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There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, m

There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. The question is how to get the good side of all these (community, meaning, satisfaction and fulfilment) without the nasty side (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants). Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past. I think we need to overcome religion and move to a world where each can have their own spirituality - but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there.

nprateem 5y ago
Think for yourself?
rajin444 5y ago
The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are. You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la > God's ways are mysterious fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode. Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things. To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    > The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected Yeah, other groups have this as well. I once had the temerity to observe that Bush did a lot to quell anti-Islamic sentiment by appealing to other people of faith in post-9/11 speeches. I recounted my own experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name living in the south in 2002-2003. An acquaintance, a young white atheist lady, told me that I needed to “educate myself” about the “damage” that “Islamaphobia does to brown people in America.” I didn’t even engage further because it was clear I was dealing with someone’s quasi-religious belief. Everyone has belief systems and everyone’s belief systems necessarily include things taken as axiomatic.
    - iammisc 5y ago
      Haha same. Been informed by so many white liberals as to how I should feel, one wonders if they think they'd make a better brown man.
      - forgingahead 5y ago
        Yeah it's been crazy to experience - white liberals lecturing minorities on how they should feel or think is itself extremely racist and insulting.
        PartiallyTyped 5y ago
        I'd use prejudiced over racist since the same 'allies' are often very homophobic, biphobic and transphobic.
        iammisc 5y ago
        Nah they're just racist. The thing is a white liberal can become a homosexual should they choose to have sex with someone of the same sex. They can even theoretically become trans. No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  > a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well. I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.
snuser 5y ago
The real problem with religion is that there's more than one
- varjag 5y ago
  That's what the GP says. It's too few of them for too many people.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  That’s what some people believe about politics and political parties, which is why China banned different parties:)
BrightGlow 5y ago
>resistance to or denial of reality It's not just this but it's also the lying and attempting to pass off various myths, mysticism, dogma, theology and fairy tales as being true with no evidence, and the promotion of "faith" and "belief" as justifications for doing so. And before someone says it, yes, there are other groups besides religious groups that fall into these same self-reinforcing traps. For example a significant number of people still believe in witches and ghosts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believe-Ghosts.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believ...
tus89 5y ago
> There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. Doubt among who? Religious congregations?
throw0101a 5y ago
> (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants). This is true of group affiliation in general, and may be innate to human beings: > “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose. * https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why-were-polarized-and-the-drawbacks-of-explainer-journalism https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized > but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there. Except that some world views do hew closer to reality than others: > Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God. […] > The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no Secondary Causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism > Secondary causation[1][2][3] is the philosophical proposition that all material and corporeal objects, having been created by God with their own intrinsic potentialities, are subsequently empowered to evolve independently in accordance with natural law.[citation needed] […] That the physical universe is consequentially well-ordered, consistent, and knowable subject to human observation and reason, was a primary theme of Scholasticism and further molded into the philosophy of the western tradition by Augustine of Hippo and later by Thomas Aquinas. > Secondary causation has been suggested as a necessary precursor for scientific inquiry into an established order of natural laws which are not entirely predicated on the changeable whims of a supernatural being.[4] Nor does this create a conflict between science and religion for, given a creator deity, it is not inconsistent with the paradigm of a clockwork universe. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_causation
ceilingcorner 5y ago
This is the classical liberal take: ultra-individualism. Everyone can have their own god(s) (even metaphorically) and things will just work out if everyone got along. Historical trends seem to be going in the exact opposite direction. Individualism is sustainable to a certain point, but not when it becomes the default position of a society. All of the countries, belief systems, and ideologies that are succeeding today are running away from individualism. Whether that’s good or bad, is up to you.
golemiprague 5y ago
It's interesting that you are not including in your list one of the most prominent contribution of religion which is morals. A lot of moral codes that we take as given were introduced and hammered into people minds by the religions. Religion is not mostly about "spiritually", it is about living life according to some code of rules which is in some religions much more important than spirituality per se.
rayiner 5y ago
