CBS has lost its mind!

[Yeahduff]

Well, it sounds like you were just in spiritual limbo, knowing only that Christianity wasn't for you. And then you ran into something that appealed to you. It's less you just decided one day and more like you were confronted with what you'd already been looking for. I dunno. I think the discussion is getting to the issue we've been dancing around for six pages, which is "Do we really choose anything? Is there free will?"

People in general are assholes, more so when their drunk, whether they believe in god or not. Discarding religion won't make you less of an asshole, just a different kind of asshole. Couldn't tell you how often I'm called a "fucking pariah" by some Nepalese fellow who's had too much scotch.

[Sortelli]

Religion really is more of a product of your society. If everyone in the world were given a list of their options and able to pick which religion they like the best with no pressure you might see a little more diversity of belief among cultural lines, but it doesn't work that way.

If you're going to be religious you're going to be starting from the framework of the religion of those around you and you don't get to pick that. Later in life, if you're fortunate enough to live in an open society, you may be able to change your mind without social consequences, but it's not like people get to sit down and think about this stuff from the moment they are self-aware and it's not like anyone will ever even know what other groups they could sign up for.

Metaphysical truth aside, religion is about reinforcing social values and providing a sense of purpose and community. Some belief systems do a better job of this than others. It's also why I joke that atheism is a dead end, because it does not provide a very effective or long lasting framework for a society. Atheists tend to have less children and looser families, and even though they are able to maintain good common sense morals about how to treat other people they are common sense to us because of deep-rooted traditions in our culture that were a ultimately product of a religion. Truths we hold to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that stealing is wrong, that people should think for themselves. Just like you don't pick your religion off a menu, you don't pick your basic moral assumptions out of thin air.

I think a lot of atheists aren't aware of this and illogically assume that everyone else will of course continue to believe that hurting other people is basically wrong because they are able to believe it as atheists themselves (and isn't it so crazy that some people need a metaphysical command not to do harm to others?).

Trying to build a moral framework that doesn't allow for exploitation or the callous disregard of human life doesn't work very well from a purely rational/materialist viewpoint, see Peter Singer for an example. There are also very powerful, rational arguments to do horrible things to people or to strip the individual of their worth that we don't even think or talk about because we currently find them distasteful... again, see Peter Singer for an example.

It might seem like common sense to us all that we benefit from treating each other as equals and that racism is to be shunned, but that's mostly a positive outcome of social reinforcement and not cold hard reason. For good or ill, religion is better at social reinforcement.

But on that note, it's not entirely true that atheism is a dead end. Having less children is a better trend in developed societies and a little doubt keeps religion from being TOO good at social reinforcement. I don't see secular humanism as a desirable end, but we'll do good by its influence.

[Escushion]

Know what stopped me from being Christian? Reading the Bible, like a good little Christian boy .


8:1, what you're saying makes sense, but in the case of many atheists I've spoken to, it's not simply the absence of belief, but the belief that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, and that it can never be proven. Which, honestly, sounds rather unscientific to me, to not be open to any options or be willing to break new ground.

[KittyKatBlack]

Just a side note since we're on the topic of religion.

I was on the train yesterday going to work. Apparently some Jehova's Witness had carpetbombed the train with Chick Tracts and they were lying about in random seats on the train.

You know that feeling you'd get if you looked in a seat and found a used condom? That's sorta how I felt when I saw this.

I just thought I'd share for no particular reason.

[Escushion]

Jack Chick's a Jehova's Witness?

[Chibiartstudios]

Trying to build a moral framework that doesn't allow for exploitation or the callous disregard of human life doesn't work very well from a purely rational/materialist viewpoint, see Peter Singer for an example. There are also very powerful, rational arguments to do horrible things to people or to strip the individual of their worth that we don't even think or talk about because we currently find them distasteful... again, see Peter Singer for an example.

I'm actually with Escushion on this one. Is stopped being Christian when I really sat down and tried to read the bible. It's true, there are powerfull arguments to do really F'ed up things, but there are also religious reasons to do bad things as well. As we've all seen recently. The difference is that one is easier to compramise with. Try calmly and rationally talking to someone who believes that America is the devil and all it's people sould be killed because they think the bible says so. Since that belief is (Correctly or incorrectly interpereted) biblically bassed, there is no way to change his mind and compromise becomes impossible.

I realise I'm talking about the extreemists. But the extreemists in religion tend to be where all the problems come up. Particularly when it comes to parts like Leviticus that have rules and regulations that are... not very applicable to a modern society (For example, I believe that it says you should be stoned for working on the sabath and there is another storry where god kills a bunch of kids for making fun of a monks baldness). I realize that alot of people say the first half of the bible is negated by the first. But ALOT of people don't see it this way and levitucuss in partucular is used to justify alot of really cruel points of view.

