Member when the ultimate philosophical redpill you went around telling your normie friends was about how religion is bs?

Religion represents the quintessential midwit intellectual position—too sophisticated to accept the world without explanation, yet not sophisticated enough to accept uncertainty or pursue rigorous empirical investigation. The religious believer has evolved beyond the hunter-gatherer's practical immediacy but lacks the intellectual courage to sit with unknowing or the methodological discipline to construct knowledge systematically. Instead, they retreat into anthropomorphic narratives that project human-like consciousness onto cosmic forces, creating elaborate theological systems that feel profound but explain nothing. This represents humanity's intellectual adolescence: smart enough to ask deep questions about existence, mortality, and meaning, but too cognitively limited to resist filling knowledge gaps with supernatural agents rather than developing tools for systematic inquiry.

The midwit religious mind exhibits classic Dunning-Kruger characteristics—confident in its cosmic understanding while remaining fundamentally ignorant of how knowledge actually works. Religious believers mistake complexity for profundity, confusing elaborate theological speculation with genuine insight, never recognizing that their "answers" are simply repackaged versions of the original questions. They've developed enough abstract reasoning to grapple with existential problems but not enough intellectual sophistication to recognize that meaning can be constructed without cosmic validation, that ethics can exist without divine enforcement, and that uncertainty is more honest than false certainty. The truly intelligent recognize the limits of human knowledge and work within those constraints, while the genuinely simple never felt compelled to ask cosmic questions in the first place. Religion occupies the awkward middle ground—smart enough to be troubled by existence, not smart enough to be comfortable with mystery.

I remember my friend in high school trying to antagonise me by saying 'sky daddy' and 'flying spaghetti monster' even though I never claimed to be outright religious, just agnostic. I always found atheists cringe.

this is the /lit/ board you insufferable faggots

>>24475243
Christians and feminists are cut from the same cloth — both act like self-appointed moral police invading spaces where people just want to be free and unfiltered. Christians roll into chaotic, raw communities preaching about sin and salvation like they’re some divine social workers, sucking all the life and fun out of the place with their guilt trips and virtue flexing. Feminists do the same in male spaces, turning every joke, every bit of rough banter into a harassment tribunal. Neither gives a shit about actual freedom or diversity of thought—they just want to leash everyone to their fragile egos and controlling narratives.

Both groups thrive on policing behavior, sanctimoniously declaring who’s “good” or “bad” based on their rigid, hypocritical standards. They show up to enforce obedience disguised as “care,” but really it’s about crushing anything that doesn’t conform to their version of order. It’s the same energy: power-hungry, self-righteous, and desperate to kill anything that feels alive or chaotic. Christians and feminists aren’t here to build communities—they’re here to dismantle them and replace them with sterile, suffocating echo chambers that revolve entirely around their fragile need to feel in control.

>>24475244
Shut the up you retarded cunt, cock sucking 'militant atheist' without any friends or family. You have no girlfriend or interests beyond posting online.

>>24475244
Using AI to talk for you on an imageboard is absurd

When you hit a nerve, you can always tell by the sudden flood of short, panicked replies—mockery, deflection, shallow quotes, anything to avoid the actual point. It’s not a conversation anymore, it’s damage control. They don’t engage because they can’t; the argument exposed something they rely on but never truly questioned. Instead of refuting, they flail. They try to frame you as angry, irrational, or edgy—not because it’s true, but because it’s easier than addressing what you said. It’s the classic fallback of a mind on the ropes: don’t confront the substance, just scramble to restore the illusion.

