#83 | POSTED BY SYCOPHANT AT 2024-03-06 11:56 AM | FLAG:
I personally don't necessarily believe any of it - in a literal sense. I don't even know many Christians that do, although having been raised by a Pentecostal literalist, I certainly once did. I honestly don't even know how many times the whole Bible, front to back, was read to me or by me.
Of course, that, along with the hypocrisy of so much of the religious right and the prosperity gospel types were why I jumped on the New Atheism bandwagon hard when I was younger - teens to mid 20's at least.
It was cringey.
Were they wrong about many of the evils done in the name of religion? No. But Stalin and Mao proved quite well one doesn't need religion to commit great evil, that rather any belief system can be perverted into something horrible.
And self-righteousness? The whole being a moral busybody all up in everyone's business and more concerned with signaling your own virtue by tearing down others rather than truly being virtuous? Well, I'm an independent these days politically, and can easily see where the supposedly rational left can be every bit the Puritanical killjoys the religious right can be. There are times the Tic Toc cancel culture culture club absolutely leave me shaking my head laughing that we've gone from little blue haired church ladies seeing Satan everywhere and trying to censor any art, music, or political views they think are evil right to not so little blue haired college students seeing racism and misogyny everywhere and trying to censor any art, music, or political views they think are evil. So you don't need religion to be annoying.
But, as Oneironaut and I both pointed out in various ways, religion need not dictate, but can inform culture, morals and social cohesion. It can give provide comfort and thousands of years of philosophy that would truly be a waste to throw out just because one doesn't see a god when looking out the window. And as I pointed out - and can go much deeper into if one wants - there is a hubris and ignorance to believing one has a monopoly on reality. What we perceive, both directly and indirectly through scientific instruments is the tiniest fraction of reality. What is dark matter? where is dark matter? Explain particle-wave duality and how the macro world coheres out of the quantum, and Bell's Theorem. And tell me which theory on that is correct. Are we all encoded in holograms on the event horizon of an expanding universe or 4-D black hole in another universe? Is our universe infinite, or one of many in an infinity of universes? Either way, what beings could evolve out of actual infinity? We do not even understand our own reality. We cannot even perceive it. There's no biological advantage to it. As I mentioned before, e we can't even prove if we're part of a simulation or not.
So while I can't say one religion in particular is correct, how can I say there isn't a higher dimension or a vastly more evolved being out there, so beyond us as to essentially be a God? There's no proof - but there's an awful lot of proof of just how tiny and ignorant we truly are.
And it does little good to mock the religious. Neither you nor they will change your minds. But it does make one look like an ass, and it achieves more to find what unites us than divides us. And most probably take most of your examples as allegory.