Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
@20
You won't believe in the soul in 20 years, not because you're going to get older, but because every time the soul exists crowd makes a claim about how we can't just be circuitry, the AI crowd says hold my beer and goes off and does the thing. Poetry? Yep. Music? Yep. Just a couple weeks ago we got "give it a description of the image you want and it draws it for you even if it's insane thing like baby cabbage wearing a tutu". There's a lot of other evidence, but there's nothing like a concrete demonstration of circuitry for the people who don't go off and learn about it on their own.
In addition to that, thought is clearly in the brain. If there's a soul it's not doing much, and every day that goes by we discover more about how the brain does what it does and take yet another thing out from under whatever a soul might be doing for us, if it existed.
I imagine that if evidence were going to sway you it would have, and gave up on trying to convince people a long time ago, but if you can short-circuit to the end it makes this easier. Unfortunately I think the capacity for atheism is innate, being as I can't think of many people who "converted" and everyone I know was an atheist at a very young age. It takes a particular personality type to deal with all the implications, and dealing with the implications has no particular moral weight or "this makes you good" or whatever so it's not like there's a reward or a warm fuzzy feeling. The only thing you get out of it is that it's true.
I do think the world would be better if more people were though, if only because we might stop fucking around and start solving problems. One of the many things that helps keep the world sucky is that everyone is able to go off and say "but god will provide" rather than just, like, providing. We could put way more of society's resources into solving aging, world hunger, etc. if people got off their asses and got serious about things like death. I don't know how far immortality is--50 years, 500 years, 1000 years, all reasonable estimates. But one of the neat things about atheism and not believing in souls is, that's actually a problem that could be solved. But as long as there's a soul and an afterlife and a god dictating human morals, and letting most people just say "but the church of whatever is in Africa solving malaria, isn't that neat?" we won't ever really get something like a government that says "you know, let's take making the world better into our own hands and make the world concretely better by actually coordinating resource usage and spending money".
I blame humanity for cases like this. We couldn't even handle covid. We should have been able to, but everyone was busy going "but challenge trials are unethical, we must go through the government-prescribed mechanisms that are okay". We could have had vaccines in a month. I don't know how far along cancer research would be if people stopped fucking around with this stuff, but it's the same mindset as religion: someone wrote a bible, and we now believe in the higher power of medical ethics whether or not they make sense. Can't do it faster, can't do it differently, just have to follow it through blindly. This is equivalent to the capacity for religion and comes from the same place. Again, I don't know how far cancer would be. But a hell of a lot further than it is now.
The fundamental underlying problem when it comes to medical ethics is that the belief in an afterlife gives everyone an out when it comes to medicine. The worse dying seems to people, the more we'd be trying to solve it. Anything that takes away from that directly takes resources away from medicine, climate change, etc. This mindset is what lets Musk and Bezos go off and be like "I'll spend billions going to mars!"
And I haven't even got into how arguing over whose god is better is responsible for the entire middle east yet.
But, as for why I suggest this--well, if you're angry at humanity, that's actionable. There's things you can do about it if you feel the need: donate to cancer research, lobby the government, protest. Get involved in clinical trials. Not so much for blind people, but for sighted people go off and volunteer somewhere. Whether or not you believe in a god doesn't matter so much, but it's always important to remember that being angry at god isn't an anger you can do anything about. Either there isn't one, or there is, and if there is it's so powerful that your anger can't ever matter. If you get angry at people instead, there's ways to get them to listen, even if you're just a small drop in a bigger bucket.
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