Tucker
From a social perspective, religion is a way to devise a philosophy with clear bounds on right and wrong, to help pinpoint what is evil and what is good.
Basing one’s society, or even solely the justice system, upon the laws of a 2000+ year of nomadic desert tribe is a terrible idea Tucker.
Lots of people do need these sorts of bearings when they themselves decide that.
I find that to be horrifically insulting to the human intellect and fundamentally untrue. I am non-religious. I have many non-religious friends. Those who identify as non-religious are steadily growing into a significant portion of the population. Are you saying that my community and I are incapable of morality simply because we do not follow the laws of a primitive society of horrifically ignorant desert tribesmen who believed in witches and magic? Are you saying that without religion, the religious would immediately descend into mustache twirling villainy? Be serious Tucker, please.
For me, as a somewhat religious person, the tennents of faith were just a starting point in the evercontinuing process of defining my personal views on right and wrong.
Well isn’t that a wonderful buffet for you then, that you can pick which of your god’s laws to follow and simply ignore the rest of your god's laws. How delightful that must be for you.
Most religions today have flexibility built into them, and most religious people are not fanatics but pretty down to earth, normal persons.
And why is that Tucker? Why are today’s religions defanged and declawed in comparison to where they were just a few centuries ago? Let’s be intellectually honest about where this change is coming from, it’s coming from
outside said religion. Religion comes to us today in such a delightfully flexible form and not fielding armies of genocidal rapists precisely because it has had to give up so much ground to secular and scientific breakthroughs. Freedom of Speech, Civil Rights, Freedom of Religion, Germ Theory, vaccinations, the theory of gravity etc, are all values that brutally annihilated their religious counterparts and replaced them, at least in most of the developed world.
Religious violence tends to underlie pretty bad social issues (poverty, corruption, etc). The conflict between the Shia and Sunnis isn t caused by different beliefs. That's just a casus belli as the romans used to say. It''s caused by POLITICAL competition between the historical civilisations of Persia (Iran) and Arabia (the Saudis). There are very real, down to earth reasons of why these states compete, that have little to do with religion. The world is bad because people are bad, regardless of what they believe in. Religion is just an excuse.
I really don’t know what evidence I can provide to you if someone strapping a bomb to their chests and blowing up school buses full of children while shouting “god is great” at the top of their lungs isn’t enough proof for you that these people honestly do believe in their heartfelt religious beliefs. They are literally martyring themselves in the name of their dogmatic god. What more evidence could you possibly need, or indeed could, be presented with to change your mind?
I would also argue that the many of the problems a nation is experiencing are directly linked to that particular nation's religious beliefs. If for example a nation has the heartfelt religious belief that every third child should have its eyes put out, that nation is going to be measurably worse off than nations which do not have that particular religious law. If a nation has a religion which mandates that half of it’s total population is forbidden from having jobs, owning property, investing, participating in the government, driving a vehicle, going out in public, forces them to wear cloth sacks and considers them to be incubators of the next generation of males and nothing else, that society is going to be measurably worse off (socially, culturally, politically, economically, militarily, etc) than nations which do not. Nations that have a religious viewpoint that climate change conflicts with the bible and choose not to prepare for it are going to be measurably worse off than nations who do prepare for the coming climate catastrophe, it's as simple as that.
The trend in political science is that the more religious a nation is, the worse off it is. Conversely, the better off a nation is the less religious it is. That goes for literacy, quality of life, quantity of life, education (college & other), GDP, etc. Less religious nations also experience less famine, disease, murder, crime, experience less civil strife, etc.
Tells you quite a bit about religion if the more religious a people are, the worse off they are. I guess their god must want them to suffer horribly or something. Doesn't seem to be an entity I would want to worship but to each their own I suppose.