When will America stop worshipping the Christian god in favor of legit worshipping companies?
When will America stop worshipping the Christian god in favor of legit worshipping companies?
This question is a joke. Also, the mods should add a joke tag to allow dumb answers.
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As an atheist, I had to ask myself how I know people are worshiping a god. In the US, it seems to boil down to a few things:
- Giving money to an organization in order to participate with the community
- Showing obedience to authority by allowing them to dictate some (but not all) of one's behavior
- Being hyper-focused on how the organization got to where it is today and whether what they do today aligns with its initial values and goals
- Performing rituals in hopes of causing specific outcomes
Based on this, I am already worshiping Apple.
I would argue that nobody gives money to their church as a form of community participation. Rather, they give money in the hope that they can buy their way to salvation or as payment to ease their guilty conscience. Probably both.
I live in Utah. Mormons are absolutely required to tithe in order to participate in temple ceremonies. I've never been LDS, but my understanding is that the accounting for how much you tithe is carefully monitored. It's also my understanding that you must participate in temple ceremonies to achieve admittance into heaven.
Your statements are correct about the practices of tithing and temple attendance. The things you mention are widely practiced among the faithful. My dear father and oldest brother attend their annual “tithing settlement” while I happily deposit an extra 10% into my savings.
So it's a cult. Not like that's any huge revelation, but there's no way anyone can claim they are NOT a cult.
As someone raised in an authoritarian Calvinist belief system (albeit not in the US) it’s simpler than you think in my opinion. People in general believe whatever fits the random things they absorb into their psyches growing up as kids because being kids they have no yardstick to differentiate between fantasy and reality other than what the authority figures in their life tell them and the evidence of their own eyes. This is true whether you’re raising someone on a diet of intellectual curiosity, a diet of pernicious cult-adjacent nonsense, or anything in between. There’s a reason so many people who’ve left similar authoritarian beliefs love “The Truman Show” in my experience but it’s true for everyone.
Part of being human is that our perceptions unconsciously bend around our beliefs and that the stronger the belief the stronger the amount of bending. We all have this built-in bias towards existing beliefs to a greater level than we instinctively assume, although it’s usually a lot more obvious among authoritarian religious groups because their beliefs are so markedly different from consensus reality.
I disagree woth the third one, as it implies using critical thinking to evaluate the success of an organisation, be it in a positive or negative light. I haven't heard a single strongly religious individual immediately agree that Joseph and Mohammed were p*dos, and using that as evidence to make a sound reasoning and evaluation on their religion's moral principles.
Religious people clearly use critical thinking. They just base a lot off of flawed premises.
They do use critical thinking but never apply it on their own religion, just all the others. To quote Richard Dawkins, "We're all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just take it one god further".