There are certain exaggerations here.

First, religions did not kill “all of humanity’s pioneering scientists, over 100-million wise Women.” These are wild exaggerations, even after allowing for being bizarrely ethnocentric (most of the populated Earth is not Europe).

Second, most religion is not violent. Violence is actually a peculiar property of Judeo-Christian religion, which is actually ethnographically bizarre. It is over-represented by natural selection: religions promoting violent conquest, imperialism, and suppression of dissent will inevitably crush all the others and replace them.

That does mean we are usually confronting the violent religions. But this should not lead us to confuse that peculiar outcome with “all religion” as a general concept. The problem with all other religion is not violence (and that includes now nonviolent Judeo-Christians, albeit still a minority but growing, as democracy allows them to now).

I demarcate and discuss these two kinds of religion in the very article you are commenting on. So do please read it.

Religion deems everything it can’t understand and control to be immoral and blasphemy against its delusions, scams, and crimes.. Religion’s solution to deal with all that which it can’t understand nor control is to kill it, as it has killed all of humanity’s pioneering scientists, over 100-million wise Women, all of humanity’s best, and still is… Humanity has lost its minds to insatiable greed, organized crime, pollution, willful contamination, and deadly chemistry (drugs).. Now humanity doesn’t understand itself, and is out of controlled, can’t be controlled; therefore humanity by religious inherent directive is now killing itself…

Religion must be ended/expunged/eradicated to prevent humanity’s inevitable impending extinction…

Religion must be expunge from government… To save our species from hell we must eliminate the religious evil…

Thanks for that!

yes! thats become so obvious to me over the past few months. LOL. especially this bit,

“….requires adopting a dangerously irresponsible epistemology (that any opinion you can fabricate through any convoluted reading of the Bible is authoritative and should be believed), which is the same folly as the conservatives, only worse, because it is even more distant from the text.”

on the flip side of that, its much easier to see the individual minister as a human being, where the image of the priest has always been ingrained as something more than human (and that view is obviously not healthy).

It creates a little “scare” in me because its the first time I’ve had to seriously confront these truth claims (whereas in Catholicism, you can sort of carry on as a cafeteria Catholic without much thought).

I like the idea of the Ethical Societies started by Felix Adler.

It looks like it provides the idea of community, promotion of the Golden Rule (which I just take on as an axiom than something I need to prove), and ethics by deliberate reasoning. There are not many of them of them in existence. I guess if there is a God, then I’m hoping for something like Rabbi Hillel’s view (to paraphrase) “don’t do anything hateful, all else is a commentary”.

Anyways, thanks for your feedback. I’ll probably be peppering you with questions as I go through your blog. I did Bart Ehrman’s a couple years ago, now I’m looking at your work and Robin Walsh’s.

Thank you. It’s helpful to get an insider view like that. And of course I concur.

I’m reminded of Avalos’s point that liberal Christians have no text—the Bible is stalwartly socially reactionary (its views on sex and women and society and personal behavior were already retrograde even when written, and now are outrageously so), and stalwartly politically radical (insisting on a full-on communism and pacifism that even liberal Christians ignore). So liberal Christianity can’t claim any real textual support the way biblical literalists can (even as it still also ignores most of what it says, it still does say socially reactionary things and does not say socially liberal things, while the politically liberal things it says are too radical even for most modern liberals). So it is self-evidently “human made” (fallible human opinion gets substituted for the text), which is self-de-authenticating (the very point conservative Christians are right about), but more to the present point, requires adopting a dangerously irresponsible epistemology (that any opinion you can fabricate through any convoluted reading of the Bible is authoritative and should be believed), which is the same folly as the conservatives, only worse, because it is even more distant from the text.

So liberal Christianity is functionally doomed. Once you have abandoned literalism for wishy-washy “whatever we say it says it says” liberalism, it starts to become apparent that that really doesn’t carry water anymore. Once you have left the entire authoritarianism framework, the soft authoritarianism of liberal religion becomes more starkly bogus. We may as well just use our own judgment as to what to believe. Which rapidly eliminates the Bible as useless. And eventually, if you adopt a responsible epistemology, it will burn away all the unsupportable just-so stories, and there goes God, resurrection, and salvation, and hence Christianity.

The only way to avoid that acidic effect, where liberal Christianity is just a way-station or pipeline on the way to atheism (about half of new nones) and unchurched woo (roughly the other half)—and thus not something that will ever experience growth or social dominance, as it will always lose as many members as it gains on that pathway over time—is to adopt some sort of defective and thus dangerous epistemology that “blocks” reliable belief-formation, which always means some kind of soft authoritarianism (with browbeating more than shunning, and politeness more than viciousness). Which anyone leaving conservativism is already cued to spot and reject. So that simply isn’t marketable in the end. Once conservative Christianity has been completely drained into isolationist reactionaries (like the Amish) and liberal Christians, there won’t be anyone left to recruit, and liberal Christianity will simply bleed out a slow death, while isolationists keep going on babies alone, but having no input or influence on wider society (like the Amish).

It’s a long arc. It may take ten generations to get there. But it seems inevitable to me. We’ll always have a 10-20% of any population clinging to some madness or other (whether godless inceldom and white supremacism and flat earth and lizard theorists and QAnon and whatnot, including scattered varieties of crazy variants of either reactionary or crunchy Christianity). But it won’t be unified and it won’t control anything anymore. It’s just sad that we have to wait centuries to get to even that sad but improved state.

But as you point out, we landed in a UCC church. But I’m starting to realize many of the things you pointed out.

