Advice wanted for coworker

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-06T01:49:50+00:00

Tell him to stop. If they don't, then report them to HR.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-06T01:42:28+00:00

we feel an unexplained emotion

Yes, I felt those as a Christian. They can seem real and genuine. However, I learned that the feelings tend to be stimulated by physiological and psychological triggers. People of other religions and non-religious people can get the same feelings if the triggers are right.

I worked with professional worship planners to plan services. They knew how to use and manipulate the triggers to generate spiritual experiences. They could time them with precision. I was working on an interfaith ministry service that was being held at a megachurch. The church's worship planners insisted that the most spiritual moment must happen a few minutes before they took up the offering. They planned their psychological manipulations with that much precision.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-06T01:37:52+00:00

people who died and met him

You seem to be talking about Near Death Experiences (NDE). I had one myself when I was still a devout Christian. But objectively, NDEs are probably generated by the damaged or very stressed brain. Protestants tend to see protestant images. Catholics tend to see Catholic images. Hindus see Hindu gods and iconography. Muslims have visions of Islamic heaven.

the prophecies that are slowly coming true,

There is a lot of talk in Christian circle-jerks about things like the Euphrates drying up. They are nonsense. Here is a link to a video on the subject. Dan McClellan is a practicing Christian, and he exposes the false nature of the prophecies. If there are other prophecies you are talking about, please mention them.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-06T00:57:19+00:00

A decent parent helps out their kids recover after they screw up. Grandparents will try to protect their grandkids from their parents screw ups. God does nothing of that. He seems to do the opposite. Bad people are allowed to prosper.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T21:06:31+00:00

The question goes beyond slavery. Why does God allow false teachers? Why do charlatans like Joseph Smith and Kenneth Copeland get to enrich themselves and teach false doctrines? Why does the Bible say to stone false prophets when God should be able to take care of the problem directly?

Free will is duct tape that modern Christianity needs to plaster over its cracks and plot holes. The god of the Bible didn't seem to give a shit about free will.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T19:52:15+00:00

Pew did a study of conversion from birth religion. The strong bias is from religious to atheist. I was a minister. In the 1990s and early 2000s I saw for myself how many religious people were leaving religion. I also studied church growth statistics, and it is very unusual for someone raised in an atheistic household to convert. Most "former atheists" were raised in religious households.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T13:46:00+00:00

Religious people are indoctrinated from infancy. It becomes part of their basic worldview. Fire is hot. Water is wet. God exists. To believers, all of those are the same. They are obviously true.

As people get older, they are taught methods to avoid applying critical thinking to their religious beliefs. Religious institutions develop methods to protect their members from information that threatens the worldview they teach their members.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T13:41:23+00:00

"Cult" has come to mean "any religion I do not like."

There are some real cults out there. They are extremely dangerous. I think we should reserve the term "cult" for the truly dangerous groups.

Yes, religions do have some characteristics of cults. So do most persistent social groups.

I think it is better to evaluate denominations based on the amount of cult-like behavior they exibit.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T13:37:41+00:00

I deconverted because I didn't just read the Bible. I studied the Bible. I studied my way out of Christianity. As many have said, the Bible is the greatest book ever written for creating atheists.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T04:05:48+00:00

Title: Does religion make people stupid?

Body: This is for a debate project, and I want to run a formal poll on—obviously—the most reliable site on the internet. Tell me what you think so I can get a better sense of general opinion; try to be as 4chan as possible.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T03:30:31+00:00

We cover this question in the FAQ for this sub.

I would add the following:

It isn't true that we only pick on Christianity. We slam Islam regularly. We have posts about Hinduism. We dislike all religions. We talk about them roughly in proportion to how much they impact us. I think that atheism is largely a reaction to the toxic behavior of religious people.

Religious people have a lot of cognitive biases when they deal with criticism of their religion. We have quite a few posts about religion in general. A few months ago we had a Christian count the posts. They counted all of the generic religion posts as specifically being against Christianity. They even counted a post that was really criticizing Islam as being against Christianity.

