It seems we are in agreement then. When the gloves come off I think anything is fair. I'm just critical of atheists who act like the gloves are always off, provoked or not.Originally Posted by simonj
It seems we are in agreement then. When the gloves come off I think anything is fair. I'm just critical of atheists who act like the gloves are always off, provoked or not.
I knew Karl Popper would come up
So what you are saying is picking on idiots is mean, but still ok because they are idiots. I see...
I am aware of abusive theocracy, and they are horrible and the world would probably be better without those, I will say that. However, beyond that things would generally be the same. Who knows, there could be countries that execute gays because it is an affront to the natural order. Religious extremists could (and probably would) just be replaced by natural order extremists. It is human nature for there to be dissenting opinion.
Mocking idiots to their face, and criticising their views on the internet are not the same. That is the point I am trying to make, I apologize if I failed to express it in a meaningful manner. They are not the same. People on this forum say all kinds of crap that I am pretty sure they wouldn't say out in public, because people can actually see you and maybe shout at you, threaten or assault you.
You seem to imply that removing religion would be pointless as nothing much would change. Actually, I think a few important things would change. Religion has always been the biggest force against human thought and progress. Removing this would be a good thing. And yes, in some cases it would be replaced by secular ignorance and bigotry, however it would not be wholly replaced and therein lies the value.
Uhh, would you care to support this assertion? You kind of just say it off-hand, like it's a well-established fact that everyone knows already.
I'd say the biggest force against human thought and progress has been institutional conservatism (or institutional inertia, or institutional self-preservation), which can certainly be seen in religious institutions but also in all manner of non-religious institutions.
It wouldn't be prudent to apply this to all cultures, but in western and Mediterranean Europe, the rise of Christianity certainly sponsored the establishment of institutions and the destruction of others. Whether deliberate or not, monasteries, for example, were wealthy and politically influential and Christian or Christian-sponsored institutions always strove to keep the people at large ignorant.
So while there is probably no doubt that traditional institutions can inhibit progress, the extent to which they do it is probably the better question; and the fact that early Christianity hardly championed free thought and creativity, then proceeded to infect 'secular' politics with these ideas, didn't do a great deal for civilisation until, well, the invention of the printing press.
Last edited by benzss; 04-10-2009 at 01:14 PM.
Syme gives a pretty good point by saying:
And on top of this, as an analogy, when you raise your children, ideally, you raise them to be themselves, but also to do good as themselves. You train them when they're young to do the right thing, but the idea is to instill in them the concept that they are responsible, for their own actions and the consequences from them. If you continually save them from the consequences from their actions, they get the idea that anything they do is fair game, and every society is littered with people who epitomize this through reckless action that goes unchecked. But that's straying from the point.
The point is if you overbaby your child, like what you're implying by putting their lives on railway tracks and having them achieve a preconceived notion of success based entirely on your own desires, it leads to miserable fucking people, in most situations. Ideally, God wants you to be happy and free to choose, but if he forces you to make those choices, what's the purpose in that? I mean this whole argument rests on pretending I understand God's desires, the existence of a soul allowing free will and a ridiculous oversimplification of these concepts, but the heart of the stance is: God is daddy who says you're old enough to take care of yourself; you've been raised with the right influences around you, but you are the one who has to choose to do them and live by them, ultimately. Claiming that the existence of suffering implies a God that doesn't care, but that's not necessarily the case - it can still explain a God who does care, but also one who respects your right to be yourself and make your own choices and live by them, even if it does cause you and others trouble.
Guys, the old way of donig things, the heart of which is still very much applicable, should totally be scrapped because it's been abused in the past.
I would love to see you point out a set of rules on that level that haven't been abused in the past, and deserve to be scrapped simply because of it.
Ok, you are comparing the history of organized, or at least publically recognized, Atheism, which has existed for... what, half a century, tops? and comparing it to the entire history of organized religion, something that has lasted for millennia, existed in human culture as it developed through some particularly bloody periods and the aftereffects of living in those periods. Of course people have killed for opposing beliefs - the length of time it's been around and the cultures and eras it has existed through mean that it's impossible for it to have been otherwise. With the culture we're in now, with the exception of some particularly brutal backwoods enforcement, religious people don't physically assault or abuse those who don't follow their beliefs. The idea that they do otherwise is absurd, so claiming superiority over them on those grounds is completely mistaken.
Making mindless digs at anything reeks of ignorance, and there is no pride to be taken from ignorance.
