Religion and country music have always baffled me and there are a lot of similarities. Both are mostly full of pointless nonsense and both rely on irritating faux-Southern accents to fake sincerity. Religion, apparently, gives the hopeless hope or some such thing. The idea, apparently, is that while this world sucks the next one will be a reward for getting through this one? That seems to me to be a good and useful excuse to do nothing to improve this world. Country music gives the illiterate cornpones something to relate to that isn’t complicated or creatively demanding. There was a long period of my youth where I believed that if I could figure out why people liked country music I’d have the keys to easy fortune. I probably figured it out, but it wasn’t worth the sacrifices I’d have to make to tolerate my victims.
Christianity and assorted cults and superstitions have infested my part of the country so thoroughly that admitting to being a non-believer may be the worst moral failure one can commit. According to several surveys of US citizens, being an atheist makes a person less reliable, less moral, less intelligent, and more unlikeable than practically every other awful thing a human can be. Based on the regular criminal activities, improprieties, and general despicable-ness of Black Collar criminals,it’s hard to figure where religion gets any sort of claim to morality. It’s enough to make me want to migrate northeast to Maine or Vermont where 69% of the population “never attend church or religious services, or go less than once a year,” which is not the same as being atheists but is as rational as the US gets. The top five rational US states are Maine, Vermont (69%), Oregon (65 %), New Hampshire (64%), and Washington state (63%). The closest thing to a “shithole country” in the US, Mississippi, is the most superstitious state at 18%. I was pretty fond of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Washington before reading that data. Now, I’m practically packing to escape Minnesota’s embarrassing 29%.
What has always baffled me about the end goal of almost all religions is the desperate hope for a life-after-death. My father was a less-than-convinced Christian his whole life, but when his final days arrived he was desperate and terrified, the exact opposite of what I’d assumed was the goal in being a Christian. If, after a life of trying to conform to the rules of his religion, he had no confidence in where he was going after death, what was the point? The ONLY thing I can see that religion might provide is that kind of comfort and assurance. If it fails at that, the religion and “faith” has failed entirely.
And that is the point of it all that I am missing. I find absolutely nothing about dying and fading into non-existence to be scary. Life is hard, often cruel, more often disappointing, painful, and, at the end, often incredibly sad. After death, all of that is over and done. I believe, as I have for the overwhelming majority of my days, that I am my brain and the electro-chemical impulses that happen in that small space and large assortment of cells. That’s it. Hit me on the head, hard enough and in the right place, and I might become someone else. That being a known and well-established fact should be enough to blast any delusions or misconceptions about the existence of “soul” outside of rhythmic music appreciation. When my brain dies, the person you and I know as “me” is dead and gone from the universe. Yeah, I know you can’t “destroy” energy, but that electro-chemical energy in my head will become something considerably less organized (“Inconceivable! I know.) and most of it will dissipate as heat. I find absolutely nothing about all of that to be afraid of. I’m a little nervous about the possibility that those last few seconds of my brain shutting down might involve a shitload of pain, but that will last no more than a minute if it happens at all. For me, all of that is a comfort not something I worry about.
Compare that to the obvious fear religious people have of not having been good enough, not having converted enough of the rest of us to their sect, and all of the other fear-inducing concepts behind practically every religion humans have devised. If form follows function, as it always wants to be doing, the function of religion is clearly to provide money, power, and status to the shamans and priests. Good for them, but useless to the rest of us. The forms are the rituals, the rules, and the mind-control tactics, but if they don’t provide comfort when it counts, they are worse than useless. Those forms definitely do not seem to restrict or improve behavior. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions have never demonstrated any sort of improved behavior and are more often used to justify wars, prejudice, inequity, theft and deception, and hate. So, again, I do not see what I am missing by abstaining from magical thinking.
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