That’s a misunderstanding of humanism. God implies perfection - humanism tells us that our ethical choices might be anything but perfect - and that we have to make them rationally and examine why we make the ones we do. Religion on the other hand assumes that moral perfection comes from a deity, which in the case of Western religions covers both the good stuff, like the golden rule, and the not so good stuff, like ordering the slaughter of enemies and defining rules for slavery.
How much of the humanity you have observed are humanist, and how many people do what they think god tells them to? The last 2,000 years or so of the West being run by god’s law hasn’t worked out so well morally, has it?
The Judaism I grew up in had no concept of blanket absolution. Yom Kippur services include atonement for a long list of possible sins, including any not covered by the above. That just got you written in the Book of Life for the next year. With no hell, no blanket absolution is required.
So we don’t even have to go to Eastern religions for this.
Very little of what humans do works out “well morally”. To blame religion isn’t really fair because a lot of good things have been done in the name of religion, also. My church is the ELCA, and we have an entire division devoted to “Global Missions”. We expend as much money as possible helping people in need throughout the world as a form of Christian outreach.
Well, you know what they say about black swans.
I like to say religion brings out the best or worst in people. It magnifies what is already there.
But after seeing what has happened in this country because of the suspension of disbelief required to be an evangelical Christian, I’m sorry to say I’m becoming more and more anti - theist by the day. These Q-Anon believers were ripe for the picking because their religion told them faith without evidence is laudable. It had already been normalized to believe in bullshit.
I don’t know if it’s any fairer to blame Q-Anon on religion than it is to blame it on gaming.
You can always tell when a writer needs to make shit up to meet a deadline when they blame all of society’s ills on “gaming”.
That second article in particular is fascinating, but it also goes to great lengths to explain how QAnon is not like a game.
Why do some people fall for this shit and not others? Well, we know a lot of religious people fall for it. Why is that? I know plenty of Christians who know that it’s bullshit, so it must be belief + something else.
People - christian or otherwise - have an astounding capacity for self delusion in order to make their perception of reality fit their preconceived notions.
What I got from the article—and I may well be oversimplifying—is that belief in QAnon is not so much about encouraging blind faith and trust in authority, as it is about encouraging people to think for themselves while tricking them into having that thinking manipulated.
My read of it was that it was encouraging them to think of reality like a story - which the brain likes, because it likes it when things make sense. And it basically used game mechanics to make the experience of ‘discovery’ of the story fun - triggering various feelings of specialness and confidence to make them cling to the story subconsciously. And of course the story was calibrated to be strange enough to feel novel, so they’d feel the conspiracy theorist’s joy of being one of the special few in the know. And of the strange story they are telling was deliberately destructive to society, but that’s beside the point.
Qanon definitely benefited from people who have been culturally trained towards blind faith in an authority, and I suspect that there are parallels to how the alternate reality game called ‘christianity’ functions. At the least both tell you that there is special knowledge that can be garnered from following the clues in their stories to their conclusion.
If you feel the need to talk to an exterior consciousness, do it! Find a friend, a spouse, a counselor, a stranger on a bus who slowly edges away as you talk. There’s nothing wrong or strange about wanting to interface with another entity.
The issue, of course, is whether an invented entity is good enough for this purpose. And if you believe in it, it is! You can get emotional comfort talking to a figment of your imagination, demonstrably. The problem atheists have, is if you don’t believe in the entity then it isn’t good enough, and doesn’t work. Theists are able to test this by calling out to Spongebob in your time of emotional need. And I think you’ll find it just isn’t the same.
So yeah, if you’re an atheist and you need the comfort of another, you’re just going to have to reach out to an actual person. Sad but true.
I think you misunderstand me.
The urge to do something that at least feels like communicating with an exterior consciousness may not be a counterproductive urge. That doesn’t in any shape way or form require that there actually be an exterior consciousness — actual person or God — it could still be an urge that we tend to interpret that way and which leads us to something useful.
I’m so stealing this.
What I’m saying is, when I talk to God (based on the first, last, and only time I attempted to seriously pray to god, back as a child) I don’t feel like I’m communicating with an exterior consciousness. Instead I feel like an idiot. Try praying to Spongebob, I suspect you’ll get what I’m saying.
As for whether praying to Spongebob is useful, well, er, um, how exactly? If you don’t have the catharsis of talking to god and all that, I’m not seeing what would happen here.
I didn’t say it would be useful or relevant. I said it could be.
In other words not to make a false dichotomy between "either there IS a God or else it is unfortunate and useless to have this inclination to reach out and have a conversation with ‘someone out there’ — that the absense of an external God doesn’t mean this is an unfortunate or worrisome tendency or inclination.
I think I see what you mean, @AHunter3 .
If I talk something out with one of the cats, or with the plants in the row that I’m weeding, it doesn’t mean I expect the cat or the plants to provide productive criticism of my thought process.But it may nevertheless be helpful to me to do so. – interesting, however, that those were the examples I came up with. The cat at least knows that I’m talking to them. And sometimes it feels to me as if the hillside does also. I’m certainly an atheist about the TriOmni; but I’m only an agnostic about the Small Gods. But I don’t think the usefulness to me of talking to them depends on their existence.
Yes, exactly!!
Yeehah! I’m making sense to somebody!
Sure religious people do good things. So do non-religious people. So do stamp collectors.
But religion claims to be special, with a conduit from god to them. Has that conduit made religion more or less harmful than non-religion?
Hurray for your global missions. But do they just help people, or do they also try to teach Jesus? Bill Gates manages to help people without telling them of the superiority of Windows.
Being Jewish I might be more suspicious of Christian Charity through the ages than most.