He was a genius, but most fans have their own ideas based on severely limited experience.
Fans Disenfranchised with Utopia?
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He was a genius, but most fans have their own ideas based on severely limited experience.
But increasing numbers of us don't. It isn't happening all at once, not to all of us at the same time, but we (as a overall species) are making stead incremental improvements to our existence.
What I was posting about before was that with the internet you can get the false impression that the really bad palaces in the world are the norm.
On most of the world, people are living pretty nice lives, no they don't all have western lifestyle, and there are some bad places and bad things going on, but the average Joe Blow and his wife Jane somewhere on Earth are getting the job of just living their lives done.
They work hard, and at the end of the day they have a glass of wine, play some cards and go to bed without the sound of gunfire in the distance.
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As a matter of fact I have read the Bible. But I read more than just Leviticus, I also read the Gospels. In the Gospels, Jesus is portrayed as basically a hippie. Infinitely forgiving, very pacifist. "Love thy neighbor". "Forgive thy enemies". "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". This is the part of the Bible that appeals to me. I do not believe in the divinity of Jesus, but if you only look at the Gospels, the stuff he said was pretty awesome.
It is certainly the case that evil things have been done in the name of religion. But they are not evil religious people. They're evil people who invoke religion as an excuse for being evil. If religion weren't there, they would have used some other excuse to do the exact same things.
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Wow, I am stunned you would say that. When I went to primary school, it was Catholic. I had my "awakening" as an adult and left it behind. But do you know what evil I was asked to do in the Lord's name? Nothing.
"God calls on us to love. Whether the person has sinned or not, they are our brother or our sister. The sin is the problem and you should not engage in their sin, let them bring you down. But the judgment of God will reign, and you risk eternal punishment if you judge someone else."
That's what I was taught. Now, does that sound evil? That sounds like trying to get others to "turn the cheek," realize they have hope and love wherever they go. It is why I appreciate Pope Francis, a man so open-minded as to invite criticism from the religious right in America, and to WELCOME atheists. The catch? We have to go into the world and do good. From there, we can agree to disagree.
Now, I don't pretend to have knowledge of other religions. But I know what I was taught. I know what I have seen in my life. And the religious right in America is giving religion a bad name. The "Chick-Fil-A" crowd.
You are aware there are churches that are welcoming the LGBT members because they are children of God, and it is not our place to judge them, right? What about the Episcopal Church, who, 10 years ago, ordained the first openly gay bishop in the world.
I suggest you get out of whatever echo chamber you're in. Drop the attitude, and mix with the faithful. I'm not asking you to like them. I am asking you to see beyond your own closed mind and bigotry. And I say that as an atheist. Don't hate your enemy, something else they teach. I didn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
TheGoodStuff, please learn to close your quotes. It makes a conversation much easier to read.
No, I understand your point just fine. I am not missing the point; the point is erroneous.
As I said: These evils you cite are not caused by religion, and the power elite would find justifications for their perpetuation whether or not they had religion to do so. You are falsely attributing to religion that which, frankly, is mostly attributable to exploitative economic systems, and ignoring the fact that other justifications throughout history have been used to perpetuate oppression.
Europeans and European-descended cultures, for instance, once justified the oppression of non-European peoples on the basis of the supposed evolutionary inferiority of those peoples -- "social Darwinism." Does this mean that the scientific process is inherently oppressive? Of course not. Science is a tool; it was used for evil ends, but it can be used for just ends.
You make a compelling argument for why religious arguments should be evaluated critically, with an eye towards what political factions their arguments serve. You make a very bad argument for the idea that all religion everywhere is an inherently bad thing.
Searching for the true causes of injustice rather than the scapegoats that allow the oppressors to survive unscathed, is not an act of semantics, and it does not avoid any uncomfortable truths.
Maybe it's not right for you. But I dare say that if it causes no long-term physical or psychological damage, that it is ridiculous to call it "mutilation."
And if someone has their child circumcised because the general medical consensus of the time is that it provides health benefits, I for one have a hard time saying that that parent's actions are unjustified -- even if that medical consensus later turns out to be erroneous, since those parents were making their decision based upon the best available information at the time.
Bear in mind that you just accused the better part of 300 million Americans of mutilating their children. There comes a point where such claims come dangerously close to the tipping point of turning into irrational, self-righteous hysterics.
