baker

Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are not expansive religions; normally, they do not even try to make converts because it is not even theoretically poss...

This is a topic that cannot actually be discussed.

The Fall of the Roman Empire and the associated economic downturn seem to be part of a reasonable explanation. Once people have to struggle for surviv...

@"Fire Ologist" @"Tom Storm" See this: This is Bob Ross feeling superior to me. Twice he invents the charge of strawmanning against me, and he believe...

Strawmanned? Eh? Learn your doctrine. Once born, we are said to bear the stain of the Original Sin, and this is enough to send us straight to eternal ...

Of course. They've even killed eachother over who has the right understanding of God. It seems part of Christianity's success is precisely its vaguene...

So this behavior of Christians is not to be taken as exemplary of Christianity, and that behavior of Christians is not to be taken as exemplary of Chr...

Are you the antelope? How does one cope with being the antelope? This is a topic I am very interested in, I started several threads on it.

Eh? You seem to be laboring under the assumption that feeling superior to others is somehow wrong, or that I am criticizing religious/spiritual people...

Who wasn't? Who isn't? You are singling out the Christians in Rome as if everyone except the Christians had a great time and an easy life. Or what are...

It's not a projection, it's a fact. Not everyone thinks the way you do, it's not universal, it's not a given, it's not something that can or should be...

On all levels, humans actually wish that certain other humans would die or not exist. From children telling other children "Do me a favor and die!" to...

In other words, you have internalized your local cultural standard of what makes life worth living and from when on life isn't worth living anymore.

Some people (perhaps even most people) do hold those additional premises mentioned above. With those additional premises, it all makes for a coherent ...

How can a person be free from "external coercion" when they are living in a culture telling them that by failing to live up to the culture's standards...

Sure, they occasionally forget their doctrinal tenets or stray from them ... But the ideal has always been supremacy.

Just as it is "wise and effective" for lions to hunt antelopes.

It makes them feel superior to the outgroup and makes them feel justified to destroy the outgroup.

Good response by the magistrate. Yes, it's typical for religious/spiritual people to be eager to play the victim. It's a defining characteristic of re...

After he created us by default such that we only deserve to suffer for all eternity. He first fucks us up, and then offers us some conditional salvati...

What discussions of this topic so often so frustratingly lack is an acknowledgment that many people often have the desire that some other people would...

It does, if the additional premises are along the lines of "We have the right not to watch other people suffer" or "We have the right not to look at m...

All major religions are like that. If anything, the reason for the success of Christianity doesn't seem to have anything to do with Christianity per s...

They lack social acceptability. "We have the right not to be reminded of the ugly sides of life" is the usually unspoken stance underlying this topic....

Can you define Normal? Normal is not to ask what is "normal".

To be clear: You promote the adversarial approach to human interaction. How do you reconcile this with your idea of a person having "infinite worth"? ...

I'm lying down after having applied some ointment to the many corns and calluses on my feet. I've stopped counting how many I have. Corns and calluses...

Stick a broom bristle up your nose, at will. Sniff on some pepper, at will.

Ha ha. Getting a real taste of aging, illness, and death, such as in the form of looking after a demented, barely mobile, incontinent elderly relative...

No. This is simply the thought process of an ostracized or otherwise incompetent person. For starters, there is no "we", there is no universal human s...

But are you really helping them? Do they feel helped by you? Did you ask them? There is such a thing as pathological altruism:

If people would really care about the survival of mankind, they would change their ways.

Rightwingers don't exactly believe there is such a thing as "society" to begin with (some explicitly deny society even exists, some have a particulari...

That's right. When talking about career criminals, there isn't nearly enough talk about politicians. There is a whole category of people who literally...

Why are you worried about a "moral decline"? Because you in particular might not have very good chances of survival when other people morally decline?

It's, literally, what "You're wrong" means. Language allows us to clearly distinguish between calling a particular person's particular action "wrong" ...

Why did I get a notification for this?

I think this is a misleading and false dichotomy. What you call instrumental values aren't inherently bad. Why should wealth and power be bad? Like I ...

Not at all. I think they have a very instrumental, down-to-earth (sic!) understanding of the "transcendental". It's the secularists and the liberals w...

Shame is irrational? Perhaps once it is cut off from a traditional metaphysical framework. That's a strange thing to say, given that in much of Asia, ...

And this is your projection, that I'm stating 'what is wrong with religion'. You insist on reading that into my posts, and no matter how hard I try to...

Like a good boy scout. Aww. You remind me of my teachers from earlier phases of my education. They, too, would talk about the importance of questionin...

How so? If anything, I think you are exemplifying the problem that the OP is seeking to explain. You are the one who is modern, not I.

Who is "we"? If you're referring to "mankind" and assuming it's somehow unified and uniform, then you're clearly wrong. Secondly, there's no need to g...

Cynical is a word used by Pollyannas to denote an absence of the naiveté they so keenly exhibit. Miss Sloane

By the religious/spiritual people themselves. Look at the dates in the statistics in the link. This is recent. For starters, overcoming the good boy s...

These yogis and swamis, ascetics, for short, are not living in a vacuum. They live in a culture that believes that giving to ascetics is a deed that b...

No, I don't see it that way.

I resent I'm not as metaphysically street smart as they are.

Shame-based morality has a limited scope and use. It's only natural that people at some point wish to transcend it and base their morality in some oth...