Religion. All of them are cults. Every single fucking one.
Nothing. No other hobby even comes close to the death, genocide, rape, murder, and hate generated by that type of religious cult. It's every single year, too. Every single year religion tops its hate, greed, and pain inflicted on everyone.
I'm pretty sure that religion was mostly used as a kind of motivational tool for the masses, but without religion there probably would have been another excuse why the enemy needs to die
Many people engage with the cults as a hobby though. Many of my relatives would probably agree that's about their level of involvement, but then they pay in to the beast that does all of the culty shit...
If you spend more time to consider and think about the differences between spirituality and religion, you'd see what I'm getting at. There's a blurring of lines sure, but a lot of these religious activities are not at all necessary for their beliefs, and merely a choice that fulfills them in a similar manner as other hobbies.
Choosing to believe in one set of imaginary friends over another- or none- is most certainly a hobby by every definition.
It is not essential for life.
It is not required by law.
People willingly choose and actively continue choosing to engage in the activities in their free time, and report positive feelings from doing so.
When doubts arise, other members of the cult try hard to sway them to stay, often using threats.
That’s a hobby. And a cult.
I mean, Buddhists just did a genocide in Myanmar. They have a cleaner track record than Abrahamic faiths for sure, but if you spend serious time in actual Buddhist places it fills the exact same societal roles.
Neopaganism is a bit of an odd one out in that list, because it's a newly invented thing.
the neopagan communities i've encountered irl are full of psychological manipulation and sex abuse, and an amount of the popular written material condones, defends, or even calls for pedophilia.
neopaganism is gross boomer shit and it needs to die with them.
I usually limit my ire to Abrahamic religions (though Buddhism's track record isn't completely clean).
I don't know enough about the history of Jainism to say one way or another, though given what I know about it (ALL life is sacred), i imagine they're probably the closest an organized religion can get to being unharmful.
Baha'is would as well, but nobody ever remembers them. The one time I saw a question about TBF on Jeopardy, it was the Final Jeopardy question, and no one got it right.
Yeah seriously. It's pretty severely missed the point of this thread.
Ironic that it looks like someone came through and downvotes every answer in this thread other than this one, considering. It'd be pretty great if the mods banned whoever that was.
To be clear, at the time I made that comment, every top-level response in this thread had precisely one downvote, apart from two. One had many downvotes ("Most of them"), obviously just not very constructive. The other was this one. It's obviously the result of some troll.