This summer I was at my cabin with several friends and family members. At some point around the fire my sister brought up some story about a woman being saved by what she said was her guardian Angel. A few other people then chimed in with other stories about people who should have died and were saved by some miracle event. In some cases these people say they could actually feel someones hand upon them pulling them from danger. You could actually see the happiness of the idea of God saving people through the use of Angels. I sat there and smiled. Not because I thought it was a wonderful thing that this gave them happiness but rather because I didnt have the heart to tell them the truth, that indeed this idea of Angels from God saving the lives of people was not only nothing to be happy about but rather a horrible and selfish idea. How can I say that? I have for a long time tried to find something of redeeming value in religion. Several times over the years I thought I succeeded in doing so but eventually I find that not only do the negatives always outweigh the positives but the positives are better achieved through other means for many reasons while the negatives are often only achievable through religion. But surly I found a redeeming value in this? Hearing the story of a child coming out of a life threatening situation by what appears to be miraculous means certainly has an effect on the heart. Any time you read a positive story about children it just makes you feel better ..well almost any time. In a world without God it may seem cold and calculating to suggest that the laws of probability are the reason these people survive these situations that others would call miracles. What comfort is there in believing these people just got lucky? On the surface the alternative is much nicer, much warmer, unless of course you are in the majority. For a parent who still has their children safe at home these ideas are great but for those whose children were not so lucky (hey theres that word again) the idea that God had the power to save your child but chose not to is hardly comforting. In fact when one looks at the number of children, never mind women and men, when one looks at all the children who will die from cancer and disease, all the children who will be kidnapped and never returned to their parents, all the children who will die from various accidents or be murdered or molested it becomes harder and harder to find any warmth in the fact that God decided for no reason what so ever to save not even a percentage of them while letting the rest suffer and die. What is so wonderful about an all powerful being turning its back on so many children? I mean if the idea is that God works in mysterious ways then I guess luck plays a major role either way. And please dont talk about God working in mysterious ways, there is nothing mysterious about being a dick. Imagine for a moment that you leave your child with a friend. Upon returning to pick them up you see an ambulance outside and find that your child has died in some unforeseen way. Though distraught and heartbroken you know through talking with the police and paramedics that there was nothing this friend of yours could do to save them. You know they too are devastated by this event and will not let them think it was their fault. You will not let them live with guilt. Now imagine that you leave your child with a friend and the child dies, only this time you discover that the person had every opportunity to save your child but chose not to. They didnt cause the event that killed your child but they could have save them and chose not to. How is the second scenario possibly better than the first? In fact imagine that the second scenario is happening thousands of times every day. Would it honestly make you feel better or warm and fuzzy just because every once in a great while the friend chooses to save the child? Religion prevents us from facing the truth of reality. We want to believe that if our kids get sick we can will them to get better, that if they are kidnapped we would find them, we want to believe that God will watch over them save them from being stolen from us, we want to believe hiding under our covers will protect us from monsters. But we must understand that what we want isnt what we need and what need is to find the courage to grow the (*)(*)(*)(*) up.
It's clear to me that our needs differ. Not everyone is capable of living without religion, and I'm thinking that natural selection has even tended to favour the religious throughout our history, leading to many people alive today having an innate need for it. Look at Doc Dred. The guy claims he was raised atheist, yet he went digging into Buddhism looking for spiritual fulfillment. He couldn't leave it alone - he had to find something to fill that void in him. Christianity ended up doing it.
Saying not everyone is capable of living without religion is like saying not everyone is capable of living without drugs and perhaps it's true but how we would know? If our lives are determined by our experiences then had we never created it-it would not be determined to be something we need. The creation need of man was first determined by the desire to know the unknown. Over time we got better and better at reverse engineering older religions into new ones. Religion was great for survival you are correct as long as you were the one doing the telling rather than the listening. Your protection as well as your enemies defeat was beyond reason and logic, you could control your fate and indeed it was your destiny to do so. Science may be able to tell you how things actually work but what good is that when the goal is a selfish one, there's no glory in being just like everyone else. There are a few kinds of religious people in this world. You have takers, sacrificers, and the indifferent all of which have different variables and evolved along different branches of the same tree. The indifferent are now the largest percentage of the western worlds religious population, survival of the least committed I guess. Just because something has evolved up until this point does not make it a positive nor a necessity. Our innate desire to hate or discriminate against those who are different from us may have provided a social and physical protection in the past but do we honestly want to take it with us into the future? The point of the OP was that the comfort of the few is greatly outweighed by the pain that same comfort causes the many.
I am so glad that you would not consider placing me in your peer group wherein I would be considered as part of that "we" that you speak of. Aside from that point, there is also the point that you cannot speak for everyone, and subsequently you cannot be speaking for me and my 'needs'. So, here you are, on this public forum making an admission that you need to "find the courage to grow the (*)(*)(*)(*) up."
Yeah, the different uses of 'we' can be difficult to grasp for those who are learning the English language. But I suspect, in this case it's merely another effort to divert and obstruct.
