But we're the bad guys?

Haha, this proves that god is not a source of morality, and instead is a dictator. I've killed everybody I want to kill, which is nobody, even when god isn't there to stop me.

God: Here's some plagues, floods, and famine. Now worship me.

Satan: Anyone interested in some sex, drugs, and rock and roll?
- Satan is also pro masturbation. He's got my vote.
- Satan: we don't torture people with thorns and nails here. That's the other guy's department. Same for locusts, killing firstborn, you get the idea.
- Good Guy Satan wants to get educated and get an abortion that could save your life.
I’ve killed everybody I’ve wanted to and had the capability of killing. Which is nobody.
According to the Bible Satan gave us knowledge and God wanted us to remain stupid so he punished us. Fuck God, Hail Satan
- Remember kids, God told the first lie, and the Serpent only ever told the truth!
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- 1200 years later, name_NULL's children were still at war with the children of name_NULL's enemies because they all deserved it. 🙄
- considering who gets to decide 'whos deserving of it'... this seems a little.. violent

If you're only a good person under threat, then you're not a good person.

@db2 @FlyingSquid as long as god sees it’s ok lol then you are going to heaven
- My dear brother, there ain’t no heaven. It’s all made up! All of it! You know why? Because someone figured that if you promise people that they’ll get a reward for doing certain things, and a punishment if they do other things, you basically get absolute control over them. To the point that you can tell them to give you their money in exchange for an absolution for their ‘moral crimes’ over the last week since their last confession, and they will! You see, people are dumb. We’re fucking dumb! You put fear of the unknown in our mind, and we’ll do anything to believe that there’s something in the unknown side. You tell them that they’re being watched all the time, and they’ll behave like good people. But no one’s watching… other than real people, that is. So go now and be free from the constraints of only doing the right thing out of fear of not going to heaven, and do the right thing because you are actually a good person. Peace be with you.

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want?

And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.

I don't want to do that. Right now, without any god, I don't want to jump across this table and strangle you. I have no desire to strangle you. I have no desire to flip you over and rape you.

-Penn Jillette

Not just that, but I've yet to come across anybody who has actually refrained from doing the bad thing they want to do because of some fear of God. They might be afraid of legal consequences, but belief hasn't prevented rape, theft, envy, murder, or anything else among even (especially) the leaders of the religious.

So no, not believing in God doesn't make atheists rapists and murderers, and believing in God doesn't prevent the devout from rape and murder.
a

As an atheist and a “liberal,” I don’t kill people because I’m not a bad person.

Silly atheist, that's just god protecting me from you 🙏
- I might make an exception for you.
- Sorta!
  
  We are extremely social creatures, and have had some intrinsic social instincts honed into us from eons of evolution. When it comes to our fellow tribemates, we generally give them the benefit of the doubt, even when they're total assholes. We see this in great effect when drivers in merging traffic will let other into their line, even though they are total strangers and are sharing a dear resource (a pathway home).
  
  I suspect that most Christians, when they assert that only fear of God's justice (or even state justice) is what keeps them from murder that they really haven't put it to the test. We may be angry. We may desire, as Nietzsche suggests, to discharge our strength but we also are resistant to hurting the innocent, which becomes difficult when the enemy soldiers look like us (rather than different colored people with weird accents) and when we know they're our own countrymen, armies infamously refuse to fight and mutiny.
  
  It's obviously more complex than this. We only want our tribe to be as big as our top 100 facebook friends -- what may be an instinct to keep COVID-19 from running worldwide -- and when it comes to large societies we have to practice putting principle over loyalty, which is why we're prone to fascist movements when we challenge the feudal / capitalist establishment.
  
  And yes, some rare folk are natural soldiers and don't have to navigate feelings before killing. And rarer ones still are driven by sexual dysfunction or narcissism to ignore the interests of others, even killing as necessary. But these are very much the exception. Most of us, by far, are quite affable and have to be driven to desperation before we consider wrongdoing. The scary ones are elite deviants like the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. In 2021 their drug marketing campaign killed 80,000 Americans, and we expect even more in 2022 and 2023. More lives would be saved, more destruction and cost prevented _by multiple orders of magnitude) if the US law enforcement ignored petty crime altogether and focused solely on white collar crime. But that's a topic for another rant.

So what’s stopping atheists from just going on killing sprees then?

nothing, I am already killing the exact amount of people I want to.
- which is like 4 a year, I like to do it once a quarter
Laws and morale (the thing parents, not god, should teach you).

