Since we've gotten told to stop talking generally about religion twice in the Homosexuality and Religion thread and were told that, if we want to talk generally about religion, we need to make a new thread, I have made a new thread.
Full disclosure: I am an agnostic atheist and anti-theist, but I'm very interested in theology and religion.
Mod Edit: All right, there are a couple of ground rules here:
- This is not a thread for mindless bashing of religion or of atheism/agnosticism etc. All view points are welcome here. Let's have a civil debate.
- Religion is a volatile subject. Please don't post here if you can't manage a civil discussion with viewpoints you disagree with. There will be no tolerance for people who can't keep the tone light hearted.
- There is no one true answer for this thread. Don't try to force out opposing voices.
edited 9th Feb '14 1:01:31 PM by Madrugada
A nice butterfly
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Nope. That is a horrible misinterpretation of the Robbers cave experiment.
The ideals and groups were fictionally constructed the children did not make them themselves but were forced into it.
See the Blue-eyed brown-eyed children experiment
. it is not until the adults confer special rights to one group over the other were the problems arise. So, no.
@Fighteer You seem needlessly confrontational on several aspects of religion. Can easily be interpreted as some hostility towards the subject. While the mental image of you as a bloodied surgeon with mask and scalpel ready to delve deep into the human psyche (by which I mean soft squishy brain-innards) is funny, I also thing it an exageration and unnecesary.
I think you simply seem to care too much about something so personal to each individual.
edited 23rd Jan '15 9:42:37 AM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Lost in Space
Eye color is not a trait that is blatantly apparent about an individual without close inspection.
Re: hostility towards religion. I am incensed by intellectual dishonesty, and religious institutions occur to me as a vast house of cards built atop a myth — an intellectual closed circle based on a Sunk Cost Fallacy. Frankly, that wouldn't bother me — you can indulge your philosophical speculations all you want on your own time — if it weren't for the very tangible effects of those institutions in the real world.
I see religious belief as creating a memetic vulnerability in its adherents: a channel for toxic ideas, in much the same way as membership in any dogmatic ideology. It denies the application of skepticism to its core tenets because they are fundamentally based on unprovable assertions. You may have noticed my hostility to many such ideologies in these fora.
Individual members of these groups may be quite sincere in their beliefs, but that doesn't mean that those beliefs gain external validity by virtue of one's ignorance of the contradictions involved, willful or otherwise. You can't make God be real by believing in him really hard; nor can you make a chair be real, but its reality is not dependent on my belief.
No divine entity has seen fit to provide any external, empirical evidence of its existence, so all we have to go on is the assertions of people, whom we already know to be capable of error.
edited 23rd Jan '15 10:08:01 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A nice butterfly
Neither are religious beliefs until they are brought to attention. just cuz it ain't color coded enough for your convenience it does not make the constructs, fictional or real, any less marketable.
And you can be angered, I can understand that. But when your...incense creates a channel that would allow thoughs and words of dismissal for an entire group of people for simply having a belief, then your constant pointing out at them will simply seem like playing world police to things that do not seem to be having an effect on you.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Lost in Space
"Don't have an effect on me" — that may be one of the more absurd statements I've seen in this conversation to date. When my school friend is forbidden by his mother to play Dungeons and Dragons with our group because it's "the work of the Devil", I am affected by religion. When a gay friend is denied the ability to marry because of dogmatic ideology, I am affected by religion. Do you know that an atheist is less likely to be voted into office in America than a Muslim?
Elected officials are sworn in on the Bible. Our money is imprinted with "In God we trust". It's pernicious, invasive, unavoidable. For something so prevalent, one might like to imagine that it's grounded in something resembling reality.
To those of a religious bent, the sheer dominance of religious thought, religious symbolism in human society must seem like water to the fish: invisible. But to those not of such a bent, it's inescapable: a weight of dogmatic conformity that you must endure.
edited 23rd Jan '15 10:15:56 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A nice butterfly
Why are you taking the burden of your friends into your own hands? Are they comfortable with you suffering for them? Surely they must be going under strain for that, but to the point that you take such things as a personal affront?
The "In god we trust" is as ridiculous a complaint as is the swearing in. An event every four years following the tradition of what even Washington a guy who was not all that religious, did? How can you remove the historical context out of religion with but a snap of your fingers? The U.S, like it not, was founded because a bunch of assholes left England to practice their assholery elsewhere. If not for religion, this would not have happened.
