You saw it, I saw it. Reality, summarized.
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I don't know where my parent comment went.
That being said, I don't think I disagree with what you said.
I disagree with your assessment on anti-theism. I feel like theism is far too easy of a mechanism to basically remove cognitive load and introspection from people onto an authority/institution that gets to exclusively arbitrate truth and morality.
What the American forms of Protestantism do is allow people to take that onto themselves. It's a kind of workaround where you say that God reveals truth and moral righteousness too you. There's problems with that, but it's a hell of a lot better than offloading that to the church.
Huh, I can't find it either. Weird. Anyways, theism is only a crutch if you use it that way. And unfortunately large percentages of the population will never rise to the mental level necessary to find morality without some kind of cultural force to compel them. The higher understanding of why moral societies are better is lost on many - look at how many people twist nietzche into justification for pointless hedonism and self-absorbed existentialism.
You identify american protestantism as better than the catholic organization, but both are theistic. You're right, but both are works of man. The organizations that form around religions are not the question of the existence of a higher power. On that subject, the protestants and the catholics are essentially an example of right vs left again - the protestants are decentralized and individually weak, while the catholic church is a leftist organization that has essentially become an extranational globalist government wearing the guise of religion.
American protestantism sits better with you probably because it fits the ideology of the right better - limited power that is easily fixed or ignored when corrupted. Whereas the catholic church is a massive corrupt institution that is essentially unfixable, like any large leftist government.
I don't disagree with any of this, I would just say that I think humans are capable of rising to that point, but our institutions seem to be aggressively dumbing people down.
Yes. I don't really disagree with you on any of this.
I'm no preacher, so I'm not going to type a book to try to explain how to find god on the other side of the bell curve. I will say that confusing a distaste for organized religion with something like anti-theism, and rejecting the existence of any higher powers is shortsighted. With regards to christianity, it's the human part of the system that is the problem, not Christ.
Spend more time in nature and you may start seeing the hand of god.
Well, I think my experience shows the opposite. The existence of a higher power is not natural, and is effectively something that only exists within the human mind as a literary device. Organized religion is just an attempt to continue that abstraction through time, but it is inevitably corrupted. No cultural institution is a final arbiter of truth or morality, and the fact that American Protestantism off-loads most of that onto "God", means it's out of human hands. That's where it's really the only exception to other religions. God not existing is why Protestantism works. You stop letting humans try to manage God through an institution.
But, once you realize you're just offloading it, you realize that some responsibility needs to be taken, which is why it has to be personally taken. But there's only one logical outcome to this: full, personal, responsibility. God simply becomes an irrelevancy once you realize you're the one that needs to make the appropriate decisions and suffer whatever consequences inevitably result.