Comments by "GodsOwnPrototype" (@GodsOwnPrototype) on "Is it time for Christianity to go underground? | Holy Smoke" video.

Dozens of millions of Christians slaughtered in the 20th Century, the complete destruction of ancient Christian communities now in the 21st that had survived millennia. Open disdain from almost all institutions, including those nominally Christian themselves & a culture that celebrates sneering at our heritage.
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You seem to be displaying a distinct lack of understanding of what you are critiquing; there are of course valid & educated critiques to be made but yours aren't either.
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@jonathanbowen3640 Like your belief that you have understood something enough to dismiss and dismantle it with a full appraisal of the consequences of doing so & our society continuing without its many aspects & impacts.
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@bertrandrussell894 Were I to be smeared across the line of an event horizon, or my mind merged with AI processing the data of all known events & variables, I could perhaps see with excruciating detail every mistake & failing of my life, knowing every instance where I did not embrace the proffered goodness or wisdom of others or give the same to those in need around me & so be aware also of the sufferings perpetuated where they might not have & to experience this with the fullness that my human nature would allow then it would be a damnation in itself & not too different from that which you dismiss as cruel bunk. Your wish & asserted value then is really for ultimate ignorance & oblivion.
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@jonathanbowen3640 & you have put the cart before the horse and atomised the analysis as well as failed to define your terms, (& I suspect have smuggled in a moral categories as factual ones, i.e. 'Belief systems, even those without a deity or supermaterial force or reality, that have overwhelmingly bad outcomes are therefore religions & those that don't aren't'. e.g. Communism, Capitalism). It has been known since antiquity, & corroborated scientifically, that stress & hardship increases a person and population's religiosity & that with ease & comfort such feelings & impulses subside. The wide adoption of television was consistently followed by an increase in burglary and theft, similarly social media has seen a rise in depression, self harm, suicide and negative social interactions ranging from ill mannered & uncivil up to physically violent. Regarding violent crime there are also mitigating distortions, as we have begun to see more clearly lately), when developed security & health services retreat from an area crime of all kinds shoots up and their consequences worsened due to the lack of mitigation. Violent actions taken today where the incident is immediately called in to an emergency service via instantaneous telecommunications technology, whereby a team is rapidly conveyed to the scene via speedy machines along orderly well established thoroughfares, or even directly through the air, and upon arrival deploy extensively developed techniques and technologies to minimise and repair the consequential damage of the violent action, all rather obscures the fact that same said action committed a few centuries ago, or a few lines of latitude & longitude away, the same distance from a hospital would likely result in death or permanent maiming rather than a few hours of surgery and discharge back into normal life a day or two later. A person who believes in no cosmic justice rests easy and content in a population of those where such a belief has reigned for generations, where as if their own cynical material calculus were to colour the majority or whole population they were in the void of social trust would need be filled with otherwise unnecessary vigilance and precaution -this effect is similar between homogeneous and heterogenous ones. As for 'inferior on every metric', the most fundamental materialist one, that of continued perpetuating existence, is hands down no contest between the irreligious & religious for the former cease to care beyond themselves and so wither out whilst the latter value it highly and so always the religious shall inherit the earth -just check with Prof. Eric Kaufmann.
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@jonathanbowen3640 I will also simplify this, you have still refused to provide the single definition that matters & has been requested: what is a religion & what is not? Those impacts of Television & Social Media were not isolated to the US, though as the first & coupled with a capacity for & push towards unrestricted consumerism it certainly was more pronounced than many other places, although all other things being equal, less so among religious demographics, if you actually are more detailed. You hand wave regarding my demonstration that like for like comparisons are not actually being made & I wonder where the Soviet Union, Cambodia & China factor in to your assertion that ethical progress and religious belief have an inverse causal correlation? Your treatment of the belief in cosmic justice makes no sense to me; as it is a claim beyond the realm of provability one way or another our discussion is limited to the consequentialism of it being held as a belief by persons or a society. You also asset that religion is only a product of educating the young but then also, (having conceded long term material superiority to the religious in the terms I laid out), asserted that atheists are superior intellectually and spiritually. I take Solzhenitsyn's stance that the line of good and evil run's through the heart of every person regardless but my assertions regarding values and beliefs and practice are more concerned with the resulting societies. The failure of any foundationally atheistic society to produce the goods you assert they do would seem to fly in the face of the evidence of history. I for my part in these kinds of discussions don't assert religion to be solely theistic belief systems but ones that aren't internally consistent materialistically reductionist. There are plenty of internally inconsistent materialistically reductionist worldviews that can be validly categorised as religions sociologically.
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@jonathanbowen3640 By your own standard large parts or your own thinking and arguments here are religious. Arguing as if 'religiousness' is necessarily & evidently a fetishistic syncretism that somehow most religious people fail at embodying by not 'collecting them all' & treating religious traditions as if they're discrete objects when almost all of them express themselves not to be and which no scholar on religion from any angle or position would ever assert or argue. It's asinine and in no way comports with empirical reality. Pinker entirely sidesteps both the points that I lead with, that of the relationship of environmental stress to strength of religiosity, the demographic self defeating outcome of comfort & over socialisation and the differential outcomes of violent actions in different contexts in regards to the background development of effect mitigating technologies; no like for like comparison is being made. You are asserting counter evidential beliefs about human nature being homogenous enough & in such a way that the cycle of civilisations has somehow ended, or that technological escape velocity from the possibility of failure has been reached, despite heaps of evidence regarding the decline of the G component of IQ in the human population, including those demographics that have historically done most of the inventive, exploratory & intellectual heavy lifting, who are also becoming a smaller & smaller share of the population and that rates of per capita innovation have been going backwards for over a century & the unlikely continuance of things without one of several major potential environmental catastrophes occuring. At root this is all about your own particular foibles, inclinations and annoyances; there is no rational argument for why your desired reality, born of a hatred of our natural human state, is necessarily better than the desires realities of those you despise; no objective rank or measure of value that you can appeal to, especially if you reject those evidently embedded in and emanating from nature itself as beneath you. Just another egoist asserted value solipsism raging against the evidence of external other values creeping in to assert that they too exist in the world to be reckoned with, dressed up with some of the trappings of a favoured milieu.
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