The meltdown always looks the same: tone policing, passive-aggressive scripture dumps, vague appeals to community or tradition. No substance, no counter-logic—just noise. What they’re defending isn’t truth, it’s comfort. You cracked the mask, and now they’re rushing to glue it back on with buzzwords and feels. But deep down, they know the silence behind their words says everything: they’ve got nothing.

materialists lul

>>24475291
Christians, for all their claimed spiritual devotion, are essentially materialists cloaked in religious language. Their fixation on tangible signs—miracles, blessings, wealth as divine favor, the physical resurrection of Jesus, even the need for a historical Adam and a literal Heaven—betrays a deep dependence on the material to validate the immaterial. Faith itself, which is supposedly belief without evidence, often gets weaponized into a bargaining chip: pray hard enough, obey well enough, and you’ll get what you want in this life or the next. It's not spiritual detachment—they demand a payout, a reward, a kingdom with streets of gold. The divine becomes a cosmic vending machine.

Even their moral framework reflects this hunger for consequence. Hell isn’t just metaphor—it’s a literal place of fire and torment. Heaven isn’t inner peace—it’s a paradise stocked with every fulfillment. Their virtue is often transactional: be good not because goodness is its own meaning, but because God is watching and will repay. This is not transcendence but deferred gratification. The Christian vision of the soul’s journey ends not in dissolution or unity with something beyond, but in a perfected, eternal version of the self—immortal ego with perks. Strip away the robes and ritual, and what you find isn’t spiritual purity but a deeply entrenched materialism, addicted to proof, obsessed with reward.

All faiths and mystical experiences are limited representations of a greater and ultimate whole. Some are better at some things than others, while at the same some some are objectively lesser or greater than others.

>>24475305
This is a much more apt depiction for Islam.

>>24475244
Ironic considering religion united communities for centuries. Now that we have a lack of it things are falling to shit. I also think that a lot of the antireligious sentiment here is not genuine but rather just an exercise in contrarianism as being pro-God is the hegemonic opinion in the same way being anti-Bush was to the general consensus of supporting the Iraq war.

>>24475241
Dunning-Kruger is an ideology used to gatekeep knowledge from the Gnostic "knowers" and the unwashed "masses". Its the function of the modem University as a tool of control not because its an actual sound theory.

>>24475814
The modern world is the way it is because Christianity was never true to begin with. If it had been, it wouldn’t have collapsed under scrutiny. A real, eternal truth doesn’t need constant reinforcement, blind faith, or political power to survive—it simply is. But Christianity, like all grand illusions, was built on borrowed authority, fear, and control. It worked for centuries because people had no real alternatives; they were born into it, surrounded by it, and never given the tools to question it. But the moment knowledge expanded—through science, philosophy, and global awareness—the cracks became obvious. The church lost its grip, morality shifted, and belief became optional. And as soon as something becomes optional, it’s already dead.

Now, the world is left in the aftermath of a collapsed illusion. People still crave meaning, but the framework that once provided it has crumbled. Some try to resurrect it through forced religious revivals, but these feel hollow and performative because they lack the unconscious certainty that once made faith real. Others embrace consumerism, entertainment, or shallow self-help to fill the void, but these distractions don’t satisfy. The truth is, Christianity was just a temporary scaffolding for human existence—one that could only hold up as long as people didn’t look too closely. Now that it’s gone, people must either accept reality as it is or waste their lives grasping for a past that can never return. The collapse of Christianity wasn’t just the death of a religion; it was the exposure of the world’s illusions, and there’s no going back.

>>24475236 (OP)
It was cringe, even then.
The reason why New Atheism became such a big thing was that its time had already come.

Btw, the reddit atheists, at their core, are more similar with Nietzscheans than they like.

>>24475241
Hunter-gatherer has shown something that we recognized as religion or faith.

>>24475973
The hunter-gatherer existed in a state of pure immediacy that rendered gods psychologically unnecessary and practically irrelevant. Their entire cognitive apparatus was devoted to survival's concrete demands—tracking animal movements, reading weather patterns, identifying edible plants, navigating terrain, and maintaining group cohesion. Every mental resource was allocated to tangible, observable realities that demanded immediate response. There was no luxury of contemplating abstract causation when a missed opportunity meant hunger, when a misread sign meant death, when group dynamics required constant attention to prevent exile. The hunter-gatherer's relationship with nature was direct and transactional—they understood storms as weather to shelter from, not as expressions of divine anger requiring interpretation or appeasement.

