Religion bad any upvotes
I don’t like the concept of organized religion either
Yet u didnt upvote 🤬
This is such a deeply disturbing viewpoint.
When someone says that a lack of religion leads to a lack of morality, what they’re necessarily really saying is that they’re so deeply sociopathic that they not only can’t reason morally, but can’t even envision the possibility of doing so. They’re effectively stating outright that they can’t even imagine arriving at sound moral judgments through the application of reason, empathy and concern for others, and that the only way they can even conceive of morality is as a set of rules laid down and enforced by some enormous daddy figure who’s going to punish them if they break them.
It’s astonishing really. And sobering.
It gets worse, because that’s what people use to justify the argument that people being evil is a part of human nature. Because they genuinely believe that being evil is the default state of humans despite centuries of evidence otherwise.
I dunno, I don’t believe in a god, but I also don’t believe humans are good either. We’re pretty fucked up creatures.
We are a very mixed bag.
There are a range of people from altruistic to greedy sociopaths. And few if any are so simple that “good” or “bad” is a sufficient descriptor.
Humans evolved to be cooperative, on average, only to such a degree to enable us to survive. On the surface we can mostly not maim and kill each other enough to work together on things.
But we have many competing motivations and instincts. We aren’t far enough removed from our violent ape ancestors to my taste. As one can see by reading the news on any given day.
Wars, capitalism, climate change, rape, murder, torture, religious extremism, mass starvation while we throw out food because someone failed to buy it, etc.
The default state of humans is good
To quote MIB: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
I think it applies pretty broadly that individuals are decent but organized into society, we mess up quite a bit.
I always say that the idea of civilised society is something we tell ourselves to make us feel better about the fact that we’re living amongst wild animals.
It’s also the reason that religious people can contentedly do horrible things - because they have no ability to make moral judgments on their own, so if their religion tells them that something that anyone with even a minimal ability to reason morally would recognize to be obviously wrong is actually right and proper, they just slavishly believe that it’s right and proper.
Well… Some cannot make those judgements but some can. Those who can, and some who are told to do or believe things that contradict their sense of morality will refuse to do so. And end up having to question their leader, church, even their entire belief system. I’m speaking from experience here.
I hear this over and over but I don’t think it’s universally true.
For me, when I was still a believer, I thought and said (at one point) that religion was needed for morality only because I didn’t think too hard (as is true for many religious folk) and also because if people could be decent and moral without religion it called into question some fundamental tenets of Christianity.
At some point not long after I said this to someone, who called me out on it, I realized this idea was stupid and was easily disproven by the many good, non-religious people I knew. That was one of many realizations on my path to deconversion.
Another was encountering religious people who seemed not to have any empathy (or who had been brainwashed into having none). So probably some make that claim who are sociopaths. Anyway I was horrified by some of the statements and attitudes and that prompted further thinking.
I don’t know… seems to me like there’s no sin enumerated in Bible that believer would be unable to somehow explain as a pro god action. God’s mercy and 10 commandments are concepts that appear to be paradoxical to each other.
Christians have 10 commandments and can’t follow them, most often even won’t pretend to, because… checks notes … god will forgive them… Imagine the talk with saint Peter after death — ”so what do you have to say for yourself?“ — ”well, I went to church and shit, and God forgives“ — ”in my experience he really responds to arrogance and taunting“.
I love the story of the 10 commandments — so he went up a mountain, sat there for way too long (I guess good clubs up there, after all he comes back later), came down with the tablets (something about killing or not written on it), didn’t like what he saw, smash the priceless religious relic and proceeded to murder everyone. Any true crime podcast would tell you that is destruction of evidence and premeditation, also clearly psychotic tyrannical religious cult leader kind of situation. Appears to me he ”saved“ them from Egypt for his own amusement.
As an aside — Jews have over 600 commandments sourced from the VERY SAME BOOK.
Judaism fascinates me with their rules. From an outsiders perspective, it’s like a constant game of cat and mouse with God trying to find loopholes in their laws.
You forgot the part of the story everyone glosses over; he went back to get another copy of the tablets and the new set have different rules. The new set is the one called “The Ten Commandments” in the story, not the one most people thing of.
