"You're supposed to have faith." Biggest cop out

[K. A. Pital]

Or do you think that religious intolerance is the only possible kind?

Technically ideological intolerance is very close to religious intolerance, the difference is marginal - blind acceptance of authority and hatred towards out-of-group people. All those are manifestations of tribal mentality - religion, ideology, nationalism.

No offense, but we were discussing what people do in the name or religion, and, frankly, it's better to keep it that way.

So? Do you think religious people are being so keen just cause... they're goodie-koo-chie-koo? Rewind a few centuries of secularization back - you could find philosophers burned at the stake.

How easy is that to revert back to something as inhumane?

Pretty easy really. You need a theocratic revolution. One happened in Iran. Now Iran's people can officially kill if they abide by the rules of Islam while doing so.

So stop this bullshit about religious bigotry being different in words or actions - if you say you hate gays since the heavenly authority you worship thinks they should be killed for their sins, that means if you were empowered to kill them, you'd most likely do this (after all, your role model in this situation is a homophobic homicidal maniac more commonly called the Abrahamic God).

I have always said it and will repeat again, without the enlightment, secularization and liberalization of religion, the world would still be in the Dark Ages, and overtly religious societies are prime examples of that - hateful, murderous, dark in everything and utterly rejecting progress.

[Justforfun000]

Lets be realistic here. The only thing religion offers that secularization can't is the promise of an afterlife. It is the singular main reason why it continues to be the mind fuck it is.

The fear of death will keep religion alive. That's the simple truth and I really don't know if I see a solution around it except the discovery of immortality through physical life extension by science or the hitherto undiscovered "spiritual" dimension that people are looking for, and praying exists.

[K. A. Pital]

That's the simple truth and I really don't know if I see a solution around it except the discovery of immortality through physical life extension by science

That may be not so far out there actually. So let's keep fingers crossed.

Afterlife belief and the idea of post-life judgement are probably the most dangerous ideas in religion, actually, since they imply the unimportance of this life and thus there is an ability to act like a shithead in this world if only this pleases your God or Angel or whatever.

[Darth Wong]

So far, I see 5 standard-issue apologist arguments:

1) "It is not bad because it is not 100% effective at making people follow its teachings".

2) "It is not bad because there are other causes of bad things in this world too."

3) "It is not bad because it teaches some good things and some bad things."

4) "It cannot be bad because so many people believe in it."

5) "It is not bad because if you throw more than half of it away, then what's left is OK."

Is this the best you've got, people? Of course, that's a rhetorical question; I already know it's the best you've got.

[General Zod]

I count six. "It's not bad because there are worse systems out there."

[Darth Wong]

I count six. "It's not bad because there are worse systems out there."

I lump that in with #2.

[K. A. Pital]

"It's not bad because there are worse systems out there."

Seriously, there's not much that can be worse than a religious theocracy. Anarchy perhaps - and even then, that's a very tough call.

[Coyote]

If you have to keep adapting and updating your holy book to stay up with the times, then frankly you'd have an easier time adopting a brand new ethical system.

Adapting to meet new social realities is bad?

Bear in mind I, personally, am coming from Judaism, where continual re-examination of the original Bible is considered part of the overall parcel. Christianity, however, runs the Western world (at least as far as Western theological beliefs go) so I'm looking at it from that perspective.

Especially if so many of the commandments and sins are so outmoded that they're either no longer practical to uphold or they have no relevance in society today except as some anachronistic throwback. If the book itself is never changed in any significant fashion, just reinterpreted, then that makes it worse when many of the commandments are obviously hateful and there's several contradictions that make it difficult to keep track of what's really being said in some instances.

I actually understand what you're saying. But-- we all know that, regardless of logic, regardless of "what makes sense" and all that, you're not going to convince millions of people to toss out their belief systems. It's not going to happen, Denigrate and berate them all you want, typically what happens is their beliefs frequently end up getting reinforced. I'm sure you and many here think that is just plain dumb and stupid, etc, and I'm not really arguing with you on the validity of the beliefs.

What I'm saying is: since people are not going to give up religion, no matter how much you cajole them, then it is better that religion be adapted to meet modern sociological and civic values. What puzzles me about this whole thing is that when some liberalist churces are doing just exactly that, yuo seem to prefer it when they are reactionary and hateful.

[General Zod]

What I'm saying is: since people are not going to give up religion, no matter how much you cajole them, then it is better that religion be adapted to meet modern sociological and civic values. What puzzles me about this whole thing is that when some liberalist churces are doing just exactly that, yuo seem to prefer it when they are reactionary and hateful.

Strawman much?

