[AnnonUSA]

10 substitutes for religion

Racism
Which is the faith that a certain kind of person is morally and/or intellectually inferior to people like you. It involves you likening yourself to one set of strangers, and distancing yourself from another set because of how they look. It’s herding in it’s most primitive, childish form (based on the easiest, most obvious means of classification) and involves a great deal of denial and clinginess on your part. To adhere to this doctrine you need to be able to ignore truth, and your own personal defects.
Technology
What OS you run on your computer supposedly says everything about your character, your ability to reason and your willingness to conform. Your pursuit of faster, smaller, more powerful technology is really about filling the gaps in your empty life, and gives you something to ponder and to yearn for.
Art
The ability to see some kind of mystical beauty in scribbles is not unlike divining the future from chicken entrails or seeing the spirit world with Ayahuasca. A painting is a painting, a piece of craft, no more significant than needlework or cake-decoration, it may be admirable based on detail and the amount of time and effort put into it, but important? No.
Wealth
For most poor people the pursuit of wealth is tantamount to the pursuit of happiness, which is what your average religion is about. You get 72 virgins by blowing people up, or you can get 72 escorts by paying for them with your Visa. It’s the reward you get for working hard at the right thing, and being smarter than the people who don’t believe in your brand of hard work.
Health
Being overly concerned with your health is the same as the pursuit of everlasting life, the closest thing to eternal happiness you will have on this Earth. You won’t be able to live forever, you will get old and infirm at some point, but in desperation you try to make things better anyway. It’s a means of feeling better than other people, too.
Work
Work gives you a sense of order, a means of classifying people, a way to look down on, and something to aspire to. Life for you is not about achievement or acquiring wealth, it’s about working for others, having your days plotted out for you so that you don’t have to think.
Sex
No matter how many times you have done it before, you keep thinking it will be good at some point. You always have hope in the next encounter, the next orgasm. You ponder, and meditate upon sex, this is what makes your life good, what you pursue.
Love/Romantic Relationships
Pretty much everybody’s idea of the perfect life involves having somebody else in it who thinks highly of them and who craves their happiness, and wants to be with them. There is the hope that this person will show up one day to make everything right. It never happens and everybody settles with the next best thing, but they never stop hoping for better even though it never comes.
Family
It has been so sentimentalized that everybody thinks it is automatically a good thing. It doesn’t matter that there has never been a happy family in the history of families, nor does it matter that your friends are closer to you, still people think that family is at the core of having a happy life.
Education
If you only get educated enough your life will sort itself out, you will be happy, have money and friends, and peace. It never comes no matter how many courses you take, no matter how well you do with material, but you still think that if you just had one more thing to add to your resume, everything will be so much better. It’s also another pedestal from which you can look down on much of humanity.

[TheDriver]

[TheBagman]

You forgot charity.

I'm still waiting to hear about some atheist missionaries who went to some shit hole country like Mexico or someplace in Africa to build houses and schools.

[gilligan]

Originally Posted by TheBagman

I'm still waiting to hear about some atheist missionaries who went to some shit hole country like Mexico or someplace in Africa to build houses and schools.

Keep waiting