The Pope recently spoke out against small-L libertarianism (the generally-defined political philosophy of liberty).
The Pope is a totalitarian, and religion, in general, is totalitarian in its goals.
If humans purely thought for themselves, they wouldn't be religious. They'd see that religion was the obvious creation of humans, and that it had nothing valid to offer them. The sociopaths running the religions know this: they know that those who take them seriously do so because they lack a coherent philosophy, or an accurate view of reality. They realize this makes their adherents susceptible to unreasonable suggestions that are above a certain (low) level of plausibility. They know that most children lack the fortitude to reject the unreason of their parents, because they are susceptible to the intellectual mistake of believing that to do so is to reject the love of their parents. (The church encourages this intolerant view, and encourages the belief in mumbo-jumbo, to fill their own coffers.)
Nearly nobody personifies the ocean any longer, offering sacrifices to Poseidon. But people do believe the even less plausible claims of the major religions. Why? There are several good reasons, all of which are explained by #cybernetics and #neuroscience. Ascribing agency to things at the size scale relevant to us(neither planetary nor microscopic) once aided our survival. Without the ability to comprehend malevolent motives, we would all have perished due to predation and parasitism. Although the basic physical laws were eventually described, the science of cybernetics lagged far behind the simpler(once described) laws of physics. For this reason, it never made sense to give a "trump card" to those who claimed scientific or philosophical knowledge. It made sense to say "That's well and good, but your attempts to engineer society are unkind. Kindness is an 'off limits' domain, between me and my God." God still serves this purpose today, as an indescribable "higher value."
...But that's where the religious make their biggest mistake. Empathy and emotional intelligence are real things. To ascribe them to an imaginary god cooked up by bronze-age desert-dwellers is an error. Even worse, it allows the charlatans and frauds of religion to claim the philosophical and moral high ground without repeated reference to external reality. (If my empathy prioritizes different standards than yours, reason and logic still enter the picture. A case can be made that one or both of our values are "defective." A case can be made that one of us should alter our emotions to bring them in line with the reason, or to otherwise minimize suffering in some way. However, if your high value is god, and you claim "he's talking to you" ...reason and logic are entirely out the window.)
All topics and subjects ("knowledge domains") are subject to human reason, even if that capacity for reason is limited. Religion throws out any attempt at reason, and simply says "reason doesn't apply to this subject." How has that worked out, throughout the ages? Terribly. Human reason makes mistakes. ...But it is correctable at any moment, and there need be no "buy in" to any set of ideas.
Religions all demand buy-in, because that's when they can use social connections to pressure you to support the unworthy portions of their cause. This is why all causes should be assessed piecemeal, on their own merits.
There may be philosophies that "get everything right," or there may not be. I'm partial to libertarianism/"classical liberalism"(politics) and objectivism(philosophy), and agorism(political strategy, minus the idiotic incitement to relinquish political participation) ...although I believe that all have made serious errors in thinking that have kept them from reaching their potential to help humankind. In the less uncertain domain of legal theory, I believe Lysander Spooner("An Essay On The Trial By Jury" free online and hard copy) and Clay Conrad("Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine") both favor optimal legal processes, based on restoring proper jury trials. As far as psychology goes, I believe Stanley Milgram's book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View was correct. But even if a philosophy "gets everything right," those claiming to represent it should always be looked at with a critical eye, and nothing should be considered sacred, without very good reason.
For myself, I take "preventing unnecessary suffering" to be a sacred personal value. Sacred "core values" should always be testable. One way to test them is to consider the outcomes that result from them, at the individual level. I've left nightclubs with people who were never arrested for using illegal drugs. ...And I've had friends who overdosed on impure street drugs (which would have been pure, if not for prohibition). ...And I've known people who went to prison for drug use, which ruined their lives and made them resentful, angry, broken people. In both cases, an immense amount of misery and suffering could have been easily prevented simply by doing something that all proper views of History, Economics, Law, and Philosophy suggest should already be the case: legal access to recreational drugs. The only arguments against this condition are always idiotic, flawed, unscientific, and bigoted (but very well-armed and belligerent).
So we just allow the belligerent and coercive to "rule the day"? If so, then Americans are nothing more than cowards. ...Yet we don't advertise ourselves as being a cowardly civilization. (But this is false advertising. We are brave only physically. We completely lack philosophical, "intellectual bravery." ...Those who violently defend incorrect ideas are the opposite of brave: they are too afraid to even consider the idea that they might have been fighting for the wrong side; this fear stems from knowing how violent their side is, and being afraid to make an enemy of it. Such people are only "brave" when they are fighting an enemy they believe to be weaker than themselves, no matter how strong they appear.)
