I'm posting this IM conversation because it crudely makes plenty of good points. The names are changed so people don't crucify the involved parties. If you are offended by this, try to figure out why.
Joseph: you know what i realized is a huge huge joke
Mary: what's that
Joseph: heaven
Joseph: think about it
Joseph: its like "hey idiot, dont do things that are bad for society, because if you are good enough you'll be in a nice place forever after you die."
Joseph: and the idiots just go right along with the idea of heaven despite having no reason to believe it in aside from that its a nice idea
Mary: hahah
Mary: true
Joseph: there are so many people who so fervently believe in heaven
Mary: yeah
Mary: well that goes hand in ahnd with the religion though
Joseph: these idiots will strap explosives to their body and blow themselves up because someone convinced them there will be 70 virgins awaiting them if they kill a bunch of sinners
Mary: truedat
Mary: they are convinced
Joseph: its like its too good to be true, if you are the one creating the relgions
Joseph: "hmmm what do people want? sex with virgins! we'll just promise them that if they do what we want. hmm but we cant really deliver on that. i've got it! we'll say they'll get it after they die!! they wont really fall for this will they?"
Mary: haha
Mary: people are idiots
Mary: sheep
Mary: you give em a nice idea like that
Mary: they will run with it
Mary: it doesn't hurt that it's self perpetuating too
Joseph: and the reason that some people fall for this shit and a few people can see through it is that the people who see through it still fuck the stupid people
Joseph: so its not like we'll ever advance past it
Joseph: but at least the majority of the dummies have something positive to believe in
Joseph: "i'm going to heaven"
Mary: i guess, but it's stupid positive nonetheless
Mary: and it's always an untouchable issue
Mary: it's like oh yeah i can't go to work on monday
Mary: gotta go do some shit for heaven
Mary: oh ok
Mary: cool dude
Mary: oh i cant go to work monday
Mary: i got an important bball game that day
Joseph: if i dont eat before sundown, i'll go to heaven
Mary: dude
Mary: you can't skip work for important bball game
Joseph: the ball game gets me into heaven
Mary: hah
Joseph: REALLY?? WHAT LEAGUE? CAN I JOIN??!
Mary: ahahah
Joseph: are there boring services and stupid ceremonies?!!
Mary: it'll be money
Joseph: can i donate 10% of my pretax earnings to perpetuate it??!
Mary: hahaha
Joseph: can we ritualistically kill a goat and then coat ourselves in its blood?!!
Joseph: dude whats wrong with you... i gotta go eat some jesus fleshwafers and drink his blood
Mary: hahahaha
Joseph: BUT MINE ISNT REAL
Joseph: so i'm not crazy
Joseph: its just a pretend fleshwafer and pretend blood
Joseph: so that makes it perfectly sane
Mary: mm pretend
Mary: symbol
Mary: religion really is a goddamn crutch
Joseph: you do all this shit for god
Joseph: show me god
Joseph: GOD IS EVERYWHERE
Mary: yeah
Joseph: its like talking to a child
Joseph: they just make up answers
Mary: religion is really genius
Mary: because if you deny it
Mary: then you are a heretic
Mary: and are invalidated
Joseph: exploitation of all these built in mechanisms we have
Mary: yeah
Mary: a fucking human virus
Mary: self-replicating
Joseph: i want a copy of this whole convo publicly available
Mary: do it
Mary: it's so taboo to disrespect religion
Mary: you know what
Mary: FUCK RELIGION
Joseph: whoa now
Mary: hah
Joseph: only the ones that hurt us
Mary: HAHAHA
Joseph: we benefit from religion for the most part
Joseph: sure i catch some shit from my mom
Joseph: and a few crazy muslims lob some grenades at us every once in a while
Joseph: but mostly jesus just keeps people occupied so they dont steal my money
Mary: i dunno about that
Mary: have you seen these jesus solicitations
Mary: i get one in the mail probably 3 times a week
Joseph: so you get some extra junk mail
Joseph: and a knock on your door once a year
Joseph: HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD WORD?
