@rolandwatts3218

2 weeks ago

Hardly. It's much more complex than you make out.

I doubt if the followers of other religions would agree with you that Christianity is useful because it is true.

In fact, if you follow Jesus you don't necessarily get truth, nor goodness, nor beauty. It all depends on the believer, and what he/she believes about Jesus and how he/she acts that belief out.

For example, consider Europe between 1618 and 1648, during The Thirty Years War. That war was fought between Christian states and it decimated central Europe. And this was in days when the population of Europe was a fraction of its modern value. Seriously, was that good? What religion did was provide the glue to keep people united into their respective tribes.

Or look at how many religious people utterly distort the theory of evolution. Can those who do so and who follow Jesus, be called people who follow truth? Even if the theory is false, those people are mostly unable to articulate the theory correctly, and as such cannot be said to represent the truth.

As for subjective opinions about beauty. Consider the history on iconography in Christianity? At various times, believers have seen icons as evil or as sacred. How can that be if believers are followers of one, unchanging truth, and who appreciate and understand beauty?

Or consider that believers themselves are tribal and cannot agree on who is and who is not the true Christian. Or consider their oft contempt of outsiders, including those who no longer see things their way. And so on and so on.

There is a lot I could say about the bad, as well as the good.

I think you are overselling the product. There is a lot about religion that is ugly, and this includes Christianity. Religion is not an unmitigated blessing.

I think religions are ideas (often involving the supernatural) which people believe with varying degrees of earnestness. Those ideas evolve organically and they are such that people begin to organise around them because of the message they carry. For example in Christianity the message is believe us and get to heaven and obtain eternal bliss, or end up going to hell and suffering eternal conscious torment. The central idea is the existence of a god who guarantees one of these outcomes to everyone.

The gods in religions generally require people to behave in certain ways such as congregating to worship, meditating, behaving morally, and so on, all of which can be shown to be of benefit to individuals and to groups.

^^ That's a very rough outline.

There are some great books and videos produced by atheists, which explore religion in what I think are reasonably unbiased ways. For example:-

1. Britt Hartley's channel "No Nonsense Spirituality".

Hartley was interviewed by "Mindshift" a few days ago in a video titled "Britt Hartley: The Future of American Religion | Mindshift Podcast #5"

It was an excellent video which, from the comments, you will see that many atheists loved it and many did not.

Hartley also has another video titled "10 Profound Losses You Experience with the Death of God!" (I think she echoes Friedrich Nietzsche in a way.)

2. Authors like the philosopher Alain de Botton, and his book "Religion for Atheists".

^^ The beauty of those people is that they explore religion in general and they don't have the idea:-

"Either you believe me and get eternal bliss when you die, or you don't believe me and you suffer eternal conscious torment when you die".

^^^ A very ugly idea in the theology of some of the bigger religions.

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