Tessa, also with respect, I absolutely agree blind faith in anything including religion is not great, and as we are discussing publicly, it is other parties I would hope to sway, if not your good self.
As you’ve mentioned elsewhere, well reasoned arguments should always be considered, and I hope most will consider my arguments well reasoned.
If we were hybrid, created from a splice of violent animal, and something of higher intelligence, this would explain the reason we were left rulebooks, in the form of religious artifacts, that we incrementally gain understanding of, to try to keep us from reverting to violent animal instinct, as our intelligence develops to a point of being more useful than just animal instinct.
I believe our intelligence is increasing exponentially. Assisted by the internet, all people now seem close to par with the geniuses of 150 years ago. We seem to be on the edge of a second enlightenment.
It appears to be the drive to make profit from all things, greed, which perverts all things, including religion, and even attitudes towards religion.
If my logic is correct, we owe our existence, and our basic sense of right and wrong, to some form of higher intelligence, towards which we should be aspiring to become ourselves.
If that is not correct, then I see no harm in having that mistaken view.
But if it is correct, then there is absolutely existential harm in mistakenly denying it.
The problem seems to be that we are putting profit before life. In order to do that, we have to obliterate the basic rules of religion, which previously we used to construct our establishments of law and order, and our constitutions, like thou shalt not kill, we have replaced with thou shalt make profit.
Some folk even try to deny a man called Jesus actually existed, yet every time we look at the date, we see the date of his birth in the number of our calendar year. Thank god at least for that.
I argue we’ve almost killed religion already, its absence is embodied in pretty much all software written for profit, including what we now call Ai, and now we are seeing the results.
Law and order is breaking down. There is real confusion over what is good and bad.
Now criminal behaviour very literally rules the Earth. The value of life is becoming meaningless. How else is it possible, to continue massacres, and sanctions leading to massacres, in the face of covid?
We seem to be creating our own hell.
If we’ve personally had particularly bad experiences at the hands of particular religions, we should try to look beyond the religion, to those who would have perverted the basic messages of those religions, to make them unjust, to see how they stood to profit by that.
It is they, and their deeds, who should be correctly identified by non profit driven historians as the real criminals, to ensure we do not keep making the same mistakes.
