Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
is this the part where twenty somethings on the internet gather to exclaim loudly “I hate hypocrites too”?
then you should love jesus, because he hated religious hypocrites just as much as you do. In fact, it was those hypocrites who killed him.
If jesus returned today, he would be killed at a MAGA rally, probably.
i’m a christian in SPITE of the church, not because of it.
this isn’t about you
I’m not Christian but there are some good bits in the Christian Bible I’d be happy if more people followed. “pray in the closet” , the good Samaritan, and the sheep and the goats mostly.
Unfortunately a lot of people use religion as an excuse to be a huge asshole.
Your not gonna get a lot of love, but I hear you. Jesus is the enemy of modern Christianity.
Im not religous but am spiritual, I prefer to come to my own conclusions about certain things.
Religion ruins everything.
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Some religions. Depending on how you use the word. Legally Buddhism is a federally recognized religion for example.
And it has so little in common with how Christian’s use the word I consider it a misnomer. But I’ll keep enjoying the federal protections.
And sihks! Those guys are just the absolute nicest people I’ve ever met, kinda wish I knew more about it
I have to agree with you there.
And yet 70% of Sikh women who were surveyed by Sikh Women’s Aid reported they’d suffered domestic and sexual abuse in the home.
The story of the girl slapped in the face by her mother for getting raped by her uncle is especially harrowing ‘who will marry you now?’ it’s vile.
All Eastern religions have their own problems and crimes committed in the name of their beliefs. Christianity might have some of the more global harms, but it’s hardly alone in being harmful.
People of every religion have done horrific things, even Sikhs. I’d know since I’m originally from India.
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I wish you ppl would stop with your fetishization for any religion outside of the Abrahamic ones. Sikhs are just like any group of ppl and have committed fucked shit in the name of their ideology. Imperial (let’s invade and massacre Asia) Japan was Buddhist who used it as justification for nationalism, violence, and persecution. Which sounds pretty damn similar to what Jews, Muslims, and Christians do/did. And let’s not forget Hindu nationalism and their problematic caste system
And no this isn’t a bashing of religion as a whole because I personally find the argument that religion is the root of all evil as childish. I have no issues with anyone believing anything they want. It only becomes a problem when you feel the need to impose your belief on others. EVERY group including religion, race, class, ethnicity, sex, political party, etc is guilty of that
The non-Abrahamic religions stick with thr peace and love parts in the US because they are not the dominant religion. Any religion ends up being cooped into being used to justify violence when it is on top even when the core tenets are supposed to be peaceful and accepting.
This also tends to be true of most human organizational structures, but religion adds a layer that make it easier for members to accept extreme behavior by the people in their group.
There were Roman Christians who made passionate arguments for freedom of religion, before they took over. Not so much after.
Buddhism was probably 10% the justification for nationalism that Shinto was in Japan, so that’s a pretty bad example.
Also, using Buddhism to encourage nationalism ≠ Buddhisms fault
Every arguments you made can be used for Christianity
I would make the same argument, and say that radicalized religion is the issue, not religion itself.
Most every religion becomes radicalized over time, but that doesnt define the inital religious teachings.
So yeah, Christian nationalism ≠ Christianity’s fault.
Buddhism has a talent for conversion by syncretism. Tibetian Buddhism is Buddhism meeting Tibetian Shamanism, Chan/Zen is Buddhism meeting Taoism (which already was very close), both Therevada and Mayayana are rather more Hindu, and what we’re seeing in the west is Humanist/Christian, depending on the practitioner. A good dividing line might be belief in reincarnation: Legit Atheists don’t care, hell-conditioned folks find relief, whereas originally the whole thing was Hindu and Buddhism calls it dhukka (suffering, also mind that it’s tied into the caste system) and promises a way to break out of it. So what was a jail in one context serves as a comfy blanket in another.
In that sense it’s very much a mistake to see Buddhism as a uniform whole, or western adoption as appropriation or fetish, or really infer terribly much about one strain of Buddhism from the other.
Then, second note: All those eastern things should be compared, if you want to compare them properly, not to western religion or churches but to that and the whole philosophical heritage dating back to at least Socrates. And gods know in that context we don’t need religion to fuck up, we’re still recovering from Descartes and like to ignore inconvenient truths such that Newton was an Alchemist. Christians like to ignore that all the stuff that is actually valuable about Christianity, is more than memes furnished to propagate the system (and doing damage while doing so), is lifted from the Stoics. Racism once was “scientific”. I could go on and on.
