I am trying to distract myself from a drab set of work I have to do, and came upon a rather long discussion about agnostics. Folks were discussing if there were irritating, are they atheists, blah blah blah. Honestly, some of those replies were massive. I kinda glazed over after a wile.
But it got me thinking, I am pretty at peace with myself on the God issue, and if you look at the pronouns I used in this sentence you could probably figure out what I think.
I have this idea that people who are exposed to religion in their youth, and later reject it, probably have the easiest time with spiritual matters. Spiritual matters is a big catch-all term I use to describe emotional and/or mental hurdles and accomplishments. I think that is the case because the ideas of religion are shed along with other traits of childhood.
Someone described atheists and theists as both claiming agnostics as their own, which is different from my experience, but that is beside the point. I used to identify as an agnostic, but now I am not a fan of the game.
I just read on the Wikipedia article that the Yankees have a rivalry with the Red Sox. There are Yankees fans, and there are Red Sox fans. And then there are people who think about baseball, in various degrees. And I don’t care about any of it, because professional sports hurt communities, redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, and bring out the worst aspects of humanity while giving very little in return.
And professional sports isn’t as horrible as religion.
And I don’t care about any of it, because professional sports hurt communities, redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich,
Amen!
and bring out the worst aspects of humanity while giving very little in return.
But here I think your sermon goes off the rails a bit. Worst? Did I just swap into a much better world? And lots of people enjoy watching, cheering, and discussing pro sports. I don’t really understand and think the net is negative due to such factors as you mention above, but mass enjoyment is something more than very little.
…
I have called myself an atheist in the past, but I don’t like the term, or any other which places myself relative to religion or belief in preposterous stories and beings (which would include agnostic of course). Religion and bizarre belief are human phenomena to be studied by anthropologists, social scientists, neuro-scientists, etc, and where they like any organization engage in or harbor criminal/anti-human-rights activity, for the appropriate intervention (which may be lacking, but that’s another problem). No need whatsoever to pin one’s personal identity relative to them.
And it was just laziness on my part: I always think of rivalry as the main aspect to which people attach themselves to. It is divisive, and I consider that the worst think that mobs of people can do.
We could list examples, British soccer fans always come to mind, but it is the learned behavior that goes hand in hand with franchise loyalty that I think is dangerous for our species. It values herding over anything else.
We often wonder how those in (and in communion with) the Catholic Church organization can stand by it after the numerous instances of child molestation and sexual assault, among other atrocities. But consider the amount of disturbing behavior seen in “fans” of sports teams, or even the culture of the players.
So my point would have been that there is a systemic tendency to put people together and then point them towards uncivil actions in both pro sports and religion. Watching, cheering and discussion are fine, but I’ve no reason to believe that those would not exist without sports.
I know this is all over the place. I enjoy chatting about it, because it uses a part of my brain not optimizing page loads and watching traffic patterns. But please point out my logical fallacies with the knowledge that I am not dedicating many cycles to this at the moment.
