this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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All religions, no exceptions. To kick things off with the lowest of low hanging fruit: your religion practices male genital mutilation.
But the abuse, manipulations and control go all the way through from patriarchal hierarchies to an "exacting regimen requiring absolute obedience and humility; strong social pressures and rewards for cooperation;"
Which is to say cult brainwashing techniques used by any religion from Judaism to Mormonism to Hinduism. From the Branch Davidians to the Sumerian high priesthood: humans have never ceased using the 0-days of the human mind to exploit and manipulate their fellow man.
Does that mean religions can only do evil? Of course not. I'm glad you get a sense of connection and peace from it.
But that connection and peace serves to perpetuate the primeval toxic hierarchy. You'll raise your kids on it. Make sure they believe it from a young age. After all - "Train a child according to his way; even when he grows old, he will not turn away from it." (Proverbs 22:6) You gotta get em young or they'll never believe when they're old.
You know that religious people have different beliefs and varying practices and varying relationships to institutions, right? Criticize specific institutions if you want, but don't be an asshole.
I felt the critic was well thought-out and non divisive. They accurately described how religion and the religious are conjoined together at the hip.
If you need real world examples of religion being bad for humans, crack open any paper or look at any creditable news site. Gaza, multiple cleansing in Africa, West China, cults in Japan and South Korea, U.S. politics, India ..... It is not hard to find the root cause.
But you calling them an asshole was a good comeback.
I'm not ignorant. I just think specifically attacking someone for their religion is shitty. There are way better ways to combat abuses of power than laying it all at the feet of every single person of a certain faith. That is being an asshole in my book.
I think physically attacking someone because of your religion or them not buying into your religion is worse. Religions took the whole "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me" ass backwards.
We are watching a native group of people being cleansed from the earth because of a book. If I murdered 40,000 people because of Santa Clause, I would be the most wanted criminal. However, we praise them and say it is " God's will."
Fuck you and the imaginary shit you believe. Butt hurt because they pointed out a very accurate fact. Even the Abrahamic religious have a story about how everyone cooperating was against "God" in the tale of the Tower of Babel.
There is just nothing liberatory about wanting to get rid of people's cultural practices. Focus your anger on the politicians and bad actors who coopt those practices.
Considering religion gets rid of people's cultural practices more than anything else, I figured you would be mad at that. Multiple cultural practices and their religions have been wiped out by the spread of Christianity and Islam. Don't worry those two are not the only ones. All religion is convert or else. The or else may change but has the same results.
So you think atheism is convert or else? Because that's where you're landing here, and being pretty loose with facts on the way. You're kinda just ....doing the exact things that the worst zealous religious folks do, don't you think? It's silly.
Yeah i was "converted" lol. All I had to do is study and read about religion. Wasn't hard.
Which facts? I need bullet points and citations. "Trust me bro" won't work.
Let me know when calling out religious folks or not be religious leads to massive child rape, slavery, murder, child/ women kidnappings, massive poverty, and destruction of a planet. I'll wait. Or I can point out all the religious examples from any of your books.
Street preacher behavior.
I think, you thought that was something but , it was a pointless statement. Also street preachers just show why religion is radical. " Let me sit outside an scream about an imaginary person and how you must follow me."
Religious people are part of the religion but not the whole.
As demonstrated by my previous comment: it is the religion that is the problem, not people finding camaraderie or community therein. I'm glad the previous commenter finds solace but it is important to call out that mechanism is exploited by the religion itself to propagate.
You cannot fully separate a religion and the religious. Without the religious a religion has died.
It would be best if all religions died: the religious that keep them alive are good people who have been misled.
You think you're punching up. You're not. You're conflating a vast group of people and their heterodox cultural practices with your imagined idea of them and labeling all of it bad, in a performatively condescending way that pretends to be altruistic. Other peoples' relationship to their spirituality is not cool to be shitty about. 'Get rid of all religion' is vaguely genocidal and also would not even make a dent in the persistent human problem of abusive and manipulative groups existing.
You're religious so you're being defensive and fighting for reasons to keep your beliefs. You don't want to believe that you participate in a larger organization that harms humanity. That means you're a good person.
The religion you participate in still harms people. It doesn't matter what religion it is.
Good people trying to do good things participate in evil organizations that perpetrate harm.
I'm actually not religious. I just think a lot of these arguments sound uncomfortably close to bigotry.
These are arguments from a position of pure concept and theory, the realm that religion deals in.
Pragmatic reality means that we're never getting rid of religion because people will continue to perpetuate the abuses of the past into the future.
That doesn't make them bad people; they sincerely think they're doing good.
Nonetheless: their belief does not make what they're doing good.
My youth spent canvasing in favor of the bigotry of Prop 8 in California is not absolved because as a fundamentalist I believed it was the best thing for "the gays".
I'm sorry it makes you uncomfortable but the truth is that religion and the religious cause endless suffering on this world and they deserve to be called out.
Your experience is not universal. There are forms of religion very different from, and much less politically powerful than, American fundamentalism. It doesn't make me uncomfortable to call out specific abusive forms of worship, I just don't think that's what you're doing. You said you think all religions should end because none are worthy of existence. I think that's a hateful thing to say. Lots of marginalized religious groups have been violently suppressed or had people attempt to wipe them out in some way. How dies repeating that argument help make the world better? Fight specifically against the actual group who hurt you. But don't lump in millions of people you know nothing about and assume they are all exactly the same. The world is more complicated than that.
There is not a single thing that a religion does to help people that is irreplaceable with non-parasitic communal structures.
What religion does beyond helping people is leech off of superstition and ignorance to control and coerce its adherents into its modes.
If a religion is free of superstition it ceases to be a religion: requiring no faith.
Cultural practices are beautiful and deserve preservation - religions are shackles that keep those marginalized people we care about enslaved to the past.
Religion as a concept is evil.
So you traded one kind of nuance-less fundamentalism for another. That sounds comforting.
To call my statements unnuanced is patently false. Unnuanced is your assertion that getting rid of religion is genocidal.
You consistently conflate religion and culture and act as though a group that lets their religion die has somehow had a genocide committed against them.
The death of a religion is not the death of the culture and genocide has no role my desire for the extinction of the dark and superstitious past that we are in the process of leaving.