Just to make it clear, I wasn't actually talking about you specifically or your own personnal beliefs and values on which I know pretty much nothing since I don't know you nor do I know what's your faith (I suspect some form of Christianity). I was making a point on the fact that some religious people teaches values derived from their personnal faith that are harmful. Some, often the same, teach their children very false things that have very bad impact on their children's life. Some, often the same as the two precedent, encourage or even force their children to be isolated from the rest of society. These are very bad things. They aren't strictly confined to religious people either. While much less heard from, it could be possible to see some secular people do the very same thing with similarly bad results. In other words, I was making a point against sectarism and cultism.
For the record, while I'm not Christian or religious and have a strong moral opposition to many doctrines and values of Christianity, I don't think Christianity has a whole is harmful for while I might be opposed to many of it's doctrines and values, a religion is more then just as set of doctrines, morals and sacred texts. It's also a community of people who all perceive and incarnate those values and doctrines differently.
I will also take some offense to the fact you basically present my values and beliefs as being no difference then some sort of caricatural version of nihilism and individualism both of which are basically anathema to humanism.
But you didn't say "some". You made a blanket statement that came across as extremely ignorant of what the average Christian is like (backwoods hicks that never talk to anyone). Chances are, you know a Christian or two, but they probably will not tell you so. Today's Christians are extremely closeted, despite an age of so-called "religious tolerance" (what this really means is extreme antipathy toward Christianity, which has become more and more live and let live since the Reformation, while tolerating religions that don't tolerate Western civilization).
I'm a syncretic Christian with Buddhist, Taoist, and some New Age thought but I'm a bit more aggro than most of these religions, since I don't really like taking garbage from ppl.
I have known several ex-Christians. Without exception, all of them are at some level nihilistic. They can't help but be, there is no guiding sense of hope for their life. And no, I don't believe that Christianity is the only way to God, despite Jesus saying this (I believe he was referring to a personal relationship with the divine). I read that statement a different way. The point is, without religion of any sort, I see a few main behaviors.
Either (1) they support throwing hard objects at people who disagree with them (
these are not devout Christians), (2) are in love with Big State despite history repeatedly showing us that
we cannot trust our government to protect us once we are disarmed, (3) believe in
overpopulation and want to sterilize themselves or others even with little or no travel to verify that other areas are as populated, (4) they are transgender (
see above on sterilizing) and taking hormones that heighten depression and mood swings, (5) actively trying to cause their own deaths through poor decisions, (6) depressed, or (7) hedonistic.
I know this, because I have been in this exact place. Without a purpose that keeps you going, you become lost in crappy ideas, almost like this.
Oh yes, they seem good at the time, but unlike you who are backpedaling to "some" I honestly can say that none of the people I have known have ever made perfect decisions. Not one of them.
