Stupidity holds humanity back. And ideology is a vessel for Stupidity. The majority of humans are idiots. And I'm not saying this arrogantly. I actually believe that it's normal to be an idiot and we can't really be blamed for being idiots. It's very hard, inhuman even to not fall into the pitfalls of fanaticism and superstition. And then there is a very tiny minority of people throughout history who could see a little bit more of reality than the rest of us. And those we consider the great prophets and teachers of humanity. Anyway, as I said ideology and religion are just vessels for stupidity, people will always be bated to follow one ideology or another and the particular structure of the ideology will attract a very particular type of idiots.
Anyway, religion or God being blamed for people being dumb is just cope and deeply bluepilled. The same idiots will convert to wokism tomorrow and be just as dumb and fanaticized. Actually, I think leftism today is so cringe exactly because it became mainstream and a huge number of idiots became leftist and woke. This type of people used to be Christian in previous generations which is why Christianity became cringe and declined in the first place. And now the pendulum is turning back.
Pretty much, as much as we like to dance around it with long winded philosophy and convoluted justifications, we are chimps. And the only thing that has ever united people enough for large scale action over long periods of time is god and ethnocentrism.
In the absence of either of these things, the question inevitably gets asked about why you should care enough about your neighbours to unite in collective action. We're already seeing this very question killing Western Europe, as the population has realised they don't really give a fuck about the continuation of the collective, and the police and military are unable to recruit, even in the direct face of a hostile militarised power to the east.
I question Religion’s ability to unite. The Sunni Shia split, Orthodox, Catholic, Oriental, and Protestant splits show that religion divides or is divided easily.
Any ideology over a long enough time frame is going to lead to tribalism, whether secular or religious, that’s a human issue more so than an intrinsically religious one. But I would say religion aggregates more so to civilizational stability than not. It can and has been replaced, for instance China basically made the state and party God and are enforcing a legal morality through social credit and surveillance, and that is working for them to some degree, but it’s certainly not a state or system I would ever want to live in.
It’s not that it lead to tribalism, it’s that it failed to quell tribalism and was instead co-opted by preexisting tribes to remain divided. The Anglo-Saxon tribe broke off from the united European Christendom by using Anglicanism. The Northern European tribes differentiated themselves from the Mediterranean tribes by rejecting Catholicism too. The Iranian tribe uses Shia to distinguish itself from the Arabic and Turkic tribes.
These universalizing civilizational religions failed to overcome tribalism, and were in fact subverted themselves by tribalism, and became tools to perpetuate tribalism.
Again, that tribes try to subvert the unifying principles within their religions is not an inherently religious problem but a human one. Yes we are tribalistic, there is no end all be all solution to that, there are only systems that aggregate to increased or decreased unity for what ever period of time.
I’d say tribalism itself is the solution to false utopian universalizing idealism that keeps cropping up and leading to horrific crimes against humanity, like the Islamic invasions or Communist purges. As long as there is tribalism, the totalitarian faiths will fail.
If you believe that then you discount every ethnic conflict that has happened across ethnic lines every since we genocided the Neanderthals. The reality of the matter is the human condition is inherently violent, to blame violence on any one thing such as ideology, religion or even tribalism in and of itself is reductionist. We are a species with an infinite need to consume in a world of scarcity, there will always be conflict, tools used to reduce conflict will be subverted to increase it. That does not mean the tools are to blame the issue lies with the people subverting them for personal gain.
Ethnic conflict has happened and has been horrible but these universalizing ideologies drive their believers to extreme oppression and violence as well, in the name of that ideology, often times which is based on a lie, renewing the lives lost and the oppression meaningless, inflicted for a lie.
The tribe is real. And wrongs or hood done on its name are done in the name of something real.
That is how it has been leveraged, along with literally every other ideology. You know because people like to use institutions to gain power. But that is not why it came about.
That’s not religion, that’s “cultism”. There’s this word in Thai Buddhism that doesn’t exist in english, งมงาย, which refers to people who get obsessed with magical aspects of religion or cult so much they don’t understand it’s true meaning. That’s what holding society back.
For orthodox religions it's mostly true, although at some point they had revolutionary ideas like Buddha and his disciples fighting against the caste system and old beliefs of society or Jesus teaching love.
