Human consciousness, particularly the higher functions, is volitional. We do have the choice to employ critical thinking or to abstain and just swallow, say, whatever religion is fashionable in our environment, however implausible. To do this we avoid all aspects of the religion that are implausible (drinking blood gives us eternal life, just like with vampires, a loving god is for killing children and I believe it ... no, I don't believe these primitive, brutal formulations are from primitive man but from an omniscient loving god, etc.). All these parts of the book one has to evade to believe the religion is valid. My focus is on me, and that's why I disappeared from the forum for months. This religion is implausible and the only way not to know it is to subvert reality testing, rationality, and reason ... and replace it with faith and indoctrination ... which is completely within the fundamental choice inherent in human consciousness.

Do you actually think this response is a valid defense against my critique of your approach? Do you want to try again to actually address my critique?

Of course not. It's all about him.

On that note, what do think about my agnostic Deist with Christian hopes?

Completely misguided - you are doomed to eternal damnation. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

There is only eternal death (non-existence) in my reality. I would prefer the $200 and eternal life.

The agency of human beings is an option in consciousness period. So obviously it is an option when it comes to religion. That is exactly what I spelled out so it does apply directly.

Of course the avoiding humiliation point is valid, but how many lying ass apologies have to be suffered before one decides going soft doesn't work. I am not trying to convert people here, but am arguing against the deceptive apologetics. So I don't have to play nice. It gets what it deserves.

One needs to be unlimited in their delusion and self-delusion in order to argue philosophically for this religion as literal, or, just totally zone out and say, "I believe it." The second option is actually superior to the first, and way more honest ... it's just that they have not activated their potential agency. Because ...

Nobody on a desert island by themselves decides that Jesus is the savior if I just accept him and drink his blood I'm saved and live forever. THAT is a cult, and cults operate by subsuming those who don't activate agency. However, people on a desert island, i.e. those not indoctrinated, can arrive at a variety of more realistic philosophies of life.

You know what is the end game for the religion if you put it on the table, and therefore you won't put it on the table. And every device under the sun, worthy of Ecclesiastes, is employed to circumvent and evade. When a book has a loving god who validates killing children and blood drinking, slavery, rape ... you know what that means. Apocryphal.

Rhetoric:

Was it an omniscient, loving god portrayed in the Old Testament ... and therefore all the writings there reflect and are indicative of omniscience and love?

Or, do the writings there reflect a brutal and ignorant primitive man and society, with all the themes strangely, in the Bible, paralleling his own beliefs (savagery, misogyny, superstition, magic, racism, authoritarianism, slavery, ignorance ...)?

The former.

Are savagery, misogyny, superstition, magic, racism, authoritarianism, slavery, and ignorance BAD?

Well, they are Jehovah's nature then, at least anyway ... right?

Answer my question first, then I will answer your question.

Reminder of my question: Are slavery, misogyny, magic, ignorance, etc. BAD?

Many things in the Good Book are immoral and, as often practiced, those are some of them.

If god tells you to go kill all the people in the neighboring town or country, maybe keep their maidens for your own purposes ... will you do it? He never changes, and he's done it before ... so he's very liable to do it again. Do you massacre the neighboring town at his command?

Nothing on your list is advocated by God ANYWHERE in the Bible (with two slight caveats):

While pre-Civil War chattel slavery is condemned in Scripture, there ARE types of "slavery" that are not necessarily condemned, for example:

Paying off a debt by working for the person you owe money too.

Incarcerating criminals would also qualify as "slavery".

In the US, I would call jury duty slavery (i.e. involuntary servitude)

Bad old joke:

If you were in court on a capital murder charge, would you want you fate decided by twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty?

Both the New Testament and Tradition teach that there are no more new revelations from God forthcoming.

Anything God would tell me today would either be already explicit in the Bible, or would be logically deducible from Scripture.

God might "remind" me of a particular idea already explicit in the Bible. But He would not reveal to me any NEW revelation.

Revelation ceased after the death of the last apostle (probably John).

Who decides what is moral and what is immoral?

One of the fictitious thousands of gods?????

Most all religions are attempts to understand origins and attempts to be good (a few totally cynical ones, devised on bets among cynics, say, exempted) ... but most all traditional religions are attempts to understand what is good and moral, at least in part. No objection to that, but when better standards came along, better standards came along ... and should be used. And the dueling religion thing, "the rest of you all that don't believe right are going to hell," was a divisive, immoral, cynical, evil move for market share via threat.

For some people, that's the only place they have.

1. Is it immoral to be divisive? If so, why? (n.b. Boldly declaring a controversial truth is ALWAYS divisive.)

2. What makes something immoral?

3. Is it morally wrong to be cynical? If so, why?

4. Who decides what makes something evil? You? Me? Popular vote? Might makes right?

5. 11 of the 12 apostles were martyred. The other one died in forced exile. Please tell me how they benefitted from their "divisive" beliefs.

1. Good philosophy, and therefore good religion, is inclusive.

2. Morality of course is rife with complications. To cede it to primitive man who imagined that stoning children was the good, and therefore attributed it to their god, is the height of folly. Passing it off to one of the uncountable gods is to forfeit agency.

3. Yeah cynicism is immoral. It's insincere and counterproductive and anti-life.

4. Once again, because morality is complicated, many just default and say "Some invisible god will tell us. Hey, the same one that talked about stoning children, killing homosexuals, killed millions, beat your slaves who are your property for life is all cool ... the same one who supposedly created man with a need for psychological sovereignty but is an utterly authoritarian god," just lol at the contradictions.

5. They benefited by joining the cult which is what they wanted to do. Just like cult members everywhere. It is mankind who is affected detrimentally by divisiveness. Philosophy is for the benefit of the human race, not the one's "chosen" by somebody's favorite god. The guys who flew the planes into the WTC and Pentagon were martyrs ... and they have the exact same justification, that god told them to do it and is behind them, that every other religion does. Which would be zero justification.

6. The whole "they died for it" claim as an argument for a religion's truth is also a zero. A cult died recently, voluntarily, thinking that a spaceship was coming to get them behind that comet. All the martyrs for religion are bullshyt, not just "all the ones but mine." Every religion under the sun says theirs are the just and true martyrs. Is there a problem with that? Is there a problem in the world because of that kind of thinking?

7. Whatever. People change their religion if and when they want to. I'm against deceptive apologetics tainting what is such a fascinating inquiry into the reality of the situation. And no, it wasn't solved by illiterate superstitious people thousands of years ago nor in anyone's Sunday School kindergarten class.

This is a good spot for further examination. You seem to be assuming and projecting a certain level of agency onto others in error. How do I know this? Because I used to do it (and still probably do unintentionally).

People do forfeit their agency, but that isn’t why we get stuck. We get stuck because we don’t have enough agency to slay the next (bigger) dragon, so rather than fail and live in awareness of the failure, we fail and blind ourselves to it by forfeiting agency, retreating back to the comfortable and familiar.

So the forfeiting of agency is more of a result rather than an original cause. It’s true going through the development of unlocking more agency first requires that we cease forfeiting our already accessible agency, but we can’t make it through this process without the reconciliation of hurt/defeated aspects of the mind, a process in which pressure and force are counterproductive.

Now, once someone is together and they are only missing that last bit of agency that they need, then those people can turn that pressure and transform it into motivation. The “true believers” that you focus on are not there yet.

Yeah no sh&t. It's an effect of "life," but it's a cause of what they do with religion.

You seem to be hyper focused on blame rather than actually making progress and solving problems, which makes you no different than what you claim to oppose.

Nope. I oppose dogma and apologetics that reject science, ignore reality and insult the search for actual answers. Amen.