Like the topic says, I find these people annoying and intolerable. Mental Illness and religion doesn’t mix, period.
I think they’re partially responsible for what’s wrong with our society. I’ve seen people like this around town with signs or scripture written all over their cars or with religious bump stickers. I’ve had these people have their cars serviced at my work place and they’re really nuts.
One woman who was crazy religious was going on and on how we get new bodies in heaven and hell. I just rolled my eyes and walked away and thinking “what world do you live in?”
Mercifully we don’t get many of those here outside the Bible Belt but I’m sure we’re going to see more of it soon as civil society continues to devolve. One sees it leaking out a little bit on the fringes of small towns, when you pass some idiotic sentiment on someone’s yard sign. One sees it in the ongoing enshittification of products and services.
In fact I have felt since the Nov '24 election, subjectively trapped in the asylum with the inmates and it is starting to leak into things like my homeowner’s association, social orgs I belong to, etc.
Wishing they would disappear is not helping though. One thing that helps a little is to understand that those kinds of ideologies aren’t sustainable and cannot long endure. It is just a question of what will be left, if anything, to rise from the ashes.
Loving that sign, the way it almost implies the whole quote about aliens and UFO’s is in Thessalonians. Funny as fuck fair play, those biblical types were ahead of their time see…
If religion never existed, the world would be 10 times worse. Ideologies will always remain whether or not you wrap them up in a nice religious package.
That requires just a bit more substance to it if you want it to fly. Religion has existed for a very long time in many different incantations. Paleolithic burial sites float the hint of an afterlife around 100,000 years ago. More distinct artifacts put a formalization around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.
How did any of this ethereal speculation improve the world?
This is the first thing you’ve posted here that I can agree with. Likely for different reasons…
Back to the OP’s image. I noticed it comes from a Floridiot. Why is surprise not my first reaction?
lol the world is already 10 times worse because of religion. Anytime you hear about an Islamic group, the Israeli army, or people killing their families in the name of Christianity…. then that’s some evidence that religion is the problem.
I don’t really disagree but I do think it is possible to coexist with some forms of religion in ways that aren’t a negative for society, and that this is the way forward in practical terms. I see fundamentalist / authoritarian / literalist religious forms as the main source of problems, and liberal forms that not only tolerate but often celebrate civil secular society and keep belief as a private matter as what amounts to a “wash” in terms of benefits vs harms. They are already full members of secular society with some extra cruft bolted onto it. Since I see the organic death of religion in the mainstream as a multi-century project, unbelievers are going to have to be more selective in targeting religion and religious harms.
So I believe we should for example object to Christian nationalists in the US in no uncertain terms and hound them with their own hypocrisy such that they find no rest. But I am not going to waste my time on, say, an Episcopalian who welcomes diversity into their congregation and really just promotes some ritualistic forms (the eucharist) as a unifying device. They still teach religious faith in theory, but in practice they defer to civil society and to science; I could in theory join such a congregation and quite likely they would never directly ask me what I really believe (or not) about Jesus in an attempt to gate-keep. They aren’t the force for good they fancy themselves to be, but not really a net millstone around society’s neck either.
I suppose that I come to this via having been a fundamentalist. In that time of my life I did not see the point of liberal Christianity, or any real difference between it and secular society. And in a sense, I was correct: in terms of practice there’s no real daylight between a liberal Christian (or in fact a liberal Muslim, or a liberal Jew) and someone indifferent to or disbelieving in the Abrahamic god. In terms of framing there’s a difference – I think they embrace the right things sometimes for the wrong reasons – but they aren’t significantly contributing to the basic problem, which is the top-down imposition of the will of their imaginary Friend (who is actually an imaginary Fiend) on the general populace.