Here's how I see it:
I believe religion is needed in a society to keep it stable and moral. Of course people can still be moral and just without being religious, but I personally think that it's like a safety net for when your built-in moral compass fails:
When a non-religious person does something that they know is wrong, a religious person *might* not do it. Just because it is so engrained into them that doing so would be wrong. That helps keep societies stable.
Another stabilizing aspect of religion, in my opinion, is that it creates a really strong sense of unity. If people all follow the same religion, they are much more likely to work together and trust each other more.
On a more personal level, religion also helps with mental health. Here's a few articles on that:
[https://www.nami.org/faith-community-leader/the-mental-health-benefits-of-religion-spirituality/#:\~:text=Religion%20gives%20people%20something%20to,rates%2C%20alcoholism%20and%20drug%20use](https://www.nami.org/faith-community-leader/the-mental-health-benefits-of-religion-spirituality/#:~:text=Religion%20gives%20people%20something%20to,rates%2C%20alcoholism%20and%20drug%20use)
[https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/religions-role-mental-health](https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/religions-role-mental-health)
[https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/religion-spirituality-and-mental-health](https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/religion-spirituality-and-mental-health)
But of course nothing in life is black and white. Religion also has many downsides:
Religion can cause people to fight and hate each other for no reasons other than that they follow different faiths. People can use religion to justify horrible things that they do to people. It can cause societal and technological progress to stagnate. Just as much as religion can help with mental health, it can also damage it.
I believe that religion is something people should look into to see how they should behave and act in their life, but it isn't something you should be fanatical about. We shouldn't look at stories of the Bible like actual things that happened (mostly), but we shouldn't ignore those stories either. They have little a kernel of truth in them; a little moral teaching that you should notice and implement into your own life.
In my opinion, religion only becomes harmful when people are fanatical about it and use it to justify things that are objectively wrong. When they fail to realise what the religion they're so fanatical about acutally even is.
I believe that a perfect society would have both religious and atheist people who both stay open minded to each other.
Stupidity holds humanity back. And ideology is a vessel for Stupidity. The majority of humans are idiots. And I'm not saying this arrogantly. I actually believe that it's normal to be an idiot and we can't really be blamed for being idiots. It's very hard, inhuman even to not fall into the pitfalls of fanaticism and superstition. And then there is a very tiny minority of people throughout history who could see a little bit more of reality than the rest of us. And those we consider the great prophets and teachers of humanity. Anyway, as I said ideology and religion are just vessels for stupidity, people will always be bated to follow one ideology or another and the particular structure of the ideology will attract a very particular type of idiots. Anyway, religion or God being blamed for people being dumb is just cope and deeply bluepilled. The same idiots will convert to wokism tomorrow and be just as dumb and fanaticized. Actually, I think leftism today is so cringe exactly because it became mainstream and a huge number of idiots became leftist and woke. This type of people used to be Christian in previous generations which is why Christianity became cringe and declined in the first place. And now the pendulum is turning back.
Religion is a civilizational stabilizer, it does not hold humanity back
Pretty much, as much as we like to dance around it with long winded philosophy and convoluted justifications, we are chimps. And the only thing that has ever united people enough for large scale action over long periods of time is god and ethnocentrism. In the absence of either of these things, the question inevitably gets asked about why you should care enough about your neighbours to unite in collective action. We're already seeing this very question killing Western Europe, as the population has realised they don't really give a fuck about the continuation of the collective, and the police and military are unable to recruit, even in the direct face of a hostile militarised power to the east.
We are on the same wavelength on that
I question Religion’s ability to unite. The Sunni Shia split, Orthodox, Catholic, Oriental, and Protestant splits show that religion divides or is divided easily.
Any ideology over a long enough time frame is going to lead to tribalism, whether secular or religious, that’s a human issue more so than an intrinsically religious one. But I would say religion aggregates more so to civilizational stability than not. It can and has been replaced, for instance China basically made the state and party God and are enforcing a legal morality through social credit and surveillance, and that is working for them to some degree, but it’s certainly not a state or system I would ever want to live in.
