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Comment by paulryanrogers | Hacker News Reader

Nothing quite like fear of eternal damnation to motivate oneself.

So true. Pork is forbidden for muslims for many centuries (an awesome kind of motivation) and yet people struggled to wear masks during the Covid19 pandemic while facing own potential death, maybe killing relatives or unknown consequences (at the time).

That's a strawman.

Not really, it was a big motivator for me in three decades I wasted believing indoctrinated garbage. Thankfully I broke out of that tar pit of magical thinking.

It's a straw man in the context of using faith to battle addiction, regardless of the role it played in your personal life. Virtually no one advocates trying to scare addicts into recovery with the threat of hell.

The problem is that many people otherwise don't have motivation.

Why strive for anything? Especially when the very bare minimum for survival is already covered by community.

Really? The only thing that will motivate them is a baseless claim about life/suffering after death?

What else?

People are motivated by many things. They don't need fairy tales. Religion and superstition has ruled over people for thousands of years. Let's give evidenced-based approaches a few millennia before we go back to that garbage.

So far evidence-based approach seems to end up as YOLO-style approaches.

Overall culture seems to be more and more nihilistic and individualistic after dropping religion. Few people may be doing the right thing and say that we have to care about future generations. But wast majority, looking at their actions, doesn’t care.

It may be hard to accept that the universe exists for no reason at all. You can fall in to a nihilistic trap where nothing matters. Or you can fall into a fantasy trap and say it matters for reasons that are not true.

I would rather follow a more humanistic path, that we define our own existence, and that we should attempt to minimize our own suffering.

The problem is if enough people go full-nihilist, society crumbles.

Same for minimising one's suffering. A healthy society requires a lot of sacrifice from individuals, even with today's technology.

Where's the evidence that lies are better to prevent this nihilistic crumbling of society?

If people would believe religion stuff, it’s be pretty easy to motivate them to clean up the damn planet. Of course, given that the leaders would sign off on that.

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