guy incognito
Well-Known Member
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Why Do You Hate It So?
- Thread starter undertheice
- Start date
undertheice
Well-Known Member
i think y'all have more than answered my original question. the hatred aimed at religion in general and christianity in particular is the result of the same ignorance and intolerance that you claim are the great sins of organized religion. instead of recognizing ignorance as the natural state of mankind that we all strive to raise ourselves from, you prefer to place the majority of the onus on a convenient scapegoat. instead of recognizing murder, war and discrimination as the outcome of a variety of social tendencies, you pick selected incidents and scriptural phrases to "prove" that religion has been the major cause of all these injustices. instead of recognizing the role that religion has played in preserving art, science and morality throughout history, you point to the worst examples of institutionalized religious hypocrisy and claim that they represent the entire sphere of religious experience. instead of recognizing the tremendous changes in religion over its history, you recite a laundry list of archaic regulations and prohibitions and claim that these represent the whole of a much more complex structure. in keeping with the best traditions of modern institutionalized science, you form a conclusion and then bend the facts to fit the theory.
so does society "need" religion? of course not, what many need is simply a bit of guidance. they do not need to be forced to behave well, only to be pointed in the right direction. they need to be given example and some hint of reward for their good behavior, no matter how fanciful that reward may be. science may be able to tell us the benefits of living an ethical life, but those benefits seem vague when compared to the immediacy of our daily needs and desires. government may be able to force us to live ethically, but government's only true tool is violence and the hypocrisy of using that violence to sway us from violence is not lost on even the most ignorant of us. we can't rely on some innate sense of "overpowering goodness", good and evil are both an integral part of the human psyche and neither holds the upper hand for long. it is religion that has always reinforced what society perceives as moral for the ignorant masses. that ignorance has always been with us to one extent or another and it's here to stay. it is not the product of the religious experience, but the natural state of the human animal.
folks keep on calling me a pessimist, but i see myself as cautiously optimistic. i believe in the capacity for the individual to reason his way through the complexities of life and come to an ethical conclusion for most any situation, but i also understand the perils of expecting that capacity to be fulfilled on every occasion. we can look back through history and see the ethical growth of society and the unbiased eye must admit that religion has played a major part in that growth. it is, after all, the ethical considerations in life that rein in our technological advances and keep us from misusing our potential.
Padawanbater2
Well-Known Member
You are delusional. I've said, more times than I can count, and repeated to you personally, that I see the benefit religion has had to our species. We've discussed it in other threads. What is the matter with you, why do you keep saying that I don't admit that religion has provided humanity with some good?
Is it because you want to paint me out as some hardcore fundamentalist atheist who is bent on religion and everything it has to offer? Is it because that then makes it easier to make your points? Wtf is it man?
Religion has provided us with some good things, some people might consider them good, a lot of that I personally wouldn't because in the big picture, the good things that religion provide to people are FAKE, they're illusions. I believe the TRUTH is the ONLY WAY to true happiness. I believe science is the best way to achieve the truth, and religion and science conflict at every intersection. This is why I take such a strong stance against modern organized religions, they ACTIVELY fight AGAINST what is true to keep the power they have.
I really don't know why this is so hard to understand.
Religion keeps people stupid. Do you need me to go get the charts again? Or is that just some biased scientific atheist research? What about the IQ points among believers v. nonbelievers? You don't see this as a problem, you've stated as much before, you believe peoples level of comfort is more important than what is objectively true and that the fear organized religion instills as a byproduct of belief is a good thing because (YOU BELIEVE!) the people too stupid or too lazy to understand what is right and wrong and what makes it that way need it.
That is the ultimate scapegoat UTI.
How does this benefit anyone?! How can you advocate LYING to people?!
People do not need this shit to behave well.
Which is the problem. None of the organized religions are moral.
undertheice
Well-Known Member
pad, first i want to apologize for the perceived insult of allowing you to believe that my post was aimed exclusively at you. even though i used a quote from your post, i figured that by leading off with "y'all" you would understand that the following "you"s were to be taken in the general sense. after all - just look back through this and similar threads and you'll see hundreds of posts that bear out my claim that the anti-religion bandwagon is filled with people that ignorantly blame religion for the sins of mankind, simply because the unscrupulous use it to motivate the masses to acts of evil. every time i see or hear inane phrases like "Too often religious rules interfere with my life." or "Religion has definitely caused wars and it justifies certain evil acts..." i shudder because i can hear my younger self using that same sort of mindless parroting to justify my own intolerance. it's like claiming that studying physics is evil because it led to the creation of nuclear weapons or that medical science is evil because it has allowed us the abomination of abortion.
people do not believe in what is false because they are religious, they do it because they are people. they are not stupid because they are religious, but because they are people. they don't murder, maim, subjugate others or hold their neighbors in contempt because they are religious, that is simply who they are. in all of the world's major religions there are prohibitions against each of these sins, it is merely our faulty definitions of them that allows the faithful to believe their actions are sanctified. all these failings are what much of religion is concerned with eradicating, a noble goal that i think we all aspire to.
