First of all, thank you for checking out my new sub and responding with actual meat to chew on. It is rare to find that when talking about theology on the internet nowadays.

My bet is I know my Bible better than most people of faith.

And I will agree that this is likely the case and I can corroborate this with my own life experiences. The vast majority of Christians I speak to show shocking ignorance about core tenets.

So whatcha got that inspired the rant above?

A decade of trying to have decent conversations about theology with atheists online. Unfortunately I am stuck in a deep red hellhole so know exactly zero atheists IRL since a certain group I will not detail co-opted and shut down the atheism group at my college. So online discourse is my only choice.

Also, I can’t really talk openly about it with my brethren as it’s basically career suicide to admit to any even slight form of progressivism where I live.

Ok above was really all preamble, time to type.

Ok, so… I’m NOT arguing God exists or doesn’t exist, instead I want to open with the statement ‘It doesn’t matter whether God exists or not if living as if He does brings positive outcomes.’

What I mean by this is that there are a convincing number of studies where theists consistently report higher life satisfaction and outcomes. Again, this fact is objectively separate from the question of the supernatural existing,

So, if living in such a way as detailed in the Bible (and please let us not get into stupid rabbit trails about two material clothing or whether it is still considered a banishment worthy sin to not carry a shovel with you when you go shit at night. You know what I fucking mean) brings higher life satisfaction and outcomes, then people who actively try to prevent such living are needlessly increasing human misery for themselves and others.

That’s point one. Atheism increases human misery.

Point two: Humans are stupid. Like more than you realize. Sure, you’re probably smart, I mean you found Lemmy, right? And please don’t drag out the MiB reference. Just because it’s been turned into a meme doesn’t make it less true. I live in a state with crippled education, rampant religious misinformation, and hookworm. 20% of the people I meet everyday CANNOT FUNCTIONALLY READ. 50% of cashiers cannot make change if they don’t have a machine to tell them what to hand back. More people I have met in 2 years personally have been proud of the fact that they’ve never willingly read a book than the number of people I have met in the library over the last 3 decades.

These people are incapable of reason, cannot grasp nuance, and are incapable of forming their own critical thoughts. Granted a lot of this has to do with the whole crippled education thing, but I want you to understand that a staggering 35-40% of everyone you have ever met in public falls somewhere into that venn diagram of ignorance. And it’s not limited by ANY demographic.

There are per capita just as many stupid rich people as stupid poor people, just that the stupid rich are capable of being more dangerous.

So, how do you keep the stupid people from doing REALLY dangerous things?

You can’t reason with them, you can’t expect them to be swayed by facts or evidence. The only thing they respond to is strong emotional pull, and religion is DAMN GOOD at creating that emotional pull. It’s why cathedrals were designed that way, so everyone walking into them was humbled and awed and ready for their moral guidance.

THE REAL PROBLEM with #2 is when that moral guidance is perverted for personal gain, and this is NOT exclusive to religion. Yes priests diddle kids a lot and they should go to jail for it and I am SO ANGRY that the church protects them. But per capita Hollywood producers diddle kids at a SIGNIFICANTLY higher rate than priests. Abusers take advantage of hierarchies and they don’t particularly care about the moral frameworks of the hierarchies they abuse.

Humans evolved religion as part of our social structure. It is part of what held together communities going back to paleolithic times. The standard atheist claim that it is detrimental to human well-being (usually accompanied by the dumb as fuck 'where we would be technologically if the ebil churchhhh didn’t cripple tecknicolgical developmenttttttt) are ignoring the MASSIVE psychological need for the sacred in our lives.

Now that we are almost entirely a secular culture now, what is considered inviolable is culturally relative. All manner of sin and crime is committed with no public outcry. Our politicians are more corrupt than they have ever been. We are closer to fascism than we have ever been. Celebrities literally get away with murder and child rape because they can afford to evade justice, and WHENEVER people gather to condemn such actions, there’s always a vocal crowd of people minimizing the social damage with tainted words, mocking those that ache for justice to return the world to sanity.

And that’s really the worst part. The solution is there, a new religion for our age needs to be born. One that people can feel passionate and excited about. No FSM and whatever the Satanists are calling themselves don’t count. Without genuine sincerity, religious practice is meaningless. So just to be clear, I don’t hate satainsts because they blaspheme, I hate satanists because they could have done so much good with their movement but instead chose to spend all their effort mocking people who don’t care about their opinions and making largely irrelevant news headlines when they do something shocking or funny.

Without a sense of the sacred in our culture, nothing is immune to careless excision without awareness of consequences for ideological reasons.

Actively removing the sense of the sacred has lessend our culture immesurably, and we are heading to a cultural divide that will only devolve into violence. All if this could have been prevented if there were still inviolable concepts in our culture.