Current Events > Why are Western millennials so intolerant of religious folk? Jews, Christians...

(+) Yeah! (+)

...Muslims, Sikhs, and so on? Why is this?

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I'm not sure that your premise is correct.

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For the same reason we are intolerant of people acting like children who dont want to take their cough medicine.

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I find millennials to be very tolerant. They're just mostly disinterested in religion.

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The only people Ive ever seen be intolerant of Sikhs are Christians.

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Are they?

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RchHomieQuanChi posted...

I'm not sure that your premise is correct.

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I won't dent it, I was using a loaded question. But, to be fair, you see people on CE often laughing at how "stupid" and "illogical" religious people are. A lot of the bashing isn't too harsh, but it's not...tolerant. I can't imagine many Western millennials really attacking (verbally) someone in a public place, just for wearing a skullcap, or headscarf (or anything else that would make it clear they were religious), but there's certainly that hostility towards religious people, even contempt.

Why?


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*deny

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lmao what areyou tlaking about. theyre only intolerant to Christians.

They never say shit baout the other religions cos they are scared to come off as a racist or something. See it all the time around Easter and Christmas where some clown on social media gotta smugly post about some shit about "imaginary friends" then pairing it up with some "be good y'all, happy holidays dont be a dick"

yet they never ever say shit about that about other religions

MeIon Bread posted...

I won't dent it, I was using a loaded question. But, to be fair, you see people on CE often laughing at how "stupid" and "illogical" religious people are. A lot of the bashing isn't too harsh, but it's not...tolerant. I can't imagine many Western millennials really attacking (verbally) someone in a public place, just for wearing a skullcap, or headscarf (or anything else that would make it clear they were religious), but there's certainly that hostility towards religious people, even contempt.

Why?

You're using an internet message board as support for your claim?

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Define tolerance.

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toyota, are you Christian?

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i'll admit i pity the believers in general, but i'm only intolerant of those who use their beliefs as a weapon.

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The people who bash religion are just as bad as people who throw religion in your face. They just dont realize it.

Millennials are against religion period. More so, we're against religion being used as an excuse to hurt people, or being shoehorned into government functions. This is why in America Christianity is criticized more. because there isn't a powerful party trying to enforce islamic or hindu beliefs onto the rest of the country.

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*deny

snu, you can edit posts.
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I hate religion because so much of it is just hateful. You've lost my respect as soon as you start espousing an eager willingness to restrict the civil liberties of normal human beings.

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"normal human beings"? And you think religion is hateful?

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I mean if religious people are calling masks satan rags....

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More and more people are "Growing out" of religion for a large number of reasons.

Be it from easier access to education - Yes, I realise this might be a bit offensive, and religious people aren't stupid, but there are many illogical inconsistencies in religious texts that become only more glaringly obvious in the modern day. As it allows people to question what is brought up with greater ease.
The continuous preaching of bigotry and oppressive values that are are in the main abrahamic religions (I don't know enough of others to really say on those)
Covering up of disgusting acts in various faiths - and this applies to far more than Catholic priests.
The shaming and refusal by so many to even pretend to hold to their own values of love and acceptance, when they continue to show only hate and disdain for anything other.
The realisation that you don't need religion. You can be a good person without it.
A growing lack of attending church to instil that "Fear and Obedience of God" in people.

And so on.

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alimajor posted...

The people who bash religion are just as bad as people who throw religion in your face. They just dont realize it.

I mean that is objectively not true, unless your only basis for comparison is obnoxious internet comments

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I'll admit that I'm very negative against the Christian/Catholic church, but the faith itself is fine. Faith is ultimately a personal thing, influenced by religious teachings and by scripture - religion goes wrong when you get scum passing down their biases through religious teachings, attaining positions of power to spread hate and bigotry by latching it to the word of God. Basically, fuck the Bible Belt, and fuck anyone in the Catholic church who covered up an instance of child rape. Faith is fine, but the effects of these Christian institutions are not.

The religion itself is fine. It's what shitty, evil people do with it that makes it garbage. The most prominent examples I've seen are in Christianity and in Islam - bible-bashing fundie morons and protected pedophile priests in the former, regressive/conservative regimes that restrict human rights like the Taliban and outright apocalyptic terrorists like ISIL in the latter. I wouldn't smear the entirety of either religion with a broad opinion, because faith at a base level is fine - but it's important to acknowledge when religion is being used to further a human evil.

