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average_bitcoiner 2y ago

You may not believe in God but humans are spiritual creatures.

We want peace with our surroundings and as time goes on we are able to explain more and more about our surroundings but the mysteries of the universe still need an explanation.

We are wired to worship. If you aren’t worshipping God or some other benevolent spiritual manifestation, you may come to worship material things or people.

The incentives of this material worship are warped and can be manipulated by evil.

Being incentivized to do good or else face eternal damnation can be a strong motivator for someone who may be morally gray.

Reputation matters. In meatspace and in the digital cypherpunk future being built now.

PV y’all.

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OpenSourceOptimist 2y ago

The argument that religious beliefs are good for society is IMO very week. I see very little correlation between safe, prosperous, high-trust societies and religious beliefs.

What I see is religion beeing used as an effective excuses to do what you would have otherwise already done, bee it good and bad.

The issues with that is of course that we often exempt religious beliefs from the scrutiny and demands we place on other beliefs. Both demands from within and for each others.

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threeseries 2y ago

Can you provide some examples of safe and prosperous secular societies? The main ones that come to mind are communist countries which haven't fared too well historically.

Also what do you mean by justifying what we would have already done? Do you mean if we didn't have a 2,000+ year Judeo-Christian tradition that we'd have the same morality? There are a lot of ideas that ethical monotheism introduced that were completely alien at the time so this seems unlikely.

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OpenSourceOptimist 2y ago

Good example could be to compare https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_country

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OpenSourceOptimist 2y ago

All top 5 in HDI are in 20 twenty of lowest importance of religion.