I will admit, the most calming take I found on Christianity was some guy arguing at length on a forum that the whole “Hell” thing we take for granted was really, essentially, a translation error, and that the alternative to divine salvation is not eternal torment, but non-existence.
Reading it, I felt a lot of my desire to argue about religion fading out, at least for that time.
What, too good to die forever like every other person on Earth?
What, you think not-dying is some sort of hubristic demand?
“Not wanting to die” is a pretty vanilla position, dude. We even argue over the morality of policy in terms of how people it saves/kills! It’s pretty common!
Humanity just came up with a bunch of reasons why going feeble and insane was a good idea because they lacked the means to avoid it, not because going feeble and insane and then not-existing is actually a good thing.
There’s no point in getting yourself hyped up over vaporware. However, once the technology becomes closer to being within reach, that changes.
Death is part of the human condition, a part of reality that every religion, philosophy, and moral system invented by a culture tries to address. Of course it is hubristic to think you can bypass it. To completely bypass death is to change the nature of what it means to be alive.
The nuance between debates around “how can we make life fulfilling?”, “how can we stall death and avoidable illness?”, and “how can we prevent people from dying needlessly in dangerous situations that we are inflicting upon them?” is not the same at all as “how do we live forever?”
Every religion or tribal culture in the world has addressed the hubris about seeking immortality. Every culture has its own failure to achieve immortality myth. How is “wanting immortality is hubristic” a hot take?
Go write a bunch of symphonies if you want to live forever.
So, is heaven hubristic, then? Reincarnation? Both are extremely old takes, both are far more commonly accepted than Transhumanism.
Or are the Christians and Buddhists and so on also Transhumanists? Are they indulging in hubris?
We’ve already redefined things radically, multiple times, to even get to the point where “writing symphonies” is even possible.
It doesn’t have to be, strictly, forever. But arbitrarily going feeble and insane, and then involuntarily not existing, it’s not actually this deep, holistic or whatever thing.
And I think it’s incredibly hubristic to say that it’s up to you how much time someone should have with their parents still in their lives, and so on. Because once the capability for the technology exists, that is a decision that’s being made, not just dodging out of the decision and all responsibility thereof.
ascalaphidae asked:
TBH, one thing I thought about from time to time is that if you’ve got an adversary figure with real magic powers, it could fake a bunch of miracles and make a fake religion with a fake Word of God, and even influence the emotions of people to make them feel like they were getting a real connection out of that. And how would you know?
But just inserting a few sprinkles here and there in the right places of an ordinary holy book could be pretty effective.
samueldays asked:
I need to re-read this ask when I’ve had more than 4h of sleep.
Anonymous asked:
I mean, the incongruence of infinite punishment convinced me more that religion was false than a number of things, so that does make sense.
That’s an interesting idea. I suppose here it serves a similar purpose as philosophical skepticism; acting as universal acid, it attacks the philosophical justification of the existing system, letting the new movement come in and take power based on no philosophical justification other than “because I have all the guns”.
The next consideration is that believing things (in general) is actually good, and a philosophical universal acid is therefore a bad and noxious thing.
You don’t need Theism to believe in things. Theists are generally the ones who claim that you do, seeing as their belief system works that way.
The other problem is that Atheism is most-likely just plain true. Its prediction - “there will be no divine intervention” - pretty accurately describes the world we all live in. Every instance theists cite is unclear or not sufficiently provable - which is exactly what you would expect from someone whose god isn’t real that has to make excuses for something that’s supposed to be all-powerful.
Worse, the reasoning used is “don’t test God, you have to show faith.” That sets off my internal memetic defense intuitions something fierce.
That’s setting aside how unforgivable the entire Hell thing is. And that’s what really gets me more than the rest of it, seeing as it’s so incongruent with “ultimate perfect good.”
Some conceptions of Ultimate Perfect Good could look pretty fucking alien, but they wouldn’t look like that.
Now usually, I let religious belief slide for what you might call Utilitarian reasons - some people use it to keep themselves out of jail, others to keep themselves alive, there are various charity things, and so on.
