He's promoting it because he controls it.

It has become my view that religion is one of the many cultural avenues toward parallel systems of power that our oppressors both fear and mimic. As we're here on the brink of a new dark age, or possibly have already entered it, I find myself realizing how many religious stories are people from the past just trying to pass down what happened in their time through means that power that be won't understand. I think about the list of names in the book of Genesis, and I realize these were relatives to someone that that someone simply didn't want erased from history, so they started speaking their names to future generations. I think about the garden of Eden and how Adam and Eve were forced to live a life of discomfort after they gained the knowledge of how everything works, and I think about how our oppressors strip funding for scientific research because we're easier to kill if we don't have abundant food and vaccines. I think about the book of Job and how god tortures a guy just to do it, and I think about how petty our presidents are. I think about the teachings of Jesus and how he encouraged his followers to ignore orthodoxy and focus on helping people, which got him killed much like how many of our allies are being disappeared right now, and how the Roman censors at the time kept certain tales from entering or surviving within the zeitgeist. I think, too, about how when Revelations was written, the author's people was subject to a genocide, and once more the Roman censors would have been curating what narratives were allowed to survive. I think about the patterns I see now and through history, how wars lead to pandemics, pandemics lead to authoritarianism, authoritarianism leads to famine, and then all of that leads back to war again. I realize that John the Reveler was probably just writing out what he was seeing at the time. Other accounts from the era probably existed but were destroyed, so the one we inherited is... Fuckin' bonkers because that's what it took to slip past the Romans.

Unfortunately, as with all parallel systems of power, our oppressors can and will seek to infiltrate and subvert them. Throughout history two of the most dangerous people have been the pastor and the politician. They trick us into thinking certain ways are just the way things have to be, that their interpretation of what we've inherited is Right and Correct, even if their interpretation is actually some nonsense and we're actually the ones who inherited the true meaning. I think the only way to combat this subversion of our truths is to reject, or at least question, orthodoxies at every turn. Refuse to fall in line to a single way of doing things, no matter what it is you're engaging with. I think about the years when r/Atheism was a starter subscription on Reddit, and how devout those atheists were. In particular they treated Richard Dawkins like a minor religious figure. I always found it so strange that their response to religious trauma was to repackage all the worst things about religion and attach it to anti-religion. They were just as intolerant of other views, outlooks, and people as religious people. I think that's what the Soviet project of atheism was reflective of. Lenin and Stalin either failed to understand, or worse understood completely, the REAL problem with organized religion and implemented Bolshevism as a form of religion.

Also, for the record, I've found !atheistmemes@lemmy.world far less horrifically awful than reddit's r/Atheism ever was. So good job, us