Got Bog from Heinlein. I nice positive side effect of shedding mental handcuffs is that I restarted my sci-fi reading career, and being out for 20 years left me with a huge green pasture ;)
I also think my own break with religion started with an emotional experience, or perhaps the experience just broke the dam of all the mental incoherence I have piled up under the carpet. I saw pics from Haiti of medical workers piling up children’s bodies; I ‘knew’ then that if god exists he does not give a crap about things I care about; I was never ‘religious’ enough to think that me and my children are any ‘better’ than what I saw in front of me. The rest was a trivial exercise in comparison (mostly historical research and some logic).
In general the problem with religion that it’s a web of beliefs, and people cannot extricate themselves one strand at a time, the strands simply tend to regrow (though weaker, I think). You need a powerful emotional experience to pull enough threads all at once.
Funny, of course I know it—Russian was my first language, but somehow I parsed it as being a whimsical made up word; I knew I was out of practice, but not this much!
Got Bog from Heinlein. I nice positive side effect of shedding mental handcuffs is that I restarted my sci-fi reading career, and being out for 20 years left me with a huge green pasture ;)
The exact opposite happened to me: I read a bunch of sci fi, and since very few of the authors I read were religious, I was essentially getting an atheistic worldview through books. That conflicted with my religious beliefs, and God lost.
Got Bog from Heinlein. I nice positive side effect of shedding mental handcuffs is that I restarted my sci-fi reading career, and being out for 20 years left me with a huge green pasture ;)
I also think my own break with religion started with an emotional experience, or perhaps the experience just broke the dam of all the mental incoherence I have piled up under the carpet. I saw pics from Haiti of medical workers piling up children’s bodies; I ‘knew’ then that if god exists he does not give a crap about things I care about; I was never ‘religious’ enough to think that me and my children are any ‘better’ than what I saw in front of me. The rest was a trivial exercise in comparison (mostly historical research and some logic).
In general the problem with religion that it’s a web of beliefs, and people cannot extricate themselves one strand at a time, the strands simply tend to regrow (though weaker, I think). You need a powerful emotional experience to pull enough threads all at once.
Incidentally, this is a big benefit on the something to protect emphasis here.
You probably know this, but Bog is the Russian (similar in other Slavic languages) word for God.
Funny, of course I know it—Russian was my first language, but somehow I parsed it as being a whimsical made up word; I knew I was out of practice, but not this much!
The exact opposite happened to me: I read a bunch of sci fi, and since very few of the authors I read were religious, I was essentially getting an atheistic worldview through books. That conflicted with my religious beliefs, and God lost.