> So what is happening when someone tosses out their religious context? They are essentially saying "I understand this organism perfectly, I know its strengths and weaknesses, and I know better than the process of natural selection as to what is a better way of living."

I think that's putting lots of words in the mouths of the non-religious. Other people, religious or not, don't know know what you know about the structure, function, and significance of religion.

Everything you wrote before that paragraph I consider to be both true and extremely important. I think it's a very rare take. The number of religious people I meet who interface with their faith with that level of insight and abstraction is very tiny and almost exclusively online. It might be that the religious people I meet in real life are nutty in ways that are not representative of all religious people because I run in the wrong circles, but generally when encountering religion in the wild, I don't find people who deal with it in a productive or rational way like that.

And THAT's the problem. There are effectively two versions of religion. The one you're talking about, with an abstract framework for winning conduct across a set of games, and the other, steeped in literalism, mysticism, rigidity, and ill-founded intolerance. It's similar to the spirit vs letter distinction in law.

And that's the religion people avoid. The one that reads about christ's forgiveness on sunday morning and disowns their gay daughter on monday night. The one that preaches grace and reservedness while diddling kids behind the curtain and driving off in a cadillac paid for by the donation bowl. The ones that find togetherness in vitrol instead of virtue. They vastly outnumber the good guys.

They throw away religion because they don't know the good side exists.

So what we actually have, in my view, is a widespread and severe failure of teachers (both the church kind and the regular kind). Because I was nearly 30 before I came into contact with the impressive and respectable elements of organized religion. Part of that is on me, for sure, and on my progressive upbringing – since the progressive counterpart to religious conservatives are closedminded, foolish, and ideological in precisely the same ways. But part of it is that you have to put some sweat into searching for, or hope to stumble randomly upon, actually virtuous religious people if you're not born into some specific circles.

We don't get converts by shitting on atheists or alienating people who are disgusted by religion, or by behaving in a way that frames organization and conduct that are religion-like as an "obvious" choice, even if they can be intuitive for some.

All we can do is set a good example.

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A separate thought: I think we should view the shape of church with the same abstract flexibility as the rest of the teachings of the bible. I believe that the benefits of organized religion can be realized without many of the fairy-tale elements, and religion would be verrrry well served to enforce that these are allegorical tools meant to communicate concept through stories, a-la-aesop's fables, and not something that should be used for virtue signaling where whoever yells louder about Hell is the winner. I think it's possible to teach conduct, community, and shared growth in places that are equivalent to church, but aren't church.

Athiests are strikingly bad at this, and I say that as basically an athiest. They definitely throw the baby out with the bathwater, and have no large scale organization that approximates even mediocre church communities.