“Dunno, doesn’t seem much different from explaining that you’re not an evil person, your genes and current programming made you do it, and that you can both let it go—and feel better—AND change your programming so that you don’t do similar things in the future.”
but people don’t get told that they can think along those lines. Unless they see a psychiatrist… The default is for people to suffer lots of bad feelings about themselves. Religion probably acts as a psychiatrist replacement for many people. In fact if you think about what a psychiatrist does, its a lot like having someone to pray to; though most psychiatrists are less judgmental than the Christian god.
“Now, the idea that there’s somebody who loves you no matter what, that might still be attractive. But if everybody learns at a young enough age how to use forgiveness and other methods to address their broken beliefs and judgments,”
since most people currently don’t do this, this is a good potential strategy for rooting religion out. Which was kind of the point of my original comment.
“Dunno, doesn’t seem much different from explaining that you’re not an evil person, your genes and current programming made you do it, and that you can both let it go—and feel better—AND change your programming so that you don’t do similar things in the future.”
but people don’t get told that they can think along those lines. Unless they see a psychiatrist… The default is for people to suffer lots of bad feelings about themselves. Religion probably acts as a psychiatrist replacement for many people. In fact if you think about what a psychiatrist does, its a lot like having someone to pray to; though most psychiatrists are less judgmental than the Christian god.
“Now, the idea that there’s somebody who loves you no matter what, that might still be attractive. But if everybody learns at a young enough age how to use forgiveness and other methods to address their broken beliefs and judgments,”
since most people currently don’t do this, this is a good potential strategy for rooting religion out. Which was kind of the point of my original comment.
reasonable