He was saying that people manage to be stupid all by themselves, with or without religion. Just as the other half manage to be intelligent, each defined relative to the other of course.
Movements tend to start with the few who are intelligently or accidentally creative in a reactionary way. The movement is already over as soon as envying people come along who seek, unknowingly, to merely immitate and belong. Their new material will become more and more refined towards the unimaginative formulaic because they merely wanted to be as creative as the original starters rather than be creative by themselves. At this point, the idea becomes institution and the initiators get bored and look for a new challenge, since imitation is the worst form of flattery.
I see religion as old and tired: beyond institution and into the offensive. Yes, it did have interesting reasons in its birth, but only til these herd sheep came along and stayed for a couple of thousand years.
Very interesting that you should say that.
You define weak, pathetic and superficial as the inability to accept God, yes?
The motivational attractive emotions at work that bring you to accept God are simply different to the ones repelling you from accepting servitude. How to describe these emotions?
Towards God: you have the strength to deny your own desires/pleasures unquestioningly in the name of something supposedly stronger. Commonly known as ‘willpower’ and performed in order to achieve a more preferred outcome to anything achievable by the self. Certainly this is a valid emotion towards ‘intelligent servitude’ that is made possible by respect towards your new cause and master.
Away from God: you have the strength to stick with your own desires and pleasures in the face of all the institutions and threats around you, because you have confidence in your self and you feel little or no connection to or need for the cause or the master. You achieve most brilliance when unfettered by any servitude except towards your own driving self: the only form of mastery. You recognise that all the affirmative driving forces that lead you to move and create have so much power to achieve something amazing and they are their own reward.
Which one you choose shows which strength you admire most.
Consider what this says about yourself: any denial of your own desires and pleasures is by definition a restraint of the affirmative driving emotions caused by the negatively driving emotions. Is this not the exact way to weaken and restrict oneself? If you turn away from what is affirmative in you, do you not reveal a shame in your self that you turn away from?
A religious person shows they cannot stand the sight of their real self or endure their suffering, so they must dress themselves up in spirituality - the only grounds on which they feel sufficient and able to compete - to join a group that reveres the supposed next life where you will no longer be unsightly.
Admiration of people has always been of the most able. The olympics, sports, the richest, the strongest, the cleverest - all these are what draw people to amazement, not the ‘most spiritual’ lol. Enjoyment of slapstick comedy is above all, a subliminal venting of shames in yourself which are exaggerated and displaced into someone else’s plight than your own.
This is why the atheist is admirable and the religious person is someone to pity. Only amongst the fellow pitiful can the pitiful seem refreshing. Only the weak want equality and pity. The strong want to excel in reality!
