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Solomon summed it up pretty well. Vanity, vanity! It's all vanity.
My life is not meaningless simply because it is finite. If I can positively impact the lives of others, that impact does not vanish simply because I die.
Solomon summed it up pretty well. Vanity, vanity! It's all vanity.
From a self-centered perspective it may seem meaningless. But in reality we are all part of something much bigger. We have an impact on others and the society at large.
If we live our lives for a lie, that has negative consequences for those who depend on us, including the wider society.
In my opinion, the biggest tragedy of religion is this: people dedicate their entire lives to something that is fundamentally untrue. They put all of their hope in something that will never come to pass. I've seen it happen to my own parents, and it almost happened to me.
Religion can totally take over a person's life, to the point where one believes life has no value without it. Life becomes about the Pie In The Sky When You Die and little else. I literally believed that I had nothing to live for other than the afterlife, since that's what I was taught since childhood.
Think of all the wasted lives. Think of all the money wasted on building giant monuments (churches, cathedrals, etc) to falsehoods. Think of all the minds occupied with how to avoid hell instead of focused on improving the human condition. So many lives lived for a lie!
yeah, deicating a life to love, compassion, and service is the worst thing ever.
In my opinion, the biggest tragedy of religion is this: people dedicate their entire lives to something that is fundamentally untrue. They put all of their hope in something that will never come to pass.
I am all for each person doing whatever they feel they must do to get through each of their days. If religion works for someone, who am I to rain on their parade? The real problem with religion is that some forms of it -- the kinds we often engage with here -- attempts to directly and indirectly control people who don't subscribe to it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Freak80
Religion can totally take over a person's life, to the point where one believes life has no value without it. Life becomes about the Pie In The Sky When You Die and little else.
That would be a case in which religion isn't working for an adherent -- and because of various taboos and social forces, they can't even admit it to themselves or do something about it. That is truly awful and it is why I speak out against that sort of thing. But it is not universally true of all believers. Not all believers take hellthreat and guilt and shame that seriously or personally.
I have often wondered where I would be today if a couple of basic things had played out differently in my early adulthood. One can even reduce the "beginning of the end" for me to religiously mediated divorce taboos preventing me from getting out of my toxic first marriage far sooner than I did. If I had acted promptly in my rational self-interest, I wouldn't have had children by her and my life would have gone down a completely different, and hopefully less naive and better informed, path ... even within my faith. As such, I might still be a believer today, on the basis of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
I think though that the seeds of the eventual cognitive dissonance that drove me from the faith were already present, and that I would have drifted into the sort of non-practicing but not exactly quitting situation that my next oldest brother is in. My personal tragedies provided that extra bit of "oomph" to push me totally out, to explicitly accept for myself the failed nature of religious faith as a valid epistemology and to reject it as a healthy approach to engaging life and understanding the human condition and my relation to it.
Much as it pains me to admit it, I know that to some extent, religion was just enabling me to be me. I have to own my part in it. It was partially self-inflicted. No one held a gun to my head. Yeah, I was just a kid ... but so are those people who were asking the priest uncomfortable questions in confession when they were just kids, too.
From a self-centered perspective it may seem meaningless. But in reality we are all part of something much bigger. We have an impact on others and the society at large.
If we live our lives for a lie, that has negative consequences for those who depend on us, including the wider society.
I don't believe that human beings are capable of being truly selfless. We are self-centered by nature. it's why communism has never worked.
But it's difficult to contribute anything meaningful when you grow up in a fundamentalist religious sect.
You're out of it. Are you contributing now? Have you volunteered at the food bank yet? Feed a child and she'll do better in school. Doing better in school means she could become the scientist who cures AIDS.
Complaining may be cathartic but it doesn't do a darn thing to make the world a better place. YOU, Freak, can make a difference. The past is past and you can't change it. You CAN make a difference now.
Last edited by DewDropInn; 06-09-2016 at 04:02 PM..
In my opinion, the biggest tragedy of religion is this: people dedicate their entire lives to something that is fundamentally untrue. They put all of their hope in something that will never come to pass. I've seen it happen to my own parents, and it almost happened to me.
Religion can totally take over a person's life, to the point where one believes life has no value without it. Life becomes about the Pie In The Sky When You Die and little else. I literally believed that I had nothing to live for other than the afterlife, since that's what I was taught since childhood.
Think of all the wasted lives. Think of all the money wasted on building giant monuments (churches, cathedrals, etc) to falsehoods. Think of all the minds occupied with how to avoid hell instead of focused on improving the human condition. So many lives lived for a lie!
And how do you know it's untrue? I've seen lives changed and people get off the path of a destructive lifestyle by having faith in Christ. We are not merely organic machines. Stress, anxiety, fear, depression are all mental states that have real physical consequences and religion and faith combats those problems.
The biggest tragedy is believing you have no hope and that life is a walk on a slippery narrow high beam and one slip up or mistake and you suddenly no longer exist. Everything you built is meaningless and ground into dust.
Helping others is ultimately selfish; it makes you feel good.
How does that work in nature? If you believe that human beings are just a process of evolution, why does that work? Helping others with no gain from it is contrary to the evolutionary process. You can compare us to pack animals and point out that we are like wolves--stronger as a collective, but do you really believe they feel the same emotions we do?
The only tragedy I see regarding religion is fundamentalism and how it can damage children for life and turn them into the twisted kind of adults we see on display here daily.
But Joe and Jane Average Catholic/Episcopalian/Jew/Muslim live ordinary, average lives in reasonable touch with reality. Their kids aren't brainwashed and isolated from their peers. They (mostly) go to public schools. They learn the truth about Science. They aren't trained to become robotic sociopaths. That they believe what they do about their god has little negative effect on others.
Be glad you escaped, Freak. I'm glad you escaped.
Keep telling your story. Keep confronting fundies and contribute to their extinction. Then there will be fewer tragedies.
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