You clearly missed my whole point if you think I prefer churches acting like bigoted shitcocks. If you have to update your religion, then fine. Update it. But if you don't make actual changes of the content of the book that the whole thing is based on then it isn't exactly fixing the source of the problem. It's just temporarily putting a bandage on the symptoms. Especially if it's a book that's constantly touted as infallible.

[Coyote]

I don't need scapegoats. The 9/11 terrorists were under the influence of an opiate that made them believe that they could enter heaven if they flew fuel-laden jets into heavily staffed office buildings. The only way we could really minimise the chance of such a thing happening again is by restricting the access to such an opiate.

But that's part of the problem-- "outlawing" religion is not easy. It's been tried before by different societies against different religions. It gets practiced anyway, frequently becoming more subversive and radicalized, and you cannot tell who has "contraband" on them. Even taking away Bibles or crosses or whatnot doesn't erase it from their thoughts-- if anything, it reinforces martyr complexes.

Religion will also be replaced with something else-- I mentioned Communism before, and in the USSR it assumed quasi-religious trappings. These government and socio-economic systems can also acquire an inertia of insanity (nationalism, national socialism, etc) that can be equally dangerous. What I'm pointing out with this is that it is human nature to take things to extremes, and that is more the problem than the route by which it takes.

Racist hatred, for example, can be channeled by a religion-- or by a state. I'm not trying to "give religion a free pass for all the harms it has caused", I'm saying that this is larger than religion in and of itself. Religion has been an easy tool to manipulate and use that animosity, but it is by no means the only one.

[Coyote]

Lus, disregard the part about "outlawing religion". You already covered that with Hugh. I had not realized how many more pages had been added to this, I folled a hotmail link to right where I left off.

[Coyote]

Strawman much?

Only when you're around !

You clearly missed my whole point if you think I prefer churches acting like bigoted shitcocks. If you have to update your religion, then fine. Update it. But if you don't make actual changes of the content of the book that the whole thing is based on then it isn't exactly fixing the source of the problem. It's just temporarily putting a bandage on the symptoms. Especially if it's a book that's constantly touted as infallible.

The "infallible" part is what makes or breaks, IMO. I also brought up, for example, the Constitution and Declaration of Independence of the US, which was radical at the time, but preserved power in the hands of the rich white males. Again, it was the starting point that provided a good foundation at the time but clearly needed to be added to and built upon-- to change in order to suit the times. The initial validity of the document is not challenged by this.

The Constitution has the advantage of being designed for change from th estart, however, with the Amendments. Judaism's perspective on the Bible also has this feature. Islam used to have this feature through th eprocess of Ijtihad but at one point they mad ea conscious decision to do away with it and officially re-create themselves as a dedicated Medieval society-- and we see what a resounding success that has been. The Christian church does not really have this built-in feature, though, and therein lies the rub. But it is changing anyway, regardless.

I'm going off-track, sorry. What I'm getting at is that a lot of our civic and social institutions are based off of earlier precedents, but as they morph into more modern versions of themselves, they don't lose validity.

[General Zod]

I'm going off-track, sorry. What I'm getting at is that a lot of our civic and social institutions are based off of earlier precedents, but as they morph into more modern versions of themselves, they don't lose validity.

If the entire system of precedents or social institutions are based on a faulty premise then you can hardly call it a valid system in any sense of the word.

[Darth Wong]

I'm going off-track, sorry. What I'm getting at is that a lot of our civic and social institutions are based off of earlier precedents, but as they morph into more modern versions of themselves, they don't lose validity.

Those institutions don't continue peddling their old primitive values, moron. That's the whole point that seems to keep flying over your little apologist head. Imagine if your local Public Health Office kept signs up in their offices reminding white and black people to drink at separate water fountains. And if you told them to take down the fucking signs, they said "that's our tradition" and refused to do so. You honestly would have no problem with this, as long as they aren't using force to make people follow those rules any more?

[TithonusSyndrome]

Any argument cribbed from a George Michael lyric is doomed from the start, anyways.

[Fire Fly]

For those who may not understand the line of questioning that I had asked earlier, I was attempting to demonstrate that there is an intrinsic, inherent flaw with many of the old religions but I wasn't able to because of the "faith" line. My point was, if you accept your holy book to be true and all of its moral teachings to be true and universal, you must by default accept all of it. If even one is wrong, then all of it is wrong simply because of this small clause which says that a supreme, all knowing deity said those things in the first place.

The problem with this clause is that much of what was thought to be true back then is no longer true today or is no longer accepted today because of science and humanism. We no longer think that the Earth is at the center of the universe; we no longer think that the Earth is a few thousand years old; we no longer accept that women are second to men; we no longer accept that gays are to be smited; we no longer accept that slaves are ok. There is so much that we no longer accept yet people still continue to hold their holy books as inerrant, as infallible. Why do these people continue to hold their holy book as the single source of their morality, as their guide to life? There is a huge blind spot that said people apparently do not see and do not understand.

