Being religious doesn’t necessarily make you delusional.
It does. Even in small nuances. Religion irreversibly breaks the logic mechanism. If you can believe even in a 7-asses dragon who shat out our planets, you will almost inevitably believe in what populists and influencers say.
Right, it makes one susceptible to suggestion. There’s a reason pyramid schemes (e.g. Avon, Amway) spread like wildfire throughout churches. They seem feasible on the surface, you invite the person into your home because they go to your church, they show you the business plan, and you sign up. Only you do a lot of work and never really make any money. The only way to make any money is to get people below you. Hence, pyramid scheme.
When they go to try to sell their secular friends on it, they’re far less likely to bite.
It’s like the whole gay marriage thing. Yes, the Christian bible does say a man laying with another man is unclean. It says the same about mixing fabric types, eating shellfish (like shrimp), and other stuff. It’s no more a sin than wearing a polyester blend shirt. And I bet most pastors’ frocks are not 100% cotton. But it’s not that they care about one and not the other. Until about 30 years ago, they didn’t care about any of that, because being unclean didn’t make you a sinner, and John 3:16 was basically a get-out-of-sin-free card anyway. What happened was, an insurance company tried to deny a gay couple’s benefits due to them being gay, despite having gladly taken their money for decades. So they found it cheaper to go to a few churches and rile them up about the gays being a problem, than to fulfill their contractual obligations. It was never about being gay being wrong or sinful, it was about insurance companies wanting to steal from their customers/policy holders and church being okay with that, despite “thou shalt not steal” being one of the Ten Commandments. Thus proving quite definitively that for church leadership, it’s all about the money, not the morals. While some rank and file Christians are good people (or are trying to be), the leaders just see those people as useful rubes.
Are you posting a screenshot of your own post??? Lemmy supports text …
oh fr? damn
Not sure if this is a clever take on it. There’s little evidence to believe Jesus was delusional and thought he was the son of God. That narrative is a story from other people who didn’t write it until 2 generations later. And I don’t think Muslims believe in Mohammed the same way they believe in God. I mean the entire trinity thing and how the messiah is simultaneously a part of God… doesn’t need a human father… is an utterly Christian thing, not theirs. We have some ideas about the historicity of both Muhammad and Jesus, though. So yeah, they’ve probably been cringy but not the final boss of Reddit atheists. I think religion has quite some effect on people. And not everyone is a moderate Christian or whatever. Also has quite some effect on STDs and the lives of women, LGBTQ+ people… I mean I know quite some progressive and open people who are religious in some form. But that’s not necessarily normal in the same way it is with secular people.
The better take is the Geth mission in Mass Effect 2, where a small change results in a big chunk of robots worshiping actual god machines who plan on wiping out all life and the robots worshiping them.
