this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Counterpoint is religion. 75% right now live in unreality. Minimum. Not a minority.
It's been like this since the beginning of written history. It doesn't seem we can break free so far.
Because it's the vast majority, my mere pointing it out will risk ire.
You bring up a good point, but I don't think religion necessarily involves the kind of unreality I have in mind.
A lot of religious claims deal with things that are unfalsifiable. Invisible forces, unreachable gods, consciousness after death, things like that. Not the most rational stuff in the world, but not obviously false on the face of it either.
Now, though, we've got folks believing things that are easily disproven. Climate change denial, anti-vaccine bullshit, the never-ending parade of moral panics churned out by the above mentioned propaganda machine, Jewish space lasers, pet eating immigrants, etc.
I won't go so far as to say that religion never causes people to deny observable reality; it surely does. But I think the right wing media empire we have now does so intentionally and on a scale greater than any religious movement I can think of.
I think it's the same thing. Same weakness or flaw in humans exploited in all your examples. With the same selfish goals driven by the same bad people as the "right winger" leadership as you call them throughout history.
I know it’s easy to see Zionists and Christian nationalist psychopaths, and fear the irrationality of so much of the world, but that’s not the full nature of religion - and many of us see much more than that.
I mean, many of us have faith beyond that. I gave $10 to a homeless guy today. I trusted beyond rationality he wasn’t going to spend it on a bottle of scotch. Even when it’s trust in other humans, that’s faith. Even when it doesn’t make sense, trust and faith in people’s empathy, or a higher purpose keeps some people going.
I’m definitely an atheist, but occasionally I’ve seen spots of really nice elements to religion - that have often become less visible in the recent cases of religious extremism.