> presumably it is because they had seen what the opposite looks like

Ouch. "Presumably" isn't a logical proposition. Not even close.

I am sure there is wisdom in the different religious heritages. But the religious heritages that lasted were able to do so using a fair amount of practices and beliefs aimed at carrying along commitment to that heritage, as much or more than general wisdom (which has value beyond the religion).

(Not dismissing the value anyone gets from their practices and beliefs, where they don't negatively impact others or treat non-believers dismissively.)

Who said he was making a logical proposition? He's speculating on an idea - or said another way, he is presuming...

If you are going to make a point based on "presuming", you are not just presuming. You are suggesting an implication.

We can all presume, imagine, confabulate. But those are not a good basis for making broad points.

Its a very short list of things people won't appropriate in the pursuit of power

I’ll be sure to tell that to my gay friends, my female friends who don’t just shut up and submit, and anybody who puts cheese on a hotdog.

Make sure you don't also forget to throw the baby out with the bathwater

As soon as you are picking and choosing, how are you adhering to any supposed wisdom provided by the divine?

I'd suggest using your best judgement - no one here is advocating for orthodoxy. Times have changed over the last 2-3000 years, and things that were once practical may not be anymore.

I think you might be assuming that the only interpretation of religious text is that they are all-or-nothing affairs, across the board. One of the core tenets to Christianity is the recognition that everyone is going to sin (or not "adhere to the supposed wisdom of the divine" as you put it) and that they will still be forgiven.

Wait, I though the cheesemakers are blessed?

What if it's Whiz?

I think it's because pork and cow products

No, it is because Judaism forbids mixing meat with dairy products: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_and_meat_in_Jewish_law

But does Whiz count as dairy or is it purely a petroleum distillate?

What nobody seems to wonder about is why both the Bible and Quran strongly prohibited gay sex and that idea is so widespread across most of history and most of the world, even today, and even in China which doesn't have a history of those religions. You can't say we know better now because we're better educated when we don't know the reason in the first place.

There are some clues. The Bible has the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which might be a collective memory of societies becoming gay-friendly and promiscuous then being destroyed somehow. It could have been put into a story about God to make it memorable across generations (we do still have the story after-all, and we don't still have the actual history). In Islam, Mohammed said his greatest fear was that Muslims would turn gay. Why was he so afraid of that? Maybe there was cultural knowledge of what too much tolerance for gayness leads to and we just don't have that knowledge in our recorded history.

Not saying I have the answer, but nobody else does either. It's naïve to just look at the direct consequences and say "they're not hurting anybody so it's fine". There might be destructive emergent social phenomena that come from it being widely accepted over the long term. We only have basically 2 generations of data on gay-friendly western society to observe from.

You mean what? That if we sin (like you know all that giant list of outdated ways to sin like touching a woman when she is menstruating) there will be a giant rain and we will drawn? So did you made your giant boat or first you need to wait for God to tell you to do it in a dream?

Sorry , but some people will not follow those outdated rules and also worship a extremely cruel genocidal inhuman God, if my sin will cause you to have to build a boat to save yourself sorry but I don't care.

I think if you gave an honest effort at interpreting what he said, you'd find that he's saying there's a reason religion has survived as long as it has.

He's not claiming that your actions are going to cause a biblical flood - that's something you're projecting on to him and, in my opinion, just feels like mockery for the sake of mockery.

He's suggesting that there are generation-spanning lessons that had been learned, both ethical and practical, that made their way into scriptures. Not all the lessons in the Bible (or other religious text) are going to be pertinent to the modern day. To say it contains nothing of value, and that nothing can be learned from, it proves his point exactly.

So your point is that there is a chance that soem microscopic parts in the Bible contain good lessons? I agree, some children stories also have good lesions.

The fact that religion survived or spread does not prove what you imply it proves, it was an useful tool for the powerful to keep the poor in check like

1 Bible says to pay your taxes

2 Bible says that is OK to be poor because you will be rewarded later

3 Bible says that violence is bad so do not attack your lord and try to make justice on Earth, you will get your justice in the next realm.

And so on, a very good tool to manipulate people.

I think you're misreading what I am saying and injecting some extra anger.

To use a simple example of what I meant - in the west, the secular section of society has below-replacement fertility. In other words, for whatever reason that group is slowly dying off. I hate to say this as someone who was secular most of my life but I think it's objectively true (do you disagree?)

Meanwhile religious folks live in the same world as we do yet somehow are able to maintain 2.5 to 3.5 fertility rate (this is in the US) depending on which version of the "homicidal inhuman G-d" they believe in.

This suggests to me that somewhere in that "religious" operating system is encoded immunity to things that are slowly killing off the unreligious right now. That's the kind of thing I was talking about in my post - we should be very careful about discarding that.

> To use a simple example of what I meant - in the west, the secular section of society has below-replacement fertility. In other words, for whatever reason that group is slowly dying off.

Except that the secular section is also replenished by children of the religious becoming secular, which currently seems to be outweighing the relative birthrate differences and is causing that secular section to be increasing as a percentage of the population.

"Looking at the U.S. public as a whole, however, the answer to the question of whether more education is correlated with less religion appears to be yes. Among all U.S. adults, college graduates are considerably less likely than those who have less education to say religion is “very important” in their lives: Fewer than half of college graduates (46%) say this, compared with nearly six-in-ten of those with no more than a high school education (58%)."

I am sure you know of the correlation between affluent people having fewer children and highly educated people tending to be more affluent. I dont think its particularly mysterious or confusing why secular populations have a lower fertility rate. It should be pretty obvious at a glance.

Religion is a lot like conservatism in that it provides a self affirming world view that relies on ethics from centuries past. I am sure there are many highly democratic, rich and ethical conservatives and religious types but generally these traits are indicators of the opposite. There is a reason the past century of progress has allowed such great leaps in education, quality of life etc while being accompanied by an ever decreasing level of religiosity.

The Bible is obsolete because the saner parts have been extracted and integrated into either the law system (e.g. the marriage system in the west) or education and social values, and have been refined other centuries of discussion and challenges to come up with a set of rules and principles that can work for our current population density and life style.

And in particular these rules and principles will continue to evolve, where the Bible wont.

What remains proper to the Bible are the funky bits, the outright offensive parts and anachronistic advices.