>>24670709
Defenders of religion routinely (and, to a large degree, correctly) point out that human beings are hard-wired for religion, which is plainly true. I recall the measured health benefits of prayer, for example, to your point. What they fail to understand is that these secondary observations are entirely beside the point, because the core tenets and detailed truth claims of the religions themselves are also all false, which is also plainly true.
Your mistake is to suggest that because human beings feel better when they adhere to a false belief, that this is a valid justification for the adherence to the false belief, and its social reproduction. It is not, and can never possibly be, because the placement of a falsehood (in particular, god) at the center of your worldview will inevitably poison your negotiations with reality, which are downstream of your psychology and worldview, and become your politics, your daily choices and so forth. To take the current hot-button example as (really valid, and correct) analogy: the tranny issue. Accomodating the delusion of a tranny and forcing others to go along with that delusion, even if it makes them feel better about themselves, is an invalid form of therapy precisely because it is based on a lie. In the case of the tranny issue, the lie is perfectly clear to most. Sadly, when it comes to the god stuff, not so much. But the two are really the same. Just as there is a humiliation in being made to state a lie that you know to be false (the Soviets did this all the time for the demoralization effect), the same is true for the right-thinking human being each time that he is confronted with the foundational lie of god. This is why there is no real dignity in the idea of god, most humans' mistaken opinions notwithstanding.
Pointing to the happy psychological effects of religion is an invalid appeal to nature. The real point is that, in order to better negotiate and understand reality, human beings must endeavor to get clear of the idea of god, once and for all, and not be bummed out about it. And reality is always going to require this adjustment, which individual humans conveiently escape every few years by dying without ever having to really and seriously interrogate their own prejudices. If this requires them becoming literally inhuman, then that is exactly what ought to be done. The key here, the real hard part, is that the (absent, vacated) idea of god should be replaced with NOTHING. Not with some state, or communism, or a doubling-down on reverence/appreciation for nature, human community etc. There ought to be a pure void or vacuum where the idea of god once existed in the human mind, and the human mind does not feel that void as a problem, or a lack. Then we will really be in a position to truly understand the world.
