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History will also show you that it is religion that has formed the moral and social framework for today's values to be opposed to oppression. You might think th

History will also show you that it is religion that has formed the moral and social framework for today's values to be opposed to oppression. You might think they, human rights, good morals, fundamental truths, are innate and fundamental but then look at geography and history together and you will see that it's religion that is the origin for these beliefs. The twentieth century featured many deaths caused by 2 different philosophies in 2 different places explicitly opposed to religion, for example!. It's a paradox and irony in many cases. Just some perspective and nuance for widening ones thoughts.

hackyhacky 4y ago
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Are you claiming that murder was totally accepted as normal before Moses got the Commandments? Religion, at best, codified moral values that were already in place in society.
- ars 4y ago
  > Are you claiming that murder was totally accepted as normal before Moses got the Commandments? Pretty much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide read the 4th paragraph. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war which also traces its roots to religion. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy.
  - hackyhacky 4y ago
    > Pretty much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide read the 4th paragraph. I asked about murder, not this particular special case. Furthermore, even from the paragraph that you cite, there is nothing explicitly connecting religious law with a prohibition of murder or infanticide. The article states the Christianity forbade infanticide, which I will note is about 1300 years AFTER Moses. > I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy. Thanks for your unjustified condescension. Maybe you should read the articles that you cite?
  - peterashford 4y ago
    As someone with a degree in Philosophy, I have no idea why you think doing a course in Philosophy would make you believe that religion was the basis of morality. There is plenty of philosophy which explicitly rejects that point of view.
- thinkingemote 4y ago
  Yes that's right more or less. Slavery and sexual violence could be a better example as it's more closer to now. History is illuminating.
  - hackyhacky 4y ago
    Slavery and sexual violence are explicitly endorsed by the Bible.
pubby 4y ago
Most inmates are religious - that's why prisons have chapels and give out religious texts. It's estimated only around 1 in 1000 prisoners are atheist.
- eitland 4y ago
  At the same time, the regime that killed absolutely most people last century were staunchly anti religious: the USSR.
  - jl6 4y ago
    The USSR, with a cult of personality around the leader, unquestionable doctrines, restraint on free thinking, and its own set of truths at odds with reality? Funny how they managed to stay anti-religious while keeping all the best bits of religion.
    - eitland 4y ago
      Atheism, more religious than religion, a common theme also on internet today :-/
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    Yeah but most weren't killed because of religion, and religion lived on for the people in the USSR, just not as societies organising body. Add up deaths in the name of religion this century and get back to me
    - eitland 4y ago
      We can wrangle around this, but absolutely most civilian deaths in the twentieth century was caused by very atheists regimes. And yes, that holds true even if you include Hitlers regime on the religious side despite the fact that major religious factions were against him.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if it would be related to socioeconomic status though, instead of some causation between sin and religion.
k1ll3r 4y ago
The notion that humanity would be morally lost without the guidance of religious belief is laughable. For sake of gaining some perspective and widening one's thoughts I'd suggest reading the works of any of the number of major philosophers. And if you need to read in some book that oppression is bad, that murdering people is bad, that basic human rights are a good idea, etc. - if you need to read that in a book and have these concepts crystalized for you as capital T True by dogma fed to you by a church of some kind... then, my friend, you're just a bad person. And we do have bad people and will continue to have bad people but religion has done nothing to abate this. Moral compass is innate to human nature, not something you learn from a book.
- thinkingemote 4y ago
  "Moral compass is innate" is a belief. Science cannot provide evidence for it. It's such a good belief, that we are blind to it being a belief and blind to its origins. It's a belief that is so successful because it is true. It comes from the belief that every person has an intrinsic value. Philosophy isn't about rational atheistic science. Science cannot prove or disprove the idea that every human has value. The Nazis didn't belief that and used science to back up their abhorrent beliefs. They murdered millions of religious People. The communists also hated religion and murdered millions more of people who thought different. The irony is that they did so in the name of ending oppression. History and geography will help you see that ideas about innate rights come from religion. But we don't need religion to keep these ideas going. Just looking at how the human rights movement started should be illuminating.
  - hackyhacky 4y ago
    False dichotomy. There's a big gap between "morality is innate" and "morality can be achieved only through religion."
    - concinds 4y ago
      The argument isn't "you can only be moral if you're religious", it's: "modern Western moral attitudes, even explicitly atheistic ones, are strongly influenced by historical religious ideas, and therefore the idea that religion is inherently immoral is incoherent; and contempt for religion is unjustified." Seems reasonable to me.
tialaramex 4y ago
The Princess Alice experiments are evidence for the alternative rationale that belief in invisible God-like beings who impose rules is a useful trait for early civilisations which have inadequate oversight for their members. Superstitious people will obey rules with no actual enforcement out of a mistaken belief that an invisible Deity might punish them for disobedience, this benefits the rest of their society, at least in the short term. Of course it breaks down if a few people in society exploit everybody else's beliefs. "Princess Alice wants you to look after the sheep" is beneficial because it means shepherds do their jobs properly, but "Princess Alice needs you to sell your worldly possessions so that I can have a nice necklace" not so much.
- satellite2 4y ago
  It's a rational looking theory, but is there any evidence that superstitious people exhibit more ethical behaviors? I have the impression that since those people are not bound by evidences they can justify unethical behavior much more easily. And so this trait that should make them more ethical actually backfires and enable worse behavior.
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    Ah, Princess Alice doesn't check for ethical behaviour it checks for obedience. This shows that religion could perform a valuable function in a pre-historic human society independent of whether it's true.
bradlys 4y ago
Slave mentality back in the day (2000+ years ago) was converted into religious beliefs and then it got “mainstream” and all the religion that was focused on being a chad became unpopular thanks to this slave religion which made being a slave cool and being a chad uncool. That’s the tl;dr of your argument afaict. Problem there is that religion was the problem in both contexts - so I don’t think it provided a solution so much as it caused the problem in the first place. Even then - it forced slave mentality onto the masses and that wasn’t exactly great for everyone either… Self-flagellation anyone?