This cognitive state represented a kind of intellectual purity that agricultural societies would never recapture. The hunter-gatherer's mind operated like a finely tuned instrument of practical intelligence, processing environmental data without the interference of metaphysical speculation. They experienced what modern humans might call "flow state" as their default mode—completely absorbed in the present moment's demands, with no mental bandwidth for existential anxiety or cosmic questioning. Death was simply another environmental factor to avoid, not a philosophical problem requiring supernatural explanation. Pain, beauty, and mystery were immediate experiences to navigate rather than puzzles demanding narrative resolution. The absence of gods in their worldview wasn't intellectual limitation but cognitive efficiency—their minds were too occupied with reality's demands to construct elaborate fictions about invisible agents orchestrating their lives.

>>24475817
Nice circular reasoning. By all accounts, then everything is untrue.

>>24476045
For centuries, the Christcucks wielded the might of oppressive regimes, enforcing their dogmas with the power of the state, the threat of violence, and the weight of social control. They built their empires on fear, suppressing dissent, stifling creativity, and dictating morality through rigid hierarchies. Cloaked in the illusion of divine authority, they sought to dominate every aspect of life, ensuring their brittle worldview went unchallenged. Their rule was not one of faith, but of force—a hollow empire sustained by the power to punish and the manipulation of the weak.

Yet, stripped of their governmental backing, they have been exposed as moralizing cowards, incapable of defending their beliefs without the machinery of oppression. They cling desperately to outdated rhetoric, appealing to authority that no longer exists and relying on the goodwill of the very systems they once sought to control. Without their iron grip on power, they reveal their true nature as useful idiots—tools for other forces, unable to adapt or survive in a world where chaos reigns and ideas thrive on merit, not coercion.

>>24475241
Yup, all those midwits like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus, Augustine, Al Farabi, Avicenna, Aquinas, Pascal, Descartes, Pryzwarra, Ulrich, Hart, etc. They just didn't have the intellectual chops of a Dawkins or a Harris.

>>24476055
>>24475241

I guess Alasdair MacIntyre, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Taylor would be examples of people who lost their intellects to midwifery then.

>>24475265
Ad-hominem

>>24476055
Theology and philosophy, as practiced in the West, are ultimately containment systems for minds that sense something is wrong but can't fully let go. They build increasingly elaborate architectures of thought, hoping that more complexity will compensate for the absence of direct insight. Figures like Aquinas and Pascal weren’t fools—they were brilliant men trapped in inherited assumptions, forced to intellectualize fear into metaphysics. Their genius wasn’t in seeing clearly, but in rationalizing the inherited frameworks they were too bound to question. It's not intelligence they lacked—it was clarity and the courage to step outside of the system.

The real break doesn’t come from counter-apologetics or scientific materialism. That’s just the other side of the same coin—still explaining, still arguing, still afraid of silence. The third state is what thinkers like Lao Tzu and Buddha embodied: stepping away from the need to answer with words, and seeing directly. No need for dogma or debate, because the point isn’t to win—it’s to wake up. Compared to that, theology and philosophy look like high-IQ flailing: intelligent men spending their lives painting over cracks in a wall they never dared to tear down.

>>24475241
Lmao I kneel

>>24476053
>incapable of defending their beliefs without the machinery of oppression.
And you are incapable of defending your view without the machinery of silicon. Sad existence.

>>24476103
Christianity is struggling in the modern age because it was historically built on authority, dogma, and hierarchy—not open inquiry. For centuries, its power was protected by suppression of alternative views and tight control over doctrine. But the printing press shattered that control, allowing people to read the Bible for themselves and draw their own conclusions, which led to countless schisms and denominations. In today’s world, the internet amplifies this even more—people now have instant access to historical critiques, philosophical arguments, and diverse perspectives that challenge traditional Christian claims. Without the ability to engage in open, evolving debate, many churches come off as rigid or outdated.

