(September 5, 2017 at 8:32 pm)mordant Wrote: Fundamentalist teachings on hell owe more to Dante's Inferno than to scripture, but it's a popular incentive to belief (or maybe more exactly, against unbelief). It backfires on fundamentalists because it tends to select the vulnerable, fearful, and guilt-able. That's good for retention, bad for healthy interpersonal relations and good decision-making. It doesn't produce responsible leadership material for running their churches.
They don't see the cognitive dissonance because the only way you wouldn't get out of jail free in their mind is to deliberately turn down a free offer. That is exactly how it was presented to me at the tender age of 5 years and 10 months, and it made sense to my not-yet-six-year-old brain. What I was overlooking is that while, as presented, it's free in the sense you don't have to earn it by being good or something, you have to earn it by acknowledging you're wrong and the doctrines are correct, despite that they make zero sense and are entirely unsubstantiated. So all you're giving up is your intellectual integrity, which is the closest thing you have to a soul.
The other thing you're giving up in the freedom to discover a valid, working epistemology to live by. What you get instead is the failed epistemology of religious faith, which does not lead in the general direction of what passes for truth, and neither explains nor predicts experienced outcomes.
This is why the whole idea of 'freedom of religion' is such a fucking paradox. You're not 'free', your minds are being forcefully warped by parents and community to believe it and to condition you that you want it and to defend it from being attacked or threatened or taken away. So unless you're just genuinely that damn stupid and don't require any indoctrination whatsoever to come to the conclusion that a religious belief is rational or justifiable, you're not practicing religious freedom, you're ignoring the fact that you're a slave.
Religions were invented to impress and dupe illiterate, superstitious stone-age peasants. So in this modern, enlightened age of information, what's your excuse? Or are you saying with all your advantages, you were still tricked as easily as those early humans?
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There is no better way to convey the least amount of information in the greatest amount of words than to try explaining your religious views.
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There is no better way to convey the least amount of information in the greatest amount of words than to try explaining your religious views.
