Organised religion is a cancer of the mind.
Those of us who grew up without it literally can’t imagine scenarios like this, though I’ve heard disturbing things from people who seem otherwise sane that make me understand what drives some to do these things. When you’ve internalised fables of good vs evil and that’s how you define reality, it’s a small step to think you have to commit atrocities to save the innocent. You don’t have to have a very divergent mentality to convince yourself of this.
We will all be better off when the vast majority of people give up these fables and begin to live in the real world.
Ehh I dunno… I’m as atheist as anyone with an IQ above 60, but I think religion is just a convenient scapegoat for mental illness here. I’m pretty sure someone who shoots strangers on the highway would have done it in a world without religion too, and they would say it’s a different mystical force that made them do it. I don’t think Christianity actually moved this person to do this.
I think religion is just a convenient scapegoat for mental illness here.
It acts more as a place for mental illness to be hidden, camoflauged, or accepted as devotion or prophecy.
When someone’s delusions overlap with what a church accepts as their ancient prophets’ experience, that illness doesn’t get proper treatment.
Yep it muddies the waters that distinguish what is rational from irrational. Like a dark damp festering basement, it gives mold a place to fester and grow.
Welcome to a place where you don’t need logic; you just need this magical thing called “faith.” Such mainstream religions were just the most successful cults.
Welcome to a place where you don’t need logic; you just need this magical thing called “faith.” Such mainstream religions were just the most successful cults.
People generally aren’t all or even mostly rational or logical. It’s difficult even for people with deep science or technical backgrounds to think in a structured way for long periods of time.
Even if you got most people off of organized religion they’d be on some other bullshit.
Evidence for that is actually all around us too. Organized religion is seeing more and more people walk away from it, but people remain just as full of shit as they were in church.
To your last point I don’t know if I see that. Most of the religious nutjobs - organized or free of association - seem predominantly concentrated among right-wing circles. See the rising Christian nationalists for instance. Those who are walking away from religious faith tend to be more on the left side of the spectrum and ironically far more adherent to the teachings of Jesus in his best of image.
It’s not one side or another of the political spectrum that’s full of shit, it’s people in general.
I have easily encountered just as many anti vax crackpots for instance coming from the left as from the right.
That is complete and total bullshit and any reputable statistics survey can prove it.
Let’s not bOtH sIdeS this with absurd anecdotes.
If you go on YouTube and look up videos of the eclipse yesterday, you’ll see a ton of videos about why the eclipse marks the beginning of the end of the world. Just pure and total insanity or people taking advantage of that insanity. You might be surprised but you probably won’t be because you know in your heart that we’re just that far gone now.
This is why I literally groaned when I read another post on lemmy about LLMs using YouTube to learn from…
Ffs do we want these things to be unhinged conspiracy theorist Nazi replicators? I can’t think of a worse data set to use than YouTube… Maybe 4chan, but I don’t doubt that’s already been scraped.
Ffs do we want these things to be unhinged conspiracy theorist Nazi replicators?
Only if I can personally generate some kind of profit from it.
the eclipse marks the beginning of the end of the world
I mean, we gotta mark the Beginning of the End somewhere, right? Might as well be during an eclipse.
I can’t believe this isn’t the onion
Shit man, wait until you hear about Andrea Yates.
Folks on Talk Radio and the Televangelical circuit have been doing dime-store prophecies about the Eclipse being the end of the fucking world for fucking months. I was honestly a bit surprised shit like this wasn’t more common.
Maybe Americans are building up a tolerance to the endless media hysteria.
The ONLY way to Prevent this is if someone SHOOTS Her First!
Classic cause of Moon Madness.