No, it is not. It is completely relevant, because you cannot factually claim that people only get circumcised for religious reasons.
Yes, there is. You have taken legitimate concerns about the role of religion in justifying oppression, and then blown them up into hysterical condemnations of an entire aspect of human culture, while ignoring the fact that other institutions have played similar roles. You have followed this up by appealing to the most ludicrous and inaccurate stereotypes of religious adherents as being somehow inherently ignorant, irrational, and dangerous. You have taken the same tribalist impulse you so decry and applied it towards your own paradigm -- with non-theists defined as your own personal "in-group" and theists defined as your own personal "out-group."
I assure you, I haven't squirmed once in this whole conversation.
Actually, a more thorough reading of my posts in this topic would reveal that I haven't justified religion at all.
I have not once argued that religion is a necessary aspect of human culture. I have not argued that its virtues outweigh its flaws, or that we should view it as a universally positive influence.
What I have done is defend religion against what I view as unfair arguments. What I have done is say, religion has done good and religion has done bad. I have not once made a conclusion about whether or not one aspect or the other is dominant -- because I view the question as absurd. You might as well ask if language is a good or bad thing, given the way it has been used to perpetuate injustice and lies. Religion and language are neither good nor bad; they just are. It's all in how you use it.
"Blatant hypocrisy?" If there's one lesson I take from the scientific process, it's that being willing to modify your conclusions based upon new evidence is a virtue, not a sign of hypocrisy.
Indeed, the whole idea that a believer who changes their beliefs to accommodate new factual information is engaging in "hypocrisy" is, I would argue, a product of Protestant cultural values. Protestantism, of course, has its origins in early modern Europe, and in the idea that Christians should not have to rely upon the Catholic Church and its priests to mediate their relationship with their God -- that a Christian should be able to study the Bible, which is believed to be the Word of God, directly in order to forge a direct relationship with God.
This idea then gives way to the idea that the holy text must be viewed as infallible, as literally true -- that "true religion" means adhering to every detail of the text, and precludes non-literalist interpretations.
This understanding of what it means to be religious, to be a believer, would have seemed very alien to earlier religious believers. The ancient Romans, for instance, were very famous for their religious syncretism -- they were more than willing to incorporate the religious beliefs of foreign cultures into their own religion, to identify foreign gods with their own gods. Hinduism has done the same throughout the centuries. Judaism has a long tradition of non-literalist interpretations of the Tanakh, to the point where scholarly commentary on it (the Talmud) is itself also revered as part of their traditions.
So, no, that's not "hypocrisy." The idea that it is hypocrisy, that a non-hypocritical religious believer must adhere to a One True Dogma that never changes -- must always, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, believe the same thing on Wednesday that she believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday -- is itself the production of one very particular religious tradition.
I don't -- but I'm not entirely convinced that some Trekkies don't!
More seriously: Not all religious people believe this, either.
Once again: Sexism is a function of politics and economics, not religion. Religion has been the rationalization, not the cause. If you don't believe me, just consider the well-established problem of sexism within the atheist community.
I don't contest the idea that heterosexism has some of its origins in ancient Hebrew prohibitions against male homosexual acts (which most scholars believe were adopted as a way to distinguish the ancient Hebrews from their polytheist neighbors, for whom sexual acts with religious leaders were a religious practice).
But ask yourself something:
The Old Testament is full of religious prohibitions of similar language and seriousness as those against homosexuality, which have been completely disregarded by modern Western society. There is no movement to oppress tattooed people, or persons who mix their fabrics.
So why has heterosexism survived? What made anti-homosexual prohibitions broadly stick in Western culture until the 20th Century, while prohibitions of equal importance to the ancient Hebrews have fallen to the wayside?
You gotta be asking yourself: Who does the taboo against homosexuality serve? What practical reason could a society have for keeping this taboo while disregarding others?
Could it, for instance, have something to do with maintaining aristocratic inheritances? With maintaining patriarchal domination of society?
You gotta be asking yourself if religion is the real reason this taboo has survived for so long, or if there's some other factor at work here.
I would argue that this is still a function of heteropatriarchy -- the desire to prevent women from having a say in their own fertility. But, I also completely agree that the power religious institutions have has been completely and utterly abused by their decision to discourage people from using condoms, and that many people have died as a result.