I think it’s time to recognize that many of the things you list as bad have a purpose as well and benefits. Remember, organized religion developed in harsh societies were people were always struggling to survive. If you think about a village in Bangladesh, where there is no government with unlimited resources to come save you, imposition of strict rules, suppression of individual preferences, etc., makes sense. What’s soured me on secular humanism is how the liberal revolution hasn’t made a big chunk of the population better off: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir.... I don’t think that’s just economic, I think it’s social as well. > According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common. If you think about the marshmallow test of impulse control, a lot of us are those kids at the far right of the bell curve who could wait forever for future rewards. But what about everyone else? What if a lot of people need the threat of exclusion or intolerance to, for example, to not walk away from their parental obligations. My in laws live in rural Oregon, and what’s striking to me is how dysfunctional their communities are. People might putatively religious, but liberalism has won insofar as organized religion has no power to police public morals. And what’s been the result? Not a social libertarian utopia, but dysfunction. My mother in law has teenagers just flocking to her house because it’s an island of stability in a world of mom’s boyfriends coming and going, divorces over trifles, etc. My dad in the other hand comes from a village in Bangladesh, and they don’t have a fraction of the material comfort of folks in rural America. But what they have is Islam, and tight regulation of social behaviors, intact families, etc. They have social structures that help them make the most of what little they have, which is why I think they thrive when they immigrate to America.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  What exactly about secular humanism has caused this social problem? Do you have some research that indicates that walking away from "parental obligations" is in any way influenced by religious belief? I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?
smohare 5y ago
I don’t think spirituality has anything to do with it. It’s about community first and foremost. We are social creatures after all. That is, unless we are going to conflate spirituality with anything even remotely related to existential ruminations. In the crowds I run in people are primarily satisfied by a good think.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> imposition of impossible standards This is one of the pluses, not the minuses. There's nobody out there saying you can achieve the standards. But there are lots of people out there saying you should push yourself in the direction of the standards.
- xabotage 5y ago
  "Impossible standards," for some religions, include things like being happy and fulfilled in a mixed orientation marriage with a large number of children. Not all directions are worth pushing in, and religion is actually really bad at identifying the good directions.
truetraveller 5y ago
The nasty side applies just as well to non-religious, non-spiritual communities. Even worse, perhaps. There are many examples. Look at the intolerance and hypocrisy in France, one of the most secular states. A girl is not allowed to go to school with the Muslim head scarf. This is worse than the Taliban. France allows insulting the Prophet (pbuh), but you'll get to jail for insulting the president. France has killed/raped/maimed tens of thousands for the sake of Imperialism. Just today, France allowed wild bird poaching: https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pvbdbh/french_president_macron_wants_to_allow_trapping/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pvbdbh/french_pr...
- hota_mazi 5y ago
  Insulting the president stopped being an offense a while ago: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/25/insulting-french-president-criminal-offence https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/25/insulting-fren... I still don't see the hypocrisy you speak of, though. France is a reasonably religious country overall but extremely secular when it comes to school and politics. The edicts you describe simply enforce these principles (e.g. "No religious symbols allowed in school, be it a cross, a star of David, a hijab, etc...").
  - truetraveller 5y ago
    No, insulting the President is an offense. Typical hypocrisy + lying by the French government. https://www.timesofisrael.com/frenchman-fined-for-billboard-depicting-macron-as-hitler-to-protest-covid-rules/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/frenchman-fined-for-billboard-... About the hijab. You say "Simply enforce these principles". Yes, and these principles are intolerant, which is my point. And this pick-and-choosing secularism when convenient, is a type of opression.
    - hota_mazi 5y ago
      I guess you could say they are intolerant of all religions, but that's a stretch. The bottom line is that all displays of religion are banned in French schools, which puts everyone on an equal footing. Even religious people should see the value of that, especially if you're part of a minority religion. Schools are places where you learn, not practice religion. That's what places of worship are for.
woodpanel 5y ago
> Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is. IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia would have been the same under atheists. And because today most of us are Atheists/Agnostics, and because most of these millenias' rulers weren't, it is our "agnostic hindsight" which follies us into believing that this suffering was all just caused by religion.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Yep, war has always been about resources and the fights of the elites. Religion is only ever an excuse, just like WMDs or whatever; a convenient lie to mislead the populous into believing there's a legitimate casus belli.
- truetraveller 5y ago
  Thank you. For anyone in doubt, look at despicable acts that governments have committed. Like how they massacred thousands, in the name of Imperialism / "Freedom".
  - dang 5y ago
    You've posted a ton of flamewar comments to this thread—not just religious flamewar but nationalistic flamewar too. This is badly breaking the site guidelines and we ban such accounts. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. And please, no more flamewar comments of any kind and certainly not these kinds!
- worrycue 5y ago
  I believe plenty of people have been killed for religious reasons. Sure religion is used as an excuse to start wars but wouldn't the fact that it works means people are willing to kill because of it?