I live by a political "Hippocratic Oath" that says "First, do no harm." For this reason, I favor a restoration of proper jury trials, and due process, as the Founders of the USA intended them to exist. (The Founders believed that the jury had to find both "injury" and "intent" to pronounce a defendant "guilty." Gradually, power-hungry judges stopped communicating this to juries, as a means of enforcing the unpopular "Fugitive Slave Law." Later, when the government seized control of education in the 1880s, there became an incentive to stop teaching jury rights to the general public --lest they stop financing government-controlled "public schools.")
Jeff Sessions, the current totalitarian Attorney General of the USA, is waging a holy war on (some of the safer-than-alcohol) recreational drugs. (He also says secularists are "unfit for government," here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/12/jeff-sessions-said-secularists-are-unfit-for-government.html ) But, of course, there is no such thing as a "war on private property" that isn't simply directed against the holders of that private property. Such private property holders are simply the latest people in a line long of people who have been demonized as "sub-human"(and hence, not worthy of human rights) by illegitimate governments and religions. Usually, governments and religions work together, and that's certainly the case in Sessions' home state of Alabama.
In fact, the Christian church pioneered prohibition. They originated it, because they were deeply upset that natives around the world had plant sacraments that appeared to actually reliably commune with a higher power. Although we now know that plant chemistry explains this phenomenon, the Christians were quick to call such experiences "the work of the devil" ...and murder the natives who experienced such drugs by the thousands.
Cooler heads could have prevailed. The socially tolerant classical liberals of the time could have caused the natives to simply have been left in peace, and the rantings of the peyote prophets could have been categorized as "similar to drunkenness." Instead, Christianity fought to "protect its turf," prohibiting such drug use. In fact, hallucinogenic Morning Glory seeds were the first drug prohibited in the new world, in the early 1500s, at the behest of the Christian church (use was also prohibited from South America, to Mexico under Spanish rule, Spaniards first labeled it "the work of the devil"). In the USA, Morning Glory seed use was banned by the DEA, and they currently pressure or require seed dealers to soak the seeds in poison (methylmercury) to prevent young people from using them as psychedelics (without labeling the packages as such, or providing any warning, of course --because they're sociopaths). (According to: Johnson, Timothy (1999). https://www.amazon.com/CRC-Ethnobotany-Desk-Reference-Johnson/dp/084931187X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=jury-rights-20&linkId=986e3a9392eda4bda10bb32a178baaeb CRC Press. p. 431.)
In any case, the doctrine that the government should prevent us from using certain recreational drugs contradicts the entire concept of property rights. Again: this can be, and is, used as a filter by the existing authorities to determine who is smart enough to detect and resist appeals to bigotry. Those attending churches are not smart enough to notice the self-contradictions. Those mindlessly accepting the prohibitions are not smart enough to organize resistance of any kind against the government (they'd need the concept of absolute property rights, habeas corpus, and the common law to mounts such a defensive legal and political counter-attack).
So, in the prior ways, religion has become a "filtering tool" used to manipulate large enough demographics to control and corrupt elections, and to smear political opponents who believe in absolute property rights as "druggies," or "people obsessed with drugs."
Instead of this, I urge every reader of this message to take a humanist view: that people ought not to be bullied by government that views reality different from them, and that one never knows when one will need absolute property rights, but that when one needs them(such as in Germany in 1938) ...it's often a matter of life and death.
To catalog the crimes of prohibition would be like cataloguing the position of every molecule in a gas piston. ..Nonetheless, gas pressure, like the political beliefs of a population, can be statistically modeled without knowing the details. The history of prohibitionism has been long and full of needless misery and suffering.
The future is scientific and secular, and contains no outmoded prohibitionist ways of thinking.
The idiotic assholes at the DEA who poison morning glory seeds so that experimental teenagers will poison themselves (rather than experience a high that is safer than alcohol intoxication), are the same type of idiotic assholes who punish doctors for prescribing adequate opiate pain medication to sick and dying people. See: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1493549560&sr=1-1&keywords=three+felonies+a+day&linkCode=ll1&tag=jury-rights-20&linkId=7126f750ff077c0664d98009a33557b5
Reason and logic have nothing to do with religion. The primary reason religion still thrives is as a political urge to protect state prohibitionism, as a tool for consolidating power around irrational voting blocs. Beyond that, it persists because people would rather feel good about death, than assess it for the biological disincorporation that it is. Such unrealistic good feelings are delusion, and a very destructive delusion that delays the financing and organization of senescence-preventing technologies.
Religion is unreason in the domain of philosophy. That which restores reason, restores life.
In short, the opposite of religion isn't atheism: it's optimally thoughtful and productive life itself.
