Theism is literally childish
November 9, 2017 at 8:43 am
(This post was last modified: November 9, 2017 at 8:48 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
Religious belief conditions people to literally think and act like children.
As a child your parents look after your needs, explain how the world works, make decisions about your future and take responsibility for those decisions.
Growing up and maturing isn't just a physical development, but a mental one as well. The child learns to ask questions, not to believe everything they are told, to make their own decisions and moral judgments and to take responsibility for their actions. They slowly become more independent by being safely exposed to a world of danger until they can look after themselves.
Religious conditioning from birth essentially stops the maturation process. Children are taught that the consequence to their actions are irrelevant because only a non-existent god ca truly judge them. They are not taught to think through the morality of their actions but to accept the morality without question that some person wearing a pointy hat gives them. They are conditioned to obey authority and to have faith rather than to ask why. This means that they do not have to accept the responsibility of their actions because they were only following orders, which ultimately came from their god and are not to be questioned. The child grows up dependent upon a system that tells them how to act, think, believe and what to value or hate. Their life is not their own but is instead owned by a church that can control them like some bot in a network to be deployed to exercise power.
Not all theists are conditioned from birth. These are the ones to be pitied because they were not properly raised to begin with. The converts though do not deserve pity so much as contempt because they have essentially outsourced their morality. They realise how difficult it is to make moral judgments because life is never black and white but always grey. So they're essentially letting someone else make those moral judgments for them instead. Instead of taking responsibility for their actions, instead of suffering the doubt that is necessary to navigate a noisy and uncertain world, they're preferring to feel good about their own lives regardless of what it costs everyone else. They are being self-centered. Their own sense of self-ease has a greater priority to them than the effect that they have on the world around them. These are the types who would happily allow their government to sign away their freedom to dispel any kind of evil that they have been warned about. Over time these converts happily become more child-like as they accept the conditioning of their church to not question but to just have faith that it will all turn out well in the end.
Children play. They fantasise about all kinds of imaginative scenarios because they are not weighed down by plausibility, The hall mark of a child is when they don't think through how heir fantasies would work in practice. Yet this is what the religiously indoctrinated do all the time. Instead of wizard performing magic, or a superhero with unexplainable powers, it's a god performing holy-magic. None of it can be explained, and none of it is meant to be. And these fantasies give people the illusion of control over their lives and their reality. Prayer does not work. There is no way that it could work. Yet it is more fun and nicer to imagine that you are imbued with powerful magic and can influence the world around you than to realise that you cannot. Or that to do so actually takes effort or comes at great cost.
The problem is, how can you tell people to grow up when they literally want to continue holding onto a child-like innocence where everyone else makes the decisions for them?
As a child your parents look after your needs, explain how the world works, make decisions about your future and take responsibility for those decisions.
Growing up and maturing isn't just a physical development, but a mental one as well. The child learns to ask questions, not to believe everything they are told, to make their own decisions and moral judgments and to take responsibility for their actions. They slowly become more independent by being safely exposed to a world of danger until they can look after themselves.
Religious conditioning from birth essentially stops the maturation process. Children are taught that the consequence to their actions are irrelevant because only a non-existent god ca truly judge them. They are not taught to think through the morality of their actions but to accept the morality without question that some person wearing a pointy hat gives them. They are conditioned to obey authority and to have faith rather than to ask why. This means that they do not have to accept the responsibility of their actions because they were only following orders, which ultimately came from their god and are not to be questioned. The child grows up dependent upon a system that tells them how to act, think, believe and what to value or hate. Their life is not their own but is instead owned by a church that can control them like some bot in a network to be deployed to exercise power.
Not all theists are conditioned from birth. These are the ones to be pitied because they were not properly raised to begin with. The converts though do not deserve pity so much as contempt because they have essentially outsourced their morality. They realise how difficult it is to make moral judgments because life is never black and white but always grey. So they're essentially letting someone else make those moral judgments for them instead. Instead of taking responsibility for their actions, instead of suffering the doubt that is necessary to navigate a noisy and uncertain world, they're preferring to feel good about their own lives regardless of what it costs everyone else. They are being self-centered. Their own sense of self-ease has a greater priority to them than the effect that they have on the world around them. These are the types who would happily allow their government to sign away their freedom to dispel any kind of evil that they have been warned about. Over time these converts happily become more child-like as they accept the conditioning of their church to not question but to just have faith that it will all turn out well in the end.
Children play. They fantasise about all kinds of imaginative scenarios because they are not weighed down by plausibility, The hall mark of a child is when they don't think through how heir fantasies would work in practice. Yet this is what the religiously indoctrinated do all the time. Instead of wizard performing magic, or a superhero with unexplainable powers, it's a god performing holy-magic. None of it can be explained, and none of it is meant to be. And these fantasies give people the illusion of control over their lives and their reality. Prayer does not work. There is no way that it could work. Yet it is more fun and nicer to imagine that you are imbued with powerful magic and can influence the world around you than to realise that you cannot. Or that to do so actually takes effort or comes at great cost.
The problem is, how can you tell people to grow up when they literally want to continue holding onto a child-like innocence where everyone else makes the decisions for them?
