Facing Facts

MY INTELLECTUAL FRIENDS deride my participation on Facebook. It is beneath them, it should be beneath me. Well, as we say, whatever. May my intellectual friends soar to the great moral and intellectual heights to which they evidently aspire, and may they enjoy looking down on Facebook, social media, American culture, me, whatever. One cannot go wrong deriding social media and American cutlure. But I look at it a bit differently. I see value in Facebook, although perhaps not the exact same sort of value envisioned by its billionaire instigators. Facebook, like American culture and society, perhaps simply because it is a reflection thereof, can yield, for example, interesting ideas for essay writers. Since members have the opportunitiy to essentially taylor their facebook experience to their individual proclivities, any negatve experience on the platform can, arguablly, be blamed entirely on the user. Consider the following post, which scrolled down my computer screen in big bright, bold letters: "Christianity is not only false, it is harmful". Anti-religious and anti conservative, anti Trump posts come along often on my Facebook "news feed", interspersed with pictures of cute kittens, big cats, lovely scenery, sports news, and ads for environmental protection organizations. Actually, I like what Facebook spoon feeds me. My personal proclivities prevail. Long live algorythms. I agree with the anti-Christian post, despite the fact that I am a star singer in the gospel singing group at my local senior center. Non religious, but open minded, that's me. I realize that religion exists in human culture for a reason, and I think I understand the reason. Religion is a means of providing people comfort and inspiration, a means of organizing, supporting, sustaining society and civilization, and an attempt by primitive humankind to comprehend and approach nature's creator,to understand the universe. A sort of proto pre science. Science now fills the purpose formally filled by religion. Religion, all religion, is false in the sense that its explanations for existence are long aoutdated, replaced by superior knowledge and superior understanding, provided by science. To the post itself I responded, dealing only with the harmful aspect, as follows: "To whatever extent religion teaches that God speaks to us in books, and that people suffer eternal torment after death, religion is harmful". The notion that God spea to us in books and stories, is patently idiotic, since not only has there never existed a single shred of evidence that God does this, but it is obvious that God speaks to us in much better ways, through nature itself. Goethe said it best: "It is beyond me how anyone can believe that God speaks to us in books, and stories. If the world does not directly reveal itself to us, and if our hearts do not tell us what we owe ourselves and others, then we will surely not learn these things from books, which at best are designed only to give names to our mistakes." Enough said. Books are good tools, but limited, and to elevate any book to the status of sacred is abuse of book. For every book ever written, there is an all too human writer, or writers. Perhaps the most, harmful evil aspect of any religion is that God is a wrathful, vengeful entity who assigns people to eternal damnation and torment in hell. Not even a shred of evidence exists to support this malign, evil, harmful notion. It is entirely the invention of the human mind, of the sometimes misguided human mind. With all the pain and suffering in this world, who in his or her right mind would ven boher to invent or embrace such a horrible, monstrous thought? invent such a monstrous thought?