u/funnylib

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a short fiction story by Ursula K. Le Guin published in 1973. The premise of the story is Omelas is a utopian society, yet somehow the happiness of this utopia is dependent upon the suffering of a single child.

The people of Omelas know about this, and they don’t like the fact, those who go to witness the child are disturbed and want to help the child but don’t because if they did do their utopia would collapse. So despite being bothered by it, most people eventually just accept that this is how it is. With the exception of a small few, who after seeing the child leave Omelas, they walk away because they can’t live in this utopia if that is the cost.

While the story doesn’t directly criticize religion, you can definitely use the logic of the story to criticize Christianity. Christians believe that if you accept their God, embrace their messiah as your lord and savior, you will go to Heaven and be rewarded with immortality and paradise. Those who don’t are condemned to an eternity of suffering. While some Christians believe in universal salvation or in the destruction of the unsaved, mainstream Christianity believes in eternal conscience torment.

So Christians, in exchange for their personal happiness, accept the suffering of hundreds of millions to billions of people. I say no. I don’t want to die, but it would be better for us to all cease to cease than for all of us to live forever in exchange for even a single person’s eternal suffering.

When I look at God’s prophets all I’m seeing is polygamy and incest. Abraham, Jacob, etc, both have multiple wives and concubines and for some reason keep marrying their sisters or cousins.

By producing the book, Stanton wished to promote a radical liberating theology, one that stressed self-development. The book attracted a great deal of controversy and antagonism at its introduction.

Many women's rights activists who worked with Stanton were opposed to the publication of The Woman's Bible; they felt it would harm the drive for women's suffrage. Although it was never accepted by Bible scholars as a major work, much to the dismay of suffragists who worked alongside Stanton within the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), it became a popular best-seller. Susan B. Anthony tried to calm the younger suffragists, but they issued a formal denunciation of the book at NAWSA's January 1896 convention, and worked to distance the suffrage movement from Stanton's broader scope which included attacks on traditional religion.

Because of the widespread negative reaction, including that of suffragists who had been close to her, publication of the book effectively ended Stanton's influence in the suffrage movement.

Also, what exactly does it do? I just got BitDefender because of some recent malware scares, though I don’t understand it well.

To me it seems to go too far, the state has has no business banning students, teachers, and government officials from wearing religious clothing (with the exemption of that which blocks the face) or symbols. Big overreach of government power and violation of free expression.

I am not referring to theistic gods from world religions, which are self evidently false. If a literalist interpretation of, let’s say Christianity, was true then everything humanity knows about the universe isn’t true but rather a Satanic deception (which is dumb), and liberal Christianity that accepts scientific facts like evolution is self defeating (the premise of Christianity depends upon a physical resurrection of Jesus, and it promises a future physical resurrection of all people).

But there are kinds of philosophers and great thinkers, Plato, Spinoza, Voltaire, etc, who all claimed to through the power of reason pierced the veil and discovered the truths about the nature of reality and divinity, all their answers extremely different. It’s all folly, our ability to reason is limited to what we can test through our empirical senses, whatever ultimate metaphysical reality that exists or doesn’t exist is beyond our ability to observe or to test and is hence unknowable.

Like, what advantage does “(insert name of my town” Unitarian Universalist Fellowship” have over “(insert my town name) Community Fellowship”?

I can see the benefits of being UU rather than explicitly Humanists, as being a big tent is more likely to attract members with shared values if you live in a small town where most people don’t share your opinions, but other than having a name association with other people, does membership in the UUA provide benefits that an individual organization wouldn’t have access to (beyond name recognition)?