With how sad and empty my geriatric mother's life is, the last thing I'm going to do is take away her imaginary friend.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Religion may be a lie but it's a comforting lie and that helps a lot of people get through their daily life.
Thing is it shouldn't be comforting to anyone if they really take the details seriously. You could do as much damage really educating someone about Deuteronomy and other fun parts of the Bible and ultimately leave them in a worse state than finding a way to make them an atheist.
We forget an atheist is just a non-theist. Someone who doesn't believe in any specific canonical god. I'm an atheist with a genuine faith the universe has more in store for "me" (whatever that is; I don't believe it's necessarily or eternally "ynthrepic") than a mere human lifetime given what we know about the universe as a whole and how mysterious and seemingly fundamental consciousness is to it all. That gives me some relief and comfort from the existential dread. More than I could possibly get from Yahweh and his totally uncompelling biblical heaven and hell dynamic.
Most people I know who are religious don't take the bible very literally; most haven't even read it. The comforting lie is stuff about the after-life, heaven, and a caring universe.
And that's great so long as it's a source of comfort and not dread. The fear of God and hellfire is real. We need people who carry faiths to recognize that this is by definition an uncertainty for which no real evidence exists, when it comes to consequences in the real world. Maybe that's a contradiction to some, but it doesn't need to be.
Yeah, I warn those who are challenging their own faith that naturalism isn't for everyone. For me it was a stark process to come to terms that I'm thinking meat, and my species is looking at some imminent great filters even before we are able to create a dependent colony on our own moon, so mostly harmless is going to be more of a footnote than our society deserves.
As someone who had an early aspiration to add something significant to the collective community that it could take with it into the future, this proved to be a bit of a let-down.
Don't get two hung up on great filters. We could've easy passed a few of them in the last hundred million years. You're much more than thinking meat, you have feelings and a perspective over time. its amazing not a liability.
Even if boom over, it was loads of fun.
What aspects of naturalism do you feel negate the reality of our collective community? I really don't see how the one led you to the other.
I don't think naturalism negates our collective community, but it does mean it is up to us to navigate an instinct for small tribes. Once we took up advanced agriculture and stopped migrating, we built large societies. And since then we have been contending with subversives who favor their own smaller sects over the good of the community, and they are very good at subverting larger systems for their personal gain.
Most theistic paradigms insist that there are higher powers to assist us when we confront existential threats (such as the climate crisis). Naturalism is one of the paradigms (not the only one) that confronts that there are no safety nets or training wheels. The human species can die out without the assurance of self-sustaining off-world colonies, and there are no higher powers to care or even notice. (Again, not to say they don't exist, but we've looked hard and been unable to detect them.)
Human society may, possibly in the face of the Trump regime, finally take class consciousness and community-focused governance seriously on a large scale. (There have been smaller scale examples.)
However, this isn't the first time we've thought about it and been subverted by established political power. Rather historically, often just after a bout of tyranny, societal collapse and its consequential horrors, we decide as firmly as we can that this time we're going to do it right! and then it gets diluted and subverted within even thirty years.
So to address the matter of uniting our collective community in a global cooperative effort: It's going to take a sociological miracle. We need to discover some new method, invent some new technology that enables all of us, even Trump, Musk, Vought and Thiel to recognize that every one of our fellow 343 million Americans (or 8 billion plus fellow humans) is, as Jesus put it, our neighbor who we should regard equally, that the worst renegade and the most wretched transient deserve the same benefits and treatment as themselves. And then this new thing needs to be resistant to efforts to subvert it.
(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal imagined such a gimmick, though I can't locate the specific comic. In it a point system is invented, and it's noted that people are nice for the points rather than for a sincere interest in community, but the system works, so it doesn't matter much.)
And we need to do it soon. We're running out of water, and the global average temperature is now at levels where experts warned us could prove a challenge to responders even at the national scale as hurricanes and wildfires rampage across the planet. The unlucky ones will survive until the global famine.
Naturalistic philosophy doesn't say we can't navigate our way to a community-driven society that acknowledges the least of us deserve a comfy life and we should mind the environment, rather, it only acknowledges that if we don't we risk human extinction, and if we die out, there's nothing watching out for us. The greatest cosmic horrir: throughout the universe not even a fraction of a fuck will be given as all of our culture, all of our ideas and works will be reduced to another geological layer on a speck orbiting a spark.
