Religion is a Mental Illness

I think you just answered your own question. Do you know what a “coping mechanism” is?

By your own admission, you don’t even believe in it because it’s “true,” you follow it because you can’t think of another answer or another way to stop being anxious and scared about the fact you won the cosmic lottery and, due to a long reproductive lineage, you get to exist for something in the order of 80-ish years, in an indifferent universe.

Why aren’t you confronting and addressing that fear, rather than masking it with superstitions and myths?

I respect people. I respect your right to have those beliefs. And I expect you to respect my right to have my non-belief. And express it, just as you express yours.

I don’t respect unsubstantiated bronze-age superstitions (or any other silly magical claims) that are beneath the modern intelligence, morality and empathy of the human race. I think you need to learn the difference. If you want your belief respected, show that it deserves respect by demonstrating that it is actually “true.”

Help is available. You don’t have to live with self-medicated coping mechanisms (your words) if you’re experiencing distress and anxiety over the unreasonable expectation that you should be able to mentally figure out the entire universe and consciousness and existence, rather than living it. There are modern day, real-life professional people who can help give you better tools than aligning your emotional state with the oral myths of illiterate goat-herders who didn’t know bats aren’t birds and thought stars could fall to the Earth.

I cannot fathom why you wouldn’t seek modern advice and assistance from a trained, objective professional, with our greatest understanding, our best knowledge, rather than trying to subjectively infer the answers from the scribblings of long-dead people who thought the universe looked like this.

I think you’re missing the fundamental point.

It could be the most free-flowing, feel-good, flowery, hippy crap in the world. (Although that would probably horseshoe back around to “cult” territory, but whatev.)

But is it true? Can you actually prove it? Can you demonstrate that it’s well supported, and there are very good reasons to believe it?

Do you even care if your beliefs are true?

Do you believe things because you want to understand the world around you, to navigate and interact with it in a way that matches reality, or simply to medicate your feelings? Do you believe it because it’s our best, most accurate understanding of the world we live in, or because you would feel sad if it wasn’t true?

Believing things because it makes you feel better does not produce truth or accuracy. Believing things for “feelings” reasons is how we got the Holocaust. It’s how we get pretty much every bigotry ever.

If you can’t substantiate your supernatural claim, then it doesn’t even matter how not-”restrictive and controlling” it is - what you’re talking about is quite simply complete nonsense.

Related: https://religion-is-a-mental-illness.tumblr.com/post/180200447127