So here is how I see it. There are 2 parts to any religion. The philosophical idea of god and such. Which I have no reall problem with. The idea of a god isn't that crazy and I see no problem with someone having this belief. Then there are the specific beliefs superstitions and rules which vary by religion and sect, which I tend to have a HUGE problem with.

I don't argue the first (unless someone speciffically wants too), but I really think we can do without alot of the second.

(Oh! and for those who care I'm not an athieist, I'm agnostic. Meaning I don't think we can know for sure either way, therefore a little skepticism is a good thing IMO.)

[Chibiartstudios]

Jack Chick's a Jehova's Witness?

Why did I read that as "Jenova's witness" when I first glanced at that?

(Now THERE is a religion you can sink your teeth into.)

[Killbert-Robby]

I gave up on religion when I saw how much suffering it's caused. Want to believe in a benevolent higher being? Fine. But organized religion tears the world apart.

[EvilChihuahua]

[quote="chibiartstudios"][quote]
So here is how I see it. There are 2 parts to any religion. The philosophical idea of god and such. Which I have no reall problem with. The idea of a god isn't that crazy and I see no problem with someone having this belief. Then there are the specific beliefs superstitions and rules which vary by religion and sect, which I tend to have a HUGE problem with.

I don't argue the first (unless someone speciffically wants too), but I really think we can do without alot of the second.
quote]

Yeah, religious people suck. My dad s religious people, and he's a pastor, for heavens sake.

The problem with any organized religeon is that, over time, many people wil begin to believe more in the rules than the original vision. Even Jesus d religious legalists. And the people who d him the most were the religious elders, who were the biggest on the rules.

[McDuffies]

I don't reckon. I figure you can change just about anything unless it's hardwired into your cells. Sure, your character is developed via the environment you grow up in, but that doesn't mean you can't change it by, I dunno, switching environments? Getting counselling? Anger management therapy? What's learned can be unlearned.

You sound like the main character of "Homo faber". Man is a creator of his own destiny, and if he acts smart enough, nothing bad will happen and nothing incidental will change the course of events for bad, because you'll always be able to prevent it.
Kind of too much belief in strength human will.
Looking from the side and purely theoretically, I see how someone can think that any character trait can be changed if you anknowledge that you want to change it. If I'm, for instance, flegmatic, but not want to be, every time I realise I'm acting flegmatic, I should put an effort not to be.
Hm. People have extreme difficulties just quitting smoking, difficulties tied to quitting being something that's so deeply built in your personality, something that you've been since you were little kid (while you've been smoking only since, for instance, 18), seems like much more than any realistic human could take.
Something very extremely difficult, if not impossible. Even if I agree that it's possible, I can argue that people have been moderately succesfully changing sex through surgical methodes for years, and that we have one well-known case of a person changing his skin colour (or at least removing traces of his original skin colour) through bleaching and numerous nose operations.

But there are also other sides of it. To change character trait, you have to anknowledge that you need to change it. A greedy person, for instance, usually won't consider himself greedy, or won't notice that as negative character trait. A lazy person might anknowledge that, but will never be so extremely lazy as to need medical help through psychological therapy. Anger management courses are attended only by people who have extreme troubles with anger management, those whose temper is literally ruining their life. Less problematic cases usually don't realise that they don't need anger management.
So if someone really does want to change religion, he might. But if he is a member of religion, that usually means he believes in it. But if he beliefs, why would he want to change it to other religion, the one he doesn't believe in? Thus he doesn't. It's a loop.
Sure, the loop is broken by people whose religion is fragile, or those who have been peer-pressured into joining it. But even for them, it's not the decision over whether they'll believe or not, but whether they'll conform to the formal side of religion they don't believe in, or not.

[TRI]

You know... getting back to the original subject here, the whole survivor-race-thing seems kinda moot now that I've seen a picture of the contestants. At first glance they all looked white, but after some very close examination I managed to figure out which teams were supposed to be which.

And even then I only figured out which was the "hispanic" team by process of elimination.

[Escushion]

McDuffies, your argument says they can, they just don't want to, thus no reason to. It doesn't say they can't change religion. Your point doesn't prove the other point wrong, it just says that the other point doesn't matter.

One of the many things I liked about A History of Violence was the mention of how one character took three years in the desert to change himself. A much more realistic take on human transformation than pop-psychology seems to believe.

[Sortelli]

I'm actually with Escushion on this one. Is stopped being Christian when I really sat down and tried to read the bible.

