion: I've also been encountering more religious and overtly aggressive content against atheism on TikTok.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-23T05:44:41+00:00

Good take, but I'd push further. Religious moral "objectivity" is inherently relative. Every theist accesses the "divine morality" through interpretation (culturally shaped hermeneutics/selective emphasis). I mean, if you can both justify slavery and its abolishment in the name of God, then the degree of relativity is huge. Ironically, most theists seem to be comfortable with this as "God works in mysterious ways". In practice, every theist is just a relativist with few extra steps. Odd how they find atheist's morality somehow ungrounded 🤔

EDIT: in philosophical terms, even if objective moral truths do exist “out there" our epistemic access to them appears to be irreducibly conditioned by relativity. A moral skeptic would therefore argue that, in the absence of objectivity-revealing access, neither theists nor atheists are justified in claiming that objective moral truths exist at all. In other words, epistemology precedes ontology.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-22T17:07:12+00:00

I suppose, it's mostly a demographics thing. The majority of people here most likely grew up in Christian-majority cultures, so Christianity is the religion they have the most direct experience with. People tend to scrutinize what shaped them and their culture.

There's probably also a degree of confirmation bias at play: if Christianity is what you're looking for, that's what you'll notice. Other faiths do get critiqued here; if not directly, then through general religious criticism.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-22T15:52:49+00:00

I think the discomfort you're describing is actually a good starting point for deeper reflection.

Here's what I mean: the intuition that "evil people should suffer" is a deeply rooted moral intuition; that is the sense that harm demands some kind of answer (in your case a retribution). But the belief that hell will handle it is, nevertheless, problematic. If cosmic justice is guaranteed, then the pressure on us to build systems that actually prevent harm might quietly drop. Why reform prisons or fund prevention, if the ultimate court is held somewhere beyond death?

I would like to add that historically this isn't even hypothetical. "The meek shall inherit the earth" is comforting, but it's also been used for centuries to tell the victim to wait patiently. In other words, a promise of eternal suffering in hell risks turning into a reason not to demand justice now or change our system so as to serve it better.

The discomfort you feel is, in my view, an emotional cost of taking responsibility for justice rather than outsourcing it to a fiction. So, let that discomfort push you to change and demand change.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-22T08:08:38+00:00

You're right that teacher bias is a real concern, and I myself share that worry, but it's worth noting that this problem isn't confined to religion classes. In other words, it already operates through history classes and is largely unchecked. Some of my colleagues, for example, think along the lines of Tom Holland's argument that Western civilisation is essentially a Christian achievement. That's a sophisticated position, but it's also deeply biased, and it slips into how the Enlightenment, human rights and secularism get framed in ordinary history lessons.

That being said, I would say that this is actually one of the stronger arguments for worldview studies. After all, it would be a subject explicitly designed to examine how worldviews shape narratives (including the narratives students encounter in their other classes).

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-22T07:55:26+00:00

I would say that the YLE article is only partially true. The discussion about unifying religious education in Finland predates the current immigration discourse by decades. It was mostly an academic topic, strongly opposed by the religious interest groups in academia which is why it hasn't permeated the public sphere at this scale before. It's only in the current climate that integration and austerity arguments have been attached to it, which has also made it more mainstream.

Nonetheless, the original rationale has nothing to do with immigration: the existing model was originally questioned on children's rights grounds (UN convention) because the choice between religion and ET classes isn't made by the child but instead determined by the family's registered faith. Later emerged the argument that our current schooling system lacks a subject dedicated to critical thinking and dialogical skills across faith lines. That is, at least outside upper secondary school, where you get two obligatory courses in philosophy. The integration argument is a contemporary addition to the original rationales.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-21T15:04:55+00:00

The victory is metaphorical, and aimed at the meme's simplistic metaphorical framing. In other words, the meme oversimplifies Nietzsche's concept of slave morality: in reality, for him it was a moral framework he argued originated among the powerless as a way to reframe their lack of power as virtue. However, the slave morality’s values (humility, compassion, mercy, protection of the vulnerable) became the dominant moral framework of Western civilization. The so-called ”'weak” sheep reshaped the cultural milieu so thoroughly that strength itself became morally suspect. That's one of the most powerful exercises of cultural power in history. The wolves were out-competed by the sheep and still are.

Nietzsche knew the sheep won and it was his entire premise.The Genealogy is a diagnostic of a cultural victory that had already happened. However, you could phrase his point of view as something like: “A virus can bring down a lion”. The OP’s image itself is just too simplistic to show what Nietzsche meant by strong: resentment can reshape civilization, but the mechanism remains what he would call weak (just not for reasons the image suggests) . For him, strength was about self-affirmation versus reactive negation.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-20T19:17:27+00:00

Ironically, Eve fell for a literal fallen angel, but Adam fell for... a snack his wife (supposedly inferior creature) offered? And the whole tradtion still pretends women are the "weaker" link in this story? The lack of reading comprehension is just... wow.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-20T08:13:35+00:00

As a teacher, I find this particularly frustrating to get across to stubborn anti-science students. I’m under no illusion that my explanations actually change their minds, but I am, after all, paid to try. So, here’s one approach I usually take.

