Think Corky hit a home run right off the bat - prosperity gospel. The disgusting bastardiziation of Calvinism and con men, claiming God will reward the righteous with earthly riches, and also inferring then that the rich must somehow be righteous. Blithely passing by the whole "you cannot worship both God and mammon" line, while simultaneously leading large swathes of evangelicals to idolize those who are the very antithesis of Christianity.

On a side note, a huge amount of what fed into my youthful not just atheism, but outright anti-theism. I remember working night shifts in the hospital while taking classes in the morning, and patients having these con men on their tv's, bilking the poorest and least educated out of their "seed money" to keep their mansions going. Nothing has ever quite disgusted me so much, or driven that level of hatred of religion in me as that. I'm a little more open to spirituality these days, and just think somebody needs to get ahold of Jesus and a whip again. But I digress.

It's filled evangelism with people who vote directly against their best interests. Plays right into the meme of republicans thinking of themselves as merely temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And feeds a bigoted line of thinking that the less fortunate must be somehow unrighteous, in line with its Calvinistic roots, which has utterly twisted the charity that was at the heart of the teachings of Jesus, and left supposed Christians idolizing the least "godly."

There are good things that have come out of religion. This - not one of them. Possibly its most disgusting perversion, even.

#26 | POSTED BY SYCOPHANT AT 2024-03-05 10:23 AM | FLAG:

Ahh, yes, I too remember the days before I learned to shave my neck.

#30 | POSTED BY BRENNNN AT 2024-03-05 01:22 PM |

Religion I have found is simply what people make of it. This coming from a once hardcore anti-theist. A position l now believe to be the Dunning-Kruger state of spirituality.

One can use religion to justify beating people to death with rocks for being gay or not listening to their parents. Or, one can use it inform and educate their morality - it's not necessary, there are certainly many moral atheists and agnostics - but the problem, particularly after the new atheism movement, becomes one of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Centuries to millennia of philosophy and thought, or of simply seeing the historical development of modern morality and applying that to the purpose of living a more fulfilling life. It only depends on the discernment of the person studying it.

Plus, it gives a great many people comfort or strength when they feel they lack their own. Is it real? Who cares. If someone gives you a sugar pill and it takes your pain away, will you be angry at the placebo effect?

And last - why I referred to it as the Dunning-Kruger state of spirituality - physics was always my first love in all subjects. And when I knew a little, that grounded me in materialism. Knowing much more now - one doesn't even have to get into woo to realize we don't understand base reality at even the most granular level. We don't know if we're moving through 6 other dimensions rolled up into little Calabi-Yau manifolds too tiny to possibly ever detect, or if we're on a brane right next to another with 5 times the matter in ours, that we can only detect by its gravity. We can't even rule out whether our universe is real or just a simulation. How the heck do we know among all that there isn't a greater intelligence or creative force? Not that extraordinary claims don't require extraordinary evidence - but that gets stretched to absurdity when you'd have to have extraordinary evidence just to make the extraordinary claim one understands the nature of just the reality we live in.

So long as they aren't pushing it, or trying to force others to live by it (and admittedly, plenty do) what harm if people try to share what helps them?

If you lose your sense of immortality (no religion) what keeps you from committing immoral behavior?
What over time, will keep society from becoming completely immoral?
Evil doing is necessary and most intelligent solution for every godless person. If no belief in immortality, is there anything to be virtuous about?
#36 | POSTED BY ONEIRONAUT AT 2024-03-05 03:20 PM | REPLY | FLAG:

From a naturalistic perspective, there is a perfectly good answer for this: humanity has evolved to be a social animal. Not individuals, but whole groups evolved more successfully if they were cooperative. A bit of dopamine boost for doing a good deed for another member of the tribe assures mutual survival. The brain being naturally wired for this makes living in a mutually beneficial and cooperative environment more fulfilling - what evolved into morality. In contrast, game theory predicts a certain amount of self-interest to be beneficial to an individual's capacity to procreate, but society can only handle a small percentage of such individuals before reaching a critical instability. Hence, there's a small percentage of socio/psychopathy inherent to the species - who on the high functioning end, sometimes end up being effective leaders, businessmen, etc, due to their inherent decisiveness and low level of risk aversion.

So most people will want to be moral, regardless of personal mortality. It leads to greater fulfillment, a "life better lived." The immortality not of the individual, but of their genes.

Regardless, it does not affect the god proposal. Evolved that way? Created that way? Guided in evolution that way? Most effective in the simulation that way? Meaningless. We still can't know.

But it does take just as much faith to be an atheist as a believer. It's just faith in your knowledge being all-encompassing of reality. Unfortunately, the more one learns, the less they find they know.

#40 | POSTED BY JOE AT 2024-03-05 03:56 PM | FLAG:

To play Devil's, er, God's advocate lol:
Luke 5:32
New International Version
I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

Maybe that's why. Though in context, it was said to the self-righteous, not so much as the actually righteous.

I have simply embraced agnostic fundamentalism.

I don't know and you can't make me.

Man, this is what I missed about this place. Other threads calling poster's intelligence, species, sexual orientation (also including species,) std's, and how best they could unalive themselves in question, and then a discussion like this.

Posted a couple times on Flipboard recently and decided the dead internet theory was true - or worse, it would be better if it was lol.

Also, great quote in the YouTube comments on that video Corky.

"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to him"
Louis Pasteur

Don't know how I never heard that before. Somewhat concerned I found it in YouTube comments.

#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.

#88 | POSTED BY SNOOFY AT 2024-03-06 01:52 PM | FLAG:

I was going to comment on that, but was already so long-winded I was tired of hearing myself type lol.

I don't mean to "God of the gaps" it - but the point of the really long brushing past of numerous physics issues - Bell's Theorem, the one the proved reality is non-local being the one that really gets me - was to say it's not just a simple "gap." This isn't "we know gravity is there, but not how it works, so let's just say God is holding everything together." This is "we literally don't understand base reality and can't even perceive most of it." String theory posits everything from multiple dimensions rolled up within our own too tiny for us to probe with a particle accelerator from here to the moon. And it also posits branes on which could literally sit entire other realities overlapping our own. Some serious scientists actually speculate on the whole simulation hypothesis - and what, if anything, is that, but God with a computer and extra steps? 4/5ths of the mass in our universe is invisible. These aren't "gaps". These are chasms you could actually fit a whole god into, and rather than simply using the supernatural to explain something natural we know exists, the problem is at the very bottom floor of reality - we don't even know reality exists as we perceive it. And that's while trying desperately to avoid any of the woo.

So again, I'm not espousing any one religion, so much as pointing out the arrogance of claiming we know what "can't be." Fundamentally - we don't know anything.

Define G-d.
#97 | POSTED BY SNOOFY AT 2024-03-06 02:58 PM | FLAG:

A theoretically conscious creative urge with the power to create and alter natural laws at the universal level, be that inherent or through technology so beyond our capacity to understand as to be indistinguishable from magic. Preferably personal and benevolent, but also some days possibly explained by a spoiled toddler left to play Universe Sim for too long so their parents could just have a moment of peace and quiet.