Quote of the day—Gad Saad @GadSaad

Religion is very comforting to people because it offers complete guidance about every aspect of one’s life from what to eat, whom to have sex with, to which exact minute to light a candle. Today, religion has been replaced by “loving omnipotent” governments that offer the same.

Gad Saad @GadSaad
Tweeted on February 3, 2021
[I see the wisdom in this assessment.

More importantly, I see the terrifying consequences of this development.

What I desire to see is a large majority of the people able to think for themselves, arrive at good decisions, execute on those decisions, and take responsibility for their actions.

I fear my desires are beyond the capacity of our current population and certainly beyond their current programming.—Joe]

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9 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Gad Saad @GadSaad

  1. Yes, and well beyond human nature in general, Joe. We have to force ourselves to behave. We have to write laws and pay people to force us to live by them.
    We should be surprised when criminals take over? Or are we insane to expect anything less?
    As our forefather tried to tell us. All human history has provided nothing but one example after another of this same human failure. It should be right up there with the death and taxes meme.
    And we never failed, to fail. It was the easiest thing to do. (A truer sentence about human nature could not have come from the drug-soaked 60’s.)
    Were fallen. And we grab for something in desperate hope that we will survive???? death? Or life?
    Enter God. Or to some of us, That’s exactly backwards. Enter God. Then human failure. To me, The problem we as society can’t come to grips with is that our failure IS God’s plan?
    I asked him once why everything seemed to turn to shit in life? The reply was, Isn’t shit where plants grow best? The parable of the wheat and the weeds Jesus explained to us.
    We as a people have to come to grips with that truth. Were not here to build utopia. Were here to learn how to fight evil. Or join it. The rest is just adaptability. (The true measure of intellect.) Till we die. We should be happy god gave us communist to fight. (Their weak and lazy.)

  2. I find the conflicts and inconsistencies between politics and religion and even the conflicts between religions or even with in the same religion incredibly interesting. In fact, much of politics today is, at its roots, indistinguishable from religion in definition. (Do not confuse doctrines relating to God as to what constitutes a religion. A zealous Environmentalist is as much committed to a religion as any Evangelical Christian.) The desires of individuals always seems to cover and/or excuse their behaviors and they look incessantly for ways to rationalize such. Either that or they look for ways to force others into conformance with their ideals so they don’t need to address their own internal conflicts. My interest comes from seeing how far and how inventively they have deviated from the basic purpose of God’s plan for our everlasting happiness. Not one to use religion as a cudgel to force, shame or otherwise denigrate individuals, I find religion as a touchstone that provides status and guidance for me personally. Additionally, knowing that God was willing to lose a third of his offspring to allow for personal agency and personal accountability provides a litmus test for me to use in evaluating what any wannabe political leader tries to promise me. If what they promise means a loss in personal liberty, for me or anyone else, then thanks, but no thanks. So is religion a crutch for me? No more so than a scope is on a rifle or the report of a shot spotter. Both tell me how close I am to my target and provide information that I can choose to use to improve my performance, if that is what I want. When we are willing to accept personal responsibility in all of its aspects we will have no problem with other people except when they try to remove from us our rights to our own determination. The problem comes from the fact that as humans we want to avoid difficulty and pain, which is the nature of accountability for behaviors that are, in the long run, detrimental. So there is always the potential for being seduced by the thoughts of avoiding undesirable accountability with many willing to promise such avoidance, for a fee of course, (politicians come primarily to mind) hence the conflict and related problems. John Adams summarized this situation well and his statement also provides insight into why we are saddled with the government we have in this age when he said “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We might modify the first phrase of this quote as “THERE IS NO government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions . . .”. Any serious and honest student of history knows this to be true and that any government which tries results in misery and bloodshed. That student will also then know that a willingness to bridle the natural human passions is the only way to find happiness and real liberty.