The harm in the liberal religions is the potential to “romanticize” the biblical texts. In the Catholic Church that was a whole tradition you could hide out in if you wanted to…you could find the “social justice” niche. The Protestant churches don’t have that so much.

The other danger is romanticizing religious membership in general. There was a social media post recently where a UCC association was celebrating how the religious decline was tapering……but without realizing that a lot of this trend favors conservative/fundamentalism. “We” should be only celebrating when people move to our side of the ledger, our interpretation of “love your neighbor”. and frankly, I’ve noticed the secular humanists do that better than most religious overall.

I just found this article and it’s very good, I completely agree with all the points, very logical!

I don’t know if I have a good point with this, but it did make me think of how issues that plague religion will simply find new ways to exist thanks to the transfer of information that is quickly distorted and disseminated throughout the world rapidly.

Could you define what you meant by “oppress” and “excess power”?

“Oppression” in this context means physically depriving people of liberty through force (e.g. jailing Christians for the sole crime of being Christians or advocating Christianity).

“Excess power” in this context means actually mandating that political office holders or even voters renounce or oppose all religions (or vice versa, e.g. that they be Christians; or whatever), or formally granting actual political power to specifically atheism-promoting (or vice versa, religion-promoting) organizations, or that the state officially favor one over the other (e.g. the state allowing or funding private Christian schools but not explicitly atheist ones, or vice versa; while neutral or evidence-based schools are neither).

Some solutions are by necessity time sensitive — especially in a era where one can in milliseconds transmit a thought worldwide or move themselves/materials across borders in minutes.

If your concern is with regard to dangerous information, you don’t need any religion-based criterion. “Is it demonstrably true or false, or only arguably one or the other” for example is a question that can be asked of speech that has no inherent connection to whether it connects with a religious position or not.

It thus is not “oppressing religion” to outlaw exposing unvaccinated kids to the community; it is provable in court, with evidence, that that is dangerous, and thus within the community’s right to stop—but this is still not the same thing as legally mandating that parents vaccinate their kids (that’s more debatable).

Likewise it is not “oppressing religion” to mandate evolution theory and not creationism be taught in school science classes (whereas creationism can be taught in world religions or mythology courses), because it is provable in court, with evidence, that evolution theory is true and creationism is not (in the US the actual legal theory currently used to prevent creationism in science classes is slightly different, but comparable: that it is not factual that creationism is the principal position in biological science, whereas it is provable in court, with evidence, that evolution theory is; teaching creationism along with other religions or myths in publicly funded schools is, meanwhile, legal, because it is factually true that it is a religious belief or myth, not a current fact of science, so as as long as no one religion is being favored over others, it’s fine).

But this is not what we are talking about when discussing what people privately are allowed to believe or talk about or publish with respect to their beliefs, or whose religious beliefs we formally privilege under the law.

I can see how I’d apply agreement of your statement to a category of the religiously indoctrinated that I’d describe as benign participants — those who will only go so far; not blindly off the cliff. But, there is a more sinister category that poses an immediate danger to you, me, indeed all others, and that group cannot/will not be reasoned with.

I don’t know what you are referring to. Or what your proposal is to deal with it.

Whatever you are talking about, though, I suspect my previous answer covers it: anything you intend to engage the levers of political power to suppress, to be justified doing so, you need to be able to prove in court, with evidence meeting the legal standards of evidence, that the thing opposed is both false and actually a danger to the community. And in practical terms, you also need to prove that your proposed means of suppression won’t make things even worse than its unsuppressed target would. And that it would even work (e.g. there is no known means of controlling individual belief that actually works; hence we limit our policies to limiting behavior, and even with respect to speech—which is still not the same thing as belief—we limit it only when it causes measurable harm and is provably false, e.g. defamation, fraud, perjury, incitement to violence, etc.).

Could you define what you meant by “oppress” and “excess power”?

Some solutions are by necessity time sensitive — especially in a era where one can in milliseconds transmit a thought worldwide or move themselves/materials across borders in minutes.

I can see how I’d apply agreement of your statement to a category of the religiously indoctrinated that I’d describe as benign participants — those who will only go so far; not blindly off the cliff. But, there is a more sinister category that poses an immediate danger to you, me, indeed all others, and that group cannot/will not be reasoned with. What does one hope to gain by petting that rabid dog? How many lives do we sacrifice before we say “enough is enough”?

So, I’m curious to hear your thoughts as to what scenario would it take before you’d find it morally acceptable to use oppression and/or “excess power”?

We see the world differently in one small way which informs my motivation — in addition to my own life, I have a wife and children that I want to protect.

I fail to see any reference to anything I said here that is logical incoherent. You do not seem to know what “logically coherent” means.

The science is the science. You can accept it or ignore it. All I can do is tell you what it is.

Meanwhile, animals don’t have culture. Thus they don’t have genders. So what we “could” do with animals is irrelevant to this conversation.

Science establishes gender is not the same as sex; that you almost never know someone’s sex, only their gender (you aren’t allowed to peak at their genitals or read their DNA or lab their blood); and that there are more than two sexes; and that chromosomes do not reliably correlate to body chemistry and body chemistry does not reliably correlate with genital or womb construction or body shape or vocal formation, so there is no definition of sex that can correlate all three in any consistent fashion. And we (as in, all human beings) share 99.9% of the same DNA, not a mere 97%. These are the scientific facts. And you have presented no evidence against any of them, or anything I actually said about them.

Thus, it would appear the only delusional person here is you.