People will fetishize anything and use anything to justify violence.
Buddhist practitioners can be as dogmatic as Christians, but having been brought up as one and studied the other extensively, Buddhism is not a religion in the Western sense of the word.
In fact there’s many teachings on avoiding dogmatic views in both ancient and modern Buddhism. Because dogmatism brings about the exact suffering we’re talking about.
Yes, Buddhists are as failable as anyone else. But the heart of the dharma begins with right view, which essentially means, don’t be dogmatic!
Which is the exact opposite of how I was brought up in a Christian family.
Buddhism is not a religion in the Western sense of the word.
Every religion claims that. Christians will tell you it is a lifestyle and a relationship. Jews will tell you it is a religion and culture. Buddhists will claim to be a philosophy and a mindset. No one wants to admit that they are just another way of doing X.
Of the three you listed only one doesn’t follow commandments given by an invisible supernatural entity.
And this exact false equivalence is why Buddhism isn’t a religion the way the West uses the word.
Cool we are just going to ignore all the Buddhists gods, like the seven headed snake (commonly depicted as the Buddha of Wednesday afternoon) and Maru. As well as the gods they borrowed along the way like Genash and about a million dead monks. We are also going to ignore all the passages in the Pali where the Siddathrata talks about his past incarnations and how he decided to decided to come to earth one more time to save humanity.
Hey remind me again, in the heart sutra what is the reason Siddathrata gives for the importance of giving gold to monks? I forget. Maybe I forget because he refers to it as a secret mystery.
Go ahead and continue. I want you to tell me more about what half remembered YouTube video from a fourlong secular Buddhist you saw once. I am just going to sit here and sort thru the hundreds of photos I have of me in South East Asia.
I’m only replying to your top paragraph because I sense a lot of hostility in your post and don’t have the patience at the moment to wade through it carefully.
Buddhism doesn’t extinguish other beliefs when it interacts with them. Nagas (the seven headed snake, who is not a God but more like a spirit, is a naga) already existed in southeast Asia prior to Buddhism. Likewise Genesh is a Hindu diety that already existed in India.
Some Zen Buddhist traditions even go so far as to draw parallels with Christian beliefs in the Kingdom of God and the ultimate dimension (a Buddhist concept for how everything is connected and interdependent).
Finally, I didn’t argue that Buddhism doesn’t incorporate the idea of spiritual beings (Gods, Demons, they can all be found in most Buddhist traditions). But they’re not beings to worship or revere simply on account of their spiritual status. Or to listen too without question like in authoritarian belief systems. So, it’s likely your post is a straw man but also possible you misunderstood my position and I didn’t communicate clearly enough. Either way, what you’re arguing against wasn’t my position. (See italics right above and below if you need clarification).
The Buddha said don’t take my word. See for yourself. And Buddhism is being incorporated under other names in all sorts of modern psychology practices. Because the shit works and is based on science (investigation of mental phenomenon with an open and unbiased mind) not dogma.
I hope someday you understand the difference. But I can tell by your tone that nothing I can say today will change your mind.
So this post isn’t for you. But the silent witnesses on the fence.
Take care.
Moralists with authoritarian leanings are the problem.
Plenty of those around nowadays who, instead of a religions, latch on to some well meaning cause and then proceed to try and shove other people around under the cover of said cause, bringing along the more tribalist (hence unthinking and easilly manipulated with the right words) members of the cause, all the way to pretty much pogroms and purges (though, fortunatelly, not normally involving killing people).
Whilst the vehicle (religion, some ideologies, politics, any “cause” supposedly beyond questioning including nationalism), being something that most people follow in a mindless way is ideal for such subvertion and abuse as an easy source of supporting usefull idiots for people indulging their lust for power over others) the reall problem is, IMHO, a certain type of individual who will seek social situations they can abuse to be powerful (all the way down to the school social bully who uses connection rather than physicallity to have power over others), so it’s really such people we should be weary of and alert for rather than their chosen vehicles.
