> my belief in the profanity of technology is not widely shared, and that even people who I imagined would have a serious critique of technology often simply don’t
with a vague suggestion that the religious people who dedicate their life to spiritual pursuits are in the wrong
The post is much deeper and nuanced than the excerpt
It's funny you refer to the tyranny of Christianity when by far the most tyrannical regimes were all officially atheist (Stalin's, Mao's, Pol Pot's, North Korea), and the west has been getting steadily more and more authoritarian as it's gotten less and less Christian. Fundamentally most non-religious people are utilitarians, who see no inherent value in a life and hence are open to the idea of sacrificing a few lives for the "good of the many".
The first step to dictatorship is convincing people there's no such thing as "absolute" rights, so that they won't object to the regime making up more and more excuses to violate people's rights. And without a belief in some kind of higher power the majority of people also won't have any reason to believe that some rights are inherently inviolable.
Non-religious people are no different than religious people in the way they view life and its inherent value. They simply don't feel that value necessitates a supernatural framework. I know this will likely be incomprehensible to you, but one does not need to believe in God at all to value human life.
In other cultures and times in the past, for example, all human life was not valued and slavery was considered a normal part of life.
We don't really understand what culture is and think that the values are fundamental constant variables baked into biology.
That's funny, because in a large amount the justification for slavery was religious.
The perks of religion are great if you're on the right side. The downside is that you might also find yourself on the side of the "other", and then any concerns you might have stop mattering, and how much that might suck for you doesn't matter because deontology doesn't concern itself with consequences.
The idea of mechanical equality, where all are masters, is absurdism.
Gee, I wonder. Maybe read a history book?
> The idea of mechanical equality, where all are masters, is absurdism.
Because you put it in an absurd way. Dispense with the idea of "masters" and what you have is peers, which makes perfect sense.
Regardless, the claim that only religious people value human life and everyone else is an amoral sociopath is as pernicious as it is false.
And I say that as someone who still considers herself to be a Christian.
The Western world is a lot less authoritarian than it was 60 years ago for people like me - women, that is. In the early 60s, I could not get a bank account, a job or a driver’s license without my husband’s permission in Bavaria.
And that was nothing to very Catholic Francoist Spain, where I couldn’t leave the country or study at university without my father’s (if unmarried) or husband’s permission.
Besides, since you are talking about valuing life, whenever I think about the catholic church, their inability to deal with their own cases of child molestation comes to mind first. So swinging the moral sword from the position of a church which still molests children without consequendces is probably a bit, hm, brave to say the least.
What they share in common is that they both reject the value of a lived human life in favor of some totalizing ideology like a "god", church or the "state". Both can be credited with millions of lives lost. Lets not forget centuries of religious wars, or what role Christianity played in Western colonization. Both excuse those deaths because of proposed ideas like "god's will" or "the after-life", or the "good of the many" etc.