Not recognizing that would be far from being free and rational of all influences, true enlightened secularism, it would be neglectful of history.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Lost in Space
Is it not possible for me to take affront at indignities suffered by people who are not me?
edited 23rd Jan '15 10:27:09 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Shop Owner
It is possible to take an affront to people that are not you. But that's predicated on wether you consider them ingroup or outgroup.
A nice butterfly
Possible? Yes.
But posturing as if you were the true victim there? No.
Now you tell me. Is such martyrdom mentally healthy? All the frustration that does not belong to you?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Lost in Space
Wow, so you reject the entire civil rights movement unless you're one of the oppressed: I have to be black to oppose slavery or segregation, or gay to support gay marriage (or in some places, not being imprisoned/executed). Nice to know that strawmen are alive and well in this debate.
Anyway, it's not like the colonization of America was some unassailable good (just ask the people who were there first), nor would the continent have remained pristine had it not been for religion: westward exploration was inevitable for technological and economic reasons.
Shipping the Puritans over here was akin to sending prisoners to Australia: the British government wanted to get rid of its annoyances and it was less trouble than rounding them up and killing them. Frankly, I don't thank the king for that: we've had a really wretched time thanks to the legacy of those morons.
edited 23rd Jan '15 10:33:12 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Um, he's affected too. He's robbed of a good time with his friend.
I was with you to a point. Religion itself is not an inherent cause of religious fanaticism, the real cause is various socioeconomic factors.
And that's that point. It is incredibly, fantastically wrong to say that religion has "no effect" to those who don't believe in it. In a world where religion holds so much power, it's the second wrongest statement after "pizza can't be tasty".
edited 23rd Jan '15 10:35:53 AM by Luminosity
A nice butterfly
I simply said you did not have the rights to play as the victim, not that you were ineligible to ally yourself to the cause. Strawmen are pretty easy to see if you plant them yourself.
And I am not saying it was good, either, I am simply saying that it happened. For better, or for worse, it happened, and you must understand the whys and the whats to see what is wrong with it, what is good with it, and what can be made better for next time. I wager that in the year 239842 when Atlantis resurfaces from the ocean and the U.S rushes in to colonialize they are not going to go with the usual pox blankets trade for that.
That is only cuz' now we know thanks to history that such is a dick move. Because we have kept the history in our hearts and minds that we know better now. Learn from your mistakes, don't just cry about them.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Lost in Space
Aszur, I am more than happy to learn from those mistakes; in fact, that's exactly what I'm trying to do here in this conversation: apply evidence of past wrongdoing to future ethical choices. Yet you still find people in this country citing Christian values as a reason why crossing an ocean and committing genocide was one whoop-de-do of a party.
The religion and the people observing it are inextricably entwined: an ideology without practitioners might as well not exist. You cannot elevate Christianity as some unassailable force of awesomeness while ignoring the horrible things it permits within its walls, any more than I could elevate Marxism (not that I ever would) as a paragon of ideology without having to acknowledge the horrible shit that happened when its ideas were applied in the real world.
edited 23rd Jan '15 10:43:09 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A nice butterfly
And we're back to square zero.
Just cuz' those people say they are doing it in the name of christian values, doesn't make those christian values, and doesn't make religion into a world-wide conspiracy to defend genocide.
Which is why I invited Antitelchen to bring those values specifically so we could discuss them instead of going in just a general, broad accusation/assumption spree.
And now I become the villain again because, in the name of TV Tropes I have once again, murdered Michael Bay and Uwe Boll, and now everyone hates TV Tropes despite all your actions as a mod being fruitless in keeping it from happening.
edited 23rd Jan '15 10:44:35 AM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Lost in Space
Yes, in circles we swim, because somehow religious faith remains unassailable in your mind, divorced utterly from the things people do in its name. And thus we understand, in this little conversation, the problems we face globally in dealing with it.
Congratulations, you win whatever you feel that you deserve to.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
A nice butterfly
I linked studies, I linked statistics, I provided with the theological conceptions as they are known in the religious circles to answer the values questioned.
Myself I am an apatheist, as I have mentioned before, and I have seen my family suffer at the hands of religiously extremist thoughts when my brother came out of the closet in a third world, conservative, majorly roman catholic country.
Under what analysis do you believe my perception is biased towards a lack of criticism and study on faith?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good.
And while teleology isn't necessary in religion it most often is, because its very purpose is to give meaning to life. It's part of every major religion. So yeah, technically it hasn't to be part of religion but practically it is.
edited 23rd Jan '15 11:10:49 AM by Antiteilchen
Fighteer, if religion is so destructive to you with no redeeming value, why even be in this thread?
The header specifically lays out that this isn't mean for bashing and you obviously have nothing good or constructive to say of religion r faith, so why even be here?
