Atheism

Look, I'm a member of your religion, and according to the strict interpretation, you can say fuck, but you can't tell someone that you can or can't say fuck.

And I may have just done that too.

FUCK!

None of the positive things about any religion are unique to that religion.

Or negative things, for that matter. Human ideas are routinely recycled across cultures and creeds.

And those don’t require belief in some mythical deity, nore a priesthood to enforce (their sect’s interpretation of) that deitiy’s rules and demands.

They require a degree of confidence in some institutional organization and a bureaucracy capable of drafting and executing policy.

Those good things are just as possible in a secular society

Only when the members of the society adhere to the fundamental beliefs that underpin the policies themselves. "God" becomes a heuristic for the subsequent consequences of a particular set of social behaviors. But the underlying assumption - that virtuous action yields a more utopian society - is common to secular and sectarian societies alike. And the allure of corruption is as well.

Dogma becomes a means of justifying complex relationships without bogging everyone down with the finer details. You don't understand how the machinery works, but you accept certain inputs and outputs as given.

Tribalism is more a neurological limitation. Dunbar's Number constrains the religious and the atheist alike.

The mistake is in assuming that you can escape the need for heuristics and ignore the baser impulses of human instinct merely by abandoning the aesthetic. You're going to end up adopting superstitions and imperfect models for the world around you whether or not you slap a cross or a crescent on the end belief structure. The universe is too vast and complex to do otherwise.

The funny thing about religion is that, not only do people only subscribe to various fractions of the theology, if you don't believe it all then by some degree you aren't a true follower.

So you end up with a spectrum of believers where any one individual will claim that that who don't believe enough aren't true followers, but those who believe too much are extremists.

It seems to me that if you don't fully believe the theology you shouldn't be a follower. And if you do believe all of it you need psychiatric help.

I think every religion comes with a dessert, I am just not why we need to sign up for the whole package.

A lot of it is just historical baggage and superstition, stacked atop what are fundamentally secular morals and legal codes. You could ask much the same of any modern democratic(ish)ly produced legal system or any cultural obligation/taboo common to your neighborhood. South Carolina just legalized pinball this year, after a 70-year (largely unenforced) moratorium. Imagine if that proscription had been etched into a stone tablet under Hammurabi.

I am curious what are the things that are so special there that you like?

Prohibitions on usury (common to all Abrahamic religions) are a big one. Loan sharking is generally a bad social practice. A state policy that refuses to apply public law enforcement to the job of collections is a net-good for society.

For another, Muslim society supports as many as five distinct genders, which is a vast improvement over traditional western interpretations.

Even just getting down to the core tenants - the Five Pillars of the Islamic belief system - I can count three I generally like. Almsgiving, Fasting, and Pilgrimage all contribute to a plural society of shared wealth, shared sacrifice, and shared identity.

I don't even strictly hate the obligation towards modesty, as sexual tension among young people is a very well-documented and long-standing problem in any mixed-gender space. In the same way we must learn to control our bodily functions as children, we do well to learn to control our hormonal urges as young adults. Westerners largely recognize the utility of prohibition against outright nudity in public and the need for dress codes of one degree or another in schools. So a lot just boils down to the degree of undress.

So much of what rubs people the wrong way about any religion tends to be the mechanisms of enforcement. For the same reason you shouldn't be spanking your kids for wetting the bed, you shouldn't brand someone's face or cut off their nose for showing cleavage or chopping off fingers for shoplifting. Or for the same reason Americans generally support immigration restrictions, but have soured on ICE as a vehicle for enforcement.

It’s not the nice things that annoy me about religion, it’s all the hidden fine details that are buried on page 120 of a 1000 terms and conditions.

In my experience, Atheists can recount the aspects of religious organizations they despise by chapter and verse. But when it comes to the far more benign and broadly held tenants, you'd never know they existed.

No shortage of pimping and child sexual crimes in the secular world. Hell, some of the West's loudest Islamophobes were front seat on the Lolita Express. One of them was chartering the damned thing.