Comment by aerodexis
7 hours ago
> religion is primarily for control of the people. Thats why you see a lot of rules in the bible.
thank God the world has moved past this kind of 2010s New Atheism.
7 hours ago
> religion is primarily for control of the people. Thats why you see a lot of rules in the bible.
thank God the world has moved past this kind of 2010s New Atheism.
Oh, the irony.
Yes, it does feed a spiritual need but is's absolutely about control. The current US administration is guided by Project 2025 which wants God to govern (so to speak).
I spend a lot of time thinking about religion, and most of that is anger/fear over the religious zealots who want to control everybody else.
There is a control dimension, because humans require some degree of limitations in order to thrive. Ultra-individualism breaks down entirely the moment you think about actual society (like actually considering children) rather than utopian fantasies about how some people want society to work.
That being said, the way anti-religion ppl talk about "control" is so profoundly sloppy and underdefined that it's entirely meaningless. If I try to stop someone from shooting me, am I trying to control them? If I change the the youtube algorithm, did I control them? If I spread a bunch of malaria-resistent mosquitos around, did I control them?
Christianity is evangelical because it believes what it's doing is good and should be shared. If you can only conceptualize this as "control", then I feel sorry that you've internalized the worst and most misery-inducing parts of the last 100 years of western philosophy.
This evangelical quality is a feature of many world religions, including the ones that don't normally get called religion, like the New Atheism movement.
> the New Atheism movement
Not a religion, not a faith. It's simply well-publicized challenging of religion.
I think that you only see it as such because of how you see the world, but Dawkins, Harris, et al are not my leaders and I strongly disagree with several of their positions.
2 replies →
Does western music lack value because it was forced to settle on 440 Hz? Is punk un-redeemable because there is a nazi punk offshoot?
There's a lot tangled up in there but I fail to see the point you are trying to make.