Quote:
Originally Posted by Goodboy
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Over the past 50 years people have stopped going to church and adhering to religious sects. Many of these people who stopped going to church, still believe in God. They say, "I don't need a church to worship God." Or "Church is full of people that will try to make me celibate"
I'm not making the argument that all churches are equal. Nor am I saying that you can't worship God without a church.
What I am saying is that a lot of things that have been taught in churches for the past thousand years have tremendous value. Typically church go-ers hear the errors of their ways more frequently than if they hadn't gone. A good example of this is the denunciation of viewing pornography. In a nutshell; porn gets you less sex and lackluster sex. Porn has been denounced by church leaders for thousand of years but it hasn't been until recently that psycologists have found a negative link between porn and sexual wellness. All the while liberal society has been telling young boys to vedge out on porn like it's a healthy source of recreation.
On the other hand, where I think a lot of young men get turned off by religion (among other things) is over zealous preaching of sex. I.E Jesus says "don't look on another woman to lust after her," and someone wrongfully takes that to "sex is bad and boners are bad and good looking women are bad and having a lot of sex with your wife is bad or having sex without the thought of having kids is bad" etc etc.
But in today's world, many young men aren't hearing both sides of morality at home, definitely not hearing it at school, and unfortunately not hearing it at church because they don't go. Traditionally churches have taught morals and it's been up to the hearer to follow or not.
I have more thoughts on all this but will continue tomorrow. Would like to see what some of you think about this.
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Did it ever occur to you that maybe if there was no such thing as organized religion -- people that spend their time and resources in organized religion would instead join groups that don't propagate make-believe shit?
I see what your saying. It's good to have intelligent guy (the preacher hopefully) giving moral guidance to a group on a regular basis. The group gets together and tried to help each other and engage in moral activity.
But the elephant in the room no one wants to talk about is that all this shit about God, Hell, Angels, and Jesus just flat out isn't real. You can be about as sure as that as you can be that we are all not in the Matrix.
The reason people continue to believe this stuff as adults is because society sanctions and approves of it. Otherwise we would call these people crazies. We have to tip toe around these wacky beliefs -- even when they come into conflict with running a modern society.
We allow religions to literally brainwash kids. We do this in other areas too, like nationalism and parental rights in general (lots of parents force stupid wacky beliefs on there kids). And maybe we should allow it -- but I'm not ready to declare its a good thing and that its sad the practice is dying out.
And religion is getting less popular. But its so influential in society that professors that study it keep arguing and obscuring that fact...arguing the rise of Islam is proof that religion is not incompatible with modernism (lol..). Or that the statistics that show religion is getting less popular don't mean what you think they do blah blah blah
So much privilege we grant religion. We need to start treating it more like astrology IMO and less like some pillar people need in their lives.