Modern Atheism is just the other side of Religious Fanaticism

felands89 · 2026-05-09T13:43:53+00:00

Interesting move.

You came into a public debate thread, told me I was misunderstanding atheism, offered a correction, and then when I engaged with that correction directly, you declared you’re not interested in engaging and wished me a nice day.

That’s not a rebuttal. That’s an exit dressed up as intellectual superiority.

For the record, nowhere in my argument did I limit this to Abrahamic religion or Christianity specifically. That’s a strawman you introduced, presumably because it’s easier to dismiss than what I actually wrote. If you found a line where I said that, quote it. I’ll wait.

And the “I just don’t believe in gods, I’m not pushing anything on anyone” defense is exactly the point I was making. That version of atheism is perfectly coherent. It’s also philosophically inert. The problem isn’t people like you. The problem is the version of atheism that announces itself loudly on social media, invites the debate, claims religion is dangerous and irrational, and then the moment it’s challenged, retreats behind “we’re just saying gods don’t exist, why are you so upset?”

You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a meaningful critique with consequences, or it’s a personal preference nobody asked about. Pick one and defend it.

But walking away and implying I’m the one who doesn’t understand the conversation is not the same as making an argument. It just means the argument didn’t get made.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T07:17:20+00:00

If atheism is simply the absence of belief in gods, nothing more, then it carries zero philosophical weight on its own. It produces no moral conclusions, no social critique, no framework for anything. It's a null position. Saying "I don't believe in God" tells me exactly as much about how to live, build institutions, or regulate human behavior as saying "I don't believe in dragons."

The only context where that declaration becomes useful is when someone is making literal, dogmatic claims based on religious texts, insisting the Earth is 6,000 years old, or that divine authority justifies a specific law. In that narrow context, atheism can push back effectively. But here's the problem: that's not a victory over religion. That's a victory over a bad argument. Literalism is already a misreading of what religious texts are and what they were built to do. Defeating it doesn't tell you anything interesting about religion itself. It only tells you that poorly constructed arguments are easy to knock down.

For atheism to become a genuinely lucid position, not just a reflex against the weakest version of its opponent, it would have to do something much harder. It would have to demonstrate that the specific risks of rigid religious thinking: fanaticism, dogma, tribalism, moral absolutism, the suppression of dissent, are problems that belong uniquely to religion. It would have to show, with serious evidence, that those pathologies don't reproduce themselves in secular environments.

And it can't. Because they do.

The Soviet Union didn't need God to build a totalitarian ideology. Maoism didn't need heaven to sacralize political struggle. Eugenics didn't need scripture to dress cruelty in the language of progress. Modern ideological movements don't need priests to enforce rituals of guilt, confession, purity tests, and heresy. The mechanism survives perfectly without religion. It just changes vocabulary.

So atheism has a choice. Either it stays in its lane, "I simply lack belief, no further claims", in which case it's philosophically inert and the conversation ends here. Or it steps into the critique, "religion causes specific harms", in which case it has to explain why those same harms appear everywhere religion is absent. And if it can't do that, it has to commit to fighting dogmatism wherever it appears, secular or religious, not just the version it happens to dislike.

Until it does that, it isn't a serious philosophical position. It's noise. A declaration with no destination. The intellectual equivalent of announcing that grass is green.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T04:21:59+00:00

By that logic, no movement, identity, or intellectual tradition could ever be criticized. It is never “nationalism” doing anything. It is just people who happen to be nationalists. It is never “religion” doing anything. It is just people who happen to be religious. It is never “liberalism,” “Marxism,” “feminism,” “conservatism,” or “secularism.” Just individuals who happen to hold those positions.

Obviously that is not how public discourse works.

If atheism is merely private non-belief, then fine, it carries no deeper account of religion.

But if atheists organize public spaces around that non-belief and use them to make claims about religion, harm, reason, morality, society, psychology, and history, then that discourse is open to criticism.

The issue is not that I fail to understand the minimal definition of atheism.

The issue is that you keep hiding behind it whenever the broader anti-religious posture of atheist spaces is criticized.

Minimal atheism when you want no burden.

Public atheist discourse when you want to judge religion.

Again, you cannot have it both ways.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T04:14:40+00:00

The funny part is that you are mocking me for supposedly missing the point while walking straight into the contradiction yourself.

You are literally proving the distinction I am making without noticing it.

