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armorgold
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armorgold
273 posts
Nomad

How would it effect us if we didn't have religion at all? For me, i think it's a huge change compared today.

  • 59 Replies
HahiHa
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HahiHa
8,256 posts
Regent

religion should be forbidden or at least completly banned from politics that meansm NO RELIGIOUS POLITICS these are the most dangerous people today - religious mans with armies

I don't think that forbidding all religions will solve the problem, but I agree that religion and politics must stay separate at all cost.
deserteagle
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deserteagle
1,633 posts
Nomad

religion is dangerous to societies and should be outlawed.


You are just as bad a intolerant religious zealot.

Religion with everything has pros and cons. The cons are fairly obvious: zealots, discrimination, and closed-mindedness. The Pros are that Religious Institutions are willing to give to the needy, they sometimes actually help troubled people, and Religion is a large part of any culture. It would be a disgrace is if a zealot atheist group tore down the Sistine Chapel, or burned St. Basils *aka Red Square*.

I don't see why a few bad apples spoil the entire pie.

@MRwalker: I doubt many 13 year olds have the attention span to read all that you have posted. But You do have some interesting points.
deserteagle
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deserteagle
1,633 posts
Nomad

religion is dangerous to societies and should be outlawed.


You are just as bad a intolerant religious zealot.

Religion with everything has pros and cons. The cons are fairly obvious: zealots, discrimination, and closed-mindedness. The Pros are that Religious Institutions are willing to give to the needy, they sometimes actually help troubled people, and Religion is a large part of any culture. It would be a disgrace is if a zealot atheist group tore down the Sistine Chapel, or burned St. Basils *aka Red Square*.

I don't see why a few bad apples spoil the entire pie.

@MRwalker: I doubt many 13 year olds have the attention span to read all that you have posted. But You do have some interesting points.
MRWalker82
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MRWalker82
4,005 posts
Shepherd

The Pros are that Religious Institutions are willing to give to the needy


Interesting you should say that. Did you know the Catholic church suspended it's outreach missions in D.C. because same sex marriage was legalized and they feared it would paint them in a poor light?

Or that a christian outreach ministry in New Zealand refused to allow atheists to help them deliver food to the hungry? They stated that the goal of the ministry was to get church members active in the community and allowing atheists to deliver food was counter to their aims.

These are just a few examples, but time and again we see that churches help the poor to make themselves look good, not out of some altruistic desire to help others, and repeatedly I have even been refused to allow to volunteer at missions and food kitchens here which are religious in nature because I am not religious. Seems to me like helping others should be the priority, not creating a good public image.

Don't get me wrong, not all organizations are like this, and there are many exceptions. The fact that there are so many that ARE like this though really makes me question the motives of any theistic assistance organization. When public image becomes more important than helping those who need help, then the assistance given loses much of it's value.
HahiHa
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HahiHa
8,256 posts
Regent

Sometimes it's not even the public image, there are some groups who help and in the same time convert as much people as possible to their belief, saying it's their god who helped them and so on. Mostly this happens after a catastrophe. There are also christians among them (but others too, and not all do this).
This is abuse of the distress of the victims and nothing more than abject.

deserteagle
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deserteagle
1,633 posts
Nomad

I was thinking more along the "loaves and fishes" line. Or the soup kitchens.

There are some groups that try to exploit people, but there are some genuine people who honestly want to help other people.

bloonkiller
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bloonkiller
158 posts
Nomad

Not much religion and law are very similar.

CrimsonRose
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CrimsonRose
75 posts
Nomad

World without a religion:

Hopeless for many.
There wouldn't BE a world. (According to my religion)
Very lonely.

And many other things; but that is my simple answer.

rafterman
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rafterman
600 posts
Nomad

Hopeless for many.

Humans aren't hopeless by default, sure if religion suddenly disappeared(or was proven, in away everyone would deny it) people would feel hopeless compared to life with it, but like I said, humans are not born without hope.

There wouldn't BE a world. (According to my religion)

Not necessarily, its possible that if something created the world, people would not know about it, meaning it did not have a religion.
Avorne
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Avorne
3,085 posts
Nomad

Y'see - the default position of the human brain is to not have a religion and so really religion is just brainwashed into you at a later stage. Also, you can't prove your religion and therefore cannot prove that the world wouldn't exist without it.