our misperceptions of what is "right" certainly aren't restricted to the area of religion, just as the lies we choose to believe don't all originate there. all of man's various philosophies have led us down the wrong path from time to time. a perfect example of this is our tendency toward forming governments. we have watched our political systems turn against us, abusing their powers and their peoples, and we have yet to give up on the practice. we tear one down and build another in its place, but never do we consider just abandoning the idea altogether. instead we attempt to improve on the design, learning from past mistakes and aiming toward unreachable perfection. we have endured and rejected god-kings, emperors, dictators and myriad other rulers and potentates and come closer each time to perfection of the self-governance of the individual.
there seems to be a certain childish impatience and conceit to the demand that religion be relegated to the trash heap. those who flatly state that religion is false and that its followers are being lied to are claiming to have disproved the unprovable, as if they have some special insight into "the truth" that the rest of us lack. we might be forced to concede that the entire earth could not have been flooded and its fauna preserved on one single ship, but this does not preclude the perception of a global flood nor the belief that its cause and our salvation from it was of divine origin. we may be able to show that a god does not exist in the sky, watching over the actions of men and judging them accordingly, but this does not prove that some presence somewhere is influencing the life we lead and that there may be some final reckoning for our transgressions. science may be able to explain how man might logically have evolved his sense of morality and how the best interests of the species are served by that evolution, but this doesn't mean that it is not part of some plan.
so why consider religion as something to be abandoned and destroyed instead of something to be evolved? you may see science and religion as in conflict, but they might better be considered complimentary. imagine them as two trains running on loosely parallel tracks. occasionally those tracks may intersect, causing one or the other to slow and reassess its situation. religion often acts as a brake on our headlong, often foolhardy, rush to ever greater scientific accomplishment and science as an incentive for religion to slightly alter its course. both trains will change over time, each picking up different passengers and freight, and influence each other by their very existence. eventually these two tracks may very well converge, uniting those two trains and melding all that both have accumulated. the outcome might leave us with a grand union of the practical and the spiritual, the advances of technology and logic tempered by the compulsion to be our most ethical selves.
once again you paint religion with that broad brush. the burning bush is fake, the virgin birth is a fraud, heaven and hell couldn't possible exist - so religion consists entirely of illusion. try telling that to the millions who are comforted by these myths and are guided by their precepts. your "true happiness" may be dependent of scientific truth and mine may run independent of these fairy tales, but we are a small minority. if reality were to be judged by consensus, as it so often is, our truths would have little bearing.
people do not believe in what is false because they are religious, they do it because they are people. they are not stupid because they are religious, but because they are people. they don't murder, maim, subjugate others or hold their neighbors in contempt because they are religious, that is simply who they are. in all of the world's major religions there are prohibitions against each of these sins, it is merely our faulty definitions of them that allows the faithful to believe their actions are sanctified. all these failings are what much of religion is concerned with eradicating, a noble goal that i think we all aspire to.
our misperceptions of what is "right" certainly aren't restricted to the area of religion, just as the lies we choose to believe don't all originate there. all of man's various philosophies have led us down the wrong path from time to time. a perfect example of this is our tendency toward forming governments. we have watched our political systems turn against us, abusing their powers and their peoples, and we have yet to give up on the practice. we tear one down and build another in its place, but never do we consider just abandoning the idea altogether. instead we attempt to improve on the design, learning from past mistakes and aiming toward unreachable perfection. we have endured and rejected god-kings, emperors, dictators and myriad other rulers and potentates and come closer each time to perfection of the self-governance of the individual.
there seems to be a certain childish impatience and conceit to the demand that religion be relegated to the trash heap. those who flatly state that religion is false and that its followers are being lied to are claiming to have disproved the unprovable, as if they have some special insight into "the truth" that the rest of us lack. we might be forced to concede that the entire earth could not have been flooded and its fauna preserved on one single ship, but this does not preclude the perception of a global flood nor the belief that its cause and our salvation from it was of divine origin. we may be able to show that a god does not exist in the sky, watching over the actions of men and judging them accordingly, but this does not prove that some presence somewhere is influencing the life we lead and that there may be some final reckoning for our transgressions. science may be able to explain how man might logically have evolved his sense of morality and how the best interests of the species are served by that evolution, but this doesn't mean that it is not part of some plan.
so why consider religion as something to be abandoned and destroyed instead of something to be evolved? you may see science and religion as in conflict, but they might better be considered complimentary. imagine them as two trains running on loosely parallel tracks. occasionally those tracks may intersect, causing one or the other to slow and reassess its situation. religion often acts as a brake on our headlong, often foolhardy, rush to ever greater scientific accomplishment and science as an incentive for religion to slightly alter its course. both trains will change over time, each picking up different passengers and freight, and influence each other by their very existence. eventually these two tracks may very well converge, uniting those two trains and melding all that both have accumulated. the outcome might leave us with a grand union of the practical and the spiritual, the advances of technology and logic tempered by the compulsion to be our most ethical selves.