And I’m glad that after all this time you still go out of your way to fill us in on your inability to comprehend the most simplistic ideas and conversations. There are only two reasons for this. One is that your mind is really this opaque in which case discussing anything with you is pointless. The other is that you must divert, you must twist and turn everything you can because you are incapable of actually discussing anything that challenges you in which case discussing anything with you is pointless. Either join the discussion and stop trying to disrupt this conversation or stay out of my thread.
I don't know of anything that can completely alleviate suffering. Having nothing to blame might help you, but some people rely on faith to carry on after a great loss. We see the failure of religion everyday. No argument on that. But we also see the failure of humanity, and religion may be too easy of a scapegoat. So if an angel comes to help you I hope you take the help, but by all means don't sit around waiting for it.
Nothing can completely alleviate suffering and that is the point of my OP and that in our attempt to do so through religion we actually cause more pain. What a thing to place on a family who loses their child that there was indeed someone who could have easily saved their child and indeed has taken it upon himself to save this one or that one but not theirs. And many people have come forward to state that indeed religion added additional suffering after a great loss, a suffering that they would not have felt without religion. Religious parents state that after the loss of a child their family and friends and people from the church come and tell you your child is in heaven, that your child is in a better place, that they are with God. This of course is meant to comfort, to alleviate some of the pain of a horrible loss. However these people who have come forward over the years have stated that instead, it prevents them from being able to mourn the loss of their child. How selfish is it of them to want their child here on earth, to be here with them in a place of suffering and loss instead of in heaven with God? They are torn between emotions that should not meet at that moment. Can you really be upset over your child being in a complete state of happiness? Sure you will miss out on the next say 60 70 years with them but after that you get to spend an eternity with them and now you no longer have to worry about them. The idea that death can be a good thing only holds its power to those who are still alive and have not had to face such a horrible loss. No doubt humanity fails, they must in order to learn, to progress, my point is not that religion is the only cause of our failures but rather the most powerful reason we do not learn from our mistakes. The point of this thread is about how the things most consider to be a positive attribute of religion are actually quite damaging when considered by those who it affects. Its about why although believing your blankets can protect you from monsters may comfort you, it will if not eventually left behind leave you vulnerable to true dangers both physical and emotional. We must have the courage to face the truth.
It is human frailty and "imperfection" that so often leads people to a religious crutch, but I think you and I would agree that this crutch can be of benefit to those who need it. The question is whether it could be effectively replaced by something non-religious. Since the issue is spirituality and man's innate need for it, which varies by individual person and individual circumstances, I expect a negative answer. No matter what a person in need ends up turning to, it will be religious in nature. If there were no religions in the world right now, people would start inventing them....
I disagree. I think one of the major factors of why religion came about was when. Thousands of years ago our knowledge of the world and humanity was extremely limited so the gaps we had to fill in were very large, the result was religion. In fact where ever or whenever you look religion always seems to form and be at its most absolute in places where secularism and science are at its lowest. As one who believes in natural selection, in evolution, I must assume that religion will eventually be non-existent. As humans we use our intelligence to survive, at the rate in which our understanding of nature and science is currently growing it will be more and more difficult to find places to hide religious beliefs unless of course you reject science outright, which is happening still to this day despite its record. There is no reason with no religious restrictions on the scientific community (think stem cells) that science won’t be able to cure many frailties of the human condition and not just physical ones but mental ones as well. But even without scientific advancements we can change the human condition by challenging ourselves to face the truth with conviction rather than falling back on crutches that will always limit our potential.
Richard Dawkins is fond of quoting Charles Darwin from the end of his book On the Origin of the Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life..." He and other atheists do argue that spiritual fulfillment can be found outside of religion, but I personally think that this would require that everyone study - and also understand - science, and I suppose it's possible that everyone could gain some appreciation for it. If the sheeple were culturally directed toward it, I should think they would then learn to appreciate the view of the universe afforded by science today. If it weren't for the obstacle of life-threatening monotheism and its salesmen standing in their way, people might indeed come to appreciate the cosmos and its evolution, including our own evolution, the way scientists do and the way I, a moderately informed layman, do. If we could just get them away from that mental virus of fundamental monotheism..... I just worry that it will never happen. The claims and promises of monotheism are easy for idiots to grasp and seductive to many. As grand as the scientifically derived view of the cosmos is, it also fails to comfort a frightened mortal species. It can't fully replace religion. And so, I think we will never be rid of religion. If our education system fails us, it may even grow rather than shrink.
If humanity survives the next 100-200 years I think it’s highly probable religion will nearly vanish, not directly after that time period but eventually. I just think there are turbulent times ahead and if we can make it through them with our secularism intact the last bastions of fundamentalism will have nothing to hide behind. As each new generation is born into a world where technology bridges gaps never before bridged the world will continue to get even smaller. Traditional education is already struggling to keep up with the amount of information everyone has access to. The internet could do far more for secularism than any government ever could as long as they keep their hands off it. Perhaps the word religion will get replaced with spirituality or naturalism as a way for people to connect with the world and the universe they live in on a more personal level but the mythological ideas that are at the root of so many problems in our world will eventually be done away with and I believe they must because if they don't we may never make the next step. People think they need religion because they’ve never truly known anything else. Atheists, nearly everyone I know at least, have known religion and now that they’ve known something else they would never go back.