Gods? Who's talking about gods? I'm talking about religion -- a facet of human culture. I never said any god did those things. I said that religion can bring benefit to humanity.
Whether you like it or not, it is a matter of historical fact that religious institutions played important roles in organizing and recruiting for progressive reform movements. Whether you like it or not, it is a matter of historical fact that progressive reform leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., have been motivated by their religious beliefs. To claim otherwise is to blatantly lie about the historical record -- is to deny the empirical evidence.
I wouldn't call them nonsense. I'd call them products of their cultures -- and important tools in understanding those cultures and the later cultures which they influenced.
I would also contend that works like these can contain wisdom, even if I do not share their beliefs. Do you look at The Odyssey and get nothing from it other than "nonsense?" The Iliad? The Aeneid? The Oresteia? Prose Edda? Do you not see the literary merit in these works, the universal themes they wrestle with?
You don't have to believe that Odysseus was real to recognize that the writer we call "Homer" was saying something important about what it's like to transition from warfare to normal life. You don't have to believe that the Greek gods caused the Trojan War to understand that Homer's depiction of war's effects on Achilles touches on a universal human truth about how war warps the human mind. You don't have to believe in Zeus or Athena to see that Aeschylus was saying something meaningful about the difference between justice and vengeance. You don't have to put your faith in Odin to see that the ancient Norse believers in Ragnarök had something interesting to say about the nature of mortality.
And you don't have to believe in the divinity -- nor even the historical existence -- of Jesus of Nazareth to recognize that when he's depicted as saying, "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me," that the author is making a very profound, universal statement about society's moral obligations to the poor and the oppressed.
You should try engaging these texts as something other than as artifacts of a system of control.
Who are you to decide whence other people ought to derive their comfort, their sense of community, their sense of meaning, their sense of liberation?
That is a very shallow understanding of what it means to be religious, or to derive the above things from religion. I won't deny that there are religious believers for whom their faith truly is that shallow -- who merely see their faith as a transaction: "Obey God's rules and He'll reward you with Heaven after you die." These people don't actual care about morality; they just want a reward and social prestige.
But that doesn't mean that's a universal truth of the religious. There are millions of people who do derive their sense of community, of liberation, of meaning, from their fellow human beings -- their fellow human beings with whom they are united by common beliefs. These are not people who are deriving meaning from the promise of a posthumous fantasy land; hell, there are plenty of religions that don't even believe in an afterlife as Protestant Christianity understands it.
Two of the best examples I can think of are the Jewish religious commandment to "fix this broken world," or the drive of progressive Christians to push for social justice, which they identify with the justice of the Kingdom of God, here on Earth, in this life. These are not people placated by promises of a just afterlife -- people like radical activist and Jesuit priest Rev. Daniel Berrigan -- are fighting for social justice and equality today, and their faith is their motivation.
If you think this is just a matter of just waiting for promises of a fantasyland after death, then you don't even understand what religion is for these people.
No, I am not. I am asserting that religious people have fought for, and achieved positive reform in the world, and that their religious beliefs have been among their motivations and sources of emotional sustenance.
I did not watch your video because I have no interest in anything Christopher Hitchens, a warmonger and religious bigot, had to say.
Understand something:
I am not endorsing religion. I am not justifying it. I am not saying that its good outweighs its bad, or that its bad outweighs its good. I am contending that religion is a much more complex, much more multi-faceted phenomenon, than you are saying. I am contending that it has many permutations, many incarnations, many variations. I am contending that it is inaccurate to try to characterize all religion as being just this or just that, because religions are simply too diverse and their roles in society too complex. And finally, I am asserting that you are taking legitimate concerns, and then running away with them into ridiculous, overly-broad statements that cannot possibly be supported except by the grossest of anti-religious stereotypes and exaggerations.
ETA:
Also, just a bit of historical trivia for you to consider:
There is a very real possibility that if there were no religion, there would be no Star Trek. Why do I say that?
Because in the West, the art form we call theatre has twice emerged from the institution we know as religion. In ancient Athens, it emerged from religious ceremonies held to honor the god Dionysus. The art of theatre mostly died out in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire -- yet it emerged again centuries later, when European churches began enacting dramatizations of Biblical episodes and other religious stories on specific days of the year. This evolved into liturgical dramas, which eventually evolved into the theatre as we understand it today -- and, of course, the 19th Century European theatre is the direct ancestor of European and American film and television drama.
