Religion Never Went Away - It's Just One Part of a Larger Mechanism

Just a rant with some pseudophilosophical/psychological nonsense thrown in-between to make it appear smart.

I find it humorous every time I hear or read a secular person talk about the ridiculousness of religion. I've started to find it more and more amusing by the day, in fact, while observing society at large.

A lot of people even in my own camp of libertarianism seem to laugh at religion.

And yes, to a secular person - such as myself - the notion of religion can seem ridiculous, but the whole phenomenon needs to be studied beneath the surface.

The naivety of people claiming that religions have gone away due to the advent of science is pretty much as ridiculous as the ancient superstitions these people mock.

Look at this way.

Religions were a massive part of people's lives for centuries. Centuries. All over the world. Religions dictated most everything that went on in society, how people acted, their moral codes, and whatnot.

Religions played such a huge role, in fact, that it's always been clear to me that humans simply have a mechanism in their brains that makes them susceptible to that sort of thinking and reasoning.

The world has changed since the dark ages, but our brains haven't. Whatever mechanism caused religions back in the day are still there.

I seriously doubt religions, in and of themselves, were the one and only manifestation of this mechanism - whatever it may be - so as the world has changed, our brains have simply adapted into their new surroundings.

Cultural evolution is always faster than biological evolution, so our brains are always playing catch up.

Just look at the modern SJW movement. Or leftism in general.

Those movements tick every box of an organized religion, just in a more modern setting. The painful irony is that those in the hip and cool atheist camp on the left are the ones that are the loudest at ridiculing religions. How religions were a form of mind control, turning people into brain dead followers of superstitions.

And then at the same time, they go ahead and claim that there are a thousand different genders.

Why? Because their religion teaches them so.

We can even go deeper.

Equality? Human rights?

Religions. Arbitrary and fake constructs.

Stings a little, doesn't it?

The sting is from the cognitive dissonance in your brain that is struggling right now with the two conflicting notions of religion being bad and concepts such as human rights and equality being good.

No one can "prove" that something like equality is a universal and "true" human right - or if there even is such a thing as human right. These things are never questioned because questioning them takes an immense amount of brain power, and our brains are programmed in such a way that they tend to avoid unnecessary work.

It's just painfully laughable when people talking about how men and women are equal in everything talk about how funny religious people believe in imaginary friends.

I argue that the traditional monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were just one manifestation of something bigger, it was just adjusted to those times.

And hey, as a libertarian I can fully admit that this takes place in "my camp", too. Libertarianism could be claimed to be my "religion". One that I've been questioning more and more recently, but that's neither here nor there. It's my view on how the world ought to be.

And that's pretty much the deal with any and all ideologies. None of us can prove that the world be a better place under our given ideology. It would our preferred world, but never a universally loved world.

One man's utopia is always another man's dystopia - and vice versa.

I really like the above statement, by the way. I created it completely by accident when writing dialogue for my story Black and Silver. It seems intelligent.

My point here is that religious wars are still happening - even in the increasingly secular West. It's just not My God can whip your God anymore, but instead, it's Anarchy vs. Statism, or Feminism vs. Patriarchy, and whatever the fuck have you.

And just like a Jew and a Muslim will never agree with each other on religion, I don't think we as a species will ever reach a point where one ideology "wins" and everybody just peacefully accepts it.

One ideology/religion may win temporarily, through force, but a revolution will brew under the surface, and will challenge the status quo, and the cycle repeats.

Just like we're programmed to spread our genes, we are also programmed to spread our memes. And that's something we can't escape.

I'd still like to believe - or have faith - in the peaceful voluntaryist revolution, but I'm not too optimistic. Just look at Steemit, which is a voluntaryist experiment. And all we do here is argue. That's who and what we are.

And, basically, that's why there will never be world peace.

Sorry, guys. Heard it here first.