Comment by aprilthird2021
2 days ago
Critical thinking doesn't make people less religious nor should less religious people be a goal in society.
I struggle to explain, but I feel like our data-obssessed society has completely thrown out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to these things. No one labels themselves with a religion or political party because there is a flaw in each one and anything with a flaw can't be correct, scientifically, so we just don't believe in any grand purpose to our lives, don't believe in any world leaders, don't believe in any shared tenets, and basically are all lonely and weak (because we abandon every group with a flaw).
The result of critical thinking shouldn't be a worse off society...
We don’t reject religion because of “a flaw.” We reject it because the fundamental basis of it is unsupported. It’s not “a flaw” when a house has no foundation. There is no baby, only bathwater.
"The Simulation" is the new modern religion. It explains everything yet explains nothing.
The "Simulation theory" people drive me nuts, because they act like a thought experiment predicated on a misunderstanding of the concept of infinity and computability theory is amazing evidence of this hypothesis.
But I completely agree, because it's so vague and all-encompassing, it can effectively be a placeholder answer to anything and everything without actually providing any insight.
The fundamental basis of theism is that this world and everything in it was created, and it has some higher purpose, being planned. While that may be unsupported, the alternative, nihilism, is equally unsupported and also very negative for people and most people who claim to believe that, don't actually act like their life is worthless. They don't practice what they preach
There’s a mountain of evidence that everything we experience is the product of a hot, dense universe evolving according to a set of unthinking laws of physics.
The only place for any purpose or plan would be in the creation of that early universe. In what sense could there be said to be a purpose or plan if it has had no visible effects for a dozen billion years or more?
If we’re going to talk about people practicing what they preach, let’s talk about all the Christians who are sure they’re going to heaven and yet fear death. All the Christians who are certain their loved ones have gone to heaven and yet still grieve for them.
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Nonsense. Religion serves some needs of the human mind. It's like saying having friends is fundamentally flawed. We don't need friends but we spend hours saying pointless words to each other and somehow feel good about all that wasted time. Humans have these emotional needs. We're not robots that can just program ourselves to be pure truth and productivity machines.
Social groups serve those needs. I’ve seen no reason to think those groups must be centered on a mythology.
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Sometimes I wish I could just pick up a religion out of pragmatism. But I don't believe in supernatural stuff, and the secular "religions" (or whatever you call an `Option<Religion>` like humanism don't have much appeal.
Humans are capable of having friends and fulfilling emotional needs without believing in the supernatural.
Like many people, you may have been indoctrinated into believing that only religion is capable of fulfilling these needs, providing community, a moral framework or a sense of purpose or value to life, but that isn't true, it's part of the propaganda of theism.
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