- whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday....
Having long since seen little point in attending to religious ceremony, or really ceremony generally speaking, I see no reason to commemorate such useless things. So instead I will demonstrate my annoyance with some particular commemorations.
Twisting Fawkes attempt to impose Catholicism into a struggle for freedom is a little off-putting, but otherwise, it is not all that distant the operations of most modern religious institutions and their promises of order, of freedom from thought (rather than of thought), and so on from V's speech.
I suppose if your desire is to depose of your reason and your faculty for tolerance of viewpoints distinct from your own in exchange for an illusory sense of balance and appoint to yourself a label of holy moral judge of the character and habits of others, if your desire is to absolve yourself the responsibility to live in exchange for the presumption of an afterlife, and that always full of reward. If it is to demand of others the conformity to your comfortable assumptions and claims of common sense rather than investigation of wisdom and a discomforting presumption that you might be wrong, then religion is the perfect world for you.
But I'd have to ask how far it has fallen since Aquinas and Augustine and others to make a challenge of free will and the responsibility of engaging and wrestling with one's moral ethical standards over a lifetime somehow a mortal danger worth casting aside in favor of being told what to do and how to live by others.
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Absolutely! I'm always telling people like you what you should be doing.
I just think it really hard, and you know what I'm thinking. It's like ESP.
Perhaps you should consider just how engrained religion is in our society.
You might have missed any of the following as common sets of attributes for us to deal with:
1) Blue laws and that many people get Sundays, rather than whatever day(s) they might choose, off
2) Vice laws (drugs, prostitution, sale of kidneys, etc)
3) Restrictions on sexuality, in particular access to birth control
4) Hostility toward scientific conclusions in biology in particular. Usually physics gets a pass, but I'm not sure if it would in your universe of ideas based on previous comments.
5) Abstinence only education
6) Public and social hostility toward non-Christians, atheists in particular.
7) Non-attendance of church is, in many communities, seen in a very dim view. Non-religious views are often treated as immoral and improper without any analysis applied to how they actually work, ie, they (and the people who hold these nefarious ideas) are dismissed without comment.
The post itself was a response to the general attitude toward atheism by fundamentalist Christians as though having the responsibility of coming up with morals and thinking about the world itself seems to be too grand a task for a human being to take on and that instead, all knowledge should be "received".
I'd consider this very much an idea toward telling other people what to do, and not for telling people like me, but for telling other Christians things like "they have it wrong" or some such in relation to their own faith. Much less the social and legal pressures brought to bear against non-Christians by these same people (prayer in school, abortion should be illegal, homosexuality is a sin, "teach the controversy", revisionist histories of the country and ideology of the US and in particular the relationship with Israel viewed through biblical rather than geopolitical lenses).
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