You know, #Christianity gets a lot of flak these days, and often for good reasons.

But one aspect of Christian religious belief that I have only come to appreciate after reading lots of German folk tales is:

"The souls of the dead should bugger off to the afterlife, and not bother the living!"

I mean, contemplate how many problems young people have with trying to please _living_ ancestors. Then consider what you'd have to do to please the ghosts of ancestors of even earlier generations, whose personal views and convictions were even more divorced from ours. Most Germans alive today likely have at least one Nazi among their ancestors, for instance.

Christian folk tales make clear that if any ghosts linger around to haunt their living relatives, then that's a THEM problem, and the living relatives are fully justified in doing whatever they want to get rid of those haunts.

@juergen_hubert

Ummm...souls and ghosts aren't real. Dead is dead. I'm not sure we should be praising xtians for pushing a different delusion than, apparently, the one most Germans already believe. It's preferring lies and delusions to hard reality that's exactly what allows scapegoating and eventually fascism to take over.

@Uair

Religion is an ethical framework like any other that gives us guidance on how to live our lives, and I do not see any _inherently_ long with that. Sure, many parts of them might be unproven, but show me an ethnical framework that _doesn't_ have unproven elements.

What ultimately matters to me is not what the precise beliefs are, but how it influences the lives of both the people who hold them and how they treat others around them. Christianity has a mixed record here - but again, that's hardly exclusive to Christianity when compared to other belief systems.

@juergen_hubert

Naaah, belief itself is the problem. I understand that everybody has the right to choose to believe something they know isn't true, but it's causing the downfall of the species. And the extinction of pretty much all life on planet Earth.

Anti-vaxxers, global warming deniers, flat Earthers--that's all religious thinking. That's coming from a place where you think your emotions are able to determine what's true and what isn't, rather than your mind. Faith itself is the root of all evil. Facts aren't determined by feelings but by logic and reason, which take place in the human part of your brain, not the pack-mammal part.

You might like this. I wrote up a fairly amusing defenestration of the way things work. There's a lot of wisdom here if you're able to see it.

Here lies one whose name was writ in electrons

I'm a black market teacher. Here are my 95 theses.

(poloniousmonk.substack.com)

@Uair

All of us believe in things we cannot prove, for existence is too vast to understand everything. Our human minds are limited, and we _have_ to take a lot of things on faith.

This is not the problem - the problem is how we act on this.

@juergen_hubert

Whatever. You don't have to "believe things we cannot prove". That is a categorically false statement, probably used as a defense mechanism because you know your mind is broken and are unwilling to fix it.

I love how religious people make these incredibly bold statements without any kind of logical or epistemological backup and expect everyone else to simply go along with it.

@Uair

Who says I am religious?

@juergen_hubert

I do. You are promoting a religious mindset.

I'll bet you ten to one you were raised religious, and now you think you aren't, but you're only capable of motivated reasoning because of the abuse you suffered as a child.

It's ok. I run into that all the time. Hell, the president of the atheist association in my area is just a fundamentalist Catholic with a different dogma.

Your thinking is too flawed to even realize your thinking is flawed.