Tony_Tarantula on 21/1/2015 at 21:36

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Discussion split from (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144887&p=2276694) this thread

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So people who do terrible things in the name of religion are honest, whereas people who do terrible things in the name of the state are lying to disguise their intentions?

Rationalization and lies are hardly the exclusive domain of Christian fanatics......and for you to make the statements you just have requires a stunning degree of blind, tribalistic, group-labeling thinking. It's dangerously close to the "bigotry" you've railed against earlier.



And quite frankly, I don't put much stock in the "good people doing bad things". The people who do the bad things are, by virtue of the definition of "good people" and "bad people", "bad people". You can dress it up however you like but at the end of the day it's just a way of self-rationalizing either your own twisted behavior or your own vulnerability to the Milgram effect.

As such I don't see any substantive difference between a torturer for the inquisition and a torturer for the KGB. Both do horrible things and justify it by appealing to blind ideology.

Harvester on 22/1/2015 at 14:01

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The thing is, though, that terrible things done in the name of religion are very obvious and very visible. I'd like to point out the smaller, but good things that religion can also bring. Let's just look at how things are/were in the Netherlands. I know too little about how it is in the USA to say anything about that.

In Dutch history: first companies to offer affordable housing to low income families? For a major part done by Christians because of their Christian beliefs. Still many housing companies have Christian foundations. The rest was done by socialists.
Financial and material help for the poor? Majority done by Christians, as far as Dutch history is concerned. Salvation Army still going strong, many churches also giving aid to the needy even in these times. Only homeless shelter in my city: Salvation Army
Volunteer work? Still done vastly more by Christians than atheists. Even organizations founded on humanist principles are staffed for a large part by Christians
Giving to charity? Dutch Christians give more than atheists, it's been researched. Not just a little more, but up to 5 times as much, depending on denomination.
The city of Rotterdam has calculated that the work their churches do saves them millions of euros and that they would be in big trouble if the churches stopped doing those things.

It's not going to make headlines, but positive effects of religion are there. Does it outweigh the negative things? Maybe not, but I just try to be a good Christian and leave it at that. I'll speak out against misuses of religion (I'm very vocal when I encounter Christian homophobia, for example) and try to be as good a person as I can be in words, actions and the spending of my money, don't know what else I can do. Since I started taking my faith seriously, I've improved considerably as a person. Can someone also become less of a good person because of religion? Definitely, atheists keep pointing that out and they're right, but I just want to show that religion can also improve a person.

EDIT: noticed that I only gave Christian examples. Just wanted to point out that there are also, for example, Muslim charity organizations active in the Netherlands and that many mosques are doing good work too.

Harvester on 22/1/2015 at 15:08

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I'll give you "some" but not "most", at least not as far as Dutch Christian charitable organizations are concerned. Some fringe groups engage in that sort of behavior, but the major ones certainly don't. Can't say anything about US organizations, you might be right or partly right there. What I know of the major ones in Holland that operate in the third world, they don't even explicitly evangelize, they just offer aid because that's what they think they should do. If a third world person were to ask "why are you doing this?" they might mention the Christian faith, but they don't even hand out Bibles or anything unless a person were to specifically ask for one. Trust me, I know, I read into this stuff because I want to know what I'm dealing with before giving money. Believe it or not, but there are plenty of Christians who actually agree with you that offering material goods but asking that they convert first or else they don't get anything, is immoral.

EDIT: also, many Christians give to secular organizations too. When there is a disaster and I have some money to spare, I give to a collective of organizations that work together to give aid. It includes reliable Christian organizations. You better believe that the secular organizations that work with them are making sure that there is no converting/evangelization going on. The homeless shelter of the Salvation Army in my city is also not employing any funny business, there are church services and everyone is free to attend, but the shelter accepts anyone and does not ask for service attendance, conversion or whatever.

Tony_Tarantula on 22/1/2015 at 15:54

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Again, you all need to educate yourselves. The 20th century alone provides numerous examples of people doing "bad things for utterly stupid, obvious horseshit reasons" that have nothing to do with religion.

I also feel obligated that "invisible man in the sky" is a term that, by it's very usage, reveals that you know jack shit about the historical nature of the religions involved, let alone the esoteric aspects. At present the term only applies to modern evangelicals and some radicalized Islamic sects.

For example....you would probably be amazed to learn this about the Catholic sect: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution)

You read that correctly. They accept evolution, basically saying that "it's an issues for the scientists to figure out".




Did you expect anything else? American evangelicals are one of the biggest things wrong with Christianity.

Of course, charity organizations in general tend to be some of the biggest racketeering organizations out there. The people who run these organizations tend to live extremely lavishly and the bigger/more visible the charity the more likely they are to be a fraud. For example the Susan Komen foundation puts less than a tenth of funds collected towards a cure, with about 40% of expenses going to "awareness"(advertising themselves). A lot of companies also support them for "pinkwashing": the practice of supporting anti-cancer causes in order to distract from the use of carcinogens in their products.

Tony_Tarantula on 22/1/2015 at 17:57

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No, you don't need religion for that.

Remember how the CIA and Dick Cheney used torture to stop the terrorists from killing us all? If you want a pure ideological angle there's plenty of examples from the USSR and the National Socialist Party where people did terrible things because "the cause" demands it. Some examples of how they thought were even borderline worship.




It's also more of a topic for a separate thread, but "zero material evidence" is starting to come into question. While they're a long way(probably a century or more) from finding hard evidence of a god there are any number of experiments that support the existence of metaphysical phenomenon....so I'm fairly open minded to see where the science leads us. I no longer feel that an informed individual can reasonably make the blanket statement that god is "imaginary". It needs further investigation which is becoming possible as we figure out how to detect quantum phenomena.

That said I am pretty sure that the "Angry man in the clouds" old testament version isn't directly true. At best it's an allegory for something else.