Atheists seem to moralize quite a bit themselves, MR. You're doing it right here in this thread.
Yeah. If criticism of a system of belief and dogma that has enforced itself on the masses with lies and superstitions and guilt and fear constitutes some kind of moralism, then so be it. I'll take that hit in the service of speaking the truth.
Humans everywhere make distinctions between good and evil, or closely related concepts. That appears to me to be one of the innate human universals, so common that it's almost invisible.
Humans make distinctions between good and evil. But only religion enforces those distinctions as some arbitrary absolute that everyone must believe in and conform to. That is the nature of believing you speak for God. MY will be done. And if you dare to disagree with me, then woe be unto you who will suffer the wrath of God, usually imagined as some fiery place of eternal torment or some curse on your household.
And "religion" isn't synonymous with "the three monotheisms".
It is in this thread. The three monotheisms are the largest instances of religion in our modern world. That's why I'm talking about THEM and not say the animistic totemism of the aborigine people.
If that's all that you see, then that's sad. I question whether the difficulty is in them or in you.
Yeah..I'm really missing out on something not loving a system of delusional lies and fables designed to keep it's adherents from doing what they really want to do in life and believing in themselves. Poor pitiful me..sniff sniff.
As for me, some of the most thoughtful and humane people that I've ever known have been deeply religious people. Conversely, some of the most judgemental people, people who were wound-up way too tight, were aggressive atheists.
Atheists SHOULD be a little mad in a world where like 90% (the religious at least) are too cowardly to even speak out against religion and its long history of mind control and psychological enslavement and anti-science indoctrination. Why SHOULDN'T atheists be a little P.O'd when everybody acts like being deluded by religion and wasting your whole life serving it is just fine. It isn't fine. You need to believe in something? Believe in yourself. You are NOT a weak sinful dependent of some manic-depressive Skydaddy. Praying to the east on a rug will NOT solve your life problems. Cutting off your son's foreskin will NOT make him more special or chosen. And eating a cracker every Sunday will definitely NOT make you a holier person.
Of course the reverse was true too, in many other cases. But my point is that religiosity and moral judgementalism aren't necessarily the same thing. And becoming an atheist doesn't necessarily free somebody from that particular defect. (Just think: Marxist.)
Religion is ideologically connected to moralistic judgement. It thrives on holding up itself as THE way and then denigrating humanity as inherently sinful and demonic and animalistic. Even Buddhism teaches that human nature is infected with a sinful seed called the mind--the snake, the monkey and the pig at the heart of the Tibetan wheel. All religion does this. It demoralizes and demonizes the human in its attempt to promote itself as the way to holiness and immortality. All just empty promises to keep the people sedated and compliant.
Religion removes choice by psychologically manipulating minds with threats of punishment and promises of reward. It gets to children before school can even get to them, scrawling over their budding dreams irrevocable visions of demons and hell and apocalypse and a wrathful God. Religion is more akin to a virus than anything else, taking over the believer's mind and controlling them in a simulation of freely chosen belief.
The three Jewish-derived Western monotheisms conceive of mankind as created by God in his own image. Monotheistic Hinduism thinks the same way. In Buddhism, which doesn't have creation or creator gods, salvation is typically seen as something that people must do for themselves, meaning that the capacity to accomplish it is certainly there.What all of the religions teach is that people need to make choices. People need to reorient themselves towards what we might choose to call higher things.
Where fear and shame reign, particularly based on imaginary phantasms and obsolete superstitions, there can be no choice. There is only being stuck in the same old patterns you were ingrained with since childhood, with only the smallest chance that you might get these educated out of you by the time you graduate.
It isn't just religion that thinks that way. Here in the West, art does it. (Or did, until recently.) It's probably accurate to say that science does it too, in its own cerebral way.
Religion is definitely the best at it having for many more centuries honed to precision its dark craft of enslaving young souls with visions of hellfire and public shaming and saccharine promises of divine coddling. No other system of thought, neither art nor science nor philosophy, so totally relies on brainwashing its believers to accept doctrines and dogmas that weren't true 2000 years ago much less so today. How long are we going to just bite our tongues and let this go on--this unquestioned elevation of ancient fictions and fables to the status of respectable concepts? Why NOT speak out against it? Can't it hold its own ground without falling apart? You're an atheist. Why do you ally yourself with such a universal and organized campaign of keeping people emotional prisoners of ignorance and deception?
I think that you're treating religious people as if they were caricatures of your own design. And isn't that what you're condemning them for doing to you?
I know it isn't kosher to speak out against religion. But then that's how religion has always maintained its power over us, silencing its critics as blasphemous heretics who need to be burned at the stake. Talk about caricatures. Witches and sodomites and whores and saints and virgin mothers and philistines and prophets and demon-possessed Satanists. Religion has been fobbing off a loony cartoon version of reality on its sheep for thousands of years now. Maybe a little adversarial caricaturing is in order, if indeed it isn't too far off the mark. Church lady anyone? lol!