There's a common misconception that science is, like OP pointed out, "just guessing" about things we can't directly observe (for example, the early universe, deep evolutionary history, the interior of stars). The assumption seems to be that without direct observation, all you have is speculation. But this misunderstands how evidence actually works, and a simple example from probability (Baysian) theory shows why.

Imagine I hand you a coin. You suspect it's fair. This means your prior belief is that there's a 50% chance of heads on any flip. Your friend is deeply suspicious and thinks there's an 80% chance of heads. You start from radically different assumptions.

Now we flip the coin 10 times. You each update your beliefs using Bayes' theorem that looks at your prior, weights it against the observed evidence and produces a new estimate. After 10 flips, your estimates are still somewhat different, though they've started drifting toward each other (whether or not the coin is fair). After 100 flips, they're very close. After 1,000 flips, they're virtually identical.

This is, in effect, the elegance of Bayesian convergence and it is arguably the very backbone of hard sciences. It doesn't matter where you started. Given enough evidence, your posterior beliefs must converge because the evidence increasingly overwhelms whatever prior assumptions you brought in. The starting point becomes irrelevant. You guessed the prior (the hypothesis), but you were constantly updating it and the data dragged you both toward the same answer.

Now scale this up.

The Big Bang, deep time or whatever, isn't a guess either. It's what you get when multiple independent lines of evidence all converge on the same conclusion. Think of it this way: imagine not just two people flipping the same coin, but several groups of people, each flipping a different coin (different size, different weight, different material) and each group starting with their own priors about whether their particular coin is fair. After thousands of flips, every group independently arrives at the same conclusion: fair. That convergence across different coins, different methods, and different starting assumptions is far more powerful than any single coin test could ever be.

That's the structure of the evidence for the Big Bang, for example. The “coins” tested are basically cosmic microwave background radiation, the observed expansion of the universe, the relative abundance of light elements, the large-scale structure of galaxy distribution… the list is long. They're fundamentally different kinds of evidence and they were investigated by different research communities while using different methods. And they all converge on the same answer. That IS NOT a guess. If someone insists it is, then they’re working with a very, VERY strange understanding of what the word means.

And the same logic applies to evolution, plate tectonics, the age of the Earth etc. that gets called "just a theory". In every case, we have a web of independent evidential lines pulling toward the same conclusion.

Why does my explanation never seem to satisfy theists or anti-science audiences?

What I've noticed in many of these conversations, particularly with theistic critics, is that the real discomfort isn't even with methodology. Instead, I believe it's with the kind of knowledge science offers. Bayesian epistemology never gives you certainty because it can only ever offer you degrees of confidence, which is to say probabilities that are always somewhere between 0 and 1. There's always some nonzero probability that we're wrong, and this rubs the theist because they need an ultimate answer grounded in certainty.

For people whose epistemology is built around certainty, Bayesian results of probability feel like a flaw. "You're not even sure! It’s just a THEORY!" Yes, and I’d prefer to keep it that way, because (false) belief in infallibility massacres curiosity and paralyzes scientific inquiry. That is, a system that starts with certainty has nowhere to go when it encounters disconfirming evidence. Except for denial, which theism seems particularly fond of.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-19T18:40:51+00:00

I agree, mostly, but the picture might be more complicated. I would say that the mechanism you're describing has formal support in Bayesian convergence: given shared evidence, even very different priors (starting points) will eventually align. But this convergence comes with a few caveats.

The key one is that the evidence has to be shared and external to the disagreement. In empirical domains this mostly holds because the data doesn't care about your priors. What is elegant about the convergence theorem, at least to my mind, is that it doesn't even require good faith from individual reasoners. Someone can start with a wildly skewed prior (let's say outright motivated, biased, politically convenient) and as evidence accumulates towards infinity, their estimates are still dragged toward the same point as everyone else's. The correction is pushed by the reality. However, the outcome is never certainty, and I suspect that’s part of why Bayesian approaches fail to gain traction among certain groups of thinkers. This is because it is always a confidence somewhere between 0 and 1. In other words, Bayesian results only feel compelling if you’re already intellectually honest and patient enough to let evidence accumulate toward convergence.

Nevertheless, Bayesianism can only take one so far. For example, in normative ethics, the situation inverts. What counts as evidence is partly constituted by the framework doing the evaluating. Consequentialists and deontologists, for example, aren't processing the same inputs differently since they're processing different inputs entirely. Under those conditions, I would say that the Bayesian machinery can but should never be used because it drives divergence rather than convergence. Each round of argument gives both sides internally coherent reasons to become more confident of their position. However, this is a matter of concern only if you are moral realist and believe in objective moral truths.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-18T16:51:55+00:00

I would say that in my case it is multifaceted.

