Even if theism is a failure, it's still superior to atheism

[arewethereyet]

I'm beginning to think that Root isn't the person to go to for relationship advice.

/s

[Ahriman]

More on Root’s second point:

The notion that men ultimately want ONLY sex out of a relationship is as dead wrong as the idea that women ALWAYS want more than sex.

I’ve been in lot of relationships, some of which were based only on sex (the ‘fuck buddy’ paradigm) and others which were purely platonic. To this day, some of my best mates are women I have no desire to have sex with.

As described by Root, male-female relationships viewed through his theistic lens are demeaning to both men and women.

But theism is somehow ‘better’.

Boru

I guess the only way theism would be better (in this context) is if you believed men and women deserved to be thought of in a demeaning way, even if that way of thinking is logically incorrect.

[Jehanne]

More on Root’s second point:

The notion that men ultimately want ONLY sex out of a relationship is as dead wrong as the idea that women ALWAYS want more than sex.

I’ve been in lot of relationships, some of which were based only on sex (the ‘fuck buddy’ paradigm) and others which were purely platonic. To this day, some of my best mates are women I have no desire to have sex with.

As described by Root, male-female relationships viewed through his theistic lens are demeaning to both men and women.

But theism is somehow ‘better’.

Boru

It's like saying that women only have sex while on their backs. As a biological male, it is physiologically and psychologically impossible for me to be in any other position; why, I don't know. It's just the way I am.

[Deesse23]

Do you care if any your beliefs are true?

This is why the anti-abortion folks lost in Kansas -- faith is a should v. ought, "pro-life" being a moral expression as opposed to the nitty-gritty of public policy, which costs money with real-world consequences.

Who does he even have to invoke this argument from consequence?
If he had evidence for the existence of his god, then either this god would know whats good for us anyway, or (might makes right) we have to accept whatever he wants. Whats the point of this (futile, like so many) exercise? Whom exactly is he trying to convince here.

btw: 
His second paragraph about sexuality and desires is borderline misogynist and looks very, very much like a polluted and twisted mind exhibiting lots of fake piety.
Disgusting. In any case utterly confused, thats the least i can conclude, giving him all the leeway i can. I begin to see why minds like him think its a good idea to force women to wear "proper" clothing and shit.
His mind really is polluted with religious BS.

[Neo-Scholastic]

So, life's a bitch then you marry one? No, I find these opinionated attempts to diagnois religious belief as if it some kind of metal health condition a bit off-putting.
Theism may be wrong but it is very normal and human to have religion...at least as natural as birds building nests.

[The Grand Nudger]

As usual, theism and religion are being used interchangeably. If it's true that religion is, in some sense, a practical response to reality as we face it (and I think that's exactly what it is) it's still unclear how that, then, conveys to theism - which is a belief in particular kinds of gods..and not a religion.

Further, if the criteria for "success" in this argument is that some x provides a way for people to deal with their mortality, and provides a framework for people to assert a value - then a successful x need not be religious or theistic and most of the ways for handling morality or value are not, in fact, either of those two things.

We've got a case of fractal wrongness on our hands - a position wrong on it's face is supported, at any level of consideration, by equally wrong things.

[Mister Agenda]

To the OP: If I granted all of your points, I still can't choose to be a theist. I can only believe that which I am convinced is true. I couldn't really believe the moon is made of green cheese for a million dollars, I could only pretend.

[Jehanne]

So, life's a bitch then you marry one? No, I find these opinionated attempts to diagnois religious belief as if it some kind of metal health condition a bit off-putting.
Theism may be wrong but it is very normal and human to have religion...at least as natural as birds building nests.

Naturalistic fallacy. Rape, genocide, infanticide and senicide may have also been common 10 thousand to 10 million years ago (and, beyond).

[Mister Agenda]

Rituals are important in ways we don't fully understand, but they don't have to be theistic and many are not.

[Anomalocaris]

Here, I hope I made the title as provocative as possible, I'll attempt to show that it's really more than a clickbait, it's true.

All religious people who work on defending their religion rationally are bound to face the difficult question : but why do you really believe ?

There are of course well-known reasons that motivate religious conviction : indoctrination, fear, sense of community, to name a few. But the thread won't be about those : there really are distinct reasons for preferring a theistic worldview over an atheistic one, even when all philosophical arguments fail. I'll cite just two for now, as I think the topics raised here are incendiary enough.

It's a horrible world out there:

Let's face it, the prospect of death wonderfully forces the mind to find pragmatic answers to all kinds of struggles. Firstly, it's important to see the difference between this fact and the simple emotion of fear : the awareness of the finitude of our lifetime is a stone cold fact that has nothing with our emotions. In other words, whether we fear death or not, we're still going to die. Secondly, it's common knowledge in philosophy that anything a man does is an attempt to "live in the moment" while they can do so, and that the full awareness of the finitude of our lives necessarily leads to a descent into absolute powerlessness, when the individual can longer find the inner momentum to move forward. Some psychologists speculated that all mental disorders are a form of weakness in one's character or mask of personality that makes them directly exposed to this awareness.

The late Ernest Becker in his award winning book The denial of death, brilliantly expressed this idea : "when the awareness dawns that has always been blotted out by frenetic, ready-made activity, we see the transmutation of repression redistilled, so to speak, and the fear of death emerges in pure essence. This is why people have psychotic breaks when repression no longer works".

But all people are also driven by the desire to stand out, to make a unique contribution to the world. An impossible dilemma : all your ready-made activity, everything you do, is the result of complex psychological mechanisms shielding you from the awareness of your own death, and at the same time, you want this same activity to be inherently valuable and cosmically important, you want it to transcend death.

Religion or theism offer a clear solution to the dilemma: there really is a Great being who guarantees that everything you do has cosmic justice, He created you so that you can accomplish it. All non-religious worldviews clearly fail or at best offer far less appealing alternatives to solve the problem.

The insoluble problem of sex and lust:

A woman constantly, and subconsciously, asks for assurance, that the man wants "me" and not "only my body", women are painfully conscious of the same dilemma above : they want to fully express their inner personality and, at the same time, are aware that all men ultimately only want the sexual act. And here it's important to note what I'll call a regress of symbolic lies to get sex : the evolving brain of the man managed to create a symbolic world of lies for the woman, he'll eventually convince her through an elaborate web of lies and sophisticated illusions that her beauty, or that the beauty of her personality, really transcends space and time, whereas his brain only aims the sexual act. What's commonly called love happens when this regress of lies becomes too sophisticated for the man, or the predator, himself : he starts to really believe that pursuing his loved one has some nobility and heroism in it, that his loved one is cosmically important, even with the full knowledge that, under naturalism, all her revered beauty is bound to decay and disappear irreversibly. The male predator eventually comes back to his senses and no longer feels the cosmic importance in his pursuit of lust, when the numbing feelings of arousal are gone.

This simple observation is enough to deal the blow to any prospect of feminism. Women can't be more than an object of lust and animal desire under naturalism. Religion, again, clearly has the upper hand here : the criterion for ultimate or other-worldly success has nothing to do with how dangerously seducing her body parts are, it's really her inner personality, the inner strength of her religious belief that ultimately determines her cosmic fate. Religion makes feminism possible as it inherently values women, whereas competing worldviews offer nothing in this regard.

Shouldn’t this be an entry under “stupid things religious people say” rather than its own thread?