  3. There are some crucial differences, though. With certain notable exceptions, most religions operate by persuasion. Governments, on the other hand, impose their rules by force. Sometimes very overt and blatant deadly force, sometimes the force is more disguised, but it’s always there.
    The better analogy isn’t between, say, the moral precepts of Christianity or Judaism vs. the operation of modern big government, but rather between the operation of big government and the operation of the Inquisition in its heyday. Or of the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (part of the Taliban government in Afghanistan) or the nearly identically named agency in Saudi Arabia.

    • Or my personal favorite under the French Revolution.
      The Committee of Public Safety!
      I also like the Jesse Kelly’s term for Communist.
      ” A religion of domination.”
      Without God. Man puts himself in that place.

  4. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

    There’s a lot of crossover between this John Adams quote and the one above.

    The proper application of our Constitution requires that the people have moral guidance separate from and external to the government.

    This makes sense; when the real power and authority reside in We the People — as the Founders intended — and not in a centralized government, only a moral people can keep it on track and hold to Constitutional principles. The people’s morality guides the government.

    If the government itself becomes the moral authority, then the reverse happens: government guides the people’s morality, and invariably it will steer itself to the acquisition of more power. The Constitution can and will be subverted into meaninglessness and the power stripped from the people … and the people will accept it — or even ask for it — because such actions are sanctified and ordained by the government.

    IOW, when government power and moral authority become one and the same, terrible things become not only possible, but inevitable. They must remain separate.

    • There’s another point to keep in mind that is usually forgotten.

      The Constitution isn’t a set of rules for the citizens. Not at all. It is a set of rules, and in particular a set of restrictions, for the government. Neil Smith often points out the Bill of Rights is misnamed, its accurate name would be Bill of Limitations (that is, limitations on the power of the government).

      Among other things, that means the morality of the citizens, or where (if anywhere) they get their moral compass, is really not the issue. Or at most, only peripherally. The people who need the moral compass are the government officials who are supposed to be operating within the constraints set by the Constitution. When they lose that compass, as they nearly universally have for centuries, there is little the Constitution can do to correct them. This is why, going back to just after the ink dried on the original document, Constitutional infringement has been far more common that obedience to the Constitution.

  5. He’s not wrong. Religion has been a controlling influence over humans for millennia. Whether it’s a steadying influence for the weak minded or a comfort
    for the fearful. Politics and religion have often been so intertwined that sometimes
    it’s hard to separate them. The Roman Catholic church of the Medieval period is a good example. Classical religions are fading in this age of “science” (sic)….but the need for many people to be controlled, to have something to obey is still there.
    So politicians are more than happy to step in and take the place of religion. And just as priests and reverends of old enjoyed dictating to congregants politicians enjoy dictating to the electorate. Some people NEED to be led, others have an innate pathologic need to tell others what to do. The problem is when these two groups seek to impose their mental shortcomings and pathologic needs on the rest of us.

    • Would you consider the likes of Isaac Newton to be weak minded? Would you consider most of our forefathers fearful?
      And contrary to some’s belief. Science is proving faith in god to be correct in almost every sense.
      And as those much smarter and braver than us have tried to explain from the passed. Is that man is fallen. And in that condition he seeks to control everything, and everyone around him in order to keep from having to confront that reality.
      The phenomenon is as predicable as gravity.
      Have you also noticed that most people want god to come down and restrict someone else’s freedom?
      Even atheists use it for their believe. If there is a god. Where is he? Why doesn’t he do……
      What is obvious is that god believes in freedom a lot more than we do.
      I’m completely happy to embrace my weak minded, fearful ignorance in god. The only other choice is to embrace man.
      Which always ends how?
      But hey, go for it, maybe you won’t just die….. tired?

  6. Yeah, this is a variation on the old “opiate of the masses” theme. As a Christian (and that word needs to be qualified because it’s been under attack by counterfeiters for millennia) I find it mostly, but not entirely, absurd.

    Yes; government seeks to replace God, of course, but mostly because those in government seek to be worshipped. They offer comforting lies as a way of getting enough power that people are at some stage forced to at least pretend to worship them, or they offer comforting excuses as a way of explaining away their transgressions as being for “the common good” etc.

