Understanding Religion's Relationship To Human Social Systems

  ​  @catfinity8799  asks: re "If there is no God, what is good?" --- Right off the top of my head, here is a multi-faceted and completely fair reply : If there is a "God" (whatever that is), we're still left struggling to make ethical-values assessments for ourselves. As evidence for that: Billions of Christians and even more theists can't agree on what attitudes, concepts, and behaviors should make any deity's list" of "what is good". The God-hypothesis neither prevents nor resolves divergence of values. It only does so in random pockets. But then it pits all those randomly divergent pockets of theists against each other; - making it impossible for humanity to harmonize their values. Because when a person thinks their values are gifted to them from an infallible source which they have well-understood, it makes that person less able (often even outrighted incapable) of questioning those alleged revelations. - Be...

For now, I'll just start with a few key issues; in no particular order. 1. Atheism isn't a worldview or a values system. It's like being a non-astrologist, or a non-Leprechaun-ist. If someone doesn't believe in leprechauns in general, or if they more specifically don't believe in "The Eternal King of the Leprechauns", this really doesn't inform their personal views and values. 2. For context, I don't identify as an "atheist". The term "atheist" means "not a theist". The term "theist" means "believes in a god". The term "god" means: whatever the invoker wants it to mean. Therefore, the term "atheist" fails to make any meaningful distinction, because the term "god" fails to provide its own meaning. However, ... 3. Once a god-word-invoker does clarify their meaning, then (in that context) the term "atheist" can be contextually meaningfu...