The more I think about it, it seems that long-term happiness is something many people spend their lives seeking OR they believe it’s something they used to have and lost.
That makes me wonder if we are truly ever happy? Or if it’s something that is always just out of reach (in the future or in the past).
Christianity made me feel more pain in my life than I choose to remember. Please don’t just assume religion works for everybody.
Where did I say religion works for everyone? I gave it as one example of something that worked for me and clearly works for billions of others.
I’ve had awful experiences with the mental health system, but I think getting triggered by someone saying therapy worked for them makes sense. Sorry to hear you suffered.
Works in deluding them. Unless you have proof that their god and their afterlife are real, they’re being swindled. And you don’t seem to care.
If you live in the US, your whole health care system is an antechamber of hell. But in most cases, therapy is not based in millenary bullshit, so you are more likely to get results based on reality.
Most people believe in God, so you’re arguing most people are being swindled, implying they are not intelligent enough to come to their own conclusions on the existence of a higher power. That is a very pessimistic view of reality I think, especially when people such as Galileo, Darwin, and Newton were very religious themselves.
The popularity fallacy is not a good argument.
Non sequitur. Being swindled doesn’t denote lack of inteligence, but a lapse in critical thinking (or the lack of it) in the particular topic of the existence of gods. Everybody is vulnerable to lapses of critical thinking, specially for those believers who are part of communities where doubt is portrayed as dangerous and the tools for critical thinking are not only not provided but discouraged.
It would be if you didn’t misrepresent my position.
Galileo lived in a time where not being religious incurred risk to one’s life, so mentioning him is unfair.
Again, being religious and being intelligent are mostly orthogonal propositions. Critical thinking requires exercise, though, and when unused, it can atrophy. Or be totally non-existent if never taught.
If I were to quote intelligent celebrities as “proof” that religions are true (a doubtful procedure in any case, as it’s an authority fallacy), I could mention Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and current science advisor for president Joe Biden. He’s deeply religious. But he’s not using the scientific method to reinforce his belief. And he’s not less intelligent just because he’s probably mistaken about the reality of his god.