Of Course, NOTHING but a scam and a tool for control

Post Reply New Topic

As you say.

What else could explain Alber Schweitzer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer

Or that cynical fraud Maximilian Kolbe?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilian_Kolbe

-------------

Just starting out - I will not restrict this Hall of Infamy to 20th Century Christians.

Feel free to nominate others.

...

I love how you completely miss the point. No one said religious people are incapable of good but religion is inherently based on faith, authoritarianism, and sacred cowism. The point is you can throw out the baby without the bathwater. You don't need to adhere to a system of blind faith, authoritarianism, dogma, etc... etc... to be a decent human being.

Wrong. You're talking about bad religion.

I mostly had Christianity and Islam in mind but I don't have much respect for organized belief systems in general.

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 26 Jul 2011, 11:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

lol

Did you use a belief system to come to this conclusion? Come on! Think about it! lol

...

I said I didn't have much respect, I didn't say my opinions are fact. I'm an atheist so I lack a belief system unless you count trust in my 5 senses as a belief system (which btw has proven to me time and time again that they can be relied on though my brain does get lost in translation when it comes to things like optical illusions lulz).

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 26 Jul 2011, 11:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

Understood.

You generally don't have much respect for belief systems in general--your words. The irony is that you wouldn't have said what you said if you didn't believe your own words. Make sense? Everyone has some system of belief. You can't "know" anything that you don't "believe."

And the difference is that I don't believe beyond what hasn't been proven. Yes if you really want to get technical, I have a degree of certainty in what I know. But my certainty HAS to be backed up with consistency and withstand the test of scrutiny. There's a lot of ambiguity in life so of course I can't be 100% dead certain but I can have reasonable certainty. Don't equate faith with certainty. Faith doesn't require being preceded by anything more than a hunch. I have a hunch that I can believe my own words, but that hunch was preceded by years of consistency, experience, observation, soundness, and completeness.

What religion do you know of that is not faith based?

ruveyn

Mine

I never even made mention of faith. But I do think that faith and belief are inextricably related. I don't think either by necessity omit evidence. If you "believe" (using your definition), you have a reason to believe it (consistency, experience, soundness, completeness).

Same with faith, but I worry there might be a semantic discontinuity there. People who place faith in the unseen have no less a reason to have faith. If someone tells me I should abandon my faith or believe in something else, I can likewise measure any desire I have to follow another doctrine based upon Biblical consistency, my personal life experiences, soundness, and completeness. Of course I've had plenty of years to explore and examine, to get to know what other Christian or Christ-professing sects believe. Either they are inconsistent with my life experience and how I relate to God, though not inherently doctrinally insufficient, or they are flat-out wrong and it's anybody's guess how they can even justify calling themselves Christian. I've been exposed to probably most major religions, and every time I find them unsatisfying. There really is nothing wrong with Biblical theology, and I have every reason to believe, based even on the criteria you presented, that Who I place my faith in is real.

Henbane likes this.

Well, first of all, you are tarring with an awfully wide brush there. There are plenty of religious traditions that are not based in authoritarianism. I will grant you that there are many religions that are authoritarian, but that does not mean that all are.

There are many religious traditions that allow for a wide scope of faith. It is a running joke that the Queen is essential to the Church of England, but God is merely a "nice-to-have."

As for, "sacred cowism," I think you will find that those same traditions that encourage individual inquiry into the nature of faith and morality will be equally likely to dispense with superstition and relics in favour of dialogue as a means to find spiritual grace.

I, for one, have never denied that it is perfectly possible for a person to be a good person in the absence of faith. But that in no way invalidates the argument that religious faith has contributed much to our societies and our cultures, notwithstanding the errors that have been committed in its name.

P.S. You might want to consider keeping the baby rather than the bathwater.

Agreed.

Religion is the socio-political expression of one's faith, and faith arises out of nothing but people's need to believe in a reason for everything, without having to determine those reasons for themselves. People also use their religious dogma to seperate themselves from others of different religions, in spite of the fact that the word "religion" has its roots in a Latin word that means "to bind". Maybe thos has more to do with binding the masses in servitude to religious authoirty than anything else.

I've said it before, and it bears repeating:

Science flies people to the moon.
Religion flies people into buildings.

(I had printed 100 tee-shirts with this saying on September 12, 2001 and made over 1000% profit on the sales in the first week alone.)

That's one good thing that science does and one bad thing that a group of people identifying themselves with a specific sect of a religion has been an integral part of.

However, without science it would have been entirely impossible for anyone to fly into a building, and extremely hard for anyone to kill another person with their bare hands in normal circumstances; it's against the normal human instinct for survival. Science provides us cultural byproducts necessary for survival but also weapons to kill. Not to mention, having the potential now to destory much of the human race.

Easy enough to ignore the bad and the good of anything, if one chooses to. Not many things in life are entirely good or bad.

Religion does indeed bind people together, we swim in a sea of evidence of it all around us. And yes, the authority related with some religion is abused at times, but socio-political abuses not associated with religion exist with or without religion.

Religion is only one of about a thousand things that has the potential to separate different groups of people and/or individuals from each other.

Human beings do need a reason for most everything in life, without our cognitive ability and instinct to do this, our chances at survival would be extremely low. If we didn't have religion or science, the reasons would be the Sun, the Moon, or whatever other reasons we could come up with to orientate ourselves in the world.

Reason and faith can't be separated from each other, regardless of whether or not a religious component is part of the logic and emotion of faith involved. Long before our modern religions people reasoned that the Sun provided Light for the day, and believed or had faith that this would happen everyday when they awoke, but all it took was an eclipse of the Sun to shake the faith a little bit. Give it a few days of acting normal and they regained their faith in the Sun again.

Faith is not the property of religion, without it reason is not possible. For some science provides the reasons for much of the faith they have in the factors that combine that make up their existence. For most people, culture, spoon feeds the reasons, that shape the faith and beliefs that motivate their existence.

There is little in life for people to figure out on their own, as compared to our ancestoral past. Many of us live a life based on the reasons of others; often it is blind faith, but it certainly isn't limited to religious beliefs or reasons.