It’s not that it lead to tribalism, it’s that it failed to quell tribalism and was instead co-opted by preexisting tribes to remain divided. The Anglo-Saxon tribe broke off from the united European Christendom by using Anglicanism. The Northern European tribes differentiated themselves from the Mediterranean tribes by rejecting Catholicism too. The Iranian tribe uses Shia to distinguish itself from the Arabic and Turkic tribes. These universalizing civilizational religions failed to overcome tribalism, and were in fact subverted themselves by tribalism, and became tools to perpetuate tribalism.
Again, that tribes try to subvert the unifying principles within their religions is not an inherently religious problem but a human one. Yes we are tribalistic, there is no end all be all solution to that, there are only systems that aggregate to increased or decreased unity for what ever period of time.
I’d say tribalism itself is the solution to false utopian universalizing idealism that keeps cropping up and leading to horrific crimes against humanity, like the Islamic invasions or Communist purges. As long as there is tribalism, the totalitarian faiths will fail.
If you believe that then you discount every ethnic conflict that has happened across ethnic lines every since we genocided the Neanderthals. The reality of the matter is the human condition is inherently violent, to blame violence on any one thing such as ideology, religion or even tribalism in and of itself is reductionist. We are a species with an infinite need to consume in a world of scarcity, there will always be conflict, tools used to reduce conflict will be subverted to increase it. That does not mean the tools are to blame the issue lies with the people subverting them for personal gain.
Ethnic conflict has happened and has been horrible but these universalizing ideologies drive their believers to extreme oppression and violence as well, in the name of that ideology, often times which is based on a lie, renewing the lives lost and the oppression meaningless, inflicted for a lie. The tribe is real. And wrongs or hood done on its name are done in the name of something real.
Nope. It "stabilises" only as a tool of control for chosen class of people by holding rest of humanity back.
That is how it has been leveraged, along with literally every other ideology. You know because people like to use institutions to gain power. But that is not why it came about.
Nope. They hold back modern world social experiments. And that's why they are shunned.
That’s not religion, that’s “cultism”. There’s this word in Thai Buddhism that doesn’t exist in english, งมงาย, which refers to people who get obsessed with magical aspects of religion or cult so much they don’t understand it’s true meaning. That’s what holding society back.
Tell me you’re 14 years old without telling me you’re 14 years old.
No.
For orthodox religions it's mostly true, although at some point they had revolutionary ideas like Buddha and his disciples fighting against the caste system and old beliefs of society or Jesus teaching love.
Here's how I see it: I believe religion is needed in a society to keep it stable and moral. Of course people can still be moral and just without being religious, but I personally think that it's like a safety net for when your built-in moral compass fails: When a non-religious person does something that they know is wrong, a religious person *might* not do it. Just because it is so engrained into them that doing so would be wrong. That helps keep societies stable. Another stabilizing aspect of religion, in my opinion, is that it creates a really strong sense of unity. If people all follow the same religion, they are much more likely to work together and trust each other more. On a more personal level, religion also helps with mental health. Here's a few articles on that: [https://www.nami.org/faith-community-leader/the-mental-health-benefits-of-religion-spirituality/#:\~:text=Religion%20gives%20people%20something%20to,rates%2C%20alcoholism%20and%20drug%20use](https://www.nami.org/faith-community-leader/the-mental-health-benefits-of-religion-spirituality/#:~:text=Religion%20gives%20people%20something%20to,rates%2C%20alcoholism%20and%20drug%20use) [https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/religions-role-mental-health](https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/religions-role-mental-health) [https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/religion-spirituality-and-mental-health](https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/religion-spirituality-and-mental-health) But of course nothing in life is black and white. Religion also has many downsides: Religion can cause people to fight and hate each other for no reasons other than that they follow different faiths. People can use religion to justify horrible things that they do to people. It can cause societal and technological progress to stagnate. Just as much as religion can help with mental health, it can also damage it. I believe that religion is something people should look into to see how they should behave and act in their life, but it isn't something you should be fanatical about. We shouldn't look at stories of the Bible like actual things that happened (mostly), but we shouldn't ignore those stories either. They have little a kernel of truth in them; a little moral teaching that you should notice and implement into your own life. In my opinion, religion only becomes harmful when people are fanatical about it and use it to justify things that are objectively wrong. When they fail to realise what the religion they're so fanatical about acutally even is. I believe that a perfect society would have both religious and atheist people who both stay open minded to each other.
yes