RE: Decline of religion
March 26, 2025 at 8:59 am
(This post was last modified: March 26, 2025 at 9:25 am by Fake Messiah.)
(March 26, 2025 at 8:30 am)Hippea Fly Guy Wrote: The last part is perplexing. What are you about mate? Trying to analyze me of something?
You just wrote a post that goes through the whole history of human race, but my posts are perplexing.
All I'm trying to do is to figure out what you talking about, to make sense out of the series of posts that you made about morality.
Like how do we know not to treat animals as equals and why we eat them. Maybe because humans and animals have always been hunting each other.
Morality of the modern society works in a way that centers people's feelings and desires. Like when people go voting, they are asked who do they feel would be the best leader.
Now, it hasn't been always like that. During religious theocracies, clergy and aristocrats decided for the rest of the people.
The change only came a few centuries ago under the name of humanism. It's main principle is that people should do whatever makes them happy unless it hurts other people.
Take current debates on homosexuality. If two adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their inner feelings. In the Middle Ages, if two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement.
In our society, there is no higher authority than human feelings. Even in the economy where it is said "the customer is always right." It doesn't say that the bishop is right or that someone else should govern the market, but what people want to buy is being produced and sold.
Now, not all problems are solved. There are some other more complicated problems like what about animals and the environment.
These and similar problems are being debated to be solved, but no one is looking in the Bible for a solution.
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"