Plus farther back there were things like monks copying and preserving texts. Overall, I’d say it’s difficult to determine the net moral impact of religion.
But then we get to things like “we’ll be cheering putting the New Atheists in camps,” and I feel the need to prod back a bit.
(also, worth asking why ~every stable and non-atrocity-generating power structure in history has used religion of some kind as part of its base.)
Now see, I know this must be bullshit, but I’m not enough of a culture warrior to give a firm rebuttal.
However, first you have to consider that most of human history is religious, therefore you’re limited to stuff from, essentially, the 1700s onward, otherwise there’s a massive selection bias.
Then there’s the fact that many of the “religious-based” structures also committed atrocities - unless you selectively handwave away the Divine Right of Kings type stuff.
And then you can count something like America as having committed atrocities and not being religious on the grounds of the founders’ Deism being closer to Atheism than other belief structures were at the time, but then you can’t count it as stable and religiously-rooted in opposition to all those medieval wars of succession.
I strongly suspect there’s going to be strategic equivocation of that kind somewhere in any such argument.
This is where there’s a bait and switch happening.
I’ve seen the anecdotes from people abused under a religious justification. I don’t begrudge these people their bad impressions of religion in general, even thinking they’re mistaken. I also don’t believe for a moment that the real driving force behind major societal-level pushes like this one is actually people who were abused and therefore have an instinctive animus. There aren’t enough of them. And the message behind these societal pushes is not “we must disempower religion because it led to these concrete abuses” (except occasionally, from a very few people, as a motte). It’s some mix of “we must destroy religion for its own sake” and “we will define this perfectly-okay thing as an abuse, then use it as an excuse to tear down religion”.
The people behind this by and large don’t have any such concrete and morally-justifiable motivation for their advocacy. They’re attacking religion for its own sake and/or because it’s in the way of their powermongering. We are called to love our enemies, but it’s with relation to this that I can sympathize with the urge to shove them in camps.
Oh come on, like those instances aren’t supposed to be able to motivate others?
You surely don’t think all anti-Communists are supposed to be those who personally suffered under Communism, do you?
And besides, some of those “perfectly okay things” really aren’t so okay.
Militant atheists have won a lawsuit demanding a First World War memorial cross erected by the American Legion has to be torn down from public land because muh separation of church and state.
Yeah no, the new atheists are going in the camps first.
This is just so sad. For any atheists out there, why? I understand the separation of church and state, but the American legion is not government, it is a private organization. Why attack a memorial to the dead erected by a private charity that has did for so many years? It just makes you look like an ass.
Self righteous superiority complex.
“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?“
–President Trump
Leftists sure do enjoy proving their opponents right, don’t they?
And people wonder why Atheists are hated.
Athiests are, as far as I can tell, right about the whole “no God” thing. It certainly makes a lot more sense WRT bad things happening to good people than any religious explanation does, and doesn’t have the whole problem of Hell thing.
You usually have to combine Atheism with something else to get this course of action, though. Like Leftism, or so on.
The thing is, people who were abused by religion, or under religious pretenses? They are going to HATE religion. So long as religion abuses or is used as a pretense to abuse people, you are going to get these kinds of reactions.
And they typically don’t agree with the religious on what morality is, so just sticking to the religious morality more strictly isn’t going to sort it.
Anonymous asked:
That was along the lines of something I considered, although I don’t really believe in Many Worlds myself.
Omnibenevolence shouldn’t be something we look at and it’s clearly wrong, but it could be something we look at and it’s clearly alien. So, “make all possible worlds, such that all possible people have a chance to exist” is more along the lines of what one would expect. Or, “God cannot imagine a world without creating it” (nesting realities proposal) “and this is part of the reason evil exists - lack of infinite forethought”.
Anonymous asked:
Man, this is a bit too close to some worldbuilding I did where, in the wake of a supervolcano eruption, a bronze-age civilization flipped from being polytheists to being anti-theists. The Storm the Heavens and Cast Down the Golden Thrones kind of anti-theists, not the internet article writing kind. (A cult expanded in the wake of the catastrophe and became the new religion.)