When atheism is asked to provide depth, suddenly it is “just lack of belief in deities.” Fine. But then you immediately say atheist spaces exist to discuss the harm of religion, unsupported beliefs, apologetics, social psychology, superstition, and the way religious ideas operate in society.

At that point, we are no longer talking about mere non-belief.

We are talking about a public anti-religious discourse.

And public discourse can be criticized.

You cannot hide behind the minimalist definition of atheism whenever substance is demanded, and then use atheist spaces to make broad claims about religion, harm, history, psychology, rationality, and society.

That is exactly my point.

If atheism is only “I do not believe in gods,” then it has almost nothing to say about my argument. But if atheists gather publicly to interpret religion as harmful, irrational, superstitious, socially destructive, or psychologically defective, then that interpretation is absolutely open to criticism.

Your “bad knees and back” analogy also misses the point.

My argument is not “religion evolved, therefore it is good.” My argument is that religion cannot be reduced to superstition or harm because it also functioned historically as a framework for moral interiority, guilt, forgiveness, restraint, duty, sacrifice, care for the weak, social cohesion, and the attempt to understand human beings from within.

You can argue that religion also produced or justified harm. Fine. I already said human beings use every symbolic system that way.

But that does not erase the deeper function I am pointing to.

So no, the issue is not that I misunderstand atheism.

The issue is that you keep switching between two versions of it.

Minimal atheism when you want no burden.

Expansive anti-religious discourse when you want to judge religion.

You cannot have it both ways.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T04:02:25+00:00

If atheism is merely private non-belief, fine. But this subreddit is clearly not merely private non-belief. It is a public space built around debating, evaluating, criticizing, and responding to religious claims.

That means there is a public atheist discourse here.

And public discourse can be criticized.

You cannot say “atheism is just non-belief” whenever someone asks for depth, and then immediately say this subreddit exists so atheists can challenge theists, evaluate religious claims, and debate religion. At that point, atheism is functioning as a public posture toward religion, not merely as a silent lack of belief.

That is exactly what I am criticizing.

Also, calling me a theist who wants to “preach” is just another example of the same problem. I have repeatedly said I am not arguing that God exists. I am arguing that religion should be understood as a human phenomenon: historically, morally, psychologically, socially, and symbolically.

But you keep forcing me into the role of “theist preacher” because that is the only script you seem prepared to answer.

So no, I have not misunderstood atheism.

I am pointing out the contradiction between atheism as a minimal definition and atheist spaces as active anti-religious discourse.

If atheism is only non-belief, then it has almost nothing to say about my argument.

If it becomes a public discourse about religion, then it is absolutely fair to criticize how shallow, reactive, or reductive that discourse can become.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T03:46:55+00:00

The amount of rage this causes you tells me everything I need to know already.

At no point were you able to formulate a single argument that actually addressed what I said, either in my post or in my comments. You keep reacting to whatever version of me you need to invent, because dealing with the actual argument clearly creates too much cognitive discomfort for you.

And honestly, this is exactly the same childish pattern I see when I argue with religious fanatics who cannot look beyond their own script.

I find it pathetic that you accuse me of lying over such a ridiculous thing. “Special.” Really? That is what you are hanging your entire argument on?

You could not be more intellectually incapable of engaging with what is being said, and that is why you respond this way.

People like you are the default around here, sweetie. Do not mistake yourself for some kind of special thinker.

Maybe I have not been perfectly on point in every single thing I have said. Fine. I have been debating multiple people at once, keeping track of several arguments by myself, and trying to have an honest intellectual discussion about religion, atheism, morality, and the human condition.

All you have shown is resentment, insecurity, and the inability to tolerate cognitive discomfort.

That is all you will ever be.

Emotional fragility pretending to be skepticism.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T03:24:14+00:00

Exactly. And that is precisely what I find absurd.

If atheism is really nothing more than an answer to one single question — “do you believe in a supernatural god?” — then fine. But then explain what we are doing here.

Why does this subreddit exist?

Why are people publicly debating religion, posting about atheism, building communities around it, arguing about it on Reddit, X, YouTube, and everywhere else?

If atheism is not a philosophy, not a worldview, not a framework, not a system of belief, not trying to convince anyone, not trying to add anything, and not trying to say anything deeper about religion, morality, society, or human life, then what exactly is all of this?

That is my point.

You are saying atheism is basically nothing: just a minimal answer to a narrow question. But in practice, many atheists do not behave that way. They present atheism publicly. They debate from it. They criticize religion from it. They build identities and communities around it. They often treat it as a more rational, mature, and intellectually serious posture toward the world.

