5 ms·
> Religion, sigh. So, no, not all religions are violent and/or harmful. I've been an devout atheist since about the age of 10. That doesn't stop me from seein
by tpmx 3y ago
> Religion, sigh.
So, no, not all religions are violent and/or harmful.
I've been an devout atheist since about the age of 10. That doesn't stop me from seeing that:
a) some religions are relatively harmless and mostly helpful to their believers
b) some religions are very destructive to everyone
I don't think we should go much further from here.
- colinb 3y ago[flagged]
- User23 3y agoThe Soviet atheists absolutely took the cake for most murder by a religious faction. What you’re describing is a people problem, not a religion problem.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoNobel laureate Steven Weinberg has something to say about this. "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion."
- graphe 3y agoThe Chinese farmer story has something to say about it too. https://matterco.co/the-maybe-story/ https://matterco.co/the-maybe-story/ > One thing for sure is that life is uncertain. We never really know what situations may yield us—good, bad, or otherwise. Whatever happens in our life, we’ll never be sure of the consequences it may bring in the future.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoIf that's true, "maybe" we should have let Hitler live. In real-life, losing a horse or breaking a leg is a bad outcome over 99% of the time, and gaining free horses and avoiding conscription (and defeating despots attempting to conquer the world) is a good outcome over 99% of the time.
- graphe 3y agoHitler could have united Europe. Had he won and taken over Russia and Europe it could have been much better. Had Genghis Khan not attacked so many places, legends of centuars may not exist and the world could be better. We don't know.
- User23 3y agoI find this line of argument to be a compelling refutation of any kind of consequentialist ethics from a human perspective. No human being ever has had or ever will have the ability to predict out the full consequences of an action throughout all time.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoI invite you to put your ideology to practice and chop off your own arm. We don't have the ability to predict the full consequences after all. The rest of us understand that though few things are 100% certain, many things are possible to predict with a high amount of certainty.
- User23 3y agoI assume that sounded clever to you when you typed it, but I invite you to consider how it completely fails to follow in any way from the statement that human understanding of higher order consequences rapidly approaches absolute deficiency as the causal chain lengthens. My practical ethic is something closer to deontology. And it includes things like “don’t mutilate your body.” It’s precisely because I can’t follow those higher order consequence chains that I settle for following general moral principles instead of attempting teleological justifications for my actions.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoWhy doesn't your practical ethic include the general moral principle of not promoting religious nonsense? The causal chain is simple. People who believe religious nonsense can be easily made to believe any nonsense that hurts them (and have done so again and again), including mutilating their own genitals and the genitals of their children, which conflicts with and takes priority over your other moral principle. Your defeatist attitude leads to bad public policy, where the powerful take advantage of the weak because the weak are stupidly convinced that they cannot understand the consequences of limiting their own exploitation.
- imiric 3y ago> Soviet atheists [...] religious faction. You're confusing atheism for a religion. Those murders were conducted by oppressive governments with a specific agenda, that didn't come from some atheist scripture. > What you’re describing is a people problem, not a religion problem. It's a problem of organized groups of people motivated by a collective ideology. This is manifested primarily by religions, since most religious texts have some passages that reject foreign groups, or outright invite acts of violence against them[1,2]. [1]: https://www.openbible.info/topics/killing_non_believers https://www.openbible.info/topics/killing_non_believers [2]: https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/violence.aspx https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/violence.aspx
- User23 3y ago> You're confusing atheism for a religion. Atheism is a religion. Atheists observably claim to have achieved gnosis. It’s agnosticism that is an absence of belief.
- amazingman 3y agoAgnostic atheism is a form of atheism. Atheism isn't a religion. It's not even a belief. It's just a lack of a specific kind of belief. Are there gnostic atheists? Sure. But even that is just a belief, and not a religion.
- tpmx 3y agoIrish, right?
- colinb 3y agoMe? Yes I am.
- tpmx 3y ago> Just don't try to claim that your club is actually less blood-soaked than the others. I'm in Sweden. Religion here has sort of faded into the background. Very few people are religious. We observe the religion here more or less as as a cultural thing. It's something we do at births, school exam celebrations and burials but not much else. Bload soaked club? Yes, a few hundred years ago.
- User23 3y agoHuman beings are observably religious by nature. We’re going to worship and make devotion to something, whether it’s God, ourselves, the sky, an economic system, science, or whatever else. There will never be a post-religious age.
- justin66 3y agoIf you’re willing to misuse the term “religious” blatantly enough, the above statement is tautologous. Otherwise it’s silly.
- snvzz 3y agoI am also an atheist, but recognize religion as damaging, forcing a tilting cognitive fog. Never helpful, a net negative to believers and society. The degree of bad depends on the religion and the believer. Plus one must not forget that, for most believers, religion preceded adulthood, even maturity. Meaning it was never a choice, but imposed through indoctrination and immediate social pressure.
- vasdae 3y agoReligion will always exist one way or the other. Many atheists take science as a religion for example, with horrible outcomes.
- freedomben 3y agoI largely agree, except: > Never helpful It clearly is helpful to believers at times. For example, when a loved one dies, it can be extremely comforting to think you'll see them again soon in a paradisical heaven. Comfort when you're hurting is helpful.
- snvzz 3y ago>it can be extremely comforting to think you'll see them again soon in a paradisical heaven Comforting? Sure. Yet it can be positive if and only if there's no value in grief.
- 3y ago
- dartharva 3y agoReligion, by definition, is a social construct explicitly built to foster a collective identity that isolates those in the in-group from the out-group. It inherently implies hostility against the non-believer; the only difference is the form this hostility takes. For some, it's just condescension for people who don't perceive the "truth", for others it's literally declaring them infidels who don't deserve to live. All religions in this world fall within the spectrum of these two extremes. No religion in this world is open to having its foundational ideas challenged or debated in any manner.