@liamdiprose @clacke and, again, I reject that assertion of god because that's neither what I nor, in my experience, most people mean by god. Why not just call your god your 'ideals' and be done with it. Am I right in my suspicion that you're a life-long Christian who has had the benefit of education and is seeking to rationalise his faith? That's what it sounds like to me.

@douginamug @yojimbo of course, Mac hardware reputedly runs Linux quite well, even the M1-based lappies 😎

@liamdiprose I think that's a much better question - I think there are lots of non-faith-dependent strands that can help bind a society together.

@liamdiprose I think I almost entirely disagree with your perspective on this. I think that the increasing loss of religion has both eased the system prejudice against various minorities in society, and provided a useful contrast to the part of the society that still identifies itself as "Christian". We see the depravity of it emerging every day with various investigations around the world into child abuse, with indigenous children as frequent victims.

@liamdiprose the deprecation of religion has now made it safe enough for people who've long dealt with unjust treatment from past eras where questioning religion was a social taboo to challenge those past wrongs. It's been rotten to the core all along.

@liamdiprose Here's the thing: one way you can completely guarantee that I (and many of my fellow non-believers, not to mention the many others who adhere to non-Christian religions) will reject any "new social order" you advocate is for it to have *any* association with Christianity. Many of us *loath* Christianity and the effect it's had on our societies for past two millennia. What you see as good, we see as the source of much of what is bad. We won't rally behind leaders who don't get that.

@liamdiprose I understand that what I'm saying to you doesn't make sense to you, because to you "good" and the Christian god are synonymous, but for many of us, that's not the case, and any social leader needs to accept that, even if they can't understand it.

@liamdiprose @clacke Atheist, by definition, need no god. They exist (and based on all societal studies are more morally consistent and "better Christians" than self-proclaimed Christians.

Your assertion that "when morals are collected up, you describe god", is your personal conceit. It's a unsupported and, from my perspective, entirely false, conclusion and assertion.

@liamdiprose I often think that the best "Christians" I know (if we assume what I consider to be the best, most illuminated, New Testament ideals that can be attributed to minorities in *some* Christian groups) aren't actually Christians at all. Many of them have no faith, and yet they offer an example in their lives that far exceeds the grace and kindness that many Christians exhibit...

@liamdiprose If one is part of the Christian establishment that has social and (in many cases, political) power, e.g. in the US, the Bible is constantly used for self-interest. I disagree that the Bible's survival justifies your high esteem for it. I'd say it's proven an effective means for subjugating populations and eliminating dissenters since Rome adopted it as their official religion. That doesn't make it right or even valid.

@liamdiprose I disagree with your definition of 'religion'. The 'collective agreement to rules and goals' is... just that. Religion involves the 'spiritual' component, and, typically, theistic belief (i.e. blind faith). They're not interchangeable, and yes, I deride religion while being quite happy with commonly agreed rules and goals.

@liamdiprose At this point, my thinking is that you're committed to a comforting delusion. The majority of people on earth would agree (they're not Christians and don't believe in your God). I've developed a deep revulsion to theistic religion in general & consider it a bug in our wetware that can be overcome by general education & observation of the universe. You might've found privilege & belonging from a Christian upbringing, but I only saw oppression of the outliers by the devout majority.

@liamdiprose What you're convolving in your term religion, I call culture + religion. Culture usually exists outside of religion and is the way people en mass behave, implicitly/instinctively accepting or reject aspects of the prevalent religion (and, more recently, the lack of religion). In my opinion, people have been behaving better without religion than with it. I think most statistical metrics would support my assertion.

@liamdiprose culture creates pressure on religion in a society, and forces it to liberalise (or at least it has done so since the Dark Ages)... for example, it was societies, not religion, that ended freedom in most of the world, achieved a semblance of racial equity (at least on paper), and even gender and sexual preference equity. Religion continues to be the force against all those good developments.

@liamdiprose if you insist on the idea of a 'divine', (which I think is unnecessarily limiting and carries lots of unhelpful baggage), let it be 'gaia' and all the ecosystems that exist in fine balance, which we, with our Christian manifest destiny, have utterly (perhaps terminally) perturbed. Restoring balance should be our 'religion'. And it doesn't need a god other than a healthy (but unconscious) ecosphere.

@liamdiprose when I say 'unconscious', I mean without agency. Non-sentient. Like the universe, so far as we can tell. But unlike human theistic inventions.

@liamdiprose I think gods emerge as a way for some individuals to disempower others. Theistic religions are political gaming from primitive times and in (even today) relatively uneducated societies. I don't think the gods they worship are a superset of ideals, they're one set of ideas that have by various means (some honourable, most not) have buried alternative views and those holding them... To me, they're tools of oppression and exploitation. So, quite a different take.

@liamdiprose don't get me wrong - we can never "legislate" belief. All we can do is provide opportunities for education on an egalitarian basis and hope that with a greater understanding of the world, more mature and rational views will prevail.

@liamdiprose The "golden rule" is common in lots of other (pre-Christian) religions. It's a society thing (although, I've learned, it's also not necessarily egalitarian)... I had at least one very devout Christian physics prof. He is (was?) a good guy and a good teacher, but I didn't envy him the enormous cognitive dissonance he had to contend with.

@liamdiprose No, we never discussed it. I just know that the scientific process prizes characteristics that Christianity explicitly condemns (e.g. believing evidence over faith) and it's difficult to reconcile what has been learned about reality via the scientific method that pushes the world of the bible and Christian god ever further into the margins.