Atheism

Mind Poison

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Mind Poison by ChatGPT4
All images in this post created using ChatGPT4

The bad news: brainwashing, gaslighting, and the technological terror of the modern PR machine has been serving evil human projects. 

The good news: The young of every caste, color, and creed hold the cure. 

I am still recovering from my poisoned mind after 25 years of SDA/Christian brainwashing. It’s especially difficult since I was employed by them as a brainwasher. But a decade into recovering from the crippled mindset, I am starting to compare the old poison with others I find around me. Religious cult-related mental poisons are surprisingly similar to other kinds I find in the wider world. 

An obvious one in my country is the cult of Trump. Perhaps less obvious is what I find in the geopolitical world. Propaganda from Russia (pre- and post-USSR) and the Zionist Israel project have relied heavily on such a similar kind of poisoned thinking. When an institution or global ideology can successfully recruit millions of minds into this cult-like culture of gaslighting, then apply that poison to dehumanizing and “othering” vulnerable victims, branding them as less than human, ‘dirty,’ or ‘enemies of humanity,’ they have gone to the next level. A frightening, Orwellian level.  

SDAs also create a mental barrier between their in-group (a.k.a., The Remnant) and everyone else, but the worst fruits of this are projected into an apocalyptic future, and they make themselves the prophesized victims in this future scenario, martyrs for their cause. Putin’s cult and Netanyahu’s cult do this uncloaked, brazenly, in a full-throated justification for genocidal intentions. Truly horrific.  
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Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System!

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TL;DR: As a species, we used to need religion and other pleasant fictions in order to cope with the wild world that spawned us. Now that we Homo sapiens are the wildest threat on Earth, we need truth more than fiction. Religion was initially an adaptive invention of Homo sapiens. Eventually, religion became maladaptive, threatening our survival. We need to put aside dangerous religions, especially the monotheistic religion, since monotheism tends to breed violence.

We don’t know when, how, or why apes experienced a cognitive revolution and became sentient, conscious, so-called wise ape-people (Homo sapiens: “Wise man”). We do know that consciousness brought to the newly sentient Homo sapiens mental abilities which enabled the species to ultimately dominate the planet. Abstract ideas now became tools and weapons.

Contemplation of abstract ideas was a new tool unavailable to non-sentient species, but it came at a cost. Now the species could ponder death, not simply witness, grieve, and experience it. Now they could recognize violence, be impressed or disgusted by it, instead of just instinctively using it as another tool of survival. Now they could contemplate the meaninglessness of existence, and be crushed by it, or even driven insane by it. Unless, of course, they could find a way to cope with this unwelcome awakening. 
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Religious Bullshit, Religious Gaslighting: A Few Thoughts About the Religious Right

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Cartoonist Duff Moses — „Some are trying to inflame those people“ | Cicero Online

The most dangerous thing about religion is how it can take a moderate case of youthful naiveté, the kind that asserts “I think I know what’s good for the world” and explode it up into a god complex. Most kinds of Christian-style religions elevate the God complex further, into full-blown assholery. These are those obnoxious true believers filling the ranks of the Christian nationalists, the militant advocacy groups usually choosing one or more of the words American, Freedom, and Patriot in their titles, and the general Trump-loving MAGA crowd. These are those who know what is best for you, and they feel a righteous duty not only to tell you but also change the law to force you to conform to their goals for your life. In a word, insufferable.

I had many advantages growing up white, male, and middle class, in the USA. I squandered most of them, because my survival didn’t depend on me maximizing my privilege. I did, however, often indulge in the aforementioned youthful naive mindset, thinking I knew SO much better than everyone. Luckily, I was also shy, to a fault, so I didn’t gain a reputation for being an asshole.

Then I embraced conservative christianity in my twenties Boy, did I become a god overnight! The speed of the mental transition is truly breathtaking. You can wake up one morning humble and full of all kinds of healthy curiosity and skepticism about your world, and by the time you go to bed that night, you can be utterly confident of the truth of one specific set of views about the whole universe, such that you just CAN’T WAIT to convince everyone you meet that you are right, and they are wrong, and lost, and sinners in need of your savior. 
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We Need A God

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Religion poisons everything.
Religion poisons everything.

