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Atheist Revolution: Let’s Get Solution-Focused

October 28, 2005

Religion offers solutions to deep human needs – meaning, comfort, justice, eternity.  The illusory nature of those promises is well-hidden by the culture that supports them. 

Vjack proposes a cooperative venture among freethinking bloggers to tackle the problem of deep human needs that religion pretends to meet:

… In this post, I call for the beginning of a shift toward a greater focus on solutions to the problems we have identified. We are right to continue addressing the problems until they are more widely acknowledged. However, religious belief endures through the ages in part because it satisfies human needs that are not easily met by the alternatives. Thus, I believe that increased attention to solutions is required to achieve real change …
- Atheist Revolution: Let’s Get Solution-Focused

This one is worth some thought, folks.  We’ve been letting religious charlatans run the show far too long.

Categories: Blogging, Geeky
  1. Annie
    October 29, 2005 at 19:37 | #1

    I’ve been thinking for several years about this increasingly militant form of fundamentalist Christianity that is openly waging war on free-thinking , rational thinking, and scientific thinking. And I agree strongly that it is time, past time, really,  to move to stop the juggernaut of their self-limiting fear-based religiosity.

    However, I disagree with the concept that we need to concentrate on a solution-focussed answer to what are typical human doubts and fears in any culture. Every culture, thoughout history, has attempted to explain what they did not understand by fashioning a creation myth and cosmology. And of course, every society considers its own myth the ONLY accurate and true version. Christianity included.

    In my opinion, a more germane solution would be for each human being to do the difficult work of critical thinking, and to learn through the exploration of our own consciousness the nature of our own mind, and thus the nature of our fears. By understanding the source of our fears(our own psyche) and the true source of comfort for those fears (our own psyche and rational thinking and the application of received and learned knowledge) , each of us may have less need of a supernatural explanation for what is not presently understood.

    The great difficulty with this concept is that it requires a quality of self-awareness which is only achieved through 1)curiosity about what makes ME, as an individual, tick 2)intensely motivated study of human and animal behavior and brain physiology 3) the deliberately developed understanding of the stages of human development and hardest of all, the APPLICATION of this knowledge to oneself AND others to the extent that each of us is able to look selflessly at how our own behaviors are driven by the id, the ego, and the superego.

    Further, the study of ethics illustrates that there is within each of us the potential to comprehend the concept of the greater good which supercedes the needs and desires of one’s own id/ego/super-ego. It is possible to do the ‘right’ thing in response to an internal monitor which is not a supernatural being.

    THIS IS A BIG ORDER. And now we know why religion is so much easier.
    “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
    Sir Joshua Reynolds, Industrialist

  2. basil
    November 18, 2005 at 19:54 | #2

    Geez, Annie,..your deep, your my hero. What do you do, whats your bag ?. Every week I go to church and the pastor says something along the lines of:
    if one doesn’t beleive, than you shall perish in hell for eternity. If the earth is only about five thousand years old, and Chistianity has only been in existance for two thousand years,…the only way to heaven, than why has god sent, presumibly three thousand years of people to hell ?. Why didn’t he or she (god) make the bible when the earth was made?.

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