nprateem 5y ago

Think for yourself?

rajin444 5y ago

The issues you describe apply to any grouping of people. Tribes have their own truths. Look at how popular those "we believe science is real" signs are. You could remove religion and we'd still have the same issues. I don't think it's possible to solve them. The best solution is going to be a world where a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected a-la > God's ways are mysterious fashion. Any differing positions appear as attacks against the person's religion, which - when it carries sufficient argumentative power - can shake the foundations of the person's world model. This, in turn, prevents them from accepting the differing position because such events induce fear and shut down mental faculties, effectively putting a person in a fight or flight mode. Furthermore, it prevents people from maturing and accepting integral parts of the human condition, such as the permanence of death, it provides a false sense of security that renders people incapacitated from taking meaningful action (God will find a way if God wills it), and finally gives a false sense importance and grandiose to puny humans who live in utter ignorance of their own insignificance in the medium (NB humanity scale) and grand scheme of things. To reach the solution that you point to, society needs to accept that free-will is an illusion, and that is inherently incompatible with Abrahamic religions.
- rayiner 5y ago
  > The difference between religion and other groups is that it provides an impenetrable shield to those who wield it, and virtually anything can be deflected Yeah, other groups have this as well. I once had the temerity to observe that Bush did a lot to quell anti-Islamic sentiment by appealing to other people of faith in post-9/11 speeches. I recounted my own experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name living in the south in 2002-2003. An acquaintance, a young white atheist lady, told me that I needed to “educate myself” about the “damage” that “Islamaphobia does to brown people in America.” I didn’t even engage further because it was clear I was dealing with someone’s quasi-religious belief. Everyone has belief systems and everyone’s belief systems necessarily include things taken as axiomatic.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Haha same. Been informed by so many white liberals as to how I should feel, one wonders if they think they'd make a better brown man.
    - forgingahead 5y ago
      Yeah it's been crazy to experience - white liberals lecturing minorities on how they should feel or think is itself extremely racist and insulting.
      - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
        I'd use prejudiced over racist since the same 'allies' are often very homophobic, biphobic and transphobic.
        iammisc 5y ago
        Nah they're just racist. The thing is a white liberal can become a homosexual should they choose to have sex with someone of the same sex. They can even theoretically become trans. No matter what a white man or woman does or how they feel about attraction or their gender.... He or she will never be brown. Sorry I'm not putting up with this intersectionality shit.
exporectomy 5y ago
> a long, happy life is guaranteed by forces outside man's control. This will likely alleviate a lot of the tribal issues we face as well. I suspect it would make it worse. People without a purpose tend to invent tribes and social status to fight for. School kids and prisoners are great examples. Their purpose is basically to passively exist while their physical needs are provided for by the system. Another example is neighborhoods with high unemployment and lots of people living on social welfare.

snuser 5y ago

The real problem with religion is that there's more than one

varjag 5y ago
That's what the GP says. It's too few of them for too many people.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mensetmanusman 5y ago
That’s what some people believe about politics and political parties, which is why China banned different parties:)

BrightGlow 5y ago

>resistance to or denial of reality It's not just this but it's also the lying and attempting to pass off various myths, mysticism, dogma, theology and fairy tales as being true with no evidence, and the promotion of "faith" and "belief" as justifications for doing so. And before someone says it, yes, there are other groups besides religious groups that fall into these same self-reinforcing traps. For example a significant number of people still believe in witches and ghosts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believe-Ghosts.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/2380/One-Third-Americans-Believ...