Yeah absolutely, and the problem is they’ll always find an excuse - someone on here recently argued to me that since we punch Nazis we should also punch people who use words like ‘unalive’ because it’s an attack on our culture - he was being entirely serious too.
You can see people rubbing their hands in glee at every climate change story too and it’s scary, I’ve been involved with a lot of green groups and eco-positive movements which are full of wonderful people who really care about making a better world - then there are overly online lunatics who never lifted a finger to help native species or anything like that but have decided it’s a wonderful excuse to live out their most destructive and hateful fantasies.
Religion is a way of harnessing that awful impulse in people and using it for the benefit of a small theocratic aristocracy, it’s a way of saying ‘you can get away with being the awfull person you want to be if you do it in the name of our gang and to our enemies’
I used to think Buddhism was an exception, sadly it is not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_violence
As found in other religious traditions, Buddhism has an extensive history of violence dating back to its inception.
Buddhist sects as a whole are not exception, but I couldn’t find an example of violence at “its inception”. All the examples I could find are from much later.
Shame about the genocide, huh?
That was perpetrated by Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar, whos actions are so fargone from traditional Buddhist teachings they can safely be considered not Buddhists IMO.
Ah like the Christian nationalists are so far gone they don’t represent Christianity right? Such a dismissive take against the reality of religions and their point to be a source of control over a population and society.
Yup
Not really, it’s just that people can’t stand by this
Besides architecture. Cathedrals are dope. But everything else, yeah.
I don’t hate some older religious music.
Gregorian chants are epic
That first Enigma record is a regular in my listening because of exactly that.
Religion was at the center of everything 500 years ago. It’s gonna take credit for a lot of stuff because you could barely do anything art related without religious involvement.
Don’t forget about the part where the only way you could be somewhat literate was if you were indoctrinated into their little cult.
And every now and then they’d go on a rampage destroying other people’s and eras’ art.
Still happening, even… such as the Taliban destroying ancient statues.
Not all musicians believe in god but all believe in Bach.
But maybe stay out of rock?
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I do like the sense of harmony that comes from singing together, but yes you don’t need a church for that.
If only they could live in that harmony
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The Shining’s opening theme was based on a medieval Christian hymn, day of wrath or Dies Irae. I love deep vocals and latin lyrics, it’s so soothing.
I agree…except the Sagrada Familia which fills me with irrational anger. Looks like Poseidon walked on shore and squeezed out a sand turd. It’s so goddamn hideous to me. If I was the god who Gaudi built it for, he would not make it into heaven. I hate it so much.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called Religion Poisons Everything. Same idea, long form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Hitchens
it’s an organized anti-religion
I hope that as more of the world gets access to the Internet and information that more and more people will leave religions. When I was able to freely read the history of different religions and critical analysis by atheists it made my mind up fairly quickly.
Religion is a mass delusion.
Not a fan.
Name checks out.
Luckily there are no Christian babies to abort
Technically correct is the best kind of correct!
You are the only person (so far) that’s understood this distinction in my name.
It’s intended to be inflammatory but also to make the point you did.
Isn’t there at least one sect out there that believes in “Christian while a fetus”? There are so many denominations it’s hard to tell. I just had a quick look at the wiki page on original sin and at least the LDS people believe there’s no need for children under 8 to be baptized, though I’m not sure if that means the kids are LDS while younger than that (or fetal). There was a bit about some Quakers rejecting original sin as well, but again I’m not too sure of the implications.
I am a Christian and am willing to throw myself into the ring.
I think we deserve all the hate we are receiving and more. I am a firm believer of the separation of church and state, because I actually have studied the history of that phrase, and I know Christians wrote it in blood.
Very little of that matters though, because the balance of power has been shifted too much into our area.
We were supposed to minister to people, wash people’s feet, love their neighbor.
Christian’s were supposed to be servants of our communities, and instead we became the rulers. Instead of showing compassion and understanding, we are tyrants with no passion, logic, or understanding for our fellow people.
Just the love of Money. “In God we Trust”
There will be a power shift back, and I don’t think Christian’s are ready for the blow-back. But I will say, we will deserve it, for we have become vile tyrants.
Fellow Christian here, well said! I am so sickened by Christmas who want to use the government to force their beliefs on everyone else.
