08-13-2021, 12:45 PM
(08-12-2021, 05:30 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(08-11-2021, 06:33 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: There is enough blame to go around among religions (especially Christianity) and atheism.
Christianity is basically materialist; seeing a battle between spirit and matter, God and Devil. It is also authoritarian and socially conservative, meaning the faithful are deserving and the infidels are to be converted or killed. To say "only bad things get attributed to Christians and all the good things to atheists" makes me wonder what planet or nation you live in, Aspie.
I understand that Germans in the Nazi era belonged to an ancestry that was Christian for about 1000 years. But the Nazis were as Aspie says social darwinists and had gone over to materialism. The Nazis were the ultimate social conservatives, but authoritarian, exclusivist Christianity did not prevent this but paved the way for it. Atheists can believe in ethics, but I agree with Aspie that morality is dimmed by materialist atheism, for even though atheists can still have good ethics and believe in principles, the culture that materialism has spawned over the last 3 centuries is increasingly immoral, and moral relativism is not a sufficient basis for ethics.
Neither atheists nor Christians/Muslims have to be authoritarian social conservatives. That is the main problem with both of them. We need to question authority, not submit to it routinely and blindly, and to value all people and all beings, not to pit religious or racial/ethnic groups against each other and conceive and establish superiority of one over the other, or to conceive of Nature as only something material to be conquered and used for our own devices.
I would say a full and ethical life requires going beyond seeing ourselves and other beings as a "bunch of random cells created randomly", OR seeing our group as spiritual and/or virtuous and other beings as material and/or unworthy. Just how one conceives of divinity does not have to be the traditional, exoteric, authoritarian Christian or Muslim way, or the way of denial. To be spiritual but not religious is a step beyond both.
I see Christianity as anti materialist. The materialist position says there is no soul, no divine, no objective morals, no supernatural, no afterlife. Christianity says all of them exist. Christian ancestry does not mean Christian values. Jesus would not approve of their behavior.
One part of Christianity is anti-materialist -- the part that denies the reality of the eternity of a depraved and corrupt world beginning with the Roman Empire. Pragmatic concerns have never prevented Christians from relying upon the highly-material reality of church buildings, the collection plate, Bibles, church literature, and (in some cases) television. To deal with the emergency that is COVID-19, the Pope told Catholics to stay at home and participate in the Mass through EWTN, cable TV, and a television. Catholic Churches and Catholic events were not to become super-spreaders.
Pure materialism is inhuman. Pure anti-materialism (idealism) is unreal. Apologies to Charles Sanders Peirce.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.