RE: Dying Well
April 7, 2024 at 4:06 am
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2024 at 4:07 am by Fake Messiah.)
(April 7, 2024 at 2:55 am)Belacqua Wrote: Serious question, and to answer it I'd say we'd need to settle two big issues:
1) which dogma? and
2) what does it mean to live well?
Living well means living as you want and not as others order you to live. Religion is the one that limits people to live how they desire and thus live well and fulfilling life. Like if someone is gay, religion frequently tells him or her they must not be gay, which leads to that person not living a happy and thus fulfilling life.
Or if you are a woman and you want to go to school, religion in many countries forbids you. Or if you are a woman who got pregnant so now she wants an abortion in order to go to college, religion orders her to push the pregnancy till the end, get a low-paying job, and live in poverty. And so on.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
