(January 4, 2017 at 1:00 pm)Astonished Wrote:(January 4, 2017 at 12:59 pm)Redoubtable Wrote: Not by one sentence, but something that stuck with me for a while was Christopher Hitchens imagery of the "celestial North Korea" referring to the world of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim God. At the time I first heard it as a believer, "I thought: wow, that really puts things in a new perspective."
He's definitely good for forming ways to use these against theists.
In a similar vein, I think an even more meaningful point he made was that the game is rigged from the beginning when it comes to religious morality. Coming from a traditional Catholic morality (which I believe is the most rigid of any major religion) this was extremely eye opening to me. I had never thought that I was supposed to fail by design when it came to Catholic conceptions of sin. The bar is set so high and so rigid that you are supposed to fail, and this initiates a cycle of guilt, confession, humiliation, return to obedience, and then the inevitable 'rebellion' of sin, and then you start the process over again. It's like a morality ponzi scheme, the debt of sin just keeps racking up and you can't escape from under it because the very system is designed to keep you indebted to the Church.
