Anti-theist

This is a continuation of the discussion that AZPaul and I were having in the 2024 US Presidential Election topic. Message 173 was AZPaul3's last response to me. I'll point out that neither WWII nor the Vietnam War had religious justifications, and yet they were sustained quite effectively. You don't seem to be making any coherent statement about war and religion apart from the assertion that warmakers often attempt to justify wars on religious grounds. Once again, you're not telling us anything about religion. You're just telling us you've been defining it in the most puerile, reductive way conceivable and you demand that everyone else take your tendentious definition at face value.The idea that religion is all about believing in the literal existence of a literal being called God or the literal truth of fairy tales such as the Garden of Eden or Noah's Flood just keeps the God-is-God-ain't debates chewing up bandwidth. And if you've acquired a taste for that kind of low-hanging fruit, there must be plenty of Scripturebots and fundies online on whom you can vent your immature wrath.The fact is that religion is all about the personal and communal construction of meaning. It's a way of life, not just a suite of claims about the world that you affirm on a provisional basis. You're fixating on the literal truth value of these claims not because that's what religion is, but because that makes it easier for you to accuse literally billions of complete strangers of being delusional and amoral without any qualms about the propriety of doing so.You & I aren't religious because we didn't get anything out of religion and don't need religious language to make sense of our experience. It's not because we're right and religious people are wrong.

That clumsy attempt at slight-of-hand won't make Penn & Teller lose any sleep. You can't just silo off science from any consequences of its development and application. If a religious person said religion is all love & lollipops, we'd have every right to laugh. And denying the downside of scientific and technological progress is just as absurd.Science doesn't just "discover" things in some random way, it needs motivation and funding by sponsors whose aims usually have much more to do with profit and domination than the epistemic horizon. You can't separate what we know about atomic energy from the deliberate and costly process that created the knowledge, or the geopolitical context that motivated its creation.