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For what it's worth, my experience with people of faith (mainly Christians, bus some from other religions), has been pretty negative, on average. I find many of them to be among the most aggressive, intolerant, arrogant, stubborn, closed-minded, bitter, toxic individuals I've ever met. For me, the fact that someone is deeply religious is a pretty accurate predictor of one or more of the above traits. There are exceptions, of course, but the norm seems to be like that.
It's sad, really... I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
I don't really like to subscribe to the theories of Bitcoin as a religion, but it seems that some of us can become the same way about bitcoin, and so to the outsiders (or the non-believers) or those who do not get bitcoin, we can come off in those kinds of similar ways in terms of our having a kind of vision that might not be shared by others - and so many times, even when people are seeming to be closed-minded and stubborn, they frequently will still like to consider themselves as being reasonable and open to a variety of views, but at the same time, are going to be wedded towards seeing the world through their own ways of framing matters... ..
so I am not sure, I am feeling mixed on the topic regarding how strongly even some people feel about their beliefs, because they might actually be open in regards to some topics, while at the same time being stubborn in other topics... and yeah, sure, I have met people who are irritating to be around.. and sure sometimes it might go back to seeming to be about religion, but I am not sure the difficulties of dealing with others is merely religion.. Of course, in recent times, we have been seeing a lot of political divides, and so worship of the state or being anti-state and then dividing of camps on these kinds of grounds, but then how much anyone divides or how much they believe their party might resolve their issues might depend upon which issue(s) we are discussing.. and looking towards leaders to rescue us from our broken money system while not necessarily recognizing that the various aspects of the broken money system might be the cause of the problems and/or disagreements about not getting enough, while at the same time blaming the problem on other kinds of ways that there are inequalities and differences of opinion regarding how the pie should get divided.
I wouldn't call Bitcoin (or, perhaps, "Bitcoinism") a religion, although it may seemingly share some similarities with religion, mostly attributed to Bitcoin by those who don't understand it. It is not a religion, because it is based on objectively true, real-world, physical, repeatable, verifiable processes (i.e., math & science), and does not rely
at all on dogma or faith in a metaphysical set of principles. Even the traditional (and scientifically acceptable) notion of "trust" is taken out of the picture ("Don't trust, verify!"), and this is precisely what makes Bitcoin so important, so revolutionary, so scientifically significant. Contrast this with religion, where everything is based on metaphysics, dogma, and blind faith in some supernatural, all-knowing, all-powerful entity, whose existence appears to be unprovable by design.
Blind faith in the success or superiority of Bitcoin, just because some fancy, self-proclaimed Bitcoin "priest" says so, is the wrong way to approach this (did you know that Craig S. Wright is [also] a
theologian, and calls himself "
pastor"?). Satoshi Nakamoto is no God, and the White Paper is not some Bitcoin bible to be worshiped and blindly accepted as truth, but a scientific paper, open to scrutiny and experimental evaluation. This evaluation (which is extremely brutal, as there's big money involved) has been going on for nearly 15 years non-stop, and no fundamental flaws have been found. Even with such a great track record, I will be the first to reject Bitcoin the moment a weakness is discovered in its code base, that makes the code so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be patched. Surely, I will be deeply disappointed if this ever happens, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon, if ever.
This reminds me of
Bitconnect (some old lulz
here), where all the people in the video were effectively disciples of a religion/cult, driven by greed. And we all know what happened. Not with Bitcoin. This is science, not metaphysics, and those who see it that way are missing the point.
But I do see the logic behind the points you're making. Humans have a tendency to want to "belong" to some superior group, call it a society, cult, religion, whatever. So people may see Bitcoin as a kind of special club they want to belong to, even though they don't understand it. Come to think of it, still good for them if they become coiners, as long as they stick to BTC, rather than BSV, BCH, or other "crypto" varieties. That's why understanding is so important.