Just something to keep in mind the next time you sit down and watch TV or enjoy a movie while thinking to yourself that religion has never produced any benefit for humanity.
No, I understand your point just fine. I am not missing the point; the point is erroneous.
As I said: These evils you cite are not caused by religion, and the power elite would find justifications for their perpetuation whether or not they had religion to do so. You are falsely attributing to religion that which, frankly, is mostly attributable to exploitative economic systems, and ignoring the fact that other justifications throughout history have been used to perpetuate oppression.
Europeans and European-descended cultures, for instance, once justified the oppression of non-European peoples on the basis of the supposed evolutionary inferiority of those peoples -- "social Darwinism." Does this mean that the scientific process is inherently oppressive? Of course not. Science is a tool; it was used for evil ends, but it can be used for just ends.
You make a compelling argument for why religious arguments should be evaluated critically, with an eye towards what political factions their arguments serve. You make a very bad argument for the idea that all religion everywhere is an inherently bad thing.
Searching for the true causes of injustice rather than the scapegoats that allow the oppressors to survive unscathed, is not an act of semantics, and it does not avoid any uncomfortable truths.
Maybe it's not right for you. But I dare say that if it causes no long-term physical or psychological damage, that it is ridiculous to call it "mutilation."
And if someone has their child circumcised because the general medical consensus of the time is that it provides health benefits, I for one have a hard time saying that that parent's actions are unjustified -- even if that medical consensus later turns out to be erroneous, since those parents were making their decision based upon the best available information at the time.
Bear in mind that you just accused the better part of 300 million Americans of mutilating their children. There comes a point where such claims come dangerously close to the tipping point of turning into irrational, self-righteous hysterics.
No, it is not. It is completely relevant, because you cannot factually claim that people only get circumcised for religious reasons.
Yes, there is. You have taken legitimate concerns about the role of religion in justifying oppression, and then blown them up into hysterical condemnations of an entire aspect of human culture, while ignoring the fact that other institutions have played similar roles. You have followed this up by appealing to the most ludicrous and inaccurate stereotypes of religious adherents as being somehow inherently ignorant, irrational, and dangerous. You have taken the same tribalist impulse you so decry and applied it towards your own paradigm -- with non-theists defined as your own personal "in-group" and theists defined as your own personal "out-group."
I assure you, I haven't squirmed once in this whole conversation.
Actually, a more thorough reading of my posts in this topic would reveal that I haven't justified religion at all.
I have not once argued that religion is a necessary aspect of human culture. I have not argued that its virtues outweigh its flaws, or that we should view it as a universally positive influence.
What I have done is defend religion against what I view as unfair arguments. What I have done is say, religion has done good and religion has done bad. I have not once made a conclusion about whether or not one aspect or the other is dominant -- because I view the question as absurd. You might as well ask if language is a good or bad thing, given the way it has been used to perpetuate injustice and lies. Religion and language are neither good nor bad; they just are. It's all in how you use it.
"Blatant hypocrisy?" If there's one lesson I take from the scientific process, it's that being willing to modify your conclusions based upon new evidence is a virtue, not a sign of hypocrisy.
Indeed, the whole idea that a believer who changes their beliefs to accommodate new factual information is engaging in "hypocrisy" is, I would argue, a product of Protestant cultural values. Protestantism, of course, has its origins in early modern Europe, and in the idea that Christians should not have to rely upon the Catholic Church and its priests to mediate their relationship with their God -- that a Christian should be able to study the Bible, which is believed to be the Word of God, directly in order to forge a direct relationship with God.
This idea then gives way to the idea that the holy text must be viewed as infallible, as literally true -- that "true religion" means adhering to every detail of the text, and precludes non-literalist interpretations.
This understanding of what it means to be religious, to be a believer, would have seemed very alien to earlier religious believers. The ancient Romans, for instance, were very famous for their religious syncretism -- they were more than willing to incorporate the religious beliefs of foreign cultures into their own religion, to identify foreign gods with their own gods. Hinduism has done the same throughout the centuries. Judaism has a long tradition of non-literalist interpretations of the Tanakh, to the point where scholarly commentary on it (the Talmud) is itself also revered as part of their traditions.
