Supreme Court blocks Oklahoma from launching taxpayer-funded religious charter school - ABC News
Supreme Court blocks Oklahoma from launching taxpayer-funded religious charter school - ABC News
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/44884488
A very pessimistic thank you.
The fact that this is a debate at all, in the year of our fantasy, fairytale, magic miracle performing lord, 2025, is just sickening to me.
Religion should be studied sociologically, psychologically, and historically for what it actually is, mythology and superstition. It should be studied for how it's been used as a tool for control of the ignorant and poor masses, by the elites to keep power and wealth.
But no. 70-80% or more of people on this planet still actually believe in fairytale bronze age mythology nonsense. Doctors, senators, police, military leadership, judges.
We have split the atom, discovered quantum mechanics, have robots and helicopters on Mars, cured diseases. Yet we are still so archaic and uncivilized. Religion should have died already.
Religion is a cultural lie and even those that are religious know it. They want to bully people into "saying the words with them" because it makes them feel better. They don't care if you believe or not ... they just want you to say the words or at the least have it be illegal to contradict them. Most religious people's egos are so weak that they cannot handle questioning their faith because it shatters their own.
Until you can explain the universe with a formula religion will not die, and even then the formula could be argued to be the rational expression of god. And it is not clear to me that religion is bad. Bad people are bad, (although I entirely dismiss the notion of evil) and they use structures in religions, politics et all to do bad things. But that doesn’t mean that religion itself is bad.
I’m not religious myself, but there’s very clearly a place for religion even in modern civilizations. Also one fundamental aspect of religion that many critics miss because they confuse it with spirituality, is community. More than ever people need a sense of community, and I think that for many people religion can be the thing that gives them that.
And after saying all that, people should have the freedoms to believe whatever the fuck they want honestly.
Anime builds communities - some of the largest gatherings in the world are anime conventions, people build shrines to the characters, some even go so far as to claim marriage to the characters most dear to them - and yet anime has never been the justification for genocide, the rationalization for slavery or the claimed source from which all morality is derived. And yet despite all that, I'm 100% certain you'll agree someone holding an unshakable conviction in 'My Hero Academia' as a literal accounting of historical events should be precluded from any position of authority. On the grounds that they're too divorced from reality to make sound decisions.
This is what the religious masses look like to the
saneoutsiders. You claim many good things that religion provides, but you fail to acknowledge that those things can exist completely independently of a system responsible for more death, suffering and cruelty than any other humanity has developed. At best that's just plain ignorant, at worst it's intentional deception.Bad People will do Bad Things, but religion gets Good People to do Bad Things. because they believe they are good.
Sincere but incorrect belief can do that without anything we might recognize as religion, tho.
Still I think Optimistic Nihilism CAN replace all the things people think they get from religion. And, it doesn't require fervent belief in anything without evidence. (Sometimes the optimism feels tenuous, tho.)
until you can conquer the fear of death and the unknown, religion will persist.
You make a lot of great points here that I try (often to no avail) to explain to people all the time. Namely these two:
I was blown away recently when I found out that 90'ish percent of chinese people are athiests.
Sorry, not correct. 90% don't associate with "religion", but to them that means religious orgs. 30% of Chinese people believe in Buddha. Only around 30% are actually Atheist
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/08/30/non-religion/
but there is alittle belief in buddhism, eventhough they dont pratice fully like monks in tibet do. some are very hard into praticing and those people tend to be more conservative in general. we had a porcelain statue of said buddhas but not go crazy religious, and vegan like some do.