tus89 5y ago

> There seems to be little doubt that religion, faith, spirituality or rite can have benefits. Doubt among who? Religious congregations?

throw0101a 5y ago

> (exclusion and intolerance, resistance to or denial of reality, imposition of impossible standards, the denial of one's own preferences and wants). This is true of group affiliation in general, and may be innate to human beings: > “The human mind,” Klein observes, “is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference”—so much so that, as soon as an affiliation has formed, the people who have affiliated with one another proceed to define themselves against an out-group. To make matters worse, Klein goes on, human groups compete less for resources than they do for social esteem, and esteem is zero-sum: more for you means less for me. We would rather “win” against the out-group and be worse off than be better off and lose. * https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why-were-polarized-and-the-drawbacks-of-explainer-journalism https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/ezra-kleins-why... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized > but as long as people follow religions that preach their own unique truthfulness (believe the pope, the Bible, the Quran, the priests, the sutras, ...) we will never get there. Except that some world views do hew closer to reality than others: > Occasionalism is a philosophical doctrine about causation which says that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Instead, all events are taken to be caused directly by God. […] > The doctrine first reached prominence in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari argued that there is no Secondary Causation in the created order. The world is sustained and governed through direct intervention of a divine primary causation. As such the world is in a constant state of recreation by God. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism > Secondary causation[1][2][3] is the philosophical proposition that all material and corporeal objects, having been created by God with their own intrinsic potentialities, are subsequently empowered to evolve independently in accordance with natural law.[citation needed] […] That the physical universe is consequentially well-ordered, consistent, and knowable subject to human observation and reason, was a primary theme of Scholasticism and further molded into the philosophy of the western tradition by Augustine of Hippo and later by Thomas Aquinas. > Secondary causation has been suggested as a necessary precursor for scientific inquiry into an established order of natural laws which are not entirely predicated on the changeable whims of a supernatural being.[4] Nor does this create a conflict between science and religion for, given a creator deity, it is not inconsistent with the paradigm of a clockwork universe. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_causation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_causation

ceilingcorner 5y ago

This is the classical liberal take: ultra-individualism. Everyone can have their own god(s) (even metaphorically) and things will just work out if everyone got along. Historical trends seem to be going in the exact opposite direction. Individualism is sustainable to a certain point, but not when it becomes the default position of a society. All of the countries, belief systems, and ideologies that are succeeding today are running away from individualism. Whether that’s good or bad, is up to you.

golemiprague 5y ago

It's interesting that you are not including in your list one of the most prominent contribution of religion which is morals. A lot of moral codes that we take as given were introduced and hammered into people minds by the religions. Religion is not mostly about "spiritually", it is about living life according to some code of rules which is in some religions much more important than spirituality per se.

rayiner 5y ago

I think it’s time to recognize that many of the things you list as bad have a purpose as well and benefits. Remember, organized religion developed in harsh societies were people were always struggling to survive. If you think about a village in Bangladesh, where there is no government with unlimited resources to come save you, imposition of strict rules, suppression of individual preferences, etc., makes sense. What’s soured me on secular humanism is how the liberal revolution hasn’t made a big chunk of the population better off: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir.... I don’t think that’s just economic, I think it’s social as well. > According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common. If you think about the marshmallow test of impulse control, a lot of us are those kids at the far right of the bell curve who could wait forever for future rewards. But what about everyone else? What if a lot of people need the threat of exclusion or intolerance to, for example, to not walk away from their parental obligations. My in laws live in rural Oregon, and what’s striking to me is how dysfunctional their communities are. People might putatively religious, but liberalism has won insofar as organized religion has no power to police public morals. And what’s been the result? Not a social libertarian utopia, but dysfunction. My mother in law has teenagers just flocking to her house because it’s an island of stability in a world of mom’s boyfriends coming and going, divorces over trifles, etc. My dad in the other hand comes from a village in Bangladesh, and they don’t have a fraction of the material comfort of folks in rural America. But what they have is Islam, and tight regulation of social behaviors, intact families, etc. They have social structures that help them make the most of what little they have, which is why I think they thrive when they immigrate to America.