Both faiths are interesting to learn about, and it's interesting to compare them since they're both different interpretations of the same basic religion. The worst aspects of both faiths come from zealots who use the word of God to justify tyranny.

I don't get what people hate about Judaism though.

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MeIon Bread posted...

"normal human beings"? And you think religion is hateful?

I don't think all religions are hateful and I don't think all religious people are, either, but there are a lot of denominations in the US where hatred against sexual minorities is sermonized and encouraged.

Don't know why you'd put "normal human beings" in quotation marks...

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Millennials only criticize Christianity, because it is seen as mostly white and has some influence over our politics. Criticizing any majority non white religion can easily be seen as racist.

I grew up Catholic and will crap on that faith all day, but I need to somewhat tip toe around criticizing Islam for the same thing.

Just the way it is.

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I criticize all religion, but I don't go up to people and start stuff. I'm down for a friendly debate. It's always amusing when you bring up all the religions that came before Christianity and they have their reasons as to why. Same thing happened with the whole dinosaur issue.

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I think there would be a lot more religious millennials if we didn't have such a bastardized version of the Bible in the US. This is why I only have a copy of the Ethiopian version where they didn't remove a bunch of books because some dude hundreds of years ago got butthurt about certain parts.

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RchHomieQuanChi posted...

You're using an internet message board as support for your claim?

cut him some slack, it's his only social interaction

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TommyG663513 posted...

Millennials only criticize Christianity, because it is seen as mostly white and has some influence over our politics. Criticizing any majority non white religion can easily be seen as racist.

I grew up Catholic and will crap on that faith all day, but I need to somewhat tip toe around criticizing Islam for the same thing.

Just the way it is.

It's somewhat insane to me that the very same criticisms I'll happily level at christianity to my leftie friends I then have to tiptoe around in regards to Islam.

Something very wrong about people treating an ideology like an implacable personality trait.

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Religion has been on a decline especially in the West. Science and people asking the right questions is changing things. I use to be a theist for years then in my 30s I started looking more into religions finally and asking the right questions. George Carlin was also a great help once I got into him <_<

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pinky0926 posted...

It's somewhat insane to me that the very same criticisms I'll happily level at christianity to my leftie friends I then have to tiptoe around in regards to Islam.

It is definitely very weird and I'm never sure how to address it.

Islam 100% deserves the same criticisms, but I think that part of the reason why we are expected to be sensitive to it is because it's other and not "the normal". Christianity has been in the west forever and what people have grown up with, and criticising those in power is seem as a fundamental right and expectation.

Not sure this means we should allow Islam to spread an ideology we would otherwise be against, and this doesn't mean all of Islam or Muslims are doing this. Just that when they are spreading female disempowerment or anti LGBTQ+ rhetoric or whatever it might be, we should be free to tell them to fuck off as much we would tell Christianity to.

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Modern utopianism is a religion.
And, much like any other religion, it considers any money and other material wealth not tithed (or coercively taken), to be wasted in sinful decadence.

It took me a while to get to this point but I have a tremendous amount of respect for what religion can mean for people as far as inspiration and hope go. Tbh I kind of miss the very brief period of my life when I could trust in a deity and not worry about certain things. I think a big part of my life was hindered by removing religion and not replacing it with any other kind of spirituality or whatever that I got from being a Christian.

I was so caught up on rejecting Christianity and its many problems that I didn't think I needed those things and as freeing as it was to rid myself of all of the toxicity, it did start to create a void. Over time, I accepted that the void was just a fact of life that everyone dealt with and that was just not a good way to look at things. It was about 15 years between leaving Christianity and finding some sense of spirituality - not necessarily religious or supernatural in nature though - and there was lots of languishing and turmoil, both internal and external, because of the void.

My life got exponentially better once I stopped operating from the the perspective that I'm a lonely, insignificant speck on a has-been planet orbited by a cold, indifferent sun.

Like others have said, it's when it moves beyond the personal that I start to have an issue, and that's for more than just Christianity, even though that is the particular brand of religious violence that I have had to endure. And it's when that happens that the "stupid and illogical" people start to take focus.

Make no mistake though, I don't have anything close to a soft spot for any other religions. I just don't make it a point to attack them because I have virtually no real world experience with them and doing so has been co-opted by unsavory types that I vehemently oppose. I learned very quickly that something like "I dislike this about Islam" reads as "no shit? I hate Muslims, too!" to far too many people and I don't want to associate with that trash.


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It's funny. To read this topic so far, you would think Islam is the one religion you can't criticise, without having serious social problems. If anything, it's Judaism. Although, of course, I can understand why scrutinising Judaism can be dicey, given the sheer length and severity of the history of anti-semitism.

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Funkydog posted...

It is definitely very weird and I'm never sure how to address it.

Islam 100% deserves the same criticisms, but I think that part of the reason why we are expected to be sensitive to it is because it's other and not "the normal". Christianity has been in the west forever and what people have grown up with, and criticising those in power is seem as a fundamental right and expectation.

Not sure this means we should allow Islam to spread an ideology we would otherwise be against, and this doesn't mean all of Islam or Muslims are doing this. Just that when they are spreading female disempowerment or anti LGBTQ+ rhetoric or whatever it might be, we should be free to tell them to fuck off as much we would tell Christianity to.

It isn't helped by the very obvious, typical islamophobe who wields ideological criticism like a weapon against brown immigrants.

The word alone is a problem to me. It really equates a people, a culture and a religion into a single entity, where you can have the effects of religion but without the free criticism of it.


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I still remember, earlier this year, when I made a random topic saying that I had been reading one of the Gospels, and then I had 100 posts of people telling me how stupid I was, and had bad a book the Bible is. Wtf.

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I read the entire NT about 2 years ago finally while still a theist trying to better understand religions and God and I'm glad I read it. I read some of the OT and stopped. Shortly after a few trips to a local church and questioning things and doing my own research I became an atheist. This has nothing to do with Christianity solely, but all religions. To each their own, but religion was designed years ago to control people.

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Most religions have their roots in systems design to oppress and control women, justify slavery and suppress thinking outside the norm and involved forcibly converting people from less unpleasant beliefs.


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Yes, religion makes you feel bad. If you express yourself a certain way sexually it's looked down upon. Many still are against homosexuality and stuff.

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MeIon Bread posted...

It's funny. To read this topic so far, you would think Islam is the one religion you can't criticise, without having serious social problems. If anything, it's Judaism. Although, of course, I can understand why scrutinising Judaism can be dicey, given the sheer length and severity of the history of anti-semitism.

You mistake "choose not to criticize Islam" to mean "can't criticize Islam." I choose not to do it because, in my personal experience, you absolutely can do it and that's a big part of the problem with discussing anything related to it. It has, in fact, been far too easy to do so, especially in a way that quickly becomes violent and intrinsically linked to broader issues of hatred.

There has been no shortage of people in my life who unconditionally hate all Muslims that one could speak with at length about any issue concerning Islam, real or imaginary, with virtually no boundaries. It's happened at school, work, in my intimate social circle, out in public with strangers. I've been ostracized for speaking out against hatred and stereotyping of Muslims. And it isn't just from the usual suspects you could imagine that I, a lifelong Texan, would complain about.

Like I said before, the leap from discussing legitimate problems with Islam to being in league with all manner of human trash is a short one. The issue deserves and requires better than to risk emboldening, as pinky said, the very obvious, typical islamophobe who wields ideological criticism like a weapon against brown immigrants, and other similar types of trash.

It very much is a conundrum and I can't say that my approach is the best one but I've experienced the alternative of accidentally supporting violent, hateful pieces of shit and I'd rather not risk that happening again.


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It's weird when hardcore conservative Christians hate Muslims when most of their values and moral views are the same

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No Religions Matter

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Dreamscissors posted...

It's weird when hardcore conservative Christians hate Muslims when most of their values and moral views are the same

it's just basic Othering.

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Bump.

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toyota posted...

lmao what areyou tlaking about. theyre only intolerant to Christians.

They never say shit baout the other religions cos they are scared to come off as a racist or something. See it all the time around Easter and Christmas where some clown on social media gotta smugly post about some shit about "imaginary friends" then pairing it up with some "be good y'all, happy holidays dont be a dick"

yet they never ever say shit about that about other religions

God damn this is stupid.

Christianity is in the culture for most of us, whether we want it or not. We can talk shit because it is regularly inflicted upon us.

Literally all Muslims and Jews have ever done to me that relevant to their religion was give me free food.

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