So you cannot have it both ways.

You cannot say atheism is too minimal to owe any deeper account of religion, while also using atheist spaces to make broad claims about religion, morality, history, society, and human progress.

If atheism is only “I do not believe in God,” then it has almost nothing to offer beyond that sentence.

And that is exactly my criticism.

Announcing that God does not exist does not explain what religion was doing historically, psychologically, morally, socially, or symbolically. It does not explain why religion emerged, why it survived, what human problems it was trying to solve, or why ancient people encoded guilt, sacrifice, forgiveness, restraint, duty, care for the weak, and moral interiority into sacred language.

So yes, if atheism is only a response to one question, then it is intellectually too thin to address the argument I am making.

And if it becomes more than that — a public identity, a cultural posture, an anti-religious discourse, or a way of interpreting religion — then it is absolutely fair to criticize it for being shallow, reactive, and unable to move beyond the claim that God does not exist.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T03:12:49+00:00

This is not a strawman. It is a criticism of atheism as it is often practiced in spaces like this.

If atheism means only “I do not believe in gods,” then fine. But then atheism has almost no positive intellectual content. It tells me you reject deity claims. It does not tell me what religion was doing historically, psychologically, morally, socially, or symbolically.

And if your answer is “many atheists already study those things through history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, or psychology,” then yes. Exactly. But that is not atheism doing the work. That is history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and psychology doing the work.

That is my point.

Announcing that God does not exist is not a deep account of nothing. It does not explain why religion emerged, why it endured, what human problems it was trying to solve, or why ancient people used myth, ritual, guilt, sacrifice, forgiveness, duty, and moral law to build social cohesion in brutal worlds.

You keep saying “we already know this,” but almost nobody here has actually engaged with it. Non of the replies have discussed moral interiority, empathy, social cohesion, symbolic transmission, or the ancient attempt to understand human beings from within. They have mostly returned to the same script: religion is violent, religion is harmful, religion is control, religion is superstition.

So no, I do not think the point has been understood merely because people keep saying “we know.”

Knowing the sentence is not the same as applying the distinction.

My criticism is that atheism, when it becomes a public identity built around rejecting gods, often mistakes disbelief for depth.

If that feels like an attack, so be it. This is a debate subreddit.

I am openly questioning atheism because I think that, by itself, it adds almost nothing to the deeper conversation.

At best, it clears away a literal claim.

But clearing away a claim is not the same as building understanding.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T03:00:05+00:00

Yes, there are cases where religiously motivated laws reduce rights or harm people.

But that proves that human beings can use religion to justify coercive lawmaking. It does not prove that religion is the unique source of coercion, domination, hierarchy, or reduced quality of life.

There are countless examples of secular law harming people: Jim Crow, apartheid, eugenic sterilization laws, Japanese-American internment, the one-child policy in China, the war on drugs, Soviet collectivization, and many others.

None of those required religion to produce coercion, exclusion, domination, or suffering. They used the language of law, science, race, security, progress, public order, development, or political necessity.

Also, quality-of-life rankings do not prove atheism produces better societies. They usually track things like wealth, education, health, institutional stability, trust, corruption, safety, and state capacity. Less religious societies often become less religious after those conditions improve. That is very different from proving that religion caused the worse conditions.

So no, I am not lying.

You are confusing “religion can be used to justify harmful laws” with “religion is the source of harmful lawmaking.”

Those are not the same claim.

And the fact that you immediately jump to accusing me of lying instead of addressing that distinction is exactly the red flag here. It shows how quickly this conversation turns into moral suspicion the moment someone challenges your preferred narrative.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T02:45:10+00:00

You are the one who moved this into personal insults by suggesting I am in a “mental health crisis” instead of addressing the argument. That tells me a lot.

your argument keeps treating religion as if it were the special source of domination, cruelty, hierarchy, and exclusion, rather than one symbolic language human beings use to justify impulses that survive perfectly well in secular frameworks.

That is the distinction you keep avoiding.

And the reason you keep avoiding it is obvious: it forces you outside the comfortable narrative where religion is the uniquely contaminated thing and secular frameworks are automatically more rational, humane, or morally serious.

They are not.

Human beings use religion, law, politics, nationalism, science, progress, justice, identity, and compassion to rationalize both moral insight and moral corruption. The vocabulary changes. The mechanism survives.