hackyhacky 4y ago

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. Are you claiming that murder was totally accepted as normal before Moses got the Commandments? Religion, at best, codified moral values that were already in place in society.

ars 4y ago
> Are you claiming that murder was totally accepted as normal before Moses got the Commandments? Pretty much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide read the 4th paragraph. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war which also traces its roots to religion. Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy.
- hackyhacky 4y ago
  > Pretty much: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide read the 4th paragraph. I asked about murder, not this particular special case. Furthermore, even from the paragraph that you cite, there is nothing explicitly connecting religious law with a prohibition of murder or infanticide. The article states the Christianity forbade infanticide, which I will note is about 1300 years AFTER Moses. > I don't think you quite realize how much of modern morality traces itself to religious law. Maybe take a course in Philosophy. Thanks for your unjustified condescension. Maybe you should read the articles that you cite?
- peterashford 4y ago
  As someone with a degree in Philosophy, I have no idea why you think doing a course in Philosophy would make you believe that religion was the basis of morality. There is plenty of philosophy which explicitly rejects that point of view.
thinkingemote 4y ago
Yes that's right more or less. Slavery and sexual violence could be a better example as it's more closer to now. History is illuminating.
- hackyhacky 4y ago
  Slavery and sexual violence are explicitly endorsed by the Bible.

pubby 4y ago

Most inmates are religious - that's why prisons have chapels and give out religious texts. It's estimated only around 1 in 1000 prisoners are atheist.