I personally hope Christians use the blowback as a way to reconnect to the core principles of their faith and reflect on the precepts of radical kindness at the core of Jesus’s teachings. I feel very fortunate that my family drifted wide from religion back in my Grandparents day. I grew up an outcast in my wider community but there was never any question we were loved.
A lot of people who joined our open family did so with a lot of baggage. Families that figured them as failures for not living up to expectations or who had some kind of isolating pain their religion told them they basically deserved. It made me feel rich in a way so many were poor just being cherished by my family for being unreservedly me. It becomes an armour that makes me very resilient.
Being queer I see a lot of the people I know deal with this broken part of them, this rejection that who they are is not loved by the people for whom our society posits their natural attachments should entitle them love… and am able to be there for them. A lot of those who flee from religion do so as true refugees. They have to build from nothing. The reason queer communities are tight knit is because they realize that people can’t exist without some kind of family and if you don’t have one you make one from scratch.
A lot of the people in this position don’t nessisarily hate the religion but they intimately know what it has taken from them. When your neighbours love you more than your family your neighbours become your family.
Being queer I see a lot of the people I know deal with this broken part of them
A lot of those who flee from religion do so as true refugees
This is what I fear most. But it happens every day. Most Christian’s paths don’t start until they leave the church and most never do.
The reason queer communities are tight knit is because they realize that people can’t exist without some kind of family and if you don’t have one you make one from scratch.
I am glad to read this. Communities are a big part of growth. I think the modern Christianity lost that bit somewhere along the way.
I personally hope Christians use the blowback as a way to reconnect to the core principles of their faith and reflect on the precepts of radical kindness at the core of Jesus’s teachings.
They will, the problem is it will take time. I just wish we didn’t have to hurt everyone seeking that growth.
In many ways queer culture is sort of a radically inclusive space informed by decades of response and radical fighting against the forces of trauma. Drag Queen’s have lineages of Mothers and Daughters, Drag Kings tend to form packs to perform. Queer events hold barbeques and brunches, create taverns and diners where queer culture is passed between generations as a way to keep old lessons alive and give people safe places to go to ask whatever they need. It is a community of outcasts who decided that the world needed less outcasts.
Here in Vancouver the last time I went to a drag event the Queens were advising everyone to keep more cash on them because homeless people often could not access free places to cool down to keep them safe in extreme heat events. Radical inclusion and the willingness to see flawed people as humans is one of the queer community’s strengths. It’s often paired with a lot of black humour and silliness but the core of the thing sometimes make me think that but for the lack of emphasis on spiritual belief there’s a lot of underlying philosophy that Jesus probably wouldn’t be too upset about.
I mean, you threw yourself in here, so I feel this is fair game…
Listen, while I certainly respect some of the concessions you are making here in acknowledging the issues with the broader issues of modern Christianity, at a very fundamental level the core beliefs are problematic for a modern society.
My guess is that you believe a dead body came back to life and floated up into the sky.
In part, I make this assumption because Paul effectively mandated this as a litmus test in 1 Cor 15 in response to Christians at the time who rejected that belief.
So you believe that things outside the scope of what is naturally possible has occurred.
This is then tied to a belief of inherent unworthiness such that without this event having occurred, you are somehow deserving of suffering and it is only through this event that you could have avoided such a fate.
You were most likely fed these beliefs as a child - beliefs people in the first generation after Jesus weren’t even all that keen on - and you will likely continue to pass them along generationally.
The entire time effectively ignoring that the version of Christianity which survived was simply the one that had successfully adapted beliefs in line with supporting authoritarianism of the Roman monarchy, of slavery, and of financing the organization out of the pockets of its members, etc - ideas that I’m skeptical you’d end up endorsing if they were positioned to you on their own, and are each beliefs that can be individually challenged on their connection to a historical Jesus in the first place.
So the social exchange of even a “good Christianity” minus the worst parts of today’s oversteps is still one in which children are raised to believe in magic, in their inherent unworthiness without the religion, of continuing on outdated and obsolete social norms and practices, and on preserving ideas that benefit authoritarianism.
Much as I think you’d probably agree it wouldn’t be good for people growing up in a world of science and technology to be indoctrinated with beliefs about Muhammad having been able to split the moon in half or a belief that the universe is in fact the dream of a giant turtle, beliefs that you yourself subscribe to happen to run counter to everything from an evidenced based approach to understanding the world and our place in it.