Mary: i'm even considering what i read one guy did
get some heavy strips of scrap metal, and send them in the reply envelope and make them pay for the postage
Joseph: hahahah
Mary: he said it drastically reduced his mail
Joseph: but he'll go to hell
Mary: hah
Joseph: you should tell him to stop
Joseph: tell him about jesus
Joseph: he can still be saved
Mary: hahaha
Mary: the best thing about jesus is you can just be an ass your whole life
Mary: and then be saved on your death bed
Joseph: thats true, jesus is a bit of a chump like that
Mary: hahah
Joseph: 20 hail marys and you're set in eternity
Mary: yup
Joseph: i think its horrible those things you said
Joseph: very offensive
Mary: hahaha
Mary: fucking a
Mary: just thinking about this shit
Mary: riles me
Joseph: turn the other cheek
Mary: almost have to
Mary: god you can't thoguh
Joseph: our relgion says that if you get punched, you should invite your attacker to repeat his assualt
Mary: people do the stupidest shit in the name of "god"
Joseph: god forbid you do shit just because it makes sense
Mary: yeah seriously
Mary: how have we fucking allowed religion to just take over
Mary: and make us do stupid shit
Mary: amazing really
Joseph: a lot of the actions religions encourage are actions that should be encouraged
Joseph: but they do it in the most ass-backwards way
Joseph: and there's so many layers of bullshit
Joseph: and pedophiles
Mary: especially imagine how things used to be, churchs running governments and shit
Joseph: "hey, its cool if you dont, but i want to eat pork, ok?" OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!
Mary: god
Mary: and even now in US politics religion is such a fuck
Mary: like if some atheist were to run for president, he wouldn't even make it past the first hurdle
Mary: he would be shot down so quickly
Mary: a fucking faggot could beat him
Joseph: well thats what happens when everyone gets an equal vote
Mary: people shouldn't get equal votes
Joseph: democracy is built on the idea that the sum of ignorance is intelligence
Mary: yeah
Joseph: at least we formally established seperation of church and state
Mary: yeah that was good
My thoughts on the matter...
- To the extent that religion encourages people to act in ways that benefit themselves and each other, reglion is a good thing.
- To the extent that religion helps people deal with life's challenges in a positive way, religion is a good thing.
- To the extent that religion unites communities and encourages friendships, religion is a good thing.
- Doing anything based only on a belief that it is the will of an all-powerful deity is insane.
- Doing anything based only on a belief that it will have good or bad consequences in an afterlife is insane.
- Many practices encouraged by major religions made good sense at some point in history. Because the world has changed so drastically, many of those practices no longer make sense. Many of these take the form of taboos: food taboos, taboos on sexual acts between consenting adults, taboos about deviating from certain rituals. Continuing to strictly interpret these obsolete ideas to the point where it causes emotional distress is insane.
- The belief that the book of Genesis is a factually accurate historical account of the creation of Earth and humans is insane.
- We clearly see that many cult leaders are twisted geniuses who exploit their congregations, but we sometimes fail to that many similar figures exist within the leadership of major religions. Combine this phenomenon with the sexual taboos for religious leaders and you get major pedophilia scandals. How many sane, heterosexual males would voluntarily choose a life of complete abstinence? Let's make that group the only people who can be our leaders! Major religions use the same mechanisms as the crazy cults, they just drink pretend blood instead of real blood.
8 comments:
wow. nobody wants to touch this one, eh?
Well, I for one enjoyed the bulleted list. . .
Most of the people I know are products of Catholic/Christian education, at least through high school, and most of these people are in the same camp as Adam on this one. This raises the question of why the more people understand, the less they believe in religion, assuming my anecdotal correlation isn't just coincidence.
I also wonder, is the smart person line of thinking anti-religion, or anti-theism? Being anti-religion is pretty understandable, since religions seem to all have a few rules that seem more than a little self serving, such as "if you don't do what we say, you will suffer unimaginable agony after you die, which, coincidentally, is right after you are no longer useful to us", "you should get other people to join this religion", and the ever-popular "give us money". Being anti-religion makes sense, because religion is a bunch of crap made up by human beings, who are all subject to corruption, and even by the admission of the religious, are fallible in every way. Being anti-theism has its own different set of problems, most of which deal with the types of questions that no one can really answer.
Take, for instance, the origin of the universe. From what I understand, there are some really intelligent scientific theories on the origin of the universe, most of which I don't understand, and none of which are really all that testable. What makes believing any of these theories inherently better than believing some dude just popped up out of nowhere and just said, "let there be light"? My brain can't really fathom how either alternative works, so I just pick one arbitrarily. Logical approaches like Occam's Razor help here, but can't really tell what's right and what isn't. And, long ago when the original theologians decided to try to explain things like this (in pulled-out-of-ass story form), they didn't know about all this newfangled "science", so clearly the "God Solution" looked like the only real alternative. I'd imagine the downward spiral started when people decided to have people in positions of power who got to dictate to everyone what the truth was.