BlackVortex
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BlackVortex
1,360 posts
Nomad

Hopeless for many.
There wouldn't BE a world. (According to my religion)
Very lonely.


What the hell?
So all humans are by default emo without religion then?
Or is it just people turn to religion to escape their own depression?
Also the, there wouldn't be a world claim without religion, is just wow.

If any religion is worthwhile and actually makes sense, It'd probably be Buddhism.
Mainly for this reason: 'Buddhism is different from many other faiths because it is not centred on the relationship between humanity and God. Buddhists do not believe in a personal creator God.'
woody_7007
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woody_7007
2,662 posts
Peasant

If it's not religion then it is politics, morals, or some other thing which we believe in and can't be disproved which we attempt to force upon others, sometimes violently.


If you believe we will just find another excuse to fight each other, why do you think there would be a reduction in wars if religion was eliminated?

And many of the 'morals' of these people are NOT on par with what you or I would consider 'morally correct' behavior.


FYI, i came from a part of lodnon considered a 'slum' and find your simpliiistic portrait of the urban poor as uneducated fairly insulting. And thats not mentioning the accusation that poor people have a twisted moral compass. In addition, the majority of people in the world live in relativie poverty. Only a few countries are affluent enough for atheism to be a big influence on public affairs. And your baghdad analogy is a poor one. All muslims, even atheist ones, consider themselves 'muslims'. Its a badge of cultural identity as much as anything. There have been plenty of works concerning atheist islam which shed light on it.

However such an emphasis on scientific process would, by necessity, eliminate all current religious doctrines.


It would still however be a religion. Religion isnt defined by mainstream doctrine, but is merely a belief system.

We have the need because we have an innate desire for understanding and the capacity for complex thought.


The human condition is why we have this innate desire for understanding. You havent answered why this exists in the first place. Complex thought is just a capability we possess. It doesnt explain why we want to know all.

And what would I be 'beligerantly casting aside' which should be kept? What traditions or dogmas should be kept and why? What can they offer to someone who is concerned only with truth?


Well, by the sounds of this, and many other posts on these forums, you would like to do away with all form of religion expression. On this basis, I would say it is the ceremony of religion and the community spirit that it engenders which should be ept. Of course this would be culturally relative to different groups, so i cant define it in much more complex terms than that. However if it went the way of a religion for atheists, celebrating human achievement, rational/critical thought etc but combining the ceremony of it, that would be ideal.

I disagree. I think that too much emphasis is placed on human intelligence. And to be even more technically correct, not only are today's monkeys our cousins, but humans ARE monkeys. And they are really not as far inferior to us intellectually as you may think. We exhibit nearly identical behavior across the board, the main difference being our capacity for abstract thought. And even then we don't know how much of that capacity other monkeys have. Their brains have many of the some structures as ours which allow for such thought to take place.


Until you provide me with some evidence for these claims, i have no reason to believe you. That said, even if this was true, equating the intelligence of monkeys with humans is nonesense. You seem very flippant about 'capacity for abstract thought', it being a massive difference, and of course are exponentially more developed cognitive abilities. You can train humans to be conditioned like dogs, however that doesnt mean we can put ourselves on the same bar as them.

However to deny that they are propagated by religion is asinine.


I dont deny it. I merely do not believe it nearly has as much affect on the world as you seem to, especially in modern times.

What baffles me is that there are still zealots sending their young children out to blow themselves up, or arming 7 and 8 year old kids with assault rifles and commanding them to commit murder, and be killed in retaliation.


Youve answered your own question there. Its because they are zealots. And actually, the people who order suicide bombs at the top of al qaeda cells and the like never use their own family members, underlining their hypocrisy, but thats another story.

Or that in some countries people are so poor and so hungry that they intentionally shove their children in front of US military vehicles because we give the families of civilian victims money in reparations for lives lost.


Again youve answered your own question again. Its because theyre poor and hungry. That kind of thing isnt new either. Up until the early 1900s in britain, the urban poor would routinely have children, and kill them for the life insurance.

More importantly it is used as a tool to garner support for wars from the masses who would otherwise have no reason to support a war of expansion or political and/or financial gain. That is what scares me.


