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I'll forever miss you, Hitchens. Until we become worm food again, that is.
I have no faith to speak of, but more and more I think we sorely need the role of a church to provide fellowship, reflection, community, and reinforce shared values. I certainly don’t believe any of the major religions are perfect at these tasks, but losing these as focal points or objectives has been a great loss to society.
In this day and age, we ought to know better than to blame religion for what are ultimately negative actions done by people who have mental problems.
it literally does and that’s the point of it as a memetic complex. It is quite literally the “mind of its own” that ensures its memetic survival.
lmao @ the concept that large masses of everyday people all independently choose to not wear mixed fabric because they each performed a reasoned analysis of the facts and determined that poly-cotton blends are a threat to a 20th century society. Like that’s just facially ridiculous as a concept - of course religions have a mind of their own.
This isn’t an empty point either, when religions make “yeah, it’s good to stone people to death for having sex with other men” as a tenent in their holy books then you are going to see that show up in people’s belief structures. It’s not just a one-way street from people’s personal feelings into the religion, the religion itself has a significant if not majority influence for deep believers. And while some people will buck the holy book (“the Old Testament doesn’t count” etc) - the reality is that most people will not, because that’s apostasy. Or at most they will abandon a few key precepts and keep the rest (“the gays can live, but marriage is still an inherently religious institution” etc).
Go around a church and ask people and you will find the overwhelming majority believe in the overwhelming majority of their religion’s precepts. Because that’s why they’re there in the pews.
It’s as ridiculous as claiming the US government “doesn’t have a mind of its own” - we have elections of course, so in principle people get the government they want, but it also doesn’t mean it doesn’t have things where it’s completely out of step (drug policy etc) and it certainly doesn’t change the fact that if J Edgar Hoover is coming after you (read: vigorously enforcing the legally ratified will of the people’s duly-elected representatives) that it’s gonna feel a whole lot like the USG has a mind of its own.
The whole point of governments and corporations and religions is precisely that they have a will of their own. They are living creatures - self-executing colony organisms. Memes and systems of rules instead of genes. That’s why they exist and why they work and why they hold real power in the world.
The only way they could simply reflect the will of the people is if they had no influence whatsoever.
However I disagree that our problems are caused by people who have mental problems, or some other distinct group. I blame human nature, which while capable of social behavior is at root selfish and hypocritical.
Yes, organized religion goes too far and gets perverted and it's bad. but we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater in abandoning it.
You want it one way but many others are happy with what you don't like.
There are quite a few people in the area I'm in who have made the same choices, some are religious, some are not. And we're still in touch with plenty of folks who match what you describe and they don't want to give up the career/city/car/lifestyle. Again, some of those people are religious and some are not.
You could make broad strokes about the relationship between religion and social culture but I think in your comment you have the relationship inverted. When you have religious freedom religions are an expression of the social culture of their members, they are not an enforcement of the social culture on their members.
I’d highly recommend anyone feeling unsatisfied by the social norms of the day to try visiting a few local churches of various denominations with an open mind.
The Soviets rejected Mendelian genetics and modern agriculture because it came from a monk and went against communist ideology. Lysenkoism killed 50 million+ in China and Russia as a result of the famines it created
Religion is allowed, but it's between you and your "sensayer" and they're not allowed to preach or tell you what to believe. It allows search & exploration, but everything has been set up to prevent organization.
If you've read Sanderson's Mistborn, there's maybe some parallel to the Keeper Sazed, who inventories religions/beliefs & tries to help folks find beliefs that suit them.
This is false. They most certainly were under the "decree of atheism."
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign_(...
By this definition, then, you have no beef with most religions
Additionally, it sure looks like atheism as the state religion and exterminating the unbelievers was decreed by the Soviet authorities.
In the case you pointed out, the only thing those atheists had in common with other atheists then and now, in general, is just a name. There is no shared doctrine(s), it is defined by a lack of. I'd argue the converse, that it is much harder to be of toxic nature when your whole belief system, or lack thereof, is defined by a lacking as opposed to the what can be the insistence of the ones who posit beliefs.
And to deprive someone therefore of a meagre 90 or 100 years, the only glimpse they'll have out of potentially hundreds of billions of years underscores the preciousness of life and why it should not be taken.
I will give you that there are surely some who can say fear of gods kept them from killing but in fairness surely there are some who were set free from those gods and realized they didn't have to persecute others just because a religious doctrine says, even if their sympathies said otherwise to the doctrine.
If that claim was true, than these monsters who caused the most harm would have been part of organized religion.