smackeyacky 5y ago
What exactly about secular humanism has caused this social problem? Do you have some research that indicates that walking away from "parental obligations" is in any way influenced by religious belief? I could make the equal assertion that religion turns men into sexual abusers of children (reference: the Catholic church). Are you comfortable with that?

smohare 5y ago

I don’t think spirituality has anything to do with it. It’s about community first and foremost. We are social creatures after all. That is, unless we are going to conflate spirituality with anything even remotely related to existential ruminations. In the crowds I run in people are primarily satisfied by a good think.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> imposition of impossible standards This is one of the pluses, not the minuses. There's nobody out there saying you can achieve the standards. But there are lots of people out there saying you should push yourself in the direction of the standards.

xabotage 5y ago
"Impossible standards," for some religions, include things like being happy and fulfilled in a mixed orientation marriage with a large number of children. Not all directions are worth pushing in, and religion is actually really bad at identifying the good directions.

truetraveller 5y ago

The nasty side applies just as well to non-religious, non-spiritual communities. Even worse, perhaps. There are many examples. Look at the intolerance and hypocrisy in France, one of the most secular states. A girl is not allowed to go to school with the Muslim head scarf. This is worse than the Taliban. France allows insulting the Prophet (pbuh), but you'll get to jail for insulting the president. France has killed/raped/maimed tens of thousands for the sake of Imperialism. Just today, France allowed wild bird poaching: https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pvbdbh/french_president_macron_wants_to_allow_trapping/ https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/pvbdbh/french_pr...

hota_mazi 5y ago
Insulting the president stopped being an offense a while ago: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/25/insulting-french-president-criminal-offence https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/25/insulting-fren... I still don't see the hypocrisy you speak of, though. France is a reasonably religious country overall but extremely secular when it comes to school and politics. The edicts you describe simply enforce these principles (e.g. "No religious symbols allowed in school, be it a cross, a star of David, a hijab, etc...").
- truetraveller 5y ago
  No, insulting the President is an offense. Typical hypocrisy + lying by the French government. https://www.timesofisrael.com/frenchman-fined-for-billboard-depicting-macron-as-hitler-to-protest-covid-rules/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/frenchman-fined-for-billboard-... About the hijab. You say "Simply enforce these principles". Yes, and these principles are intolerant, which is my point. And this pick-and-choosing secularism when convenient, is a type of opression.
  - hota_mazi 5y ago
    I guess you could say they are intolerant of all religions, but that's a stretch. The bottom line is that all displays of religion are banned in French schools, which puts everyone on an equal footing. Even religious people should see the value of that, especially if you're part of a minority religion. Schools are places where you learn, not practice religion. That's what places of worship are for.

woodpanel 5y ago

> Religion has been a major source of soothing and a major source of suffering for all of humanity's past The idea that religion is such a big source of suffering throughout all of our history is one I stopped believing once I took a closer look at the actual nature of war, particulary how a country's elite is moving closer to war and how "religious" said elite actually is. IMO the amounts of blood shed over millenia would have been the same under atheists. And because today most of us are Atheists/Agnostics, and because most of these millenias' rulers weren't, it is our "agnostic hindsight" which follies us into believing that this suffering was all just caused by religion.

beaconstudios 5y ago
Yep, war has always been about resources and the fights of the elites. Religion is only ever an excuse, just like WMDs or whatever; a convenient lie to mislead the populous into believing there's a legitimate casus belli.
truetraveller 5y ago
Thank you. For anyone in doubt, look at despicable acts that governments have committed. Like how they massacred thousands, in the name of Imperialism / "Freedom".
- dang 5y ago
  You've posted a ton of flamewar comments to this thread—not just religious flamewar but nationalistic flamewar too. This is badly breaking the site guidelines and we ban such accounts. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. And please, no more flamewar comments of any kind and certainly not these kinds!
worrycue 5y ago
I believe plenty of people have been killed for religious reasons. Sure religion is used as an excuse to start wars but wouldn't the fact that it works means people are willing to kill because of it?