eitland 4y ago
At the same time, the regime that killed absolutely most people last century were staunchly anti religious: the USSR.
- jl6 4y ago
  The USSR, with a cult of personality around the leader, unquestionable doctrines, restraint on free thinking, and its own set of truths at odds with reality? Funny how they managed to stay anti-religious while keeping all the best bits of religion.
  - eitland 4y ago
    Atheism, more religious than religion, a common theme also on internet today :-/
- diordiderot 4y ago
  Yeah but most weren't killed because of religion, and religion lived on for the people in the USSR, just not as societies organising body. Add up deaths in the name of religion this century and get back to me
  - eitland 4y ago
    We can wrangle around this, but absolutely most civilian deaths in the twentieth century was caused by very atheists regimes. And yes, that holds true even if you include Hitlers regime on the religious side despite the fact that major religious factions were against him.
kaba0 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it would be related to socioeconomic status though, instead of some causation between sin and religion.

k1ll3r 4y ago

The notion that humanity would be morally lost without the guidance of religious belief is laughable. For sake of gaining some perspective and widening one's thoughts I'd suggest reading the works of any of the number of major philosophers. And if you need to read in some book that oppression is bad, that murdering people is bad, that basic human rights are a good idea, etc. - if you need to read that in a book and have these concepts crystalized for you as capital T True by dogma fed to you by a church of some kind... then, my friend, you're just a bad person. And we do have bad people and will continue to have bad people but religion has done nothing to abate this. Moral compass is innate to human nature, not something you learn from a book.

thinkingemote 4y ago
"Moral compass is innate" is a belief. Science cannot provide evidence for it. It's such a good belief, that we are blind to it being a belief and blind to its origins. It's a belief that is so successful because it is true. It comes from the belief that every person has an intrinsic value. Philosophy isn't about rational atheistic science. Science cannot prove or disprove the idea that every human has value. The Nazis didn't belief that and used science to back up their abhorrent beliefs. They murdered millions of religious People. The communists also hated religion and murdered millions more of people who thought different. The irony is that they did so in the name of ending oppression. History and geography will help you see that ideas about innate rights come from religion. But we don't need religion to keep these ideas going. Just looking at how the human rights movement started should be illuminating.
- hackyhacky 4y ago
  False dichotomy. There's a big gap between "morality is innate" and "morality can be achieved only through religion."
  - concinds 4y ago
    The argument isn't "you can only be moral if you're religious", it's: "modern Western moral attitudes, even explicitly atheistic ones, are strongly influenced by historical religious ideas, and therefore the idea that religion is inherently immoral is incoherent; and contempt for religion is unjustified." Seems reasonable to me.

tialaramex 4y ago

The Princess Alice experiments are evidence for the alternative rationale that belief in invisible God-like beings who impose rules is a useful trait for early civilisations which have inadequate oversight for their members. Superstitious people will obey rules with no actual enforcement out of a mistaken belief that an invisible Deity might punish them for disobedience, this benefits the rest of their society, at least in the short term. Of course it breaks down if a few people in society exploit everybody else's beliefs. "Princess Alice wants you to look after the sheep" is beneficial because it means shepherds do their jobs properly, but "Princess Alice needs you to sell your worldly possessions so that I can have a nice necklace" not so much.

satellite2 4y ago
It's a rational looking theory, but is there any evidence that superstitious people exhibit more ethical behaviors? I have the impression that since those people are not bound by evidences they can justify unethical behavior much more easily. And so this trait that should make them more ethical actually backfires and enable worse behavior.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Ah, Princess Alice doesn't check for ethical behaviour it checks for obedience. This shows that religion could perform a valuable function in a pre-historic human society independent of whether it's true.

bradlys 4y ago

Slave mentality back in the day (2000+ years ago) was converted into religious beliefs and then it got “mainstream” and all the religion that was focused on being a chad became unpopular thanks to this slave religion which made being a slave cool and being a chad uncool. That’s the tl;dr of your argument afaict. Problem there is that religion was the problem in both contexts - so I don’t think it provided a solution so much as it caused the problem in the first place. Even then - it forced slave mentality onto the masses and that wasn’t exactly great for everyone either… Self-flagellation anyone?