gemini://qwel.smol.pub/religions-1

Other note : I'm trying my best not to be the "sky-daddy" kind of guy here, but sometimes it's hard.

I have so much going in my head right now. I'll try to write while it's fresh.

I'm not even sure what I just read. What's the point of what I just read.

I think it's a list of conclusion they reached about religions. Bargains between themselves and the texts.

Proud conformism. That's the first thing that struck me. Conformism is usually a silent, status-quo thingy. Here - no, outright plain "a Christian is (and should be) a servant to authority". He even found Jesus quote¹ for that. It was clear that it was to both "authority" AND religious authority. I guess "authority" without a definition just resolves to "whoever gives you orders". Like, that's wild.

Humility. He preached strongly for humility at first. Even doing some ostensible self-depreciation. Apparently God is so great he cleanses epistemological humility in a 3-sentences radius. To me, a big part of humility is accepting that I'm wrong (in a way that I shouldn't have been). Maybe it's because it's the part that hurts me the most, but it's the first thing I look at when evaluating humility. How do you just expect what you think to be true? How do you live like that?

I'm used to Faith as an axiomatic good. Not to Devotion as an axiomatic good. I don't have a negative view of self-sacrifice. But the point of the sacrifice is meant to be, well, the point of the sacrifice, not the sacrifice itself. I can understand devotion to feed, to heal, or to children to be good. Devotion to harm to be bad. Here devotion to the divine is fundamentally good, without a given objective, whatever effect it may have. I think it's tied to the "servant" part, some sort of moral obscurantism.

They talked about the meaning of life at some point, but I don't remembered what was written.

Also they attributed primitive resource-sharing to "impressively strong faith". That's the kind of things that always annoy me. It's first-person bias² in all it's majesty, but I still resent against it.

A belief that humans are fundamentally bad. This isn't just first person bias, there's a lot going on around this. I don't see how this can lead to anything good. Here it leads to "we need to be saved from ourselves, others need to be saved", which in turn leads to a whole bunch of irrational behavior. I mean, irrational stuff isn't necessarily bad, sometimes good things are made, but it generally lowers chances to achieve what the individual attempts.

Religions are generating motivation out of thin air. Sometimes also aiming it at thin air. Sometimes aiming it at real things, good and bad. It's a force of nature I need to understand better.

... I need to keep a list labeled "everything" to keep track of things that interest me. Just, at every minute, add everything I wonder about. Wonder how that would go.

1. Would love to see P-value based theology arguing. Like "these words were not associated more than they could be associated at random".

2. Here used as in "you assume people behave like you know people to behave, and your knowledge of how people behave comes from looking at yourself". Here, this partially explains the variety of perceptions about altruism. Some people go "it's incredible that people share resources" while others just "Yeah? That's how humans work?", as they expect others to have the same altruism that they have.