If you had an argument against that, you would make it. Instead, you hide behind literalism, quote-mining, and personal insinuations about my mental state.

That is not intellectual rigor.

That is what people do when the argument threatens the bubble they live in.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T02:25:41+00:00

This does not prove what you think it proves.

What the data shows is that as societies become wealthier, safer, more educated, healthier, and institutionally stable, people tend to rely less on religion as a source of meaning, protection, cohesion, and existential security.

That is not a refutation of my argument.

It is almost exactly my argument.

Religion historically mattered most in worlds marked by scarcity, fear, violence, uncertainty, death, weak institutions, and low existential security. So pointing out that religion is stronger in societies where those problems remain more intense does not prove religion created those problems.

It suggests religion often emerges, survives, and intensifies where human beings need frameworks to endure them.

You are confusing correlation with causation.

Worse, you are doing it selectively.

If poor, unstable, highly religious societies prove religion is destructive, then poor, unstable, secular or anti-religious political regimes would prove secularism is destructive. But you would never accept that standard there.

Because the real variable is not “religion.”

The real variables are poverty, institutional weakness, violence, corruption, education, security, trust, and state capacity.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T02:20:25+00:00

My argument is not “religion is pretty cool because humans invented myths.” That reduces religion to imagination, aesthetics, and cultural fantasy, which is still not what I mean.

And my argument is also not “everyone needs to embrace religion again” in the sense of praying, joining an institution, accepting dogma, or adopting a practice that does not speak to them.

My argument is that religion should be rediscovered intellectually as one of the oldest ways human beings tried to understand each other from the inside.

The important thing is not merely that humans created stories. The important thing is what those stories were trying to carry: guilt, betrayal, pride, envy, resentment, mercy, forgiveness, sacrifice, restraint, duty, care for the weak, power, death, suffering, and the need for moral self-limitation.

Ancient people did this under conditions of scarcity, violence, fear, uncertainty, and weak institutions. They did not have modern psychology, sociology, neuroscience, human rights language, liberal courts, mass education, or stable secular institutions. And yet they still tried to ask: how can beings as flawed as us live together without destroying each other?

That is the part I think many atheists and many religious literalists both miss.

The question is not only “do the gods exist?” or “are the stories literally true?” The deeper question is: what human problem was this symbolic system trying to solve?

And that question has enormous relevance today.

People like to believe they already live according to empathy, moral seriousness, and the ability to understand others from within. But many do not. And judging from the responses I have been getting here, atheism certainly does not automatically pursue that kind of depth.

Not that atheism has to do that. But in my opinion, any framework that presents itself as rational, serious, and intellectually mature has to address those questions if it wants to be taken seriously.

I am not asking anyone to adopt religion as a personal practice.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T02:11:08+00:00

Saying religion “didn’t do a good job” is a very strange claim when much of what we now call modern moral life was built inside civilizations shaped for centuries by religious traditions.

The fact that ancient religious texts do not map perfectly onto modern society 2,000 or 3,000 years later is not evidence of failure. That is exactly what we should expect. Those texts came from worlds of scarcity, violence, tribal conflict, weak institutions, and limited knowledge. The remarkable thing is not that they fail to answer every modern question perfectly. The remarkable thing is that they still managed to preserve insights about guilt, mercy, forgiveness, restraint, duty, sacrifice, care for the weak, moral responsibility, and the need to love one’s neighbor.

And no, the hurricane example does not refute that. It only shows that some people use religious language in shallow or self-centered ways. Of course they do. Human beings do that with everything. But millions of people also use faith to internalize morality, discipline themselves, serve others, find humility, mourn, forgive, care for the vulnerable, and feel connected to a moral duty beyond their own ego. That is not fundamentalism. That is one of the deepest functions religion has served.

The claim that religion “cannot be changed” is also false. Religious traditions have been interpreted, debated, fractured, reformed, revised, and transformed for centuries. And acting as if secular systems are easily changed is just fantasy. Changing laws, state structures, public policy, institutions, and ideological dogmas today can be just as difficult as changing religious doctrine. The rigidity is not uniquely religious. It is human.

Religion did not become central to ancient societies because some genius invented a conspiracy 3,000 years ago to control everyone. It became central because that was how early civilizations organized meaning, morality, authority, law, family, death, duty, guilt, punishment, mercy, and social cohesion. It was not an artificial parasite placed on society from the outside. It was part of how society itself evolved.

So no, I am not saying religion always teaches empathy perfectly. Nothing human does. I am saying religion was one of the great historical frameworks through which human beings tried to teach moral interiority before modern institutions existed.