So, no, that's not "hypocrisy." The idea that it is hypocrisy, that a non-hypocritical religious believer must adhere to a One True Dogma that never changes -- must always, to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, believe the same thing on Wednesday that she believed on Monday, no matter what happened on Tuesday -- is itself the production of one very particular religious tradition.
I don't -- but I'm not entirely convinced that some Trekkies don't!
More seriously: Not all religious people believe this, either.
Once again: Sexism is a function of politics and economics, not religion. Religion has been the rationalization, not the cause. If you don't believe me, just consider the well-established problem of sexism within the atheist community.
I don't contest the idea that heterosexism has some of its origins in ancient Hebrew prohibitions against male homosexual acts (which most scholars believe were adopted as a way to distinguish the ancient Hebrews from their polytheist neighbors, for whom sexual acts with religious leaders were a religious practice).
But ask yourself something:
The Old Testament is full of religious prohibitions of similar language and seriousness as those against homosexuality, which have been completely disregarded by modern Western society. There is no movement to oppress tattooed people, or persons who mix their fabrics.
So why has heterosexism survived? What made anti-homosexual prohibitions broadly stick in Western culture until the 20th Century, while prohibitions of equal importance to the ancient Hebrews have fallen to the wayside?
You gotta be asking yourself: Who does the taboo against homosexuality serve? What practical reason could a society have for keeping this taboo while disregarding others?
Could it, for instance, have something to do with maintaining aristocratic inheritances? With maintaining patriarchal domination of society?
You gotta be asking yourself if religion is the real reason this taboo has survived for so long, or if there's some other factor at work here.
I would argue that this is still a function of heteropatriarchy -- the desire to prevent women from having a say in their own fertility. But, I also completely agree that the power religious institutions have has been completely and utterly abused by their decision to discourage people from using condoms, and that many people have died as a result.
Gods? Who's talking about gods? I'm talking about religion -- a facet of human culture. I never said any god did those things. I said that religion can bring benefit to humanity.
Whether you like it or not, it is a matter of historical fact that religious institutions played important roles in organizing and recruiting for progressive reform movements. Whether you like it or not, it is a matter of historical fact that progressive reform leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., have been motivated by their religious beliefs. To claim otherwise is to blatantly lie about the historical record -- is to deny the empirical evidence.
I wouldn't call them nonsense. I'd call them products of their cultures -- and important tools in understanding those cultures and the later cultures which they influenced.
I would also contend that works like these can contain wisdom, even if I do not share their beliefs. Do you look at The Odyssey and get nothing from it other than "nonsense?" The Iliad? The Aeneid? The Oresteia? Prose Edda? Do you not see the literary merit in these works, the universal themes they wrestle with?
You don't have to believe that Odysseus was real to recognize that the writer we call "Homer" was saying something important about what it's like to transition from warfare to normal life. You don't have to believe that the Greek gods caused the Trojan War to understand that Homer's depiction of war's effects on Achilles touches on a universal human truth about how war warps the human mind. You don't have to believe in Zeus or Athena to see that Aeschylus was saying something meaningful about the difference between justice and vengeance. You don't have to put your faith in Odin to see that the ancient Norse believers in Ragnarök had something interesting to say about the nature of mortality.
And you don't have to believe in the divinity -- nor even the historical existence -- of Jesus of Nazareth to recognize that when he's depicted as saying, "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me," that the author is making a very profound, universal statement about society's moral obligations to the poor and the oppressed.
You should try engaging these texts as something other than as artifacts of a system of control.
Who are you to decide whence other people ought to derive their comfort, their sense of community, their sense of meaning, their sense of liberation?
That is a very shallow understanding of what it means to be religious, or to derive the above things from religion. I won't deny that there are religious believers for whom their faith truly is that shallow -- who merely see their faith as a transaction: "Obey God's rules and He'll reward you with Heaven after you die." These people don't actual care about morality; they just want a reward and social prestige.
But that doesn't mean that's a universal truth of the religious. There are millions of people who do derive their sense of community, of liberation, of meaning, from their fellow human beings -- their fellow human beings with whom they are united by common beliefs. These are not people who are deriving meaning from the promise of a posthumous fantasy land; hell, there are plenty of religions that don't even believe in an afterlife as Protestant Christianity understands it.