People are not advocating that people should become more fundamentalist; this is merely a way to juxtaposition and to highlight the flaw in one's thinking. Rather, what others are trying to say is that you need a new moral/ethical system, one which does not have so many contradictions. A good moral and ethical system does not contain so many contradictions that it is necessary to eventually abandon significant portions outright because of people's changing attitudes. A good moral and ethical system should be applicable in different situations. If there was a religion which said that it is ok to amend the tenets of its teachings, I might be ok with it but then there's the paradox: if a religion is ok to be amended, does that not destroy the credibility that this supreme deity is all knowing and all powerful? Why is it ok to change the teachings of this all knowing deity if he is suppose to be infallible in the first place? If this deity is not all knowing and all powerful, is it really a deity at all?

Fortunately, we've reached the point in our humanity that we can start to formulate a new ethical and moral system which can govern people of different ideology, of different politics, and of different attitudes and its time that we do so.

[Plekhanov]

That's an issue. But religion doesn't steer into you all by itself. Blame the people.

If the religion in question specifically tells people to impose their beliefs upon others (as the bible tells believers to) then shouldn't we also blame the religion?

"Also" is the keyword here. Yeah, maybe we should.

There's no 'maybe' about it, if an ideology specifically instructs people to try and force that ideology on others and those already indoctrinated do just that then the ideology in question can clearly be blamed.

But then again, when a murder is committed, do you also blame the weapon, or just the murderer?

Complete red herring religion isn’t a passive tool which people use to facilitate murder but an ideology which gives people the motivation to amongst other things commit murder.

[Shrykull]

How is it really different from debating a fundy? They have faith that thier book is true and there supposedly "moderate" Christians just believe it?

Anyway, when you say faith isn't logical they say things like people use faith all the time, therefore thier belief is totally valid, some examplesof you using faith are such as: that your car will start in the morning, that your brakes will work, or faith that you will do well in school and get a good job, faith that you will succeed, etc.

They might say that your faith that you will succeed has a logical basis, you're just being optimistic, like they are that there is a god, BUT they are not content to believe it and want to shove it your throats with all the strings attached, it's more than just believing you will have an afterlife and justice for wrongs done against you in your life, it's a whole creed, which isn't logical and is unsubstantiated.

[Darth Wong]

Anyway, when you say faith isn't logical they say things like people use faith all the time, therefore thier belief is totally valid, some examplesof you using faith are such as: that your car will start in the morning, that your brakes will work, or faith that you will do well in school and get a good job, faith that you will succeed, etc.

The kind of "faith" that religious people have is absolute conviction despite a lack of supporting evidence or logic. That would be like having faith that your car will start even when there's no reason whatsoever to believe that it will (for example, all the spark plugs have been removed). When you have rational reasons to believe that your car will probably start, that's an entirely different kind of "faith".

I personally never hear anyone talking of the importance of having faith in their car. Most people prefer to talk about keeping a proper maintenance schedule. Similarly, I never hear anyone talking of the importance of having faith in getting a good job. Most people talk about getting a good education and getting good references, or working hard. I would say that if "faith" was the only reason you had to believe that your car would start, then you'd better get your bus pass ready.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

More extreme than that. Religious faith is like being certain that your car will get you to your destination despite your never having owned a car in the first place, and then denigrating bus riders as being irresponsible and demanding that students be prevented from receiving bus schedules because it will distract them from the more important task of obtaining a ride in your invisible car, which offers far superior amenities to any public transportation.

[Shrykull]

Anyway, when you say faith isn't logical they say things like people use faith all the time, therefore thier belief is totally valid, some examplesof you using faith are such as: that your car will start in the morning, that your brakes will work, or faith that you will do well in school and get a good job, faith that you will succeed, etc.

The kind of "faith" that religious people have is absolute conviction despite a lack of supporting evidence or logic. That would be like having faith that your car will start even when there's no reason whatsoever to believe that it will (for example, all the spark plugs have been removed). When you have rational reasons to believe that your car will probably start, that's an entirely different kind of "faith".

I personally never hear anyone talking of the importance of having faith in their car. Most people prefer to talk about keeping a proper maintenance schedule. Similarly, I never hear anyone talking of the importance of having faith in getting a good job. Most people talk about getting a good education and getting good references, or working hard. I would say that if "faith" was the only reason you had to believe that your car would start, then you'd better get your bus pass ready.

I have heard them say things like this, usually when you tell them you don't use faith. I once had one say I was using faith that when I turn a doorknob, it will open, but faith would be more me thinking I could open it by pulling on my ear.