No, it became a thread about a religious person using circular logic to justify their beliefs to people who see religion as contradictory and inconsistent.
Humans are dumb, religion exploits that. It’s easy to manipulate people when you can explain away everything and justify anything. It’s way easier to use religion as a crux than to be introspective.
What believers don’t understand is that you can be highly critical of religion but choose to accept various principals it seeks to teach without having to believe everything it teaches, it’s not an all or nothing choice.
Religion is like any ideology, it sounds good on paper but in practice it’s highly flawed. However if you pick and choose the good aspects of an ideology and mix them with the good from other ideologies you’ll have a much better system. Take capitalism for example; it’s an ideology that looks good on paper but in practice it leads to monopolies, brutal working conditions, and flirtations with slavery (long working hours, a 7 day work week, and company towns for example), but if you take the good aspects of capitalism and you balance it out with the good parts of socialism and you add in some government to keep it all in check with democracy as a backstop, you’ll have a pretty good system. However the more we move towards any one ideology, the worse the outcomes will get, it’s all about balance.
To tie it all back to the OP, when you have the government pushing religion instead of the universal principals of all religions you get fundamentalists and a system that cares more about adherence to the religion than it does to the principals it teaches (sharia law ring a bell). Instead of focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion, we focus on making sure women have sex for procreation purposes only, people only love the opposite sex, and criticism of religion or religious states are prohibited. One seeks to make the world a better place but isn’t so rigid that it can’t improve on itself and the other seeks to make the world a better place but is so rigid that it does the opposite.
/steps off soap box
Humans are dumb, religion exploits that. It’s easy to manipulate people when you can explain away everything and justify anything. It’s way easier to use religion as a crux than to be introspective.
What believers don’t understand is that you can be highly critical of religion but choose to accept various principals it seeks to teach without having to believe everything it teaches, it’s not an all or nothing choice.
Religion is like any ideology, it sounds good on paper but in practice it’s highly flawed. However if you pick and choose the good aspects of an ideology and mix them with the good from other ideologies you’ll have a much better system. Take capitalism for example; it’s an ideology that looks good on paper but in practice it leads to monopolies, brutal working conditions, and flirtations with slavery (long working hours, a 7 day work week, and company towns for example), but if you take the good aspects of capitalism and you balance it out with the good parts of socialism and you add in some government to keep it all in check with democracy as a backstop, you’ll have a pretty good system. However the more we move towards any one ideology, the worse the outcomes will get, it’s all about balance.
To tie it all back to the OP, when you have the government pushing religion instead of the universal principals of all religions you get fundamentalists and a system that cares more about adherence to the religion than it does to the principals it teaches (sharia law ring a bell). Instead of focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion, we focus on making sure women have sex for procreation purposes only, people only love the opposite sex, and criticism of religion or religious states are prohibited. One seeks to make the world a better place but isn’t so rigid that it can’t improve on itself and the other seeks to make the world a better place but is so rigid that it does the opposite.
/steps off soap box