Oh yeah, the Old Testament is especially gory. It's just an account of a developing culture's roots and a story that reinforces how they were right and their enemies were wrong and God was always on their side unless they were making the elders who were writing this stuff unhappy. Much like any other culture's roots. Blood spilled to further the people's goals was good, blood spilled among the people or by outsiders was the work of dark subhuman forces.

People as individuals had to learn to get along without killing each other while competing over resources, and then our tribes had to learn to deal with other tribes, nations to nations, etc. Along the way our oldest and wisest figured out the best way to do it. Explaining to every soldier and farmer how to defend or expand or grow the best crops through rational little baby steps would have been a fantastic waste of time and resulted in a lot of people working against each other as they made up their own minds about things. So they said "do it this way because your gods/karma/spirits/ancestors SAY SO." And they most certainly believed it themselves. Religion was not spawned out of some cynical manipulation, we evolved into it either because there's something true there or just because that's the most effective way of creating a society.

And for all the holy wars and blood spilled in the name of any religion anywhere, you'll find that religious appeal to get along within the tribe is what makes us all still get along today. That appeal has just been getting broader all through history. It starts out as "we have to get along or the savages will kill us" then moves to "we have to dominate the savages" and eventually ends up at "hey, these savages really aren't as different from us as we thought, we should treat them the way we treat each other." That all spawns from the various religious decrees to live peacefully with your neighbors.

Back in the 18th and 19th century United States, you will find that it was those old time bible thumpers who most fervently expressed the idea that the soul of a black man was of equal worth to the soul of a white man and that the instutition of slavery was therefore a grave sin before God and the world, incompatible with American ideals.

And back in the 20th century, when John Scopes was trying to break through the taboo of rationally teaching evolution as science in school, he was doing it with textbooks that openly argued the reason white folks conquered the earth was due to superior genes and natural selection.

There's no purely rational reason to say people should treat each other decently, and atheists adopt the idea that people should be good to each the same way religious people get their religion. It's only how we were raised, it's not how we reason.

I mentioned Peter Singer because he's done an awful lot of work in bio-ethics and trying to produce a materialistic set of morals. And even then he merely asserts that we shouldn't discriminate and then extrapolates from that some disgusting set of ethics that allows for unfit children to be discarded and requires that the nervous systems of animals be given equal consideration to the pain and pleasure of humans. He preaches that loving your family more than a stranger is discrimination and we should waste all our resources converting the human race to strict veganism because we're the only animals that should know better than to live according to our natures.

After a few years wrecking the planet to follow his ideals people will remember that discrimination is great as long as you're on top, and that our nature is to fight and kill and eat and fuck. Then we're back to tribes going to war over goodies because it's all about pain and pleasure and human life has no special value. But at least Singer tries, and his intentions are good. I do agree that we should take it as a given that we should not discriminate, but I'd rather draw that line among sentient species and I don't pretend that logic has anything to do with this assumption.

There have been other purely materialistic societies that we've tried to form in the past 100 years. They've produced death and misery at a scale that would make the wickedest torturer of the Inquisition blush and cross himself, with human beings reduced to resources to be discarded when they interfere with the will of the State. I'll take the crazy and flawed fruits of religion over that any day.

[Yeahduff]

Know what stopped me from being Christian? Reading the Bible, like a good little Christian boy .

Totally. The beginning of the end for me as well.

8:1, what you're saying makes sense, but in the case of many atheists I've spoken to, it's not simply the absence of belief, but the belief that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, and that it can never be proven. Which, honestly, sounds rather unscientific to me, to not be open to any options or be willing to break new ground.

I imagine those are the kind of atheists who join atheist organizations. It seems silly to me to base your life around a lack of god, but I guess that's why it's a personal belief system.

Sortelli, your taking this discussion somewhere interesting. You're on a whole different level.

I can't disagree that on a sociological level that basing life on spiritual matters is better than materialistic. I don't need religion to be moral, but I stopped using myself as the ruler to base other people long ago. In the unlikely and unfortunate event that I have children, I've considered raising them Catholic for just this reason.

But I don't feel religion has to be the source of morality. The central and most basic statement of morality is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you. Which, yes, comes from the bible, but it has nothing to do with god. I think religion partly sprung from this feeling in our early ancestors that we know there are things that we don't want done to us, and so they shouldn't be done to others. I mean, we all look at the ten commandments and feel deep down that some of them are more important than others, but god certainly wouldn't have found these negotiable. Working on Sunday and skipping church is just as bad as killing someone according to god, but I imagine we wouldn't find anyone here who agrees. So a god or a religion setting a bunch of rules is fairly arbitrary, and while many of us will adopt some of these more arbitrary commandments, we know there are some worse than others regardless of what the minister says.

sigh. I dunno. I guess it's easy to decide all of this millenia and millenia down the line after refinement and philosophical discussion and all. But it seems like if we value our lives, we should value others; if we don't want things stolen from us, we shouldn't steal from others; if we want to be respected, we should respect others. If god saying that helps, I guess that's what society needs, but it becomes troublesome when we get to the part that says "my god is truer than your god."