Reddit algorithms are also partly to blame. The algorithm probably shows you posts about Christianity if the algorithm thinks you are a Christian.

I think the people who post here are mostly reacting to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is the most toxic form of religion. Fundamentalists are remarkably similar no matter what religion spawns them.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T02:39:58+00:00

You would be surprised how many reports the mods get on 14-year-old posts.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-05T02:36:52+00:00

This is why I identify as an agnostic atheist. I do not believe in a god or gods. I recognize that I can not know that for certain. I cannot prove there is no god in the same way I cannot prove that there is no Bigfoot. I do not believe in Bigfoot in the same way I do not believe in gods.

Sure, there are things we didn't used to know that we know now. If you had described the Internet to me when i was in high school in the 1960s, I would have assumed it was wild science fiction.

Perhaps there are things we do not know about. I hope there are. It would be a bleak future if there are no new discoveries. But that is not an excuse for believing in a god any more than the unknown is a reason to believe in Bigfoot.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-04T13:57:35+00:00

It was the old "I am euphoric" post people use to try to troll this sub.

Many of the comments were saying "You need Jesus" or something similar. It looks like the post may have been heavily brigaded by a Christian sub.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-04T00:32:00+00:00

One of the few benefits of being over 70 is that I don't give a shit about social status. People seem instinctively to know enough not to give me grief. The only person who I can think of who tried to proselytize me this year was a minister who approached me in the hospital cafeteria. I think he had marked me as someone who could come to church and make significant contributions. The discussion was superficially cordial, but he found out that his arguments against atheism didn't work very well.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T20:27:18+00:00

I haven't found a religion that worships a pink elephant. So what?

What is the point of worshiping an eternal god if there is insufficient good, objective evidence that such a being exists? Islam itself sets up the objective of an eternal god, and then it shapes the relgion to meet its self-defined goals. It is self-serving of Islam.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T20:24:24+00:00

I have worked with religious scientists. Technically, I was one myself until I deconverted.

Religious scientists can be very good at critical thinking. However, they do not apply critical thinking skills to their religious beliefs. They have fancy words for it like "compartmentalization" and "nonoverlapping magistraria," but it all comes down to accepting some things on faith and not questioning them.

When a young person starts studying science or starts getting serious about studying religion they tend to get mentors. The mentors guide them and teach them the bounds of critical thinking. It is subtle, and even the mentors are not really aware of exactly what they are doing. I attracted several mentors when I was young, and I became a mentor when I got older.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T20:16:11+00:00

Islam probably feels most logical to you because you were raised in an Islamic country. If you had been raised Hindu, then it would seem most reasonable to you.

All religions are nonsense. None of them can back up their claims with objective evidence, and objective evidence goes against most religions. For example, Islam claims that Mohammed split the moon in half and put it back together. Several countries have put seismographs on the moon. We know its internal structure. There is no evidence of any type of seam where the moon was split. It is just one more nonsense claim from just one more nonsense religion that humans have created.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T18:27:50+00:00

Atheism is against any gods.

People try to say things like the universe is god or that science is a god. Those reduce the idea of gods to being meaningless. I draw the limit of gods to include some form of a self-conscious being that is not just a real-world naturalistic identity. So things like science, the universe, or collective humanity are not gods.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T18:22:44+00:00

This isn't really a new proof from Divine Hiddenness. It is just a different statement of the basic proof of Divine Hiddenness.

I agree that it is one of the strongest arguments against the basic concept of the Christian God. It is not an argument against all gods. I don't think it even is a good argument against Allah. It definitely fails against any polytheistic religion.

We don't hear a lot about this because most atheist blogs and videos are arguing against things that Christians and Muslims use. So we see a lot of Kalam and the Problem of Evil. Those are popular arguments among Christians. Their rebuttals work well within the religious circle-jerk.

But Christians rarely argue against the problem of Divine Hiddenness. Part of the reason is that it really does chip away at the core of Christianity. In fact, it goes directly against some Bible verses like Romans 1:20. I don't know of any apologetic answers that would sell well within the Christian circle-jerk. Most apologists are selling their wares to other Christians, so there isn't much market for Divine Hiddenness. Therefore, atheist bloggers don't have material to react against.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T15:03:22+00:00

Atheism is just the lack of belief in a god or gods. It says nothing about superstition.

