Why would anyone be religious?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Socially, religiosity is a way of problematizing or at least lending some much-needed complexity to the privileging of certain ways of looking at reality that when their privilege is unquestioned impose their own, often oppressive, absolute intellectual laws just as much as dictatorial religious bodies in previous eras did (and still do in many places). As such religiosity is perhaps a more useful force in the current zeitgeist than it was previously, not less.

Personally, in my case at least my intellect inclines me to believe in the basic tenets of a theistic worldview; my emotions and inculturation incline me to the institutions and practices of the Christian religion and specific faith in the figure of Jesus; and my will dictates, partly for the social reasons outlined above, that I should be a religious.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Your religion is a function of your intellect/ emotions and inculturation / and will…?

To the extent that those things are my own anyway, yes, but the fact that I have those things and that they work as they do is of course entirely divine in origin and function. There was a time when they worked differently, which was unpleasant for me and for those around me and which cried out for a long time to be changed. The fact that they changed and the fact that they work the way they work now were not all my doing.

Having the operations of grace function upon one does not entail ending up in a position in which Jesus does all of one's thinking and feeling. Of course if I were to hypothetically fall from grace with Him the fact that I have the intellect and emotions and inculturation and will of which my religion is the function would presumably fall likewise, and that fall from grace would be through my own grievous fault, unlike my current state which if it is indeed justified or desirable (it is in any case, obviously, not sufficiently so) is so because of changes on my personality that were not within my control.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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Fear

Of what?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Hah. If you think that religion functions or is supposed to function as a mechanism of assuaging fear and trembling then you really don't understand it.

I can play this game too: You fear accountability and are offended conceptually by eternity. See how easy it is?

[disclaimer: I know perfectly well that atheism doesn't, in fact, normally work this way.]

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Hah. If you think that religion functions or is supposed to function as a mechanism of assuaging fear and trembling then you really don't understand it.

I can play this game too: You fear accountability and are offended conceptually by eternity. See how easy it is?

[disclaimer: I know perfectly well that atheism doesn't, in fact, normally work this way.]

Not really, no. I would be all for upgrading the human body so we could live forever

Again, I didn't actually think you thought that way (though you seem to genuinely think that anybody with my beliefs thinks the way you're describing, which makes me sad). I was just attempting to demonstrate the silliness of what you were doing.

I, meanwhile, don't want to counterfeit eternity or call down manmade eschatons. 'Upgrade' also implies that something is 'defective' or in need of 'improvement', which is assigning questionable temporal teleology to evolution. Bodily death is a feature, not a bug, since eternity can't be arrived at without experience of both living and dying states.

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I certainly agree with this. I just also make further distinctions within the set 'things that make me feel good', and between is-problems and ought-problems (neither of which are properly viewed hedonistically) in the realm of attempting to generate 'facts' (whatever that, as a concept, is worth these days...).

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As does your rhetoric, even though most of your ideology is fine. The sentence 'religion and conservatism thrive on false equivalency' is false equivalency.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Socially, religiosity is a way of problematizing or at least lending some much-needed complexity to the privileging of certain ways of looking at reality that when their privilege is unquestioned impose their own, often oppressive, absolute intellectual laws just as much as dictatorial religious bodies in previous eras did (and still do in many places).

I assume this is referring to science?

Only among other things.