Comments by "John Goldsworthy" (@johngoldsworthy7635) on "Listen to Amy Coney Barrett's full speech after Supreme Court nomination" video.
-
2
-
@kdmcbri
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
“There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.”
1
-
@kdmcbri
“Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.”
“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries”
“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
“The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”
1
-
1