froghawk on 10/2/2015 at 17:20
Fair enough all around! That's honestly a very compelling argument.
Tony_Tarantula on 10/2/2015 at 22:33
Quote Posted by faetal
Yes yes, but all of that ignores things like:
* Is there a god?
* Whose religion is correct, if any?
* Should other people care about your religion if there is no proof it exists to anyone other than believers? (think people protesting about other people getting abortions)
* Does the wish to appease a creator and a belief that doing so results in an eternity in a fantasy-esque afterlife allow for a mindset which can be turned to violence if a person can be convinced that it appeases the creator?
* Should religion be mandatory? (this is essentially what religious education of small children boils down to - indoctrination by traditional mandate rather than individual choice)
You aren't going to get any answers to those questions nor solutions to the problems if you ban public discussion of religion entirely the way you want.
Tony_Tarantula on 10/2/2015 at 22:36
Quote Posted by DDL
I agree, so I think the problem we're having is we're arguing at cross purposes: I just think it would be good to take away
a tool of oppression/manipulation. It won't solve the problem once and for all, but it's unlikely to make it any worse.
Debatable. Literally every historical example of state-mandated atheism was as bad if not much worse than religious states. For example you were a lot freer as a medieval serf(with much stronger legal protection) than you would have been in any 20th century atheist state.
If nothing else the current "survival of the fittest" mentality among non-religious conservative movements highlights how intellectually dangerous it can be to take concepts of moral absolutes out of the equation. Doing so allows those people to seriously believe that it is acceptable for them to take advantage of any person or organization they please, and that it's right merely by virtue of the fact that the victim failed to resistance.
A micro-scale example of this mentality would be to ague that it's a woman deserved to get raped simply because she wasn't able to successfully resist.
DDL on 10/2/2015 at 23:38
*sigh* And it was going so well.
I think by the time "state mandated atheism" is even a thing a state can do, you're already so far into totalitarian craziness that atheism is not your problem. It's totalitarian government, THEN atheism by force (or indeed, literally anything you like, by force). It's a bad example, is what I'm saying.
I also like how you managed to get "atheism means rape is fine" in there somehow, too. Classy.
Nicker on 11/2/2015 at 04:13
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Literally every historical example of state-mandated atheism...
Name a few...
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
A micro-scale example of this mentality would be to ague that it's a woman deserved to get raped simply because she wasn't able to successfully resist.
I believe you will find that the concept of the "good rape" is a religious one or certainly originates in scriptural justifications. But again, citations please...
demagogue on 11/2/2015 at 04:46
I personally liked religious instruction growing up. For a humdrum contemporary suburban environment, it was pretty much the only time in the week a kid could ever expect to seriously discuss big philosophical issues where people think the answers actually matter -- the nature of free will, what makes for a good life or society, etc. Even if your answer always comes back to religious concepts, I mean you can't have a debate about free will without dealing with the real problems of it, and people's use of "God" is often a placeholder for real philosophical issues. It's like street philosophy; it's always enlightening just to talk about, whichever direction you take it. And I already knew I had a philosophical disposition then, so I loved it. Just as important as the answers to me was the manner of questioning and debate.
I did think, even then, that it's better to have a secular education to learn how the world works, and religious instruction is something separate, but that was more to protect the religious discussions from getting pulled down by public education, which can suck the life out of topics. Although I also thought it should be kept out of public education.
What I found anyway was that, the people that brought religion into school tended to have a pretty dumbed down version of it that encouraged dumbed-down thinking all around, which I thought was bad for public education *and* religious instruction. My vision of religious instruction was much more in the style of rigorous discipleship, spending a lot of time reading and understanding the language right, being analytical, asking tough questions, basically everything postmodern religion doesn't do and you can't expect from populist religion. You only get it in a very special setting of a few people being serious about the discipline. But I agree, once they politicize it and think it needs to apply to the real world, in practice it means they're going to water-down the work so it's not good discipleship anymore. (I take for granted that it makes for bad politics. My point is, politicizing religion is also bad for religious thinking too.)