    Of course none of it would work if we weren’t seeking comfort of some kind in the lies of politicians! So a better statement might be that most of us love lies more than we love truth. And yes; Jesus says that too.

    But true religion*, which is Christianity based solely on the Bible (sola Scriptura, sola Gratia, sola Christos), has little earthly comfort to offer. Jesus himself tells us that we’ll be persecuted, prosecuted and killed for believing in Him, and millions in fact have been so treated, are now being so treated, and the rest will be so treated in the future. Most people wouldn’t find that promise from Jesus terribly comforting.

    And if religion is “that which is pursued for the sake of comfort”, OR obtaining comfort by way of better understanding the reasons why things are the way they are, then surely there are more religions which have no specific “god” than there are religions which do. Drinking alcohol certainly brings some people comfort, and so does promiscuous sex, or gambling, stamp collecting, over-eating, or belonging to trade unions, gangs, or secret societies.

    The scientific method itself would fall under that definition of religion, it could be argued, as it seeks….what? That form of comfort which results from bettering one’s understanding of why things are the way they are? So, one who hates it could say that it’s a crutch! An opiate.

    But understanding, in science or in any religion is of course only the first step. One’s actions are then to be modified as a result of said better understanding. Martin Luther struggled with this, but eventually figured it out, and it’s quite simple, but hardly anyone knows these things anymore.

    And we must be careful in our assumptions!– Understanding CAN be used for evil, for selfish and destructive purposes. And in THAT we see both religion and science used for evil all throughout history, but to equate religion with evil or simplemindedness is no more valid than to equate the scientific method with evil or single-mindedness, pointing only to the bad actors as the quintessential practitioners. In simpler terms; don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    And by the way; many pagan religions involve lighting candles, but Christ doesn’t prescribe the ceremonial lighting of candles. That’s for heathens. Christ uses parables and metaphors, some of which involve lamps and candlesticks, to describe understanding as “light”, or the spirit of truth as “oil”, but that’s entirely different from saying “light a candle at such-and-such a time or for this prescribed purpose”. Wickens and luciferians, et al, (you know; Democrats, Republicans and Catholics) do that stuff.

    So when I hear people lumping all “religions” together so as to point out their absurdity, I can agree fully on some points, but I also know that the person is speaking out of ignorance; much like conflating astronomy and astrology.

    *Or, can you call it a “religion” if it’s true? I mean; what is the average person’s definition of “religion”? Believing something that isn’t true? So if it’s true, then is it religion? Or does it qualify as a religion only if it’s false, made-up, hocus pocus? Because if that’s the case then there are far more “religions” that we’ve previously thought!

    Be careful in your answer, because, for example, no one can prove the Big Bang (theory) or evolution (the theory thereof). They’re only theories, else we’d dispense with the “T-word” and call them laws or facts or some such. They both invoke an un-caused cause, as does religion. And so we might say that we have “bishops”, “high priests”, “priests” and “friars” of the Church of Big Bang/Evolution. Surely in that field we do see another aspect of “religion”. It’s the sort of rule by intimidation against heretics that we’re accustomed to seeing during the Dark Ages, and we see the same tactics also (those of intimidation and so on) being applied in The Church of Anthropogenic Climate Change.

    And so if you’re an atheist scientist wondering how it feels for us when our religion is attacked, even credibly so from a certain point of view, by the ignorant, and by those with personal agendas, welcome, Brother! You now see that science can be twisted and re-defined in exactly the same ways by which Christianity has been attacked for millennia! It’s by infiltration and usurpation, and the presumption of authority by the usurpers– Now THEY will be the ones to define the field and it’s premises and doctrines, and woe be unto any “heretic”! The heretics are now running things, calling you a heretic!

    Also, you’re in for a surprise when you find out how atheism has been usurped, for as I’ve been saying; secularism isn’t nearly so secular as it lets on.

    And, fascinatingly, the usurper/wreckers of science and the usurper/wreckers of Christianity are often the very same people!

    Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. 2 Thessalonians 2:4

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