Almost any ideology can be used to start wars. Just look at the us in iraq and afghanistan, invading on the basis of spreading democracy. Since that is also a tool for garnering the support of the masses, shouldnt that be considered dangerous and need to be outlawed?
Eless
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Eless
118 posts
Nomad

Woody discouraged me from a short, random answer, but anyway. I think many, i.e. at least everyone on this forum, would be very shocked by a lack of religion in the world. Religion, despite some people's quarrels, has contributed and continues to contribute a great deal to the world today, both negatively and positively. Stereotypes would be created and destroyed, even forgotten, and there would be no pedo priest stories on the late night news. Morals would, ignored by our rapidly numbing minds, deteriorate rapidly, and culture, both in art and music, would be lost.

MRWalker82
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MRWalker82
4,005 posts
Shepherd

If you believe we will just find another excuse to fight each other, why do you think there would be a reduction in wars if religion was eliminated?


Because religion is used to garner support for many wars, and it is manipulated to swell the ranks of the groups fighting in them. Sure, humans will always find reasons to kill one another, but when ~80% of the world's population is religious it's fairly easy to see why it is such a powerful tool to gain support or claim reasons for the wars.

FYI, i came from a part of lodnon considered a 'slum' and find your simpliiistic portrait of the urban poor as uneducated fairly insulting.


I'm not sure how it is in London, but as you can see I used examples here in America, areas where I myself have been personally. I do not say that all poor are uneducated, however if you look at the overall level of education in these areas you will find it well below the average in areas which are more affluent.

It would still however be a religion. Religion isnt defined by mainstream doctrine, but is merely a belief system.


Let's take a look at a few things here before we call science a religion:

Religion:Religion is often described as a communal system for the coherence of belief focusing on a system of thought, unseen being, person, or object, that is considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine, or of the highest truth.

Belief:That state of the mind by which it assents to propositions, not by reason of their intrinsic evidence, but because of authority.

Scientific process does not, nor does it require belief. It is based on evidence. Observable, demonstrable, testable, and verifiable facts. Accepting fact is not belief, and belief often exists in contradiction to fact, or at the very least in spite of a lack of facts.

There also needs be no ceremony, tradition, worship, prayer, or communion needed for science to be applied in our lives, and as I said, strict adherence to scientific method in all areas of our lives would require an elimination of dogmatic practices, especially those rooted in superstition.

Until you provide me with some evidence for these claims, i have no reason to believe you.


Evidence of what? That we are monkeys? Or that they have brains nearly as evolved as ours? Obviously you don't follow science too closely or you would already know that.
Information on Humans
About the theory of Mind
Humans and Monkeys share Machiavellian Intelligence
And then let's look at the phylogenetic classification of the clades which humans occupy. If you look back to our previous ancestors you will see that Anthropoida are monkeys, and thus every species thereafter are also monkeys, meaning that we, the apes, and the modern monkeys are ALL monkeys despite our usage of the term today outside of scientific fields:
http://locolobo.org/Windows_Phylogeny.jpg

I dont deny it. I merely do not believe it nearly has as much affect on the world as you seem to, especially in modern times.


So the conflict in the Gaza area, the Jihadists blowing themselves up, the fundamentalist Christians trying to ban anything which doesn't conform with their faith, the Creationists trying to teach our children theistic doctrine as fact in our schools just to name a few. These are not major issues caused by religion? I fail to see how religion is NOT an issue in the modern world.

Youve answered your own question there. Its because they are zealots. And actually, the people who order suicide bombs at the top of al qaeda cells and the like never use their own family members, underlining their hypocrisy, but thats another story.


Yes I am aware of their hypocrisy and the function of their methods. And the fact remains that they are religious zealots and they manipulate the religious faith of those who they recruit as bombers and soldiers in order to bend them to their will. It would be fairly safe to assume that if these recruits were not religious they would not fall sway to the poisonous ideals of the leaders of these groups.

Almost any ideology can be used to start wars. Just look at the us in iraq and afghanistan, invading on the basis of spreading democracy. Since that is also a tool for garnering the support of the masses, shouldnt that be considered dangerous and need to be outlawed?


We invaded on many other reasons than 'spreading democracy' and while I don't agree with our presence their I have seen the people in these nations who are very appreciative that they have a chance to be free. That ideal I agree with, although I don't agree that we have taken it upon ourselves to police the world. In that sense I do agree with you. Any widely held belief system which cannot be disproved with fact is dangerous. It inspires extremists and zealots and must monitored carefully lest it become a tool of control.
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