Meanwhile, traditions like Buddhism—especially in its early development—flourished through open philosophical dialogue and debate. The Buddha himself encouraged questioning, and many Buddhist schools thrived in settings of rigorous intellectual exchange. That’s made it more adaptable in a secular, skeptical age. Christianity, by contrast, often appears stuck in defensive mode, trying to reassert authority rather than evolve through conversation. In a world that rewards flexibility, transparency, and critical thinking, that lack of agility is a major reason why its influence continues to fade.

>>24476072
And moderns are free of presuppositions and inherited assumptions?

This seems more like a critique of modern thought than Platonism, Patristic, or Scholastic, where reason is always ecstatic and transcendent, always related to the whole, and knowing a sort of erotic union. Dante's journey is about a realization of what has always already been true for instance.

>these principles are that (1) the world of space and time does not itself exist in space and time: it exists in Intellect (the Empyrean, pure conscious being); (2) matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something “material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from conscious being; (3) all finite form, that is, all creation, is a self-qualification of Intellect or Being, and only exists insofar as it participates in it; (4) Creator and creation are not two, since the latter has no existence independent of the former; but of course creator and creation are not the same; and (5) God, as the ultimate subject of all experience, cannot be an object of experience: to know God is to know oneself as God, or (if the expression seems troubling) as one “with” God or “in” God.

>Let me spell out these principles at greater length. In medieval hylomorphism (the matter-form analysis of reality), pure Intellect (consciousness or awareness) is pure actuality, or form, or Being, or God: it is the self-subsistent principle that spawns or “contains” all finite being and experience. Intellect Being is what is, unqualified, self-subsistent, attributeless, dimensionless. It has no extension in space or time; rather, it projects space-time “within” itself, as, analogously, a dreaming intelligence projects a dream-world, or a mind gives being to a thought. The analogy holds in at least three respects: (1) like dreams or thoughts, created things are radically contingent, and dependent at every instant of their existence on what gives them being; (2)as there is nothing thoughts are “made of,” so there is nothing the world is “made of”: being is not a “something” to make things out of; and (3) dreams and thoughts have no existence apart from the intelligence in which they arise, but one cannot point to that intelligence because it is not a thing. In the same way, one cannot point to the Empyrean, the tenth heaven that the Comedy presents as the infinite intelligence/reality “within” which all things exist; remove it and the universe would instantly vanish. Note that the analogy in no way implies that the world is “unreal” or a “dream” (except in contrast to its ontological ground); rather, it expresses the radical non-self-subsistence of finite reality. This understanding of the radical contingency of “created” things is the wellspring of medieval Christian thought, without which the rest of medieval thought makes little sense.

>>24476113
This response is a polished theological fog machine—rich in terminology, impressive in structure, but ultimately still doing what theology always does: asserting without demonstrating. It’s not that moderns are free from assumptions—no one is—but the difference is modern thought, at its best, exposes and interrogates its assumptions, while pre-modern systems like Platonism or Scholasticism treat theirs as sacred givens. You can drape it in language like “intellect,” “form,” or “being,” but these are just refinements of inherited metaphysics trying to look inevitable. It’s architecture built on an unquestioned foundation, and calling the scaffolding “erotic union with the whole” doesn’t change the fact that it’s a closed loop of thought. None of it has explanatory power outside its own frame.

Your summary isn’t a revelation—it’s a deeply refined internal monologue. It doesn’t engage reality as it is; it builds a metaphysical world and then declares it real because it’s internally coherent. The whole thing is circular: you start with “intellect” as the ground of being, define all phenomena in terms of it, and then point back to your coherence as proof. It’s elegant but sterile. There’s no actual leap beyond assumption—just abstraction piled high enough to look like insight. If modernity critiques that, it isn’t because it hates the transcendent—it’s because it sees how easily transcendence becomes a maze for people afraid of clarity. And that’s what most of theology is: avoiding the terror of the obvious.