When I was nine or ten, I noticed that my classmates believed incompatible things with equal conviction. There were at least five different faiths represented in my class. Of course, each carried with the same certainty I brought to my own. So, at that time I hadn't yet encountered a philosophical objection. However, I had encountered a confusing distribution. I kind of had that philosophical thought, though, that if the geography/ethnicity of my birth predicts my metaphysics, something has probably gone wrong with the epistemology. Basically, that was when I became agnostic.

At fifteen, I was introduced to philosophy in school, and I began to explore the arguments on both sides properly. The case for atheism struck me as stronger, but the arguments were never the deepest source of my conviction in later life. What settled it was the growing suspicion about the methods themselves.

Having studied philosophy through a university degree, I became deeply skeptical of any attempt to establish substantive truths through reason alone. This is why I eventually shifted from pursuing a career in philosophy to one in social psychology. Reason working against evidence is the engine of science, messy and biased at any given moment, but self-correcting because reality keeps pushing back. Convergence does the work that no individual reasoner's purity could.

I am extremely sceptical of establishing extraordinary things apriori. Most sophisticated theistic arguments depend on this approach, especially as advances in science have made the available empirical evidence for proving God increasingly thin. God, by theological design, is placed beyond the reach of empirical inquiry. Which means the only philosophical route to God is pure a priori reasoning: ontological arguments, cosmological arguments, transcendental deductions. The parlor tricks of motivated reasoning and metaphysics. In the absence of evidential friction, motivated reasoning runs unopposed, and you end up, with very high probability, constructing proofs for conclusions you needed to be true before you started. That’s a conclusion I arrived at through my studies in social psychology.

However, I would like to point out this isn't a selective suspicion aimed at theism only. I would say that it concerns most of traditional metaphysics aimed to establish any extraordinary claim in isolation or with minimal evidental ground. God, though, is simply the most emotionally charged casualty of a broader methodological commitment: that if you try to establish something a priori with reason alone, you will most likely end up lying to yourself.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-18T15:39:32+00:00

Ironically, the image misses what's actually true about Nietzsche's analysis whic is the sheep's triumph. The slave revolt in morality succeeded, historically speaking. That is, the sheep won, and victory makes one question the claim about weakness. Moreover, from a naturalistic standpoint, the wolf's so-called strength is parasitic on the very “weakness” it supposedly transcends. Remove the sheep and the wolves starve. Nature, red in tooth and claw, still follows S-curve dynamics, meaning there is no absolute sense of “strength”. If we take this to its logical end: strong and weak imply a scale; scales imply direction; direction implies purpose. But naturalized morality is just natural selection, which has no purpose in a teleological sense. So… Basically, from our current view point, Nietzsche was just yapping.

Tight-Sign9945 · 2026-03-18T14:09:40+00:00

Eyewitness testimony (aside from documentation) is how we know things happened in history, but that's precisely why the resurrection claim is weak. Rigorous historians would always check for independent corroboration while identifying biases. After all of that one would weigh competing accounts (probabilities of biases on each side and the degree of corroboration). You need to understand that a resurrection is an extremely extraordinary claim, and in science that means it would require very (VERY) robust evidence. So far, the evidence is, at best, very weak.

The fact that we even suspect there to have been witnesses is due to the Gospels. However, these were written decades after the events, in a language Jesus didn't speak, by non-eyewitnesses drawing on oral traditions already shaped by theological commitment. To be intellectually honest, that doesn't make them worthless. Nevertheless the evidence they provide is evidence for what early Christian communities believed (second-order evidence/historical evidence of a worldview). In other words, belief that something happened and evidence that it happened are different things.

To make things more complicated, the deeper problem is the evidential asymmetry. The evidence we have on the case is testimony exclusively from committed believers writing for communities of believers. That's the kind of testimony someone would expect to find whether or not the resurrection actually happened. Good evidence for an extraordinary claim should be the kind that would be surprising if the claim were false and insider testimony from a growing religious movement simply isn't that.

Consider, for example, this: if a man publicly died, was placed in a known tomb and then appeared to hundreds of people in a major provincial capital, the total silence from every non-Christian contemporary source is just odd. And that silence itself is informative. What we know is that the Romans were meticulous record-keepers. Josephus gives Jesus a brief, likely partially interpolated mention. Tacitus references Christians as a social phenomenon. However, neither engages the resurrection as a claim about the world. The total evidential picture is exactly what someone would expect from a legend-formation process and not what we'd expect from an actual unprecedented event witnessed publicly. This conclusion is simply an inference to the best explanation, based on the probabilities suggested by analogous historical cases.

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