They are to train over multiple reincarnations for the literal, not metaphorical, battle at the end of time.
Anyhow, the good news is that gluten has been deemed one of their unholy foods.
Militant atheists have won a lawsuit demanding a First World War memorial cross erected by the American Legion has to be torn down from public land because muh separation of church and state.
Yeah no, the new atheists are going in the camps first.
This is just so sad. For any atheists out there, why? I understand the separation of church and state, but the American legion is not government, it is a private organization. Why attack a memorial to the dead erected by a private charity that has did for so many years? It just makes you look like an ass.
Self righteous superiority complex.
“So, this week it’s Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself where does it stop?“
–President Trump
Leftists sure do enjoy proving their opponents right, don’t they?
And people wonder why Atheists are hated.
Athiests are, as far as I can tell, right about the whole “no God” thing. It certainly makes a lot more sense WRT bad things happening to good people than any religious explanation does, and doesn’t have the whole problem of Hell thing.
You usually have to combine Atheism with something else to get this course of action, though. Like Leftism, or so on.
The thing is, people who were abused by religion, or under religious pretenses? They are going to HATE religion. So long as religion abuses or is used as a pretense to abuse people, you are going to get these kinds of reactions.
And they typically don’t agree with the religious on what morality is, so just sticking to the religious morality more strictly isn’t going to sort it.
Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.
As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.
And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?
Whenever atheism so called achieves footholds of significant power in society, it seems to spawn for itself noxious combining ideologies (Jacobinism, Communism, &c.) that then take the blame for the resultant atrocities. It’s possible that atheism is not in fact the ultimate root cause, but this degree of correlation seems to require some explanation.
You want an explanation?
Atheism is simple. It’s obvious. It doesn’t contain much information. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” “Because there is no one powerful enough and willing to stop them.”
But because it doesn’t contain much information, because it’s mere non-belief, it can only achieve widespread support in societies that are religion-dominated by riding on some other, more powerful, more viral ideology which displaces the main one - and those kinds of displacements tend to be a lot more violent.
Atheism doesn’t tell you what values you should have. The other ideology does, and uses the Atheism as a means to attack the legitimization of the previous ideological power structure.
“Atheism causes atrocities” has the causation backwards.
As for abuse, it’s certainly interesting that this is a major focus of discussion here, and not for any number of other societal institutions that have some arguable causal connection to individual abuse cases. For that matter, if you compared practicing religious with nonreligious, would you actually find individual abuse any higher? My intuition says that abuse should be higher among the latter, but I haven’t seen numbers on this topic specifically. Overall, though, I think that “abuse” is a red herring meant to legitimize attacks on religion just because it is religion.
Look, the attitude here is “HOW DARE THOSE ATHEISTS BE SO AGAINST RELIGION?”
The OP says “the new atheists are going in the camps first.”
Now, he’ll say he was just memeing or whatever, but the underlying emotion about it, about how anyone could be so against religion, they must be evil, is there.
But the Atheists see religion in ways similar to how a number of people see some forms of Communism - an oppressive ideological machine that uses and discards human beings for its own ends, composed of many interlocking components.
They want to destroy all reverence for religion like some right-wingers want to destroy all reverence for Communism, because each bit sacredness contributes some small measure of power to the aura of uncriticizability that gave religion its power in previous eras.
Many of them see it that way for reasons not so different from why some of those right-wingers hate Communism so much - it was used to excuse or legitimize violence against them.
So as long as that’s happening, you don’t need to have people be tools of the Devil to run around wanting to tear down crosses. Unless, of course, you consider those doing the abuse to be tools of the devil - but then you wouldn’t be sending the Atheists to camps, ne?
And in this particular case… Does anyone actually think that further escalation in tearing down our formerly shared symbols and destroying our erstwhile binding national identity is a good thing?
Cross memorials? No. Not a blanket on stone monuments though - no Ten Commandments for courthouses.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
