this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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You think you're punching up. You're not. You're conflating a vast group of people and their heterodox cultural practices with your imagined idea of them and labeling all of it bad, in a performatively condescending way that pretends to be altruistic. Other peoples' relationship to their spirituality is not cool to be shitty about. 'Get rid of all religion' is vaguely genocidal and also would not even make a dent in the persistent human problem of abusive and manipulative groups existing.
You're religious so you're being defensive and fighting for reasons to keep your beliefs. You don't want to believe that you participate in a larger organization that harms humanity. That means you're a good person.
The religion you participate in still harms people. It doesn't matter what religion it is.
Good people trying to do good things participate in evil organizations that perpetrate harm.
I'm actually not religious. I just think a lot of these arguments sound uncomfortably close to bigotry.
These are arguments from a position of pure concept and theory, the realm that religion deals in.
Pragmatic reality means that we're never getting rid of religion because people will continue to perpetuate the abuses of the past into the future.
That doesn't make them bad people; they sincerely think they're doing good.
Nonetheless: their belief does not make what they're doing good.
My youth spent canvasing in favor of the bigotry of Prop 8 in California is not absolved because as a fundamentalist I believed it was the best thing for "the gays".
I'm sorry it makes you uncomfortable but the truth is that religion and the religious cause endless suffering on this world and they deserve to be called out.
Your experience is not universal. There are forms of religion very different from, and much less politically powerful than, American fundamentalism. It doesn't make me uncomfortable to call out specific abusive forms of worship, I just don't think that's what you're doing. You said you think all religions should end because none are worthy of existence. I think that's a hateful thing to say. Lots of marginalized religious groups have been violently suppressed or had people attempt to wipe them out in some way. How dies repeating that argument help make the world better? Fight specifically against the actual group who hurt you. But don't lump in millions of people you know nothing about and assume they are all exactly the same. The world is more complicated than that.
There is not a single thing that a religion does to help people that is irreplaceable with non-parasitic communal structures.
What religion does beyond helping people is leech off of superstition and ignorance to control and coerce its adherents into its modes.
If a religion is free of superstition it ceases to be a religion: requiring no faith.
Cultural practices are beautiful and deserve preservation - religions are shackles that keep those marginalized people we care about enslaved to the past.
Religion as a concept is evil.
So you traded one kind of nuance-less fundamentalism for another. That sounds comforting.
To call my statements unnuanced is patently false. Unnuanced is your assertion that getting rid of religion is genocidal.
You consistently conflate religion and culture and act as though a group that lets their religion die has somehow had a genocide committed against them.
The death of a religion is not the death of the culture and genocide has no role my desire for the extinction of the dark and superstitious past that we are in the process of leaving.