If you found happiness through religion, good for you. Everyone has their own ways.

The problem starts when you think happiness can only come from religion.

It sucks to be a widow or widower looking for support groups to help you cope with the death of your spouse, and the only available groups are at churches who then turn the group into a mini church sermon. These churches should not have tax free status when they won't even offer the most basic help for communities without trying to convert vulnerable people to their cult.

Not saying I disagree, but as someone who was once religious I'd say that in their minds it is exactly the point to serve the desperate and broken hearted. "It is the sick who need a doctor, not the well." They genuinely believe they are helping by doing this, not trying to be deceptive.

I mean... yes, but this is kinda true for everything. Most people don't change their worldview/religion/political ideology etc. when they're happy and everything goes well. Most people also don't start their own business, move countries or leave their spouse if they're entirely happy with how things have been going.

To put it in system dynamics terms, in order for a system to settle on a new attractor state, there first needs to be enough instability to spur change. So the mechanism you're describing isn't unique to religion.

Don't know if religion is the best predator but it sure does have a lot of them.

Most people "find god" when they're children, they're going to church with their family/friends, they're participating in social activities under the auspices of the church, and they're nibbling away at the propaganda of the institution. Conversions are the exception, not the rule, and are far more commonly a consequence of interfaith marriage than some personal trauma.

I would argue that people "lose god" when they're unhappy more often than they find one. Discovering that you're not the ideal religious worshiper - you're selfish, you're angry, you're horny, you're heretical, you're not merely satisfied to exist as a little disposable worker bee in the business hive that keeps the church coffers well-funded - is alienating and disorienting. Discovering that church officials don't have satisfying answers to life's harder questions is frustrating and tense.

Big institutional churches feed on normalcy and prosperity. They do best when their congregants are looking for a certain baseline validation in their own virtue, not when they're defeated or transitioning or questioning their social norms. Downturns don't send people to the pews, unless the pews offer something that newly impoverished people need.

There are church missions that fill this role in some instances. But - by and large - the church exists as an amenity for the wealthy and privileged, not the poor and disempowered.

When people are at their lowest, they seek something to fill the void

When I was at my lowest, I went to my church looking for relief and I got back empty platitudes and a mysticism that didn't hold up under the slightest pressure. I became significantly less religious and more agnostic, as I started looking outside the church for better answers.

Things might have been different if I'd been in a more Evangelical Church with a savvier group of ministers. Or if I'd been in a family that was more well-connected with the church's philanthropic organs. But the depression, the fear, and the indignation I felt at my lowest propelled me away from a church full of pleasant-seeming do-nothing gospel singers.

Made me think of "there are no atheists in foxholes". To which my response is, so religious people are only religous because they fear for thier life? That sounds healthy.

“Religion invents a problem—namely sin—throws a poison into you, and then offers you the cure.” - Hitchens

Most of my life has been shit and never once did i think to believe in "God" and i am from a very religious family, my mother stopped with that bs years ago but my grandmothers were most of their lives in church praying and all that bs and yet they were abused, beaten and treated like trash by my grandfathers to their last day... not to mention all the crap people have done and still do in the name of one god or another and all this time all this god has done is finger it's asshole and do fuck all and if we were created in it's image then it just enjoys the misery we have and i could type more but i have already wasted enough time as it is...

Maybe God really does exist, he's just a person that likes to pray on the emotionally vulnerable.

This is why I resisted AA/NA for so long. It seemed like an attempt to convert people when they were at their lowest, rock bottom.

And it may have started that way, but today there are variations. My home group was full of angry atheists and agnostics. We spent a LOT of time trashing religion and the spiritual abuse we suffered as young people.

That's where I learned that we are all gods. Anyone who creates is god. I started praying to myself and actually still do occasionally. Since I'm the one in control of my own destiny, why shouldn't I? It's odd but it actually works, it's like telling your subconscious what to do, which makes things easier for your conscious self.

This is what I imagine it's like for the rest:

Desperate people go looking for god after they've fucked up their lives so badly they need something--ANYTHING--before they end up dead.

"Well, fuck it, mom said I should try religion, so..."

Then they get back to something resembling normal, and attribute it to "GOD IS GREAT!", and suddenly, they're yakking at you like they're a linux user vegan on crossfit. Or, a born-again Christian.

Many of us never fucked our lives up to begin with, so don't have any use for religion. For those whom it has worked, great. Good for you. But, don't assume everyone needs it.

🎶We found god in a hopeless place🎶

Which is also why the religious right is more prominent than the religious left. The latter are individuals whose faith tells them to serve others, the former are organisations calculating how to gain more power.

thats why schizophrenics fall into it, and right wing looneys who had braind damage from strokes: sorbo, cavazial, dean cain, maybe cameron.

Oh the other hand, you can be at your lowest, then have a dream about being Yahweh's 2nd son¹, invent your own religion, and act as a prophet for God, recruit a bunch of cultists ahem I mean followers, and rebel against the monarchy.

¹But isn't Jesus supposed to be God? But then Yahweh is also God? Is Jesus his own father? What the fuck xD

{in bursts Russell Brand}

Amen to that

Huh? Why not?

There's so many memes of basketball players thanking god for their good shots and such

The privileged have everything, while the destitute only have "god".

It seems like a strange thing to lose or find.

I lost God finally when my aunt died. It was my last bit of faith. I had one last conversation with god before I finally understood.

Facts. But also:

How many of y'all became atheists through happiness?

On AtheistMemes - shows a pic that's not a meme, it's just a person saying something...

Typical