Two of the best examples I can think of are the Jewish religious commandment to "fix this broken world," or the drive of progressive Christians to push for social justice, which they identify with the justice of the Kingdom of God, here on Earth, in this life. These are not people placated by promises of a just afterlife -- people like radical activist and Jesuit priest Rev. Daniel Berrigan -- are fighting for social justice and equality today, and their faith is their motivation.
If you think this is just a matter of just waiting for promises of a fantasyland after death, then you don't even understand what religion is for these people.
No, I am not. I am asserting that religious people have fought for, and achieved positive reform in the world, and that their religious beliefs have been among their motivations and sources of emotional sustenance.
I did not watch your video because I have no interest in anything Christopher Hitchens, a warmonger and religious bigot, had to say.
Understand something:
I am not endorsing religion. I am not justifying it. I am not saying that its good outweighs its bad, or that its bad outweighs its good. I am contending that religion is a much more complex, much more multi-faceted phenomenon, than you are saying. I am contending that it has many permutations, many incarnations, many variations. I am contending that it is inaccurate to try to characterize all religion as being just this or just that, because religions are simply too diverse and their roles in society too complex. And finally, I am asserting that you are taking legitimate concerns, and then running away with them into ridiculous, overly-broad statements that cannot possibly be supported except by the grossest of anti-religious stereotypes and exaggerations.
ETA:
Also, just a bit of historical trivia for you to consider:
There is a very real possibility that if there were no religion, there would be no Star Trek. Why do I say that?
Because in the West, the art form we call theatre has twice emerged from the institution we know as religion. In ancient Athens, it emerged from religious ceremonies held to honor the god Dionysus. The art of theatre mostly died out in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire -- yet it emerged again centuries later, when European churches began enacting dramatizations of Biblical episodes and other religious stories on specific days of the year. This evolved into liturgical dramas, which eventually evolved into the theatre as we understand it today -- and, of course, the 19th Century European theatre is the direct ancestor of European and American film and television drama.
Just something to keep in mind the next time you sit down and watch TV or enjoy a movie while thinking to yourself that religion has never produced any benefit for humanity.
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Religious philosophy, which is what most of the defenders of religion in this thread seem to be talking about, is all well and good. But religion is an altogether separate beast. Religion is a construct built around a philosophy. A construct that is about gaining, keeping and maintaining social, political and economic power. I don't doubt that the philosophies of Jesus, Allah or Whoever have contributed good things to human society. So has the philosophy of Plato. But the philosophy can exist seperate from the construct. There is no Church Of Plato trying to have an influence on the lives of non-Platonics. That's why so many people have such a negative view of religion. It's also why, in the Western world at least, people are so vocally critical of the Catholic Church. It's not discrimination. It's because the Catholic Church is one of the most influential powers in the world, and those of us who have chosen to live our lives without religion don't appreciate living in a society heavily influenced by an agenda that has nothing to do with us.
America has always been, traditionally, a Protestant country, for the most part. The difference in philosophy being that it rejects the Catholic Church and it's authority. The Catholic Church does have a great deal of power, obviously, but not so much as it has in Latin countries. But the Pope, himself, is very high profile and has the respect of many World Leaders, but so do celebrities. It's not quite as oppressive as all that ...
And again, ignorance throws names and acts with anger. Religious apologists really need to grasp the concept that it is perfectly acceptable to criticize religion and call it utterly stupid. If you have to get personal and throw around words like 'bigoted' then feel free. I will just stick to rational arguments here.
Exactly. Im rather enjoying this thread as it highlights how destructive religion is. Users here cannot handle a direct assault on religion.
Which is ironic as religion pervades numerous aspects of our lives. Many profess ways to live, promote afterlives and issue commands and directives on how to live. They frequently have punishments and condemnation for those who do not follow, or follow properly. Yet...
We have religious school. Politicians who believe in 'gods' and religion attempting to influence politics and society at every opportunity it can. The misguided listen to religion and allow it to dictate to them and they thus have an effect on the lives of those around them.
Religion offers humanity nothing. It is merely destructive and its about time more spoke out against it.
If you take the old testament literally, God personally slaughtered thousands of people. Which is why I absolutely disagree with that religion. I don't want to worship a being that does stuff like that, and that is absolutely independent from whether or not that being exists.
