If I was trying to convince anyone of anything I wouldn't be deliberately offensive. I'm not proselytizing or trying to "deconvert" people who have no interest in it in the first place. I'm venting and ranting, the same way I do on ... just about any subject on these forums. I guess the stream of curse words and insults weren't enough of a hint, I should step it up.
You know, merely speaking of organized religion in a critical manner isn't a theological position in itself. Most of my criticism is reserved directly for real world political and cultural effects of religious dogma, not the dogma itself. Although I have routinely mocked that as well, usually for provocation. Organized religions in themselves aren't inherently despicable, (although I challenge you to find any of the big 3 abrahamics that don't encourage objectively fucked up moral and social norms from a modern western perspective in their holy books) but the effects it has on collectives often are. I'm sorry if pointing this out offends people, but I feel confident with thousands of years of recorded history backing my conclusions, as if present day reality wasn't enough. I don't feel the need of anyone's approval to "believe" that organized religions have been throughout history a source of tribal centralization, a more sophisticated way of deciding who was part of the "tribe" and who was "other" than just blood relation and marriage, a political system, used and abused by the powerful to their own, very material ends. And over time religions become inextricably linked to other tribal markers (for those don't already start that way), ethnicity, local customs predating the religion if it was non-native, language, different political systems, different economic systems dictated by geography, etc. They schism and fragment as the one unique interpretation becomes many, as seen from different eyes that have lived different things under different circumstances. I don't take the revealed "truths" of organised religions seriously because there have been hundreds of millions of people throughout tens of thousands of years that have all lived and died and often killed each other all believing in a baffling variety of different ones, all just as utterly convinced it was the only. I don't make any particular judgements on the nature and existence of God, I don't have enough evidence. I have enough evidence to believe organised religions are largely political and tribal systems "true".