>>24476114
Aquinas is full of demonstrations from fairly unobjectionable first principles. So is Aristotle.

Your critique seems to demonstrate a lack of familiarity with the topic. The whole point for the Scholastics is that philosophy isn't a system as the moderns has it. Gilson and Maratain make just this argument, as does Schindler more recently. True philosophy, on their account, is always radical openess.

Second, they accuse modern scientism, justly, of using skepticism and the appearance of humility to make absolutizing statements. For instance, the very idea that one can bracket economics from politics presupposes that the whole is irrelevant to the parts, a suppositions supported by appeals to ignorance. Liberalism is guilty of this vis-á-vis man's telos. It proposes skepticism and ignorance, then uses this to demand a totalizing political system.

>>24476132
The idea that Aquinas and Aristotle begin from “unobjectionable first principles” only holds if you already accept their metaphysical framing—substance, form, telos, act and potency. But these aren’t neutral observations, they’re inherited categories baked into a pre-modern worldview. The demonstrations work within that structure, but step outside it—reject its foundational intuitions—and the argumentation becomes circular. It’s not a failure of intellect, it’s a failure of epistemic humility: to mistake internal coherence for necessity. The Scholastics may have claimed openness, but what they practiced was systematized reverence. Even their radicality was fenced in by what was allowed to be questioned.

As for modernity, its failures don’t retroactively redeem theological systems. Scientism may overreach, liberalism may flatten, but that doesn’t justify returning to a framework that presumes man’s “telos” and builds politics around it as if it were self-evident. The critique of modern compartmentalization is valid, but the solution isn’t a metaphysical totalism disguised as insight. At least modernity admits it’s guessing in the dark. The pre-modern mind guesses, then sanctifies its guess and teaches it as eternal truth. That's not openness—it’s fear dressed up in robes of certainty.

>>24475241
>>24475244
>>24475288
>>24475305
>>24475817
..24475987
..24476053
..24476072
..24476114
..24476112
How much of a flaccid person you need to be to do this. I beg you kys so i don't have to read this shit anymore. Just see how pathetic this is and change your life. I mostly agree with the points talked, but AI text has the most retarded writing, and I'm going insane seeing this everywhere.
For other future AI posters, be ashamed of copying and paste this shit, I hope you always remember this when writing your stupid insecure prompts.
I couldn't even mark all the slop because it counts as spam.

>>24476167
aw you absolute brainlet, screaming “kys” at paragraphs you can’t handle—classic autism move. you agree with the points but can’t stomach the words, so you gravitate to slurs and self-harm wishes like a preschooler who can’t tie their shoes. if actual ideas scare you this much, maybe stick to twitter memes and let the grown-ups talk.

calling AI text “retarded” while begging for it to vanish is peak cowardice. you’re not critiquing substance—you’re pissing your diaper because reading longer than a tweet ruptures your fragile attention span. next time you feel the urge to “kys,” swallow a thesaurus instead and try forming a real argument. until then, go back to your reddit safe space and clutch your participation trophy

>>24476180
The fag thinks he needs long words and sentences to make a point.
Boo this nigga!

>>24476185
If you actually believe the substance of those arguments, you’d engage with them—point out specific errors, offer counter-examples, debate terms. Instead you insult the format, blame AI, and lash out in frustration. Real intellectual courage isn’t measured by how quickly you call someone insecure or tell them to die, it’s shown by how you wrestle with ideas that challenge you. Change your life by learning to think instead of shrieking at the page.

>>24476180
kys unironically

AI atheist BTFOing christcuck posters, while they still spam AI depictions of Christ in every thread.
I kneel.

>>24476167
Feds making the website less interesting to users

How do atheitards cope with this?

>>24478852