Christo-fascists openly revealing that they are genuinely terrible people held together with duct tape and faith in a genocidal God will never cease to be both hilarious and terrifying.

So nothing stops this guy from killing?

No, his fear of imaginary retaliation stops him from murdering. All he's saying is "if I could still get into heaven I'd be killing all of you." Doesn't matter that God is real or not, his imagination is keeping him in check (thankfully.)

This is actually what religion was meant for. Keeping those that believe it and are psychos in check.

As others are saying though, it looks awfully fake lol
- His 40 virgins are waiting for him on the other-side so he has to "play" by the rules even if he doesn't like it.
- Sky cake. https://youtu.be/55h1FO8V_3w?feature=shared
- I dunno if it's fake or not but the sentiment is real.
  
  Ok, but can I break it down a bit?
  
  The god atheist believe doesn't exist? Which god is that; all of them? The god described by "christians" that doesn't align with biblical context?
  
  Which ever way you slice it i find it hard to believe this person's belief in said god keeps them from killing. Unless that god is preventing them from physically committing the act through some sort of psychic connection there is more at play than these people would admit.
  
  There is a whole system of laws and a social contract that is way more intimidating then anything a hypothical god could impose. There is the human ability to empathize with others which would keep you from killing. There are also physical limitations and people are capable of defending themselves.
  
  One could argue all these things were put in place by god. I think atheists would remain unmoved by that argument.
  
  All that aside, christians, muslims, jews, etc have all killed in the name of god.
nothing stops me from killing either. OH WAIT! pesky morals and the respected value of human life.

Matthew 15: 18 "But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them"

As stated in his own holy book, he's going to hell.

Not if he says sorry at the very last second. Those are the rules.

Saying the quiet part out loud. If you need a god to keep you from doing awful shit, you are a terrible person on a leash but we already know this.

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Yeah, I thought so as well when I first saw it. It's a pretty obvious Photoshop job - the text is crooked, too small and, sadly, too educated in its prose.

We don't need to invent fictitious things to find theism hypocritical or logically flawed, there's plenty of truth out there to prove that.
- too educated in its prose
  
  When you're over-qualified for the job
- I wouldn't use crooked text as an indication of fakeness. I see morons with the "new driver" stickers putting them on crooked more often than not.
Do you even know how to read this analysis? It simply shows you the blocks in the JPEG that contain high frequency information, it doesn't massively reveal areas that were edited. The documentation even tells you how to read it, but you obviously didn't bother to reference it; you can only use it to compare areas with similar texture and edges to see if they have been compressed differently. Text and high detail textures are supposed to be highlighted because THAT IS HOW JPEG WORKS; it throws away information in uniform and low detail areas to save space, because human perception cannot tell the difference. This would only indicate manipulation if parts of the text contained less or more information than similar looking parts, indicating that someone e.g. took a highly compressed JPEG, added uncompressed new image fragments and compressed it again using high quality settings.

I really don't care about this particular image, but you are claiming that you can tell fakes from reals by using an analysis method in a wrong way, and you didn't bother to back up your claim, you just linked to an analysis which could cause people to jump to the wrong conclusion. This is how misinformation begins.

Edit: for reference, look at the ELA for this random bumper sticker: https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=0461290163af13fe55380b661fc1bf9d5d56a020.463104&show=ela

This effect is completely expected. Frankly, ELA seems like a crackpot analysis. At least you have to be REALLY careful when applying it to JPEG. You would need to have two similar looking bumper stickers of the same size and same level of detail in shadows in the same picture. Only if they differed significantly in the ELA could you maybe conclude something, but I still think it's shit.

The method for producing these highlights is also really roundabout, since it just re-compresses the input and compares it with the original. A much more straightforward method would be to count the number of bits in each block in the raw JPEG data to get a measure of how aggressively the blocks were quantized.
- This is what real window decal text looks like: https://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=1ae993b658499e87da21f4af0b7890b73d58b654.119742
  
  The level of detail between the text and the rest of the image is consistent, unlike OP's image
This website is great! Thanks for the heads up.
not that I don't believe you but what is that link supposed to prove?

Yeah, uh huh... This is fake.

What?!