If you want to 'have a go' at anything on an intellectual level, you had better be able to back yourself and your viewpoints up. Simply mocking something doesn't imply any sense of superiority, and the viewpoint you've adopted that, because their beliefs are foolish in your eyes, these people somehow become less human (more worthy of denigration and your hate) and are therefore more worthy of contempt begs for escalation.
oh you're a good guy because your own views are "well we shouldn't do that, but i still support it."
my correlation with the other one was that it was a poorly done satire that only appeals to a certain asinine crowd, much like, say, a television show entitled: Ow, my Balls![/quote]
I think you have too little respect for religion and the benefits its given in its relationship with human development on a societal level. You would rather look at the harm it's done and the foolishness of literal interpretations of allegories and claim that's the only value religion has. Nobody pays attention to the quiet, devout religious couple that goes to church twice on sunday, maintains their jobs, pays their taxes and lives their lives quietly. This isn't even to imply that only religious people do that, it's more to say that religion has encouraged this kind of living, of participating in your community and loving the people inside it, for a lot longer than any secular movement, and to greater effect.
Ok, belief in the tooth fairy doesn't contain the same level of commitment, of commandments and rules to follow, of practices and cultures that religion does. The only comparison that it has is the one you've made, where you choose to take what can easily be seen as wishful and unrealistic and saying that's the only aspect of religion, and it's worthy of contempt and mockery. This is , probably in naïvety, completely ignoring the benefits that religion has offered and accomplished. Anything that exists as long as organized religion and wields the power that religion has achieved is going to have black marks in its history. Abuse of a law doesn't imply that it's ineffective.
Religion doesn't always harm people, and it's not a fair representation to make saying that's all it does. You are willfully choosing to watch and acknowledge only the terrible things it's done.
What?
Religion is the only factor on the development of a societal or cultural understanding of sex? This isn't true, with an admittedly weak example being the island of Tikopia who practice Zero Population Growth based on the tiny size of their island and the realization that unchecked growth would lead to massive starvation.
I would further clarify this, but I've lent out my copy of Collapse! to a friend in Ontario, and so I won't have it for a few days, but Jared Diamond mentions this, and also talks about the sexual taboos involved in Tikopian society, all of which was present well before any contact with Europeans, much less any religious influence.
The issue here isn't whether or not they believe in God, it's whether or not it's ok to harass them for adhering to a religions precepts (personal beliefs and level of fundamentalism notwithstanding). The tooth fairy analogy doesn't take that into account.
well i'm friends with black people so it's ok if i call people niggers on the internet although i would never do it to their face (out of respect you know)
No! Ignorance and Bigotry are the source of hatred and problems! While some fundamentalist and extreme sects of varied religions certainly have those two qualities in spades, they don't have a monopoly on those aspects. As much as I hate to bring Godwin's Law into this, Nazi Germany also hated and persecuted (to the point of death) Homosexuals, and for completely non-religious reasons.
Well at least you're smart enough to realize that.
Call me crazy, but removing certain power structures that influence millions of people would alleviate some problems. Of course, they would wildly exacerbate others, but we'll conveniently ignore that.
Being religious isn't about believing in myths, it's about living by the tenets of your faith. These tenets are also created to create a strong community that supports itself. But again, it's not about that, is it?
There are so many non-religious things that are completely fucking insane and do more harm than religion, but again, we'll just ignore that aspect.
Oh, so because the other side believes different things than me (the justification the other side uses to demonize you), it's ok to be a bigot.
I've already explained that you're tooth fairy analogy is flawed and why it's flawed, but if you want more clarification, I can provide it for you.
You are really going to have to back up a massive statement like that.
As a hint, where there is a vacuum of ignorance and bigotry, something will always come in and fill it up. Because religion has done so in the past doesn't mean that nothing else will. I guarantee you that any power structure that has been around as long and exerted that much force will have abused once or twice in it's past, but that is not the structure's fault - it is the blame of those who ran it, and what allowed them to get into power.
Coq, your answer is not satisfying enough. Like I said, it's one thing to raise your child to make his or her own decisions, but it's another to let them fall to the consequences of others' decisions. It's also another thing to turn your back when your child makes really bad decisions that lead to the intense suffering of others.
It's a stretch, but I'll grant that it's acceptable for God to sit back and let people reap the consequences of their choices. I will not grant the same allowance for God to sit back and let innocent people reap the consequences of the choices of others.
Yes but the keystone of that is that you are granted free will, and part of that is accepting the consequences of temptation and succumbing to that seduction.
If in the face of that temptation, you still lead a virtuous life, that is truly a remarkable, wonderous thing. If you succumb to it, there are repercussions for it; there is nothing that can absolve you of responsibility for what you've done in your life. It is, in this explanation, not God's job to ensure that you live life the right way, because those who would succeed would have that effort be cheapened, I guess? I am not a perfect theologian, so I can't really express a lot of details about it, but suffering is a part of life and overcoming that and coping/maturing/learning is all steps in growth and maturity.