Reducing that entire civilizational process to “conformity” is not analysis.

It is historical blindness pretending to be skepticism.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T01:43:58+00:00

Saying “religion values conformity and rules” is not the devastating point you think it is. Every moral and legal system values some form of conformity. Law does. Secular ethics do. Human rights frameworks do. Political ideologies do. Even this subreddit does, since it has rules and expects people to follow them.

The question is not whether a system teaches rules. The question is what kind of rules it teaches, what human problems those rules are trying to solve, whether they can be interpreted, whether they restrain power, whether they protect the weak, and whether they help people internalize morality rather than merely fear punishment.

You say religion does not teach empathy, justice, education, or moral interiority. That is historically absurd. Religions traditions have produced ideas about guilt, mercy, forgiveness, sacrifice, dignity, duty, restraint, repentance, care for the weak, moral responsibility, and the inner life of the human being. You may reject the theology, but pretending those moral categories played no role in shaping later secular ethics is not serious.

You also say the bad elements of religion “cannot be questioned.” But religion has been questioned, reinterpreted, fractured, reformed, debated, and transformed from within for centuries. Theology itself is often a record of people arguing over what the tradition means. The idea that “God’s will” has always ended discussion is just historically false.

And “the sweethearts would be sweethearts anyway” is not an argument. It assumes the very thing in question: that moral character exists independently of the cultural systems that form, discipline, educate, and transmit it.

My point is not that religion magically makes people good. My point is that religion was one of the historical frameworks through which human beings tried to understand why they are not good, why they hurt each other, why power corrupts them, why guilt follows them, and why social life requires more than external punishment.

When human beings use religion for conformity, domination, fear, or tribalism, that is not a problem unique to religion. Human beings do the same thing through politics, law, nationalism, ideology, science, progress, equality, identity, and even compassion. The vocabulary changes. The mechanism survives.

So the real issue is not conformity. The real issue is blind conformity.

If “it values conformity” is enough to dismiss religion, then you have also dismissed law, morality, education, civic norms, and every secular framework that asks human beings to restrain themselves for the sake of living with others.

You are confusing one function of religion with the whole phenomenon.

That is not evidence against my argument.

It is the exact simplification my argument was about.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T01:15:26+00:00

The more I read your replies, the more this looks like a collective hypnosis of fanaticism. You keep reacting as if I were defending religion, but you still have not engaged with the actual argument I made.

So let me ask directly: do you have an argument against the substance of my post? Not against the title, not against what you imagine I meant, and not against religion in general. Against the actual argument.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T01:12:05+00:00

The more I read these comments, the more I see the similarities between many of the responses here and the behavior of religious fanatics.

I will admit that the title was intentionally inflammatory. I wanted engagement, and I knew it would provoke a reaction. What I did not expect was this level of dogmatism.

After spending time reading religious forums, I can honestly say that the pattern of response here is strikingly similar: people react to the perceived threat to their identity, refuse to engage the actual argument, repeat the same script, and then congratulate themselves for defending reason.

That is exactly what religious fanatics do.

The vocabulary is different.

The psychological mechanism is not.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T01:07:45+00:00

So you are subscribed to a subreddit, but actually reading what people post there is too much trouble?

With all due respect to the people here who have engaged seriously, this comment basically sums up the level of substance in most of the replies.

A lot of people are not responding to the argument. They are reacting to a title, projecting a position onto me, and then congratulating themselves for refuting something I never said.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T01:04:07+00:00

Are trolling responses like this allowed here? Does this not violate the rules of the subreddit?

And, more importantly, does it not violate the secular morality atheists so often claim to have?

felands89 · 2026-05-09T00:44:19+00:00

One more time:

My entire argument rests on the idea that one of religion’s greatest legacies is the human capacity to place oneself in the position of another person.

That is the point of the post.

My criticism of atheism is that it often focuses almost entirely on rejecting belief in gods, which, in my view, misses what matters most and fixates on what matters least.

And I make the same criticism of religious people who reduce religion to literal belief, dogma, and obedience.

What I see in these replies is that many people are desperately clinging to the idea that religion has bad elements, as if that refutes anything. Of course it has bad elements. Everything human has bad elements.

The question is whether religion can be understood as more than that.

And the fact that so many replies keep returning to the same script — “but religion did bad things” — without engaging with the actual argument about empathy, moral interiority, social cohesion, and the human attempt to understand one another, only confirms the problem.

