You saw it, I saw it. Reality, summarized.
(twitter.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (79)
sorted by:
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.
You're only looking at one end of the bell curve for what role a higher power fills.
True, but I see no reason why human IQ development can not be continuously grown. I agree that that level of anti-theism was not possible in the Bronze Age, but I see no reason low IQ is the kind of limiting factor that would make it impossible for a secular society to take responsiblity for itself.
Atheism and anti-theism is not the other end of the bell curve. Low IQ people need religion imposed upon them for the fabric of society to remain stable. Most atheists are just lashing out in rejection of that and tend to become religious adherents of things that are less strictly theistic, but still religions - like the cults of communism or media's pop "science" (not to be confused with an actual understanding of the scientific method).
The other end of the bell curve is understanding and making peace with the existence of a higher power without the need for societal compulsion. Lashing out against the concept of God is not beneficial. Accepting God is beneficial even to people that can understand morality without God.