TagliatelliMonster
Established
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2019
- Messages
- 145
Now a view that I had since ever and never was challenged by anyone and which I want to discuss is:
I believe that believers are/have been caught in a negative feedback loop. I believe that by spending time and effort to actively increase their chances for a better afterlife - like regularly spending time on prayers, sticking to various religious rules beyond clearly benefitial ones (like Thou shalt not kill) - they are actively harming their outcome in this life. Sometimes directly - for example by giving money to religious institutions - sometimes indirectly through opportunity cost.
I believe the idea of sacrifice is a deliberate strategy by religious institutions to keep the believer in a state of seeing his own life as something to escape from. They create a world that is relatively worse than if they had been more productive instead and thus are more likely to believe that life is simply misery, a trial, suffering etc. so that they want to seek refuge in religion because it offers escapism through the idea of the afterlife.
I believe this feedback loop was much stronger in the past. For example by being told to not wash yourself because it would upset god and at the same time being told the plague happened because god was upset, not seeing that missing hygiene was really the cause of the plague. It's still very much observable in war-torn regions like Syria. I remember an interview of some older woman who escaped ISIS territory who cried that all her sons were taken by Allah but that she would make new sons just so Allah could take them too because she (said that) "loved Allah so much" and probably expected to be sent to al jannah (Islamic idea of paradise if I understand it correctly) for sacrificing all to her beloved god. I mean it's obvious that she can't think straight due to psychological trauma. But if she and many other people like her weren't religious in the first place they would strive for peace and not continue with destroying this world for the sake of the next.
In the end they wouldn't have a reason to be religious because the world would be a much nicer place. Ever since the end of WW2 we in the West have very little reason to be religious. The cases where someone died from an unnatural cause are much rarer. Child mortality is much lower. Life expectency is higher. Sicknesses end up deadly much more rarely. Workload per person is much lower. Freetime opportunities are much more diverse. Communication all around the world is possible, and for knowledge you don't have to travel to Alexandria, you can just click on a Wikipedia link instead. We are the cloest to the Utopian ideal than we've ever been and I believe the primary reason for this is the replacement of theism with the scientific method and to direct any effort to real things, real improvements. Like Da Vinci who cut open corpses to learn about the human anatomy even if according to catholics god didn't like that; it was considered unholy.
So, believers, am I wrong here?
I believe that believers are/have been caught in a negative feedback loop. I believe that by spending time and effort to actively increase their chances for a better afterlife - like regularly spending time on prayers, sticking to various religious rules beyond clearly benefitial ones (like Thou shalt not kill) - they are actively harming their outcome in this life. Sometimes directly - for example by giving money to religious institutions - sometimes indirectly through opportunity cost.
I believe the idea of sacrifice is a deliberate strategy by religious institutions to keep the believer in a state of seeing his own life as something to escape from. They create a world that is relatively worse than if they had been more productive instead and thus are more likely to believe that life is simply misery, a trial, suffering etc. so that they want to seek refuge in religion because it offers escapism through the idea of the afterlife.
I believe this feedback loop was much stronger in the past. For example by being told to not wash yourself because it would upset god and at the same time being told the plague happened because god was upset, not seeing that missing hygiene was really the cause of the plague. It's still very much observable in war-torn regions like Syria. I remember an interview of some older woman who escaped ISIS territory who cried that all her sons were taken by Allah but that she would make new sons just so Allah could take them too because she (said that) "loved Allah so much" and probably expected to be sent to al jannah (Islamic idea of paradise if I understand it correctly) for sacrificing all to her beloved god. I mean it's obvious that she can't think straight due to psychological trauma. But if she and many other people like her weren't religious in the first place they would strive for peace and not continue with destroying this world for the sake of the next.
In the end they wouldn't have a reason to be religious because the world would be a much nicer place. Ever since the end of WW2 we in the West have very little reason to be religious. The cases where someone died from an unnatural cause are much rarer. Child mortality is much lower. Life expectency is higher. Sicknesses end up deadly much more rarely. Workload per person is much lower. Freetime opportunities are much more diverse. Communication all around the world is possible, and for knowledge you don't have to travel to Alexandria, you can just click on a Wikipedia link instead. We are the cloest to the Utopian ideal than we've ever been and I believe the primary reason for this is the replacement of theism with the scientific method and to direct any effort to real things, real improvements. Like Da Vinci who cut open corpses to learn about the human anatomy even if according to catholics god didn't like that; it was considered unholy.
So, believers, am I wrong here?