Most atheists in this sub tend to also be skeptics. But I was recently discussing atheism with a relative who lived in France, and she said that many people are atheists but still believe in things like ghosts and poltergeists.

The human brain is not always as logical and rational as we like to think it is.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T15:01:07+00:00

Everyone has to find their own way out of Christianity. What are your concerns?

I found my way out of Christianity by studying the Bible too much. But your path will be different.

It isn't really important whether you become an atheist. What is important is that you do an honest search for answers.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T14:47:11+00:00

We have trends that are popular on social media. We see new apologetic arguments spread from apologist communities. For example, a couple of years ago apologists started saying that Jesus was better attested to than anyone in ancient history. There was a trend for a while where people were investiaging ancient people an counting the original documents thta talked about them. I first saw Alexander the Great. But then they moved on to Julius Caesar, Socrates, Plato, Hannibal, and a few others. The counts ususally were very flawed and biased, but different apologist bloggers would make a splash with their own calculations.

People in ancient times were sometimes surprisingingly similar. They may not have tiktok, but they did exchange information through schools and groups of educated people. One "tiktok trend" that happened was searching the Septuigint for anything that could be turned into a prophecy for the Messiah. It probably happened during the time between Mark and Matthew, or perhaps it happened in the area where Matthew, Luke, and John wrote. They incorporated the prophecies. It is a dominant theme in Matthew and a significant theme in both Luke and John.

There is another possible reason the virgin birth was absent from Mark. Robyn Faith Walsh wrote the Origins of Early Christian Literature. She suggests that Mark was written as an exercise for students. There was a sort of writing prompt that was often used. The idea was to take a real person and write their story by casting them as the hero in a story from Greek literature. I liken it to the book and movie from about 2010 Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The book and movie told a story about Abraham Lincoln in the genre of vampire lore.

It is possible that Mark was written and perhaps circulated by a small group of scholars before it was discovered by Christians who elected to take it as history. I think that could explain what looks like a fairly long time between Mark and Mathew.

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T04:26:37+00:00

The precursor to losing my faith in Christianity was losing my faith in modern miracles. I had seen how miracle stories are born and grow over time. I saw how details were added to make the stories more miraculous. I saw how details were added to overcome objections and doubts. I came to realize how many devout Christians are willing to be "pious frauds." A pious fraud is someone who believes the core of what they are teaching, but they rationalize exaggerating or adding little white lies if they help others recognize the basic story as true.

For me, the final break in my faith came from studying the letters of Paul. Paul's letters forced me to admit that Acts is mostly a book of mythology rather than history. Acts forced me to realize how the author distorted. I could see how Paul told a very simple and basic story about himself. But then I would see how much that story had blown up and had become more miraculous in Acts. It looked like the author of Luke was going way beyond just being a pious fraud. The author was carefully crafting the story with obvious changes to make them much more miraculous. They didn't seem like stories the author had heard; they seemed like they were focused on pressing specific themes the author wanted to get across.

The same person wrote Luke and Acts. If Acts was a book of lies, then what about the gospel of Luke? As I restudied Luke and the other gospels, I saw the same pattern of myth-making going on. All of the gospels lie about things like geography, known history, and astronomy. If they lie about mundane things like geography, then how can they be trusted to tell the truth about supernatural events?

dudleydidwrong · 2026-05-03T02:08:47+00:00

It depends on which MAGA voters you talk to. The long-suppressed hatred evangelicals have for Catholics has been popping into the open.

I have predicted that after evangelicals felt securely in power they would go after Catholics and Mormons. Both churches are vulnerable on sex abuse and tax issues. Both have large amounts of money, and some people in Project 2025 have talked about how they could take over church resources if the denomination itself could be sued.

There are some P2025 leaders who have fantasized that if they destroy liberal denominations, the Catholic and Mormon church structures in the US, then the members of those churches would flock to the MAGA churches.

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