In other news:
Pope Francis asks families to engage with each other instead of engaging with technology.
“The media can be a hindrance if they become a way to avoid listening to others, to evade physical contact, to fill up every moment of silence and rest, so that we forget that ‘silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist,'” Pope Francis said.
...
Even in 1967, long before the dawn of the selfie, Pope Paul VI remarked upon the rapidly expanding world of communications, noting how television and other media leave “their deep mark upon the mentality and the conscience of man who is being pressed and almost overpowered by a multiplicity of contradictory appeals.”
Oddly enough it was Louis CK who also mirrored this problem here.
A nice butterfly
So...Godwin's Law? Is...that your argument to something that was not even tangentially related to "others do it too"?
Did you read anything I linked? How the leadership and hierarchies are formed (hint: it's not "based on skill"), and you just replied No, Except Yes to try to defend the actions of extremists? "No they arent really...but...they are because some still do it!"
And you blame an ideology that is against victim blaming and accounts for individuality for being abused to excuse victim blaming without being knocked unconscious from your chair by the sheer stench of irony?
Do you mistake culture for numbers? Culture is what distinguishes us from numbers...
edited 23rd Jan '15 11:26:31 AM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good.
Not Godwin's Law. I wasn't saying religion is anti-semitic and therefore like Nazism. I said that the logic is the same. Saying that a bad idea is also found outside a certain ideology, it doesn't suddenly make it a good idea.
About hierarchies forming. You seem to be under the impression that I have to approve of it just becasue it's "universal".
And in what way is religion against victim blaming? Saying something bad happens to you because you were naughty or because it's God's plan isn't abuse of religion, it's use of religion.
There are many faiths out there who are very quick to blame their authorities or higher power.
If you look at the oldest rendition of Job that we have, Job calls god to court over his actions as is his right and god dodges the charges. Job chooses to withdraw his petition and give god a second chance.
Of course this version is often lost in translation as well as the fact the story of Job is as old as dirt with the earliest known telling coming from Babylon.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur
HGW XX/7
Pedantry: There is only actually one documented instance of deliberate biological warfare during the conquest of the Americas. It was the British at Fort Pitt, and it probably didn't work.
edited 23rd Jan '15 11:59:28 AM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der Partei
United Earth
Job still falls under "because it's God's plan" clause.
Robbers-Cave had the kids use the same area at different times of the day without knowledge of each other. Upon being made aware of each other, they spontaneously developed ingroup and outgroup mentalities, and a hostile competitiveness. Upon being given a common (unseen) enemy, they got over it.
At best, you could say that children are blank slates. Their potential for good is wonderful. Their capacity for evil is terrifying.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
A nice butterfly
No. Just no. The kids were systematicall yseparated and knew the others were around, the original study dedicates a whole fucking chapter to detail how they introduced problems that marginated one from the other.
Godwins law refers to the usage of the shock value comparison of Nazism to not just mock, but reduce the other's argument by comparing it to a "greater evil". So the comparison remains the same invokation. An invokation that ignores the points that 1- science has yet to prove a positive, statistical correlation between the two factors you profess that do and 2- You are working under the assumption that being "infected with religion" is some sort of virus that cannot be fought and that no person with it ever questions and intenralizes with their own system of values.
Not approve. Just respect and not judge them for the simple fact that they exist. "Teh groupz wiht teh hierarcheis r evil!!1!" is too broad, and stupid, a statement to hold any water since you're not judging their actions. Just their mere existence.
The concept of the original sin. The concept of men being the originators of evil. The very concept of hell and punishment. The story of Adam and Eve. The story of Job, as Gabrael said above, and the Q'uran are pretty strict in saying "You know, if you are an asshole, that is on you. God did not force you in on this"
If someone says the opposite, well, goodness, that's the abusive asshole, isn't he? Why are you defending him or her?
Oh pfff. Come on Ach, you know as well as I do that the yanks would totally do it if it happened again just replacing blankets with like coca cola or hamburgers or American Idol offshoots or something!
edited 23rd Jan '15 12:17:22 PM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good.
And how adults treat children can encourage or discourage these traits.
There is a reason why I said younger the better. By the time most kids are school aged, their disposition has already been heavily shaped.
I saw it here. You see kids that are brainwashed into being afraid of hell at a young age. Kids aren't born aware of a heaven or a hell. That is taught to them. You take my son, same age, who sits there and says he doesn't believe in hell. Why? I allowed him to make that choice. Same faith, but thanks to different adult's method of guiding them, two different reactions.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur