Honest question here - I don't think I've ever heard Christianity described as "antihuman" here - can you explain? To contrast, I find that Christianity gives a fairly coherent reason to value humans. I mean how is "treat others the way you would be treated" antihuman?
Humans don't have any potential for genuine freedom or choice in a Christian universe, because our existential qualities are entirely subsumed by God's will. God claims an absolute and eternal ownership over human destiny and human actions. We may be allowed a temporary choice to sin, but we will never be allowed to choose what
is sin. And even this minor slice of relative freedom to sin or to not under God's paradigm is then obliterated by an eternity of torment/antitorment, an infinite extrapolation of a temporal decision.
There are other reasons I could list, but that's the ultimate reason why Christianity is antihuman. Humans have no meaningful existence in a Christian universe, we're not even able to take a title as wretched as being God's pets or slaves. We're treated mostly as extensions of God's
own being, warts to be kept or lanced at God's sole mysterious digression.
To follow on yes - the Bible does talk about "punishment" but I think the distinction I've made over the years is that it's punishment in the sense of actual justice, not in the sense of "I'm gonna whip you good!" Maybe that is just a cultural thing; I am well aware that culture influences many things.
As is increasingly clear as time goes on and we learn more about psychology and sociology, human behavior is not primarily or even at all due to people "being good" or "being evil". The Nazis were in reality as boring and mundane as any group of accountants rather than supervillians. Those who commit crimes have no inherent trait of "criminality" but do so for specific reasons, many of which are valid and even irresistible to any people in the same circumstances. And most damningly, what is treated as right and wrong is not consistent over time even if one appeals to the grander tides of societal acceptance and ignores the million spalls and currents within it.
And so the "final judgement" we see so often in the old religions begins to resemble less an ontological certainty of justice and more the desperate clawing of folk who saw themselves wronged and could not tolerate the idea that they would never get back at those who struck against them. "I'll show you", the temptation goes, "when the almighty god beyond the veil of death learns about what you did to me!"
And to finish out my random thoughts for the night... regarding atheism / humanism: my general trouble with that philosophy is the concept of trying to establish a basis for anything other than hedonism or nihilism. Compared to Christianity (of the sort I've been steeped in) where humans have value because they are in the image of God, if the universe is just a collection of physical laws, then why is preserving the species better than just living today with today's most enjoyment, future generations be damned?
What is the "basis" for you liking one food and hating another, when I like the very thing you hate and hate the thing you like? The answer is not that one of us is damned to be flayed by demons forever due to an ontological scar of judgement across the cosmos . The answer is that some truths, and most truths regarding the philosophy of human beings, are dependent on a subject.
Even though one can never be more "correct" in an objective sense than any other, lines can be drawn between what is consistent and what is not, what leads to certain outcomes and what does not, and what is or is not practical. Through this process a subjective meaning may be gained.
It is not invalid or delusional to accept the evolution-built drive for survival and satisfaction as also being subjectively valuable, and it is similarly not invalid to value those lines of thoughts over ones where we, for example, all butcher each other in a self-directed genocide.
Your meaning will not be found burned into the cosmos. You aren't cosmic. You're a human, and your answers will be similarly human. We get to decide what is right and what is wrong. That's scary. Terrifying, in fact. But it's true, and ignoring the difficulty of the questions before us only allows the most ignorant and malignant to take the advantage.
I go further to say that objective existential meaning is logically impossible, even if God exists in any format asserted by anyone, ever. Even ontology and supremacy do not in any way then grant ultimate right to one being's opinion to the exclusion of all others. Not only that, but even if God existed, you could not perfectly (or even vaguely, as is apparent by the lack of God Sightings since the invention of video) know his will and thus you cannot even honestly attempt to follow this "objective meaning".
Incidentally, most religions, including Christianity, do allow you to disagree with God. And this I think ties back to the earlier discussions about sticks; if you do disagree with God, you get to experience the outcome of that disagreement. Similar to the fact that you can disagree with the laws of physics, but no amount of disagreement with them (or even how much you "like" them) is going to make perpetual motion possible.
You're allowed to disagree with the Mafia about this month's payment too, and equally allowed to "experience the outcome". That's nothing more than withdrawing responsibility to an "outcome" unrelated to an actor carrying out that same outcome.
This is one of the areas where atheist ethics has a clear and almost undeniable advantage. "Natural evils" are explainable and tolerable in an atheistic universe. Bad things are allowed to happen because we are caught up in a physical process that doesn't care about our existence or nonexistence. We should try to keep people from dying in hurricanes because that's only sensible and rational for the same reasons we try to keep people from dying in general. But we have no cause to rail against the hurricane, except perhaps from frustration and shame in ourselves for not finding a better answer before it was too late.
But in a theistic universe this changes completely. Hurricanes only exist because God created them. So do addictions, and existential ennui, and all the faults in the human brain that predispose us towards suffering, and parasites that eat children's eyeballs. God had the choice to create or not to create any source of natural evil, and so chose to create them. God cannot escape culpability for this action any more than a mob soldier can escape culpability for burning your house down with your family locked inside.
And while there are countless proposed answers to this culpability, the fact remains: You've got yourself an evil god, man. Doesn't matter which religion except the most deistic. Even then. Hell, Christianity's got a particularly bad boat here, because you can scripturally blame God for moral evils alongside natural evils due to him choosing to "harden hearts" and thus brainwash people into choosing to do evil when they otherwise would have done good.
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