[KittyKatBlack]

Jack Chick's a Jehova's Witness?

Honestly, I don't know. Unlike most of these people. I don't really study things that I find offensive in detail. So I have no idea what sect or cult or whatever they call it he belongs to. I just kind of lump them in the 'religious zelot' catagory.

[Yeahduff]

He definitely isn't, but there's a lot he shares with Jehova's Witnesses. I doubt witnesses would use Chick tracts, though. They have their own literature.

[Blackaby]

*stuff*

I totally lost track of this whole argument because I forgot this thread was interesting and haven't bothered to read through it for a while.

I think my point from the beginning here is that I think there are some things which are fairly stuck, from the VERY STRICTLY BIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE THAT WAS MENTIONED MUCH EARLIER IN THE THREAD - like race, gender, and sexuality.

Aside from Michael Jackson, I haven't heard of anyone who's managed to successfully 'change their race' - and of course, with him, it's only the way he looks. His DNA is still that of a black bloke. I haven't heard of anyone who's been able to change their physical gender in keeping with the STRICTLY BIOLOGICAL perspective, which means being able to have kids. (Although here's hoping that they can somehow change that in the future.)

Sexuality is a shakey one: there are a lot of people who've been one thing and then the other - heck, I'm a hasbian myself - but I think a lot of it can be chalked to having bisexual inclinations, rather than being strictly homosexual or heterosexual. If I'm going to make this argument, sexuality is the weak link and I wouldn't rely on it too heavily.

I can't see religion even slightly fitting into these kinds of categories. Religion can be changed. Even religion ITSELF changes. It happens all the bloody time. It doesn't fit on the same scale.

ANYWAY topic has moved on now. Just thought I should cleeerrrifyyy.



I was taught in my American history classes that slave owners used the Bible and religion to better control their slaves and keep them unwilling to revolt, and that this was part of the really interesting brainwashing shiznit that happened to make plenty of slaves in America LIKE being slaves. That's just what my professor said and what I'd read in slave witness accounts/our textbooks though. :/ I'm not going to state my own opinion on it all because I'm not American, and as a result likely don't know anything about it.

[Blackaby]

I do agree that religion can be a good thing. What's that line - Religion is the opium of the people? I'm okay with the whole world being stoned. So long as people are using religion to enforce good things - like people's basic rights - that's all cool. I'm not going to get involved in it, but if it's making people happy, that's great for them, and I'm happy for them. I also have no problem with people revising and re-reading religion (I've read a bunch of books on Bible analysis, that change and readdress a lot of the more bleh aspects of the Bible.) to suit a personal or ethical agenda. So long as it's a good one.

Which so often it isn't.

I'd prefer to keep it out of my life, though. I would be uncomfortable being in any serious relationship/friendship with someone who is religious, and if any kids I had ended up religious, I would find it extremely hard to deal with.

[KittyKatBlack]

He definitely isn't, but there's a lot he shares with Jehova's Witnesses. I doubt witnesses would use Chick tracts, though. They have their own literature.

Oh yeah. I remember that when this old couple came to my house and started reading from a pamphlet about the Jehova's Witness thing. It made me angry. Not because they came to my house. Not because they were preaching the word of God, and not because they were Jehova's Witnesses. It made me angry that these people had basicly devoted their lives to knocking on doors and annoying the holy hell out of people on a daily basis yet they can't take the time to memorize the freakin' material? It was appalling.

[Escushion]

I do agree that religion can be a good thing. What's that line - Religion is the opium of the people? I'm okay with the whole world being stoned. So long as people are using religion to enforce good things - like people's basic rights - that's all cool. I'm not going to get involved in it, but if it's making people happy, that's great for them, and I'm happy for them. I also have no problem with people revising and re-reading religion (I've read a bunch of books on Bible analysis, that change and readdress a lot of the more bleh aspects of the Bible.) to suit a personal or ethical agenda. So long as it's a good one.

Which so often it isn't.

This is how I feel as well; I think there are a lot of people who just need to feel they're one-upping others and some use race, some use religion, etc. It can be seen on the smaller scale among feuders (families who feel the need to be at war with some other family, even if that "enemy family" doesn't know they exist.)