this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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I am an atheist and I believe the world would be much better without religions. Having said that, I don't conisder it as a scam in itslef. Instead they must have been something evolved over the time due to our ignorance, fear and helplessness. The very same factors that still keep them going.
But hell yeah, people are exploited in the name of religion. I'm from India, one of the largest so called democracies, currently under the governance of a fascist hindutva party that thrives on polarizing people in the name of religion.
BTW I was actually looking for specific instances of scams carefully plotted by known people, companies or even countries instead of broad answers like religion.
I think the more correct thing to say is that Organized Religion is a scam. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being religious (provided you don't force those views on others), but organized religion always winds up rotten at the top - and it's not surprising. Organized religion is one of the most powerful tools for controlling people, even if it wasn't (though it might have been) intended to be that way at the beginning. A king/president/dictator can threaten the lives of their subjects, but only a holy man can threaten their immortal soul (from the perspective of the devotee anyways).
Now that's a take I completely stand behind and agree with. I couldn't have put it better myself. That said, some religions were not made with the intent of controlling others. I don't think Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism were made with the intent to control people. We can argue about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as they were made for control by their founders, and what they intended for these movements after their deaths we do not know (or at least I don't, maybe someone out there does).
Again - I'm not arguing necessarily that any of them started out that way, in fact - I'm willing to bet that very few (looking at you, Mormons) actually were. Most religion (in my humble opinion) just stems from folks trying to make sense of an unfathomable universe using what tools are available to them at the time. But once you have the religion, and you have holy men/women who have the ability to excersize some form of power over their flock, you'll inevitably find corrupt people flocking to those positions, as they do in every position of power. Then over time they'll carve out more power for themselves and more authority, find ways of extracting influence and power from their positions until soon you've got "holy men" living in palaces with the authority of kings.
It's just human nature for positions of power to eventually become corrupted to some degree, and positions of religious authority offer an unparalleled lever in which to move the masses, which only serves to make it more attractive to would-be tyrants
Just FYI, that is specifically why The Baha'is don't have clergy. They do have an administrative body with local, national, and global levels of influence, but those are 9 member councils that are elected by the members of the faith, who must use the Baha'i rules of Consultation to reach unanimous decisions. Also if any of them ever appear to want the position, they are automatically ineligible to hold said position. It's worked well for about 60 years so far.
Hum. That's like saying "there's nothing wrong with being convinced that 2+2=5". There's something intrinsically mistaken about it, and I don't think it's defensible.
Religion was needed, but at some point logic and critical thinking should have been enough.
The issue is the wealthiest benefit when the masses don't have the tools to use that. They want people who won't question rules and blindly follow them.
Humans are just animals, we're not born with those abilities, we need to be taught.
So we see education outright cut or forced to focus on rote memorization rather than the process to understand and figure shit out on our own.
We should be past religion as a species, but it's not automatic, we have to continually teach the next generation to think for themselves
Just imagine what could have been done in the last 300 years if every dollar that was donated to churches went to some other cause, or back into the pockets of the masses. There is an immense amount of wealth that is trapped in the collective real estate, bank accounts, etc owned by churches. I'm not even talking about megachurches or the mormon's giant stack of cash, just mom'n'pop little parishes that are everywhere across the US.
If ALL that money was still kicking around in the economy and in the pockets of people to spend on real things, building real businesses, etc...we'd be way better off.
Always makes me sad when I visit my in-laws who live in a particularly bible thumpy area and you go and there are spots there where churches outnumber normal businesses. It seems like it's just a huge drain on the local economy devoting that much money into propping up churches of various kinds...
There’s a church across the street from my home in a small rural town in Oklahoma. It sits completely empty except for about 90 minutes from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM when about 6 cars pull up into the parking lot and maybe 15 people saunter in for Sunday service after ringing a loud bell announcing to the whole neighborhood. None of these attendees live in the neighborhood I might add.
There are literally dozens of other churches just like it throughout the town. It blows my mind that a religion that claims to be about spreading the love of their savior and saving as many people as possible from literal damnation would let a resource like that go unused. They could have volunteers there every day of the week helping to improve the community and help people in need but they couldn’t care less.
Churches do an immense amount of charity work and helping their communities.
So do secular charities.
https://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/who-gives-most-to-charity/
I'm not even religious myself, just find it annoying that reddit atheist cool guys think that religious people are all greedy and selfish, when this opposite is actually true.
A church in the city I work for is being used as an extreme weather shelter for homeless/at risk people. I received a couple dozen phone calls from the parish when it was first announced who were pissed about homeless people using their church for shelter. Any time I tried to explain the irony of their complaint it just made them angrier.
I'm not saying this to paint a picture of all religious people, but from my experience the one's I have come across tend to not care about anyone in their community not in their circle.
Considering giving to any church 501(c)(3) themselves are considered "charitable donations" when it comes to taxes, this rings a little hollow. If you consider a church as a charity itself, and those churches are soliciting donations every week in services, of course you're going to see higher charitable giving from areas with a lot of churches/religious. That said, my gripe is not with religious based charities, it's with churches. Salvation Army can continue to do what it does, religious affiliated childrens hospitals, etc. The amount of money that is spent on congregations is just a waste and it's a shame.
~signed, an atheist (ex)reddit cool guy
Yeh I hate that reddit atheist attitude, it embarrasses the rest of us atheists/agnostics. Of course it got brought over here too.
Organized religion has done a lot of bad, but they have done some good too.
Religion is used as a scam by many people. It is also used in other ways by other people.
Sometimes I mull over what state we'd be in as a society if instead of celebrating a man's deeds we had been celebrating nature and the environment that hosts us since the beginning.
I can't help but think there would be a lot less damage to the environment and less greed.
Obligatory George Carlin clip. https://youtu.be/iouZYYzQEjU
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/iouZYYzQEjU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Lesson for next time, use the text part of your post to define what you are asking or are interested in hearing. Otherwise you get everyone giving glib answers that suck like the above.
BTW, I'm reading Smartest Guys In The Room, the book about Enron, you might be interested in looking up that company. They used very complex financial instruments to deceive shareholders and Wall Street and boost their stock price. Bunch of assholes, some of the shit they pulled was obscene.
Right, I should've seen it coming. But as long as the discussions are healthy, instead of mudslinging, I'm kind of okay with it.
things have been like this for a long time, irrespective of the parties. but this has been going too far for the past two decades, especially after the current prime minister started his period.
True that.
I was gonna write about the fascist aspects of the country, but I wouldn't say that it's something completely unknown; many of my peers are okay with fascism just because there is no centerist alternative, as what we have already seen leftists are not going to be better given the same amount of power.
When it comes to religion, it should have been a personal thing rather than systematically integrating it with each aspect of our lives like how it was initially intended.
Sometime earlier in my life I took a decision of not going to my place of worship; this helped decouple my belief in something bigger that I don't understand, and a cult made by man.