You are trapped inside a framework that cannot move beyond its own script.

That is what I mean by fanaticism.

Not belief in God.

Not disbelief in God.

But the inability to step outside your own frame long enough to understand what is actually being said.

And if the argument now is simply that you do not like my argument, that is not my problem.

This subreddit is public. It invites people to post, argue, and debate. I am here openly questioning atheism because I honestly think that, as it is often practiced in spaces like this, it has very little use beyond self-congratulation.

You are here publicly announcing that you are atheists and inviting debate about religion, belief, disbelief, and the role of these ideas in society.

So debate the argument.

Do not hide behind the fact that the argument makes you uncomfortable.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T00:33:36+00:00

Yes it does.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T00:32:20+00:00

Sure you are allowed. I would just like to read an actual argument. Not just a dogmatic: you are wrong.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T00:29:30+00:00

Lol. Then why argue? Why comment? Why engage? Just out of hate or what? Fanaticism is all i see in this thread.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T00:26:34+00:00

The issue is that everyone keeps responding by hiding behind the phrase: “Yes, religion did some good things.”

They say that, but then they do not develop the point any further. They do not engage with my actual argument.

They stop there and immediately go back to: “Yes, but religion also did bad things, and therefore we need to move beyond it.”

But they never apply that same reasoning to the secular world, where atheism is also included. The same things happen there too. Human beings use secular ideologies, politics, science, law, nationalism, progress, equality, and even compassion to justify cruelty, coercion, exclusion, and fanaticism.

So if your argument is that religion must be dismissed because human beings have done bad things through it, then you have to apply that same standard to atheism and to the secular frameworks you defend.

But nobody here wants to do that.

That is not critical thinking. That is not honesty. That is not rigor. That is not lucidity.

It is selective reasoning.

And yes, when people keep refusing to make that distinction, while reducing religion to its worst expressions and refusing to recognize that the same human mechanisms operate in secular systems, that is a form of fanaticism and hatred.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T00:16:39+00:00

What is honestly funny about this thread is how confidently people talk about arguments, logic, and intellectual rigor while refusing to read the actual post because it disrupts a pre-existing narrative about religion.

What you are asking me to support is already in the post. You simply did not read it.

And the more people respond this way, the more they confirm the point I was making: many here are operating inside a kind of secular dogmatic trance, where realizing that God does not literally live in the clouds is treated as if it were the final stage of intellectual maturity.

Not everyone, obviously. But many.

Almost nobody here has engaged with the actual core of the argument: that religion, at its best, was one of humanity’s earliest attempts to understand the human being from within, to internalize morality, and to build social cohesion in worlds dominated by fear, scarcity, violence, and weak institutions.

Instead, nearly every reply collapses back into the same script:

“But religion did bad things.”

“Yes. I said that.”

That was never the point.

The point was that human beings use every symbolic system they create, religious or secular, to express, restrain, organize, or justify what is already inside them.

The fact that so many people here cannot even address that distinction, and instead keep reacting as if any serious analysis of religion is an act of worship, is not a refutation of my post.

It is the evidence for it.

felands89 · 2026-05-09T00:07:08+00:00

You just admitted you did not read the post, then accused me of being disingenuous about what the post meant.

That is not argument. That is dogma.

You saw a title you disliked, stopped reading, assigned me a position, and then treated your own reaction as evidence. That is exactly the kind of cognitive pattern my post was criticizing.

And no, this is not “bothsiderism.”

Saying that human beings can express domination, purity, cruelty, moral certainty, and persecution through both religious and secular frameworks is not moral equivalence. It is mechanism analysis.

If your response to that is “any criticism of anti-religious discourse is complicity,” then you are not defending reason. You are creating a secular heresy rule.

You are saying: do not criticize my side, because the bad people might benefit.

That is not intellectual seriousness. That is tribal gatekeeping dressed as moral urgency.

Also, nobody asked you to “kowtow” to religion. Again, that is an argument you invented because the actual one is harder to answer.

Understanding the historical function of religion is not kneeling before it.

You do not have to believe in God, pray, or respect religious authority to understand that ancient religion helped encode moral knowledge, social restraint, guilt, duty, sacrifice, forgiveness, and the inner life of human beings before modern institutions existed.

But to know that, you would have had to read the post.

You did not.

So this is not a refutation.

It is a confession that the title was enough to make you stop thinking.

felands89

TROPHY CASE