New Pope Elected: Centuries Of Make-Believe (Religion) Reaffirmed For The Masses

[Silent3]

216. When did I say anything about hating anyone?

Last edited Thu Mar 14, 2013, 11:31 AM - Edit history (2)

There are some believers who are themselves hateful, and my feelings for those people can be strongly negative at times.

For the rest, however, it's a mix of bewilderment and bemusement, maybe a bit of repulsion in some cases at that aspect of the person -- but not the total person. I'll confess to feeling a bit elitist sometimes.

I'm quite well aware that I'm surrounded by believers, and that, like or not, I have to deal with it. Why even comment on that? Is there anything in what I've posted that hinted even slightly that I intended pretend religion didn't exist, hoping that if I ignored it it would just go away?

As for the comparison to religion, I find "family" and "government" as social constructs, when exercised well, have much more redeeming value than religion.

Here's where I strongly disagree:

Sure, leaders of churches do and they get a lot of press. But most people don't take that stuff seriously.

I think this is a common self-delusion among some very liberal "believers", believers who can barely be called believers because they've so intellectualized and abstracted religious teachings that the specifics of dogma and ritual become mere interchangeable ornamentation and play-acting surrounding an amorphous "spirituality" and/or humanitarianism.

I'm afraid a lot of not-so-liberal believers out there take their beliefs pretty seriously. They think angels are really protecting them. They think that someone or something is actually listening to their prayers. They think that a miracle-performing raised-from-the-dead Jesus is an actual historical person. A substantial minority in the US believe in biblically literal creationism, and that extends to a majority when you include people who think that God must have at least made humans as a special creation, and guided the rest of evolution to some extent.