Christian certainty in their beliefs led to suppression of ideas ranging from the notion matter was made up of indivisible parts (atomism) to the idea life that existed around us was not from intelligent design but simply based on what survived to reproduce and what did not - both ideas present and broadly discussed in Jesus’s day.
With all due respect for the freedom to have faith in something, at a certain point faith should not be put on a pedestal over evidence backed evaluations and it is necessary to let go of the past in order to embrace the future.
Moore [a former Evangelical leader] told NPR in an interview released Tuesday that multiple pastors had told him they would quote the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the part that says to “turn the other cheek,” when preaching. Someone would come up after the service and ask, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”
“What was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,’” Moore said. “When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”
Moore said he thinks a large part of the issue is how divisive U.S. politics are, which is now spilling over into the church. He pointed to how a lot of issues are “packaged in terms of existential threat,” leading to the belief among everyone, not just evangelical Christians, that “desperate times call for desperate measures.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/174950/christianity-today-editor-evangelicals-call-jesus-liberal-weak“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
― Mahatma GandhiBest response would be to say they might just not be Christian enough
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this is insane
Genuinely appreciate you sharing your thoughts.
Full disclosure. Even as a somewhat aggressive agnostic, I fully support religious freedoms and will stand up for peaceful religious rights.
I must draw a line when I or others become victims of religious ideologies though, as you suggested.
the reason i am nonreligious is because i realized it is human made concept, it has nothing to do with my likes or dislikes of the organizations
For me it’s because everyone made a big deal of having a “personal relationship” with God, but nobody was on the other end
This is why strive to keep my relationship with God purely sexual.
If I’m going to follow a made up belief system I’ll just make up my own that’s fun and inspiring
all religions are based on lies and fairy tales
Organized religion is a poison masquerading as a cure. The opium of the people as it were. I will never cause trouble for a religious person who doesn’t cause trouble for others, but organized religion I can not abide.
I always thought that the success of Religion boiled down to two things:
- It provides an explanation for what for many would otherwise be a terrifyingly chaotic random World. When faced with great tragedy (especially personal), “it was the will of Deity” is emotionally more easy than the terror and meaninglessness of it something like the death of somebody close having happenned purelly by random chance.
- It’s a social network and support group which brings all sorts of advantages, not just materially but even emotionally.
We are all born atheists. Religion is the oddity.
Not really.
Magical thinking and rationalizing randomness are very innate features of humanity (and most animals, I.e. Skinner’s box).
Overcoming this is both a noble and difficult pursuit, and it’s arguably more worthwhile to recognize this than to incorrectly assume that we’d fall into rationality by default.
We wouldn’t. We didn’t. And that’s exactly why religion exists in the first place and remains so successful.
We need to actively work hard to be better.
I agree with your sentiment. The takeaway for me is that we are influenced by our environment. Our experience is one of learning through experimenting with our reality, so it does come down to what we are presented with. I was raised around a temple that my parents were very active in, but it was reform, so I could ask lots of questions. I was told the narrative, but was allowed to interrogate it a bit and pretty much had the rabbi provide the evidence against religion by asking the right questions and getting fair responses. Others don’t get this opportunity and are instead force-fed religion and told not to question it. I still remember the moment that it clicked for me that it was all a charade. I basically asked the rabbi that, if all life is lived now per Judaism and we don’t have the concept of heaven or hell, then why do we need to do these practices and he basically said to make us feel happier. I was pretty much like ok, I’d rather go to space camp then.
Yeah, it’s like the Aristotle quote saying “give me a child until he’s seven and I’ll show you the man.” Not a lot of people have much chance to choose beliefs as opposed to have had them thrust on them.
As an aside, your rabbi’s answer was essentially the outlook of the Sadducees in antiquity. They believed that there was no afterlife and that God didn’t care what people did or didn’t do, and yet followed the religious laws because they saw the law itself as a gift from God.
But I’m inclined to agree, that space camp sounds much better, and perhaps if the Sadducees had space camp too they’d have taken a different stance on things.
We are all born as social animals predisposed to superstition. Religion is practically inevitable.
