Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "The Evangelicals Voting for Biden | God's Country" video.
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This has always been, through the entirety of human history, the whole danger with religion and faith.
As a non-religious person, I don't see the concept of faith and religion as a necessarily bad thing.
It's more like a tool. It can be used for good things, as well as bad things.
It just so happens to be way more showy and damaging when it's employed for bad things, like nuclear science.
The problem with it is that it's often used as a way to guide people. It sets up a structure of rules, beliefs, ideals and purpose that we as humans often cannot set up, discover, build up and manage by ourselves.
The largest percentage of us can't. And certain situations only amplifies that. Lack of education, poverty, moments of crisis, grief, and all sorts of other things.
The core defense of the church as an institution and of religious people to defend their beliefs ammount to basically that. Purpose. Something to guide them. Belief.
So, religious as a guidance system can be good... but it's only as good as those who are leading the pack.
And therein lies the biggest problem with religion. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
What you really end up with is large groups of people that delegates their sense of responsibility, their critical reasoning, their moral compasses, their decision power, their sense of ethics and everything else that is important in their lives to varying degrees, at the hands of a central power, sometimes a single person, so they can get on with their lives without all this extra weight. You can immediately see how enticing this whole deal is, and so the reason why it's neverending.
By human nature, how our mind is setup to be from basic instincts, the vast majority of huge, ambitious, over reaching religious groups will have a degree of corruption.
Why? Because we as a species don't tend to be convinced and gather around leaders solely because their plans vaguely seems to be "good", selfless, or for a higher purpose.
And people with real altruistic purposes tends to shy away from the spotlight, which directly contradicts modern western societies which tends to only give attention to celebrities, rich people and loud brash populist leaders. It's all about visibility and being as close as possible to the late-capitalism notion of success. Christians using socialism as a cuss word against it's perceived enemies without realizing how much the Bible and it's cast of heroes and good characters preached so much closer to socialist ideals, which is all sorts of weird.
Among all religions we currently have around the world, Christian religions are probably the ones that preaches ideals closest to socialism ideals than anything else.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not a socialist or communist myself... it just doesn't work well with human behaviour. Those systems are primed, because of it's idealistic blindness, towards totalitarism, dictatorship and tyrannism. Because it hits straight on with the conflict between society being equal towards everyone, it's incompatibility with individual freedoms, and then it's necessity of centralizing power in order to regulate such a system. If power is centralized, society can't be equal, and when it proves not to be equal, it either crumbles or the central power removes individual freedoms in order to promote equality. It's an idealistic system that does not works because it easly enters in contradiction with itself with centralized power spiraling out of control.
Anyways, back to religion. All this combined, it's no surprise that religious leaders will give support for presidents like Trump. It's not about how the person behaves, what he or she preaches, what lessons that your religious leader taught, or the message anymore. It's about power. It's about having the largest, richest, most powerful group.
It's not the church of God, it's about the dictatorship of your group or sect.
And this is nothing new. It happened during the middle ages, it's always happening all around us, and it'll keep going indefinitely as long as there are people out there who can't think for themselves. Which US citizens might think is not a big problem in the richest most developed and powerful country in the world, but it just so happens that the power of a country does not automagically means it's necessarily enlightened or educated enough in a self conscious, scientific, critical reasoning manner - as was the case of most of the biggest empires in our history.
If anything, on the macro scale, religion can also be a powerful tool, because it unites people under a set of rules, conditions, beliefs and purposes voluntarily. But again, it delegates power to single or small group of people.
In the past, religion was used as a very powerful tool to fight against our very basic nature of conflict. It gathered people together under a single system, it had part in forming the most basic community and country management systems such as law and morals, it united people against invading forces, it set the stage for more enduring times of peace, and it helped setting up human rights and other base principles for better living to everyone, imperfect as it was.
But the Acquilles heel of religion is also starting to show. The ways it can be co-opted for the detraction of others, the brainwashing potential of it, the fanaticism it can attract, how much it can corrupt.
And finally, how it's inflexibility towards changing times can go directly against what is happening all around us.
Most religions are unfortunately extremely incompatible with most of the fights we're going against today, or facing in the very near future. I actually think we need something like a religious belief system to go against something as encompassing and massive as climate change, as the rise of populism, tribalism, misinformation, and several other problems. But current religions aren't fit for it. Because they were created in a different era for different purposes. And despite efforts for modernization, the way they were set up puts precedent first. Modernization wasn't part of it. Because of blind faith and the way people set up their expectations and their invisible command into an ethereal being of sorts, it became too open for interpretation which leads to confirmation bias and other biases that works against unification against modern problems.
And so, the very thing that played a huge part in uniting us, in the end might also be what sets us apart, and ultimately finishes us.
Makes me wonder if by some chance we didn't have Christianism as the central religion of several countries, but instead something like Buddhism, Asceticism and others. Probably a different set of progress, with a different set of problems.
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