Of the small group that went through that discipleship process, I feel like I'm the only one that got out unscathed and still ready to read works with some discipline; but that's because I went into philosophy, and they went into different religious vocations that forced them to apply religion to practical life. I expect they would look at my current world outlook with horror though, since I'm pretty free minded now. But for me, I'm carrying on the same tradition of being analytical and disciplined with works so it's not a contradiction, and I see them as backing down to water everything down into some incoherent pomo muddle.
tl;dr. I think there's a lot still valuable about (proper) religious instruction. I agree it should be kept separate from the public school system.
froghawk on 11/2/2015 at 05:16
See, this is where I differ with faetal and DDL (if I understand them correctly). I don't think religion has to be a universally bad thing - it's just a tool, and said tool can be used for good or abused for evil. I wasn't raised on religion and have never been a part of it, but I do think it's important to maintain some aspect of the spiritual/sacred which is otherwise absent in modern western society. Now, I don't think that most religious experiences are going about that properly, partially because they have been too dumbed down as demagogue said, but I do think it would do a disservice to society to eradicate dedicated time spent being in awe.
faetal on 11/2/2015 at 08:34
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
You aren't going to get any answers to those questions nor solutions to the problems if you ban public discussion of religion entirely the way you want.
The way I want? I'm talking about removing religious instruction from schools. If you actually read what I write, you might get within shouting distance of what I want.
You're incredible, I'm literally inviting debate from religious people and you're insinuating that I want such things banned. How do you even make that work inside your mind?
faetal on 11/2/2015 at 08:44
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Debatable. Literally every historical example of state-mandated atheism was as bad if not much worse than religious states. For example you were a lot freer as a medieval serf(with much stronger legal protection) than you would have been in any 20th century atheist state.
If nothing else the current "survival of the fittest" mentality among non-religious conservative movements highlights how intellectually dangerous it can be to take concepts of moral absolutes out of the equation. Doing so allows those people to seriously believe that it is acceptable for them to take advantage of any person or organization they please, and that it's right merely by virtue of the fact that the victim failed to resistance.
A micro-scale example of this mentality would be to ague that it's a woman deserved to get raped simply because she wasn't able to successfully resist.
You don't understand what "survival of the fittest" means. Clue: it isn't even vaguely connected to the concepts of
might makes right or
do what you can get away with, simply because those aren't evolutionarily stable strategies as demonstrated by decades of evolutionary studies of higher mammals and particularly primates, which includes humans. Altruism is not something which was invented as a social construct. Altruism is the most stable behaviour for socialised animals because too high a proportion of cheats / bullies leads to social disharmony and a weaker species. Thus, the brains of social animals have evolved over millions of years to respond to altruism with reward pathway responses which make people feel good for the act of being good. This allows for a far stronger species. Of course you still get cheats / liars / bullies / conservatives because even the most stable model can tolerate a small proportion.
Somewhere along the line, religion decided that this was invented by them and that without religion, society would descend into a maelstrom of rape, murder, theft and pillage, because religion = morality. Survival of the fittest in the Malthusian sense that you are describing actually hews a lot more closely to Calvinistic Christianity, the belief that those who do well in life are divinely appointed to do so and those who don't are, well, somehow less divine. Atheism is in no way, shape or form causative to a loss of morality.
Put in a way which is perhaps easier to understand - the reason moderate Christians are able to ignore parts of the bible which seem to espouse racism, slavery, torture, murder, mass murder, rape, genocide etc... Is because our moral compass tells us to. If religion was the basis of morality, then those things would be considered moral, given that the word of god is supposed to be infallible etc...
(just to clarify, this is mostly a rant about how often the phrase "survival of the fittest" is misappropriated to mean "the ruthless fuck the meek")
Froghawk - I never said that religion is universally bad. If I thought that, I likely wouldn't have married a catholic. I do however think that a belief in a higher power and the afterlife are vectors for a lot of harmful instruction, if a trusted authority uses those beliefs to disseminate ideas which could cause non-altruistic behaviour, like e.g. homosexuals are perverts in the eyes of god etc...
demagogue on 11/2/2015 at 10:21
Somebody above asked about religion in Japan and I didn't really know how to answer because it's not very clear how to make sense of it. It's full of contradictions. Anyway, someone showed me an article today that explains some of why it's such a hard question to deal with.
(
http://blog.gaijinpot.com/japan-religious-atheist-country/)
Edit -- So to answer a question like, were kamikaze pilots religious or atheistic dying for their country/gods? Um ... yes?
Keep in mind many of them are today enshrined in Yasakuni shrine as spiritual, um, something or other.