Ok so, here’s the funny thing, there might actually be a neural disorder to blame for the original polytheistic religions that morphed into modern religions.
There is the phenomenon that some people have an internal narration while others don’t, but there’s a hypothetical phenomenon within that phenomenon where someone has the internal narration, but doesn’t recognize the narrator as their own voice, but rather as an outside presence instructing them on what to do next.
First time I heard of this my mind immediately went to the evangelicals who swear up and down that they have a personal communicative relationship with God.
Ok, but followers of Judaism and Islam do not believe in a “personal relationship” with God. In those religions only prophets can get instructions directly from God.
I had the narrator when I was a kid and even asked other people if they could hear the person talking, which creeped out my siblings occasionally. Fortunately grew out of that by presumably realizing that was myself talking to me.
IIRC this is the idea behind avatar therapy for folks with vivid hallucinations
“Growing out of it” by slowly taking more and more control over how the hallucinations behave until they’re basically just a sensory extension of the internal monologue
I think the God of Spinoza view is a good one to convey to people that want to hold onto something. To say that the whole of existence is the nature of reality is redundant, but that is the answer. We exist because that’s the way things work, so the boundaries of the whole system don’t require a personal deity. The system in a sense is the deity and that waters it down to nothing supernatural. The one thing that I can still get behind is the possibility of simulation theory, which would totally fuck everything up. It is a theory though and not a steadfast belief.
Even religious groups hate organized religion. They just make an exception for the one they happen to be part of.
The one thing most religions agree on is that all other religions should be eradicated from the world until only the true one remains. Turns out they are ALL right!
How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one
- Richard Dawkins
Ricky Gervais said something super interesting to Stephen Colbert, who is a Catholic. It was something like “We actually agree on a lot more than you think. You think that thousands of other religions aren’t true. I think the same thing, plus one more.”
Early Christians were accused of being atheists by the Romans, since they didn’t believe in most gods.
Christians were atheist before it was cool
Sometimes I wonder what Abraham would think knowing literal billions of people worldwide worship the god he made up.
And what he thinks about how all the different sects all hate each other so much.
I know what he would think. “What the fuck??”
Nah, probably not something in Enlgish
I read a really interesting book called How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, and the author made some very interesting points.
It takes a seismic change in perspectives to change closely-held beliefs that are intertwined with our identities. I grew up as a devout Christian in an extremely conservative protestent young-earth-creationist denomination. I spent my Sundays and Wednesdays listening to the values preached from the pulpit: love, humility, repentance, understanding, protecting the vulnerable, meekness, charity, and unconditional love.
However, these same people when outside of church would spew tirades about “the gays”, how poor people are just lazy, and how prayer wasn’t allowed in school anymore. The love that was exalted above all other values on Sunday was just a platitude to give cover to hateful grievance.
And that was almost thirty years ago; they’ve only gotten worse. That’s why people are abandoning religion in droves. The values that they sell are not aligned with the actual values of their congregants. Like the old Jim Croce song, their philosophy is “Let him live in freedom - if he lives like me.”
Furthermore, losing one’s religion nowadays is not the social exile it once was. People have support structures outside of organized religion. It’s one of the reasons that Evangelical churches are so against a social safety net: it keeps the excommunicated from crawling back.
People have support structures outside of organized religion.
I agree with you overall, but do not agree with this point. There are very few non-commercial support structures in America for adults outside of organized religion, and even some of them (e.g. AA) are somewhat religious in nature.
I think they meant outside friends and family
I probably wouldn’t have lost my faith if I was t constantly called a commie socialist for espousing ‘christian’ values and wanting to help the less fortunate by the very people who instilled those very values into my moral code.
Anymore I’m just a non-denominational pagan because at least pagans aren’t such raging goddamned hypocrites.
Supply side jesus is always one of the funniest figures to exist.
I prefer to call myself a heretic whenever in the presence of someone who really cares, it’s fun seeing the reactions.
Check some social gospel, those folks are basically what happened when the socialists in America decided to start their own church with blackjack and hookers
Reject nonreligious communities, join the religious non-communities. Choose your flavour between anarcho-catholics, Sikhs of the woods, or feral Zoroastrians
The older I get the more angry the concept of God makes me. It’s hit the point where I hope I’m wrong, so when I die I can spit in his face and call Him a useless God