And a lot of people are not prepared to confront this.
Honestly, this is why I don't discuss Mormon history and the massive, gaping chasms in their claims of Truth with my parents. My parents are old--old enough that the family is talking about who is going to call the coroner, who's going to deal with tying up finances, etc.--and knowing that they've wasted an entire lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tithing on a con isn't going to do anything useful at this point. Fifty years ago? Sure, they would have had plenty of time to come to terms with it. Now? Meh.
When I worked in a nursing home, I was Christian.
I mean, I wasn't. At all. But the dying little old ladies who sundowned so bad that they sometimes thought I was their grandchild? When they asked if I believed in Jesus, I'd bite my tongue and tell them yes. I hated having to lie to their faces, I hate even thinking about it all these years later, but some of them had nothing to look forward to except "going to heaven" by that point. Lying seemed the most ethical choice.
I would think you’d need to tell lots of lies to someone in that state to not make things difficult over and over for them. Jesus would just be another one on that pile.
You got it. Sometimes the safest thing to do when somebody’s having hallucinations is to play along, and that means telling lots of lies. Sometimes people think their kids (who are well into their 60s) are still newborns, and they will have a panic attack because they don’t know where their “baby” is. I’ve reassured people that I “just set the baby down to nap” numerous times.
I’ve seen people treat dolls like real babies, too, and one time a lady rolled up to me in her wheelchair, asking to see a doctor because her baby (a doll with food smeared over its mouth) wasn’t eating. I even went so far as to get those “magic” doll bottle things that appear to “empty” when you tip them.
Point is, you’re right. But I don’t feel as conflicted about all the other lies I told, I guess the religion thing is just too … I dunno, “icky” for me? I’m an out atheist with pretty much everyone else. I don’t like having to go back into a closet.
One set of lies is about their past or present. The Jesus one is about their future. It’s a lot easier to lie to someone about the former two than to tell them there’s no future, they’ll never be whole or happy again. We all need a reason to look forward, a reason to keep the chin up and carry on. Most anyone can empathetically understand how crushing it would be if they were told that they were going to die soon, so telling an Alzheimer's victim that there’s nothing to look forward to rings a similar bell in our heads.
I mean to make it easier I guess I would just tell myself I am convinced that Jesus existed. So I believe in him. But not "in Him" capital H.
Or you could imagine yourself cheering Jesus on and hoping he will do well in sports ball for the Jerusalem league. I could see him as a solid basketball player with the magical powers and all.
Nothing wrong with lying there obviously.
knowing that they’ve wasted an entire lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tithing on a con isn’t going to do anything useful at this point.
It always gets me how people can be so comfortable with tithing while so prickly about paying taxes. I've straight up heard "every dollar I give to the government is one I can't give to the church" as an argument, when the town and state I'm living in is joined at the hip with the church they love.
Fifty years ago? Sure, they would have had plenty of time to come to terms with it.
Church is one of those third-spaces that the unemployed and retired flock to when they've got too much time and not a ton of money. A great deal of the appeal of these places, especially back in my parents' day, was as a social center with a feel-good energy. As a born-and-raised Houstonian I've seen it work on enormous numbers of otherwise-religiously-apathetic people. The whole Joel Osteen model is Good Vibes as a religious experience. One big Jesus Themed Pep Rally.
I think you can probably logic your way to a "God's Not Real" conclusion with a generic religiously-ambivalent lay person. But I don't think a simple logic chain is enough to convince folks who consider religion a form of community recreation to stop showing up. No more than you could talk someone out of blaring their favorite brand of Country Music or driving an oversized pickup truck or playing with their toy guns down at the gun range.
These just aren't logical decisions. They are social decisions.
I don't know that my parents were ever the kind of person that bitched about paying taxes. They might have privately, but i don't remember it ever being a big deal. Me, I understand that my taxes are too low for what I expect the gov't to be doing.
And you're exactly right about the social experience. One of the enormous struggles for atheists has been building a community. Churches fill that need, even though they cause real harms in other ways. If you go to a church, it's easy to meet people and make friends when you move to a new community. If you don't, well, good luck because you're going to need it.
I got a Father in Law that tithes his retirement income from the military to his church and votes hard republican. But he abstained from Trump voting so he considers himself enlightened.
They are social decisions.
Exactly.
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