There's suffering and there's adversity. Adversity yields character and strength. Suffering is meaningless pain. (Those don't quite work as definitions, but "meaningless pain" is the specific kind of suffering I'm talking about.) A life of inescapable suffering because of someone else's actions is something that a benevolent, omni-etcetera god should have forseen and should not allow. There is no justification for unjustifiable suffering!
Gwahir I am sorry, but you are wrong. There are non-secular reasons to hate gays and be against abortion.
Non-secular reasons to hate gays: They are different than me and I don't like that, It is just not natural
Non-secular reasons to be anti-abortion: It is against the natural order, People should have to live with their mistakes not get a free pass
Just because you personally blame religion for those two things being issues doesn't mean if you took religion away they wouldn't still be issues. Ironically enough to your point, I was an atheist during the times of my extreme conservatism. Now I am something else entirely that I won't go into.
There are much better ethical concerns against abortion that need not invoke a supernatural component to humans.
I'll go into them in a second, but first let me give you the atheist's campaign slogan:
"A cock in every butt, and some pot in every menage."
PANDAS
If you don't like them, then get the fuck out.
I was just giving simple examples, I didn't think too hard about it.
Briefly stated, the biggest ethical concern with abortion is that there simply is no clear-cut point at which you can say this thing in the mother's womb is a human. The viability criterion really makes no sense since it is arbitrarily set by how good our technology is to sustain the child outside the womb, i.e. viability keeps getting pushed back to earlier and earlier stages of development as technology improves, and if it were an absolute criterion for "humaness," then it would be independant of our state of technology. Also, one could claim that a child outside of the womb is stll not "viable," as it requires intensive support from the parents or other caretakers to survive. Some have made this claim and have been lambasted for promoting "infanticide," but really, how is a completely helpless 3 month old child any more viable if he can't even put food in his own mouth without assistance?
I still think that accesible abortion provides benefits to both individuals and to society that out-weigh the ethical concerns that come along with it, but I still recognize that abortion is a more complex issue than many of its supporters would like to think.
Also, there are plenty of reasons that people give for hating gay people or any other sort of people, from pseudo-scientific reasoning to just plain out-and-out unjustified disgust. Sure, there might be less intolerance for gay people if Christianity didn't so strongly condemn homosexuality, and Christianity might even be the source for such intolerance in our society, but if Christianity were to disappeared tomorrow, gays would still have to face some degree of prejudice.
Last edited by sycld; 04-10-2009 at 02:16 PM.
PANDAS
If you don't like them, then get the fuck out.
Yeah, I think the secular objection to abortion is perfectly clear. You don't need the slightest shred of religious belief to reach the conclusion that abortion is wrong. You only need to believe that a fetus is a human being, and that killing it therefore constitutes murder, and that murder is wrong.
For the record, I'm pro-choice. But I agree with sycld that you don't have to be religious to have a problem with abortion, and that the arguments against abortion are more valid than a lot of pro-choice people give them credit for.
I don't think it's as simple as this. No offense, but this is kind of the "pop history" view of Christianity's intellectual impact on European history. The fact is that the intellectual history of Europe is more complicated than this, and that the church's impact varied greatly over time, and from area to area. The popular image of the church fighting against intellectual progress hardly holds true in a consistent fashion over Europe's history. For instance, there was a period from the 12th to the 14th century where Europe saw a blossoming of scientific and philosophical thought that was largely spearheaded by religious thinkers, and was certainly not opposed by the religious institutions of the day. The approaches and ideas of these thinkers would probably be pretty surprising to most modern people who associate the medieval period with ignorance or backwardness. The arrival of the plague more or less put an end to that, though, and eventually brought about the cultural shifts that would produce the conservative attitudes that predominated in the post-plague period and have lead most people to associate the European church with anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, or anti-progress zealousness. I don't think it's fair to say that Christianity in Europe has consistently been a force against progress or thought. It has played that role during some periods of history, and it has also played a very different role during other periods of history.
Again, I think the biggest single obstacle to human thought and progress has been institutional conservatism--the reluctance of people to give fair treatment to ideas that differ from or challenge the ideas that inform the institutions of the day, and the tendency of institutions to exhibit hostility towards ideas that differ from or challenge the ideas they are based on. This isn't an innately religious problem; certainly religion has been guilty of it at various points, but no more so than the institutions of secular society (economic and political institutions, for instance).
Well yeah I agree. Which is why I stated it's probably not a good idea to lump all of Europe (and beyond) under one banner, and also noted that it was early Christianity that largely hindered progress.
edit: and medieval humanism was largely inspired by classical thought anyway. It's my contention that sans Christianity, Europe would have advanced at a far faster rate.
Last edited by benzss; 04-10-2009 at 03:35 PM.
Early meaning 300s to 1000s? How did it hinder progress in a systematic way during that period?
