If love is a verb, there would seem to be required a standard or, if you will, formula for doing it. For me so far it’s, (sorry to repeat) : (1) distinguish my needs from wants: and (2) strive to meet my needs with as little harm and as much benefit to human and nonhuman others as possible. That pertains to my need for food, water, shelter, medicine, transport, and so on. It also pertains to psychological needs such as the need for meaning and belonging and community. —–
I’ve tried to focus on love and not on atheism, per se, due to not wanting to antagonize and alienate religious folk, but it seems hard for me to get away from the idea that the dogma of religion actually makes human beings less moral, by way of distracting us from the key issue of empathy and compassion and filling our minds with convoluted stories about an angry God who demands obedience and sends his son to suffer and die as a sort of proxy payback for our sins. —-
In my opinion, that mentality is based on revenge, blind obedience and the contradiction of a god who loves us more than we can humanly imagine yet will torture us for eternity if we don’t sacrifice our honest and open-minded pursuit of truth on his alter of belief and obedience.
—-All that distracts humans from taking a rational and more clearheaded cause-and-effect approach to living our lives according to our knowledge of how our behavior affects nonhuman and human others, here, now, and into the future.—-I don’t set out to criticize religion, what seems to get in the way of creating a more loving human civilization seems to be the other-wordliness involved with trying to please or appease an oxymoronically all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving god who is also jealous and angry.
—–No offense intended, but if there is such a thing as human progress and such as things as the evolution not only of species, but of human consciousness itself, it might involve subtracting one more god from all forms of monotheism.
Leave a Reply