Religion would be much cooler if it was about people figuring life out on their own, maybe with a little help, rather than having a bunch of old, irrelevant bullshit spooned down your throat. I believe Adam has a quote from Siddhartha that would be appropriate here.
Disclaimer:
Am I religious? No. Do I believe in God? Still working that one out. Am I drunk? Yes. Do I understand science? Kinda.
--W
The human mind was crafted by the process of evolution, something that we are capable of understanding.
Understand evolution backs our understanding more or less back to the creation of the universe (with various generous allowances). We seem incapable of understanding that, probably because evolution had no reason to craft that understanding into our brains. So the best guess our minds have come up with is that everything was created by something kind of like our minds. And that doesn't really even make sense because where did that thing come from...
I'm content to recognize my own limitations: I'm probably not made to be capable of understanding forces at work outside of my own tiny world. And I'm find with that.
Interesting take on religion a friend of mine wrote:
"I don't think there's enough room to fully describe how I feel about religion...but I'll try and truncate a little. While I recognize and respect people's individual beliefs, I tend to think all organized religion is a farce. I don't believe in Heaven or Hell, in God or the Devil. I do believe that there is a power in the universe that binds all living and non-living things and governs the laws of nature. But I do not believe it is sentient or deliberate or named. It simply exists and that's all the explanation I need. Thousands of years ago, people created elaborate stories to explain what they couldn't understand. Eventually, those stories became what people believed as truth. I think that at some point in time, someone came up with the idea of using these beliefs as a way to control people and that gave birth to religion. If you really pay attention, most religious concepts are inherently flawed. You ever notice how every major religion believes in a 'God' and that this one person, oddly enough, has all these human qualities? Religion explains this by stating people were created in the image of this God and that it is we, who reflect him. Ever consider it might just be the other way around? It's been said that if God didn't exist, man would have to create him. Well I think that's exactly what was done in the first place. Societies throughout time have been governed by a single person, or have transitioned between individual and group leadership. The idea of a single authoritative power is something very acceptable. So I think people decided that there just had to be this one power in the universe that was responsible for everything they didn't understand, and it's likewise easier to accept this single power in a humanistic embodiment. I could go on forever, but I said I'd try and be short. One thing I will say for religion, is that there is a certain enviable aspect to it. It must be very freeing to give yourself over to and believe in something so completely...to accept that something else guides your fate and that in the end, you'll be given some kind of adequate treatment in an everlasting afterlife. It must be nice."
Good thoughts, thanks for sharing.
I agree somewhat with the "it must be nice" but it must be equally horrible if they have a moment where they realize that maybe none of it ever meant anything.
Well, it's not like you really have control over what you believe, anyway. Believing in a religion is like being in love...you can try to convince yourself that you are or you aren't, but you can't force it either way. If you don't believe in God, you aren't going to convince yourself of it by thinking about it really hard, and the reverse is true as well. Both also carry the risk of waking up one day with your position totally reversed. Nice or horrible, it's not like you have any control over it either way, regardless of which side of the fence looks greener to you.
click my name for a link to a decent, relevant excerpt from harper's i read last week. wish it was the full article.
walt is right: for the most part you don't have control over what you believe, overarchingly determined by your upbringing. if you grow up in iraq you will be muslim, if you grow up in india you will be hindu, if you grow up in a western culture you will be christian. the more pertinent question is why do we continue to brainwash our children into believing something that relies on blind faith, is impervious to logic, and ultimately causes a lot more harm than it does good.
on evolution, it's possible that belief in a higher power helped our ancestors, or even modern humans. it feels good to know that shit you do matters, and you will be rewarded in an after-life. or maybe when a tribal war or torrential flood destroys all your friends, relatives, and food, religion gives you some sort of mental resolve to continue to survive. or maybe when your brain gets beyond x cc and you have cognitive, emotional, reasoning processes, you start wondering about shit. or maybe you don't have time to start wondering about shit until you finally get some free time from hunting and gathering all goddamn day and making sure your kids are fed and your mate(s) are taking care of your kids and not off fuckin some other dude while you were hunting because now you have a wheat farm and crispix is some tasty shit. maybe only then can you sit on your ass and wonder what the fuck is going on.
in any case, ditto on fucking religion. religion is not the answer. imagine if all the efforts spent on religion were instead spent on more productive things.
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