But the religious institutions of the period provided the means by which classical knowledge was preserved (often literally, physically preserved in fortified monasteries that could hold out against Viking/Saracen/Magyar raiders), studied, debated, taught, spread, and built upon. They set up a continent-wide, supranational network of education and intellectual intercourse. Do you think that if the church hadn't existed, then some supranational secular institution would have emerged to fulfill the same role? Given the political conditions of the period, this strikes me as extremely unlikely.
Last edited by Syme; 04-10-2009 at 04:05 PM.
Take the spread of Christianity in Europe, which was complete at roughly AD 1000. Instead of competing philosophical theories, you were only allowed to have one - Christianity. For example, several of Charlemagne's capitularies (legislation) dealt harsh penalties to those who wandered away from the church, and since monasteries and seminaries had a monopoly over education, any non-christian thought was repressed in a way it wasn't beforehand (at least under the Roman Republic). This is not to mention the papal influence on domestic affairs of Catholic states, where in all cases pagan thought was pretty much outlawed and in many cases lost. The re-discovery of Aristotle's philosophy and the emergence of Scholastic thought largely gave rise to humanism and the rise of secularism.
Of course, insofar as Christianity can be blamed for the dark ages, it's no coincidence that the decline of the western Roman empire and the rise of separate, competing Christian nations led to a decline in literacy thanks to the almost complete lack of secular institutions.
A lot of the classical documents kept by monks wasn't kept for its intrinsic value. For example, Cicero's works were kept as good examples of prose and oratory, not because De Re Publica was a good example of secular republicanism. Aristotle's works only re-emerged in the 1100s thanks to Islamic scholars.But the religious institutions of the period provided the means, on a continent-wide, supranational basis, by which classical knowledge was preserved (often literally, physically preserved in fortified monasteries that could hold out against Viking/Saracen/Magyar raiders), studied, debated, taught, spread, and built upon. Do you think that if the church hadn't existed, then some supranational secular institution would have emerged to fulfill the same role? Given the political conditions of the period, this strikes me as extremely unlikely.
Of course it did. It got its cues from Scholastic thought, which just mixed Christianity and classical philosophy.
edit: and humanism was indeed rooted in Christian moral thought, but I'd argue that without Christianity that moral thought would not have changed much. Were ancient laws hugely different from medieval laws? Or even modern laws? If anything moral thought regressed and become more insular during Christianity's dominance.
Last edited by benzss; 04-10-2009 at 04:11 PM.
Okay Syme, you're obviously ignoring that facts that every liberal "knows":
- Everyone in Europe was a dirt farmer and a Catholic until the 15th, at which point a full-fledged economy, cities, and philosophical movements sprung out of absolutely nothing with no precedents whatsoever. Some guy was just like, "lol dirt farming sux imma just gonna go read plato" and BAM!-- Renaissance.
- Humanism and a liberal sense of morality clearly has its ultimate roots in the highly-stratified, strictly caste-based, and extremely misogynistic Classical social models and ways of thought. It obviously has nothing to do with the Christian synthesis various philosophical systems in which such expression as this were made: "there is no man nor woman... slave nor free... but all are one in Christ."
- The great inspirations for some of Western art's most profound works are obviously not drawn from Christianity, and those works that are were just made cynically by the artist for profit and with hidden anti-Christian messages. Like for example, Dante's Comedia Divina (which was written in the Middle Ages but is actually a work of the Renaissance duh) was clearly made for profit, even though it was mostly written during his exile and a period of profound private privation, and quite clearly the roof of the Sistine Chapel is nothing more than a lampoon of Christian belief rather than a forceful expression of personal belief completed through tortured and painful exertion.
PANDAS
If you don't like them, then get the fuck out.
I mean the greeks were notorious for their love of man/boy love, and i'm pretty sure they got lambasted for that.
although to be honest my sources are pretty sketchy so i mean that could theoretically just be modern prejudices applied to older viewpoints.
Bullshit. I'm not going to argue that Humanism was not influenced at all by Classical thought; indeed, it was. However, Humanism is fundamentally Western tradition that has its roots in Christian moral thought, even if it has advanced far beyond its roots.
Last edited by sycld; 04-10-2009 at 04:04 PM.
PANDAS
If you don't like them, then get the fuck out.
I was wrong about homophobia being a purely religious thing. Mr E's example isn't really good enough, but there are ones, like in mainly secular Asian countries which place enormous emphasis on family.
But abortion, not so much. You may be killing a living human, but without an idea of the "soul" and without the black-and-white commandment from on high not to murder, what's happening is akin to the killing of an animal. A foetus may be a human, but it is no more sapient than a crab (and probably less). It is certainly not a human person. I'm not saying nobody would argue against abortion, but I'm saying that without the religious arguments against it, it's really a fairly simple discussion.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks