He said religion is moral outsourcing. Ooooof!
https://video.nostr.build/8f331488ce67c6f403464f55c7ca66fe208cba5f3ee4434f7e548d08341c7797.mp4
Discussion
Yes, religion is moral outsourcing, but it’s not just outsourcing. It’s giving up responsibility for your own soul.
Instead of thinking for themselves, people hand their conscience to a higher power and say, "Tell me what’s good. Tell me what’s evil. Just don’t make me decide."
They don’t become moral... they become obedient.
And the worst part? They call this obedience virtue.
🎯 🎯 🎯 🎯
I think it's a mistake to dismiss religion. Many of its stories made sense in their time—and some still do. Religion condenses thousands of years of accumulated wisdom into narratives and traditions that were the most effective way to guide people. When it warns of "hell," I believe it's not just about the afterlife—it’s about the suffering we create for ourselves now when we ignore these principles. Human nature hasn’t changed much in 5,000 years, and we still need boundaries and meaning. Even in the age of memes, I believe we need religion more than ever.
Yes, most people are not strong enough to create their own values. They lack the inner strength, independence, and creative spirit needed to face the abyss of existence without inherited beliefs. For them, religion (and later, ideologies) provides ready-made meaning, rules, and morality. Most are incapable of bearing the burden of freedom. They need the illusion of moral certainty handed down from authority.
House cats are not domesticated. No record of it in their genes like with dogs.
They act differently than wild cats because they are stuck in adolescent dependency.
If you kick one out they mature and survive just fine unless they were declawed.
They are capable but simply not doing it.
That is what I think of the religious and statists.
I doubt that these people you talk about. Really exist. I am not particularly religious, because I have spent most my life hating it..for some weird reason. Then I listened alot to Jordan Peterson,. Robert breed love and John Vallis. Combined with bitcoin. These people made me look at religion in another light. I was thinking about how you would make sure that kids 200 years from now, would know why you should not change the number from 21 million to anything higher. You would probably have to create some form of religion around it. But thats just a thought :) I do however think that religion is a net positive. And humans like yourself, benefit immensely from religion. And many of the values you think you created yourself,.is actually from religion itself.
Correct. Only free spirits exist... for now.
They are the questioners, the doubters, the ones who step outside the herd.
But the Übermensch, the one who creates new values rather than merely rejecting old ones... he has not yet arrived.
Yes, many of our values passed through religion... but that doesn’t mean they belong to it. I don't deny the past, I just refuse to be owned by it.
You're right if you want people to defend Bitcoin’s 21M cap for centuries, you need more than math... you need myth.
The problem is if future Bitcoiners defend the cap not because they understand it, but because it’s sacred, we haven’t evolved... we’ve replaced one priesthood with another.
I think that they should change the cap. That will create a hardfork and then economic reality will set in. People will learn the hard lesson and go back to the original bitcoin. You don’t need a religion to teach this. In fact, a religion would make it more likely people will want to change the cap.
I think people often substitute "religion" with "religions institutions" in these type of debates.
Religion can be a way to outsource (or shortcut) moral thinking, but it doesn't have to be. If practiced effectively, religion can be a guide, a compass to orient someone to general moral directions. It does not have to be the destination.
Secular Humanism is itself a form of religion - a belief system. So is any and all forms of State-worship...even "democracy".
With this in mind, his entire argument becomes circular with "sociologists" and politicians at its center instead of the priest class.
If he really wanted to put logic at the center of his belief system, he should be better at it.
Religion tells you what is moral. It clearly specifies what is sinful. This doesn’t allow the individual to choose his own morals.
How is secular humanism a religion?
This is just like the rules of Bitcion...you choose to conform to the morality by choosing what version you choose to follow. You can create your own, if you wish, but you'd be out of consensus with the rest of the network.
"Religion" made an attempt to define morality, and define its boundaries...that's true. But...
The concept of morality is largely a social construct and based in human terms.
It's a set of guide posts that help us in dealing with other people in a civilized way. In this way, we don't get to define our own morality-per say- we need to difine a common morality that does best to harmonize individual incentives across society. We choose to participate to social "norms", or not...if we don't, we risk being shunned. If we do, we are "accepted".
Great thinkers before us used the concept in an attempt to put us on a higher plain than the animal kingdom. If we viewed nature in terms of human morality, we would come up with a very different way of thinking about individual actions. "Eating your young" for example, is done often in the animal kingdom, but is not allowed in human society.
Religion is just a way of putting a supernatural wrapper around this idea for "normies" of the time to reinforce the ideas without needing to teach grammar, logic and rhetoric to explain it. That's where the short cut is. (A protocol is another way to do it 😉) It's not outsoursing, its just branded as "sin" for anyone that doesn't have the time to study the rationale.
Having said all of that, every religion and every sect of each religion has a different tolerance level for free thought. We each must choose wisely. Not all religions are created equal.