And Muhammad was a womanizing, paedophile, drunk. Buddha starved himself into having visions showing the path towards enlightenment...
The Old Testament God slaughters people for fun and makes more ethical and moral catastrophes than I can count. The New Testament is very similar, its just more apt to be selectively chosen from [as Jesus makes some 'buzzword' sentences that people latch on to] while still being full of horrible, horrible things.
Apparently when Buddha was born, the birth was painless and lotus blossoms sprung up from his feet.
Apparently, Jesus' mother was a virgin....not raped as was common at the time or anything.
Its just silly.
If you were to employ QUOTE tags properly, all would be perfectly easy to read and your bolding of text would be rendered wholly unnecessary.
Also: He who would first write his own mountains of text ought not complain about having to respond to mountains of reply. Just saying.
But I don't want a Utopia becuase it would be boring as hell.
I'd rather have a better world where people got along better without turning into boring ass sanctimonious cookie cutter people.
No matter how many times you say it, it won't be true.
Apparently, Jesus' mother was a virgin....not raped as was common at the time or anything.
Because obviously those are the only options.
And Muhammad was a womanizing, paedophile, drunk. Buddha starved himself into having visions showing the path towards enlightenment...
The Old Testament God slaughters people for fun and makes more ethical and moral catastrophes than I can count. The New Testament is very similar, its just more apt to be selectively chosen from [as Jesus makes some 'buzzword' sentences that people latch on to] while still being full of horrible, horrible things.
Apparently when Buddha was born, the birth was painless and lotus blossoms sprung up from his feet.
Apparently, Jesus' mother was a virgin....not raped as was common at the time or anything.
Its just silly.
Congratulations. You have made it abundantly clear that you don't have any use for religion, consider it unnecessary, dangerous, etc. Anyone with the ability to read and understand English also knows that your version of a "utopian" future does not include religion.
Now I have a request to make. On behalf of those who do not agree with you (I know, there are too many idiots in the world - must be religion's fault) and those who just might want to discuss the ORIGINAL topic, could we take a break from your amazingly well constructed and detailed breakdown of your distaste and disgust for religion of any kind?
I am sure that numerous people have stepped away from their computer and discarded all their religious paraphenalia and literature and resigned from their houses of worship after reading your stunningly well written takedown of religion. So why don't you give the poor ignorant saps who just can't get it through their holy numbed skulls that you are of course right in every way and let us discuss Star Trek again?
Please, as a religious person my shriveled brain just can't take being exposed to your wisdom and insight. So let me go back into my dark cave and watch some Star Trek, and hope for a better future.
Are you serious?
Using the term apologists is condescending but doesn't make you superior or more rational in your arguments.
You're allowed to hate religion and believe it has caused the world grief and harm, bought about aids, disharmony, whatever but people are allowed to think otherwise without you making fun of them.
Then why can I not find any atheist organizations to volunteer at (I do volunteer) where they stand for social justice and worry about the same things in America that the rest of us worry about--the people who have no shelter and no food, people who have no clothes, people who need medical and mental health treatment--where is my enlightened alternative to helping with the world's problems?
That is a part of religion, more than a philosophy or words, and actually makes an impact in people's lives. When I volunteer (at homeless shelters, food banks, donate to the Red Cross, etc) I run into people that just want to stamp out hunger and end the abuse in the world. I don't run into people handing out pamphlets. They know that I am an atheist and guess what? They DON'T CARE!
It's more than philosophy. It's a very Conservative community in which I live. But I have found that they have kind hearts and we share a need to help others. When I judge myself at the end of the day, that is what I want to be remember for--I didn't let ideology or differences get in the way of doing my part, in this generation, to help in all the ways that I can. And that means mixing with the faithful. That is what Star Trek awakened in me as a young lad. It takes work to move beyond these problems and they will get worse with no help. Do more than wish for a utopia. Work towards it.
So I want to imagine that you or Mr. GoodStuff enter into the world of volunteerism with the faithful. Will you huff and puff and thump "The God Delusion" until you are blue, or will you just agree to disagree and stock a shelf at a food bank?
To be quite honest, the majority of Trek's best moments over the years, at least to me, had little or nothing to do with Gene Roddenberry
If you guys want to debate religion, open a thread in Misc or better yet, TNZ. This forum is not the place.
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