The terrible behavior of the god-believers is a convincing evidence of the non-existence of a morally influential God. Believers loudly legislate each others’ behavior, imposing their made-up gods’ made-up codes on each other (and the rest of us). And believers in gods constantly embarrass the hell out of each other.

It’s a shame there isn’t a real god behind all of the shouting, the offense-taking, the in-the-name-of-killings, whippings, wars, and blasphemy laws, sitting up above it all, shaking his divine head in disgust. The way the world is going, we could really use a god.

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Rejecting Jesus

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[This post is in response to a comment by a pastor on my previous post; here’s the link to the comment].

In previous blog posts, I’ve been clear about having a knowledge of Jesus, the Bible, and at least one version of Christianity, Seventh-day Adventism. However, as Christians are sometimes urged to do, I invested great emotion and time seeking more than just knowledge about Jesus, but also a relationship with him, as if he was real. As if he heard my prayers, even all my thoughts. As if he had the power to make that kind of a God–believer communication more than one-sided.

And I fully expected him to do just that. To make himself real to me, in obvious and faith-building ways, or even still, small, subtle yet undeniable ways. Or even just any unambiguous way. The longer I went with no obvious communication from God, I got good at lowering my expectations, lowering the bar for what could pass for the amazing all-powerful Jesus making himself real to me.

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Good Without God, Better Without God

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For whatever reason (I’m not sure I’m willing to guess), in the few years since I’ve come out atheist, I have experienced a motivation to behave ethically and morally far beyond that which two and a half decades of Christianity ever provided.

My denomination was the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I was not your average pew-warmer, either. Within 18 months of my baptism at the tender age of 20, I had embarked on a year-long foreign missionary teaching assignment, been ordained a local elder in that mission’s church (at the ordination ceremony, when the pastor read to his church the biblical requirements of an elder, he literally skipped over the verse in 1 Timothy 3 which states that the elder must not be a recent convert; I swallowed hard and kept smiling), and had preached sermons and taught lessons more than many elderly members who had been Seventh-day Adventists all their lives.

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How Do I Know?

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These past few months, I’ve become more interested in how I know, than what I know. While facts play a big role in the formation of my values and beliefs, the primary concern is summed up in my title, How Do I Know?

How did I decide that my favorite set of values are ‘right,’ as opposed to all those ‘wrong’ values? How did I settle on my particular list of ‘good to know’ facts, and how do I test and retest their reliability in the real world?

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You Got Your Religion in my Humanism

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This article (call it “Opening” http://www.strangenotions.com/the-opening-of-the-scientific-mind) is a comment on this article (call it “Closing” http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-closing-of-the-scientific-mind). The “Opening” article was recently recommended to me by my cousin and facebook debating partner, Tom. For a wider audience, I here present my thoughts on both articles.

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Atheists Don’t Get God, Claims Arrogant Thomist

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This is a response to the article “Atheists Don’t Get God”, a review of David Bentley Hart’s book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

To me, what commends the thinking and reasoning and explanations of scientists is not that they are very certain of the claims they make; it’s that they most often are the exact opposite of certain. Scientists are notoriously averse to drawing conclusions with an air of certainty, instead usually bathing each statement in a thick coating of qualification, moderation, and pensive hesitation. It’s as if the most dangerous way to behave within scientific circles is to behave as if you just figured something out to a mathematical certainty, even if you have done so. ‘Embrace doubt and skepticism’ seems like the unwritten code of science. The first impulse of the researcher upon making a possible discovery or breakthrough seems to be to turn to colleagues and say, “please prove me wrong.” Which, of course, is true, because of the importance of falsifiability and criticism to the scientific method.

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Comfortable Delusions

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I’ve been thinking about what it was like to be a comfortable Christian church member; remembering the soothing feelings of belonging to a morally superior movement with a great commission directly from the throne room of Almighty God.

The high I experienced from just mingling with younger generations (as teacher, supervisor, chaperone, worship leader, etc.), reveling in their energy, soaking up their contagious attitudes of earnest, idealistic hopefulness and utter confidence in the Bible and the happy future it promised us– it reinforced the superiority complex and pride because the “high” was “natural,” not from supposedly satanic substances. And it felt good to know we were superior and to be proud of that lofty status.

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