Don't you have individual Sans Serif letter stickers around the centre-right of your rear windscreen that you managed to line up like a text editor in photoshop but also rotated 10 degrees off centre saying literal insane shit that's perfect for smug internet people to screencap?
- No. But, I do have a rear window full of great brewery stickers, including some one of a kind custom pieces.
  
  https://i.imgur.com/HIksPmH.jpeg
- That face paint looks cool AF!
Yes it is...but at the same time, this pic looks like it was originally from rural Western PA, where something like this wouldn't even be a surprise to see on the road.

The thing is its simply not true. We know what Jesus is like. (🐪🪡💰) And yet most ministries in the 21st century see the right to property as central to Christianity rather than the duty to feed and clothe the destitute.

Behind The Bastards did a recent two parter on How Capitalism Ate Christianity, starting with the ministry of James W. Fifield Jr. that reinterpreted scripture to veer away from charity and mercy and towards the righteousness of capitalism. It was largely helped after WWII by the red scare in which the Soviet Union provided a fine example of the singular alternative.

So Christianity was repurposed into the Christian Nationalist movement that seeks to turn the US into a one-party autocracy with fascist features.

Why would Adonai allow His holy scripture to be subverted to serve plutocrats? In fact it is done all the time, and has been done to advocate monarchy, to endorse slavery, to oppose war, to endorse war against specific belligerents and so on.

Dan McClellan on his YouTube channel notes scripture does not feature univocality, inerrancy or divine authority according to scholarly consensus (which commonly runs contrary to what apologists might suggest). As McClellan notes the people of any era has to negotiate with the scripture to affirm their own morality, whether that's pacifism and charity or standing your ground and massacring degenerates.

But that is also to say the ministries will justify violence when it serves them, whether that's torturing POWs and massacring villages during the Iraq war or forcing conversions at swordpoint as per the crusades and holy inquisition. And yes plenty of Christians when told they need to load for bear and hunt the sinners will do so, especially if they're in precarity and fear for the security of their home, family, job, survival, etc.

"I'm only a good person because the invisible sky daddy makes me be good."

You're not a good person if someone is holding you back from being a bad person.

I agree. But from a civility standpoint, if someone needs a bolt-on substitute for a conscience and do so voluntarily, I'm all for it. Good news is that vehicle stickers and t-shirts like this let people self-label which is really darn handy.

I want science, reason, and logic to prevail but clearly not everyone does okay with that.
- Yes, but their "bolt-on substitute for a conscience" is only for straight white christian men, who are specifically their kind of christian.

For the most part, never try to talk people out of religion. Some people Need skycake and the boogie man to be a reasonable human being.

This isn't even a good photoshop, it looks like it was made in snapchat

My response is simply that I'm glad they still believe in an overseer that restricts their dangerous behavior. Some of us don't need that to be nice to others.

Another way to say the sentiment of this shit-kickin' Jayzus knuckle-dragger:
"If I wasn't afraid of punishment, I'd go on a killing rampage."

"I ~~read~~ ~~was told about in church~~ saw the cover of a book about a zombie a long time ago. I now assume what the book PROBABLY said and I also hear a voice in my head based on those assumptions. I'm VERY afraid of the voice and also it loves me and it did the Holocaust - anyways, that's the only reason I'm not a murderer"

“The threat of the unknown is what keeps me from forming my own opinions of right and wrong based on what is known.”

Jesus hold me back bro!!!

Ya’ll are so lucky my lord and savior is with me at all times, holding me back. He doesn’t want to wake the dragon, bro
- @NegativeLookBehind @SayJess lol I’m scurred
One shot, kid!

"I do the bare minimum to function in society because of the threat of eternal punishment"

Also, looks a little photoshopped to me.

By all means, keep believing in that god and stay tf away from me. I don't want to risk myself being around you if and when you lose your faith.

Really looks like a photoshop, I've met the type of person but the bumper sticker is a little on the nose and doesn't quite look right.

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I don’t think that’s how it works.

And what keeps me from killing you, dufus? Rational Thought!

Lol. That suggests intent...

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Well then I guess you have the disadvantage, stupid Re-Tard.

Atheist memers: separate church and state

Also atheist memers: Here is this politically charged photoshopped rage bait lmao

yeah government structures and shitposting communities on lemmy are totally the same thing....
- I really dislike rage bait, so maybe this community is not for me.
Are you saying that OP is part of the state legislature, the this lemmy community is part of the state apparatus, or that the meme itself is the state in as kinda 'i the meme am the people' kinda thing?
- I'm just saying this is mildly toxic rage bait. The first part was me trying to be funny.