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Religion V: Utopianism, Fundamentalism, Apothesis


Sci-2

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I think I have mentioned this before but the human brain is wired to be religious. We atheists can fulminate as much as we like about this but nothing will change. Religion seems to be something that lets cultures survive. As with everything else, the strength of religious feeling is a gaussian distribution with us atheists on one tail and popes, imams and ministers on the other. All the talk in the world will not change this fact.


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I think I have mentioned this before but the human brain is wired to be religious. We atheists can fulminate as much as we like about this but nothing will change. Religion seems to be something that lets cultures survive. As with everything else, the strength of religious feeling is a gaussian distribution with us atheists on one tail and popes, imams and ministers on the other. All the talk in the world will not change this fact.

Funny, I'm finally finishing Haidt's The Righteous Mind and he makes a bunch of similar claims, obviously leading him to attack the "New Atheist's" view of religion as just a byproduct or misfiring. I think it's an interesting discussion all on its own, especially some of the things Haidt deals with, like the question of whether religious people truly are more charitable because of greater social cohesion or the inability to argue with sacred rules. That could really ruffle a few feathers.

I don't see any reason to buy into your fatalism though. I don't think that even the supposed "militant" atheist public figures are worried about killing religion (except in their daydreams) and I don't recall bringing that up.Even Gears,who has already been accused of being intolerant didn't really base his opinions on biological grounds. Whether or not people are prone to religiosity does little for the discussions about specific religions just like you can't dismiss a discussion of specific racist or sexist ideas with an appeal to the general groupishness of our species.

All the talk wasn't trying to change that "fact". Perhaps if it was a Sam Harris thread. But it's not.

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Sologdin,

Hume attacked empiricism and inductive reasoning as fallacous? How can non a priori things be investigated without empricism.

Hume did not attack empiricism. He showed that inductive reasoning can not be non-inductively based and theorized that inductive thinking is "just a habit", but of course a habit we cannot get rid of and which is extremely useful, although it does not provide knowledge in the strong sense Humes predecessors assumed. Although all this is beautifully done by Hume, it is of course not entirely new, basically a form of scepticism, well known since the 3rd cent. BC and especially in the century before Hume by thinkers like Montaigne oder Descartes.

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I think I have mentioned this before but the human brain is wired to be religious. We atheists can fulminate as much as we like about this but nothing will change. Religion seems to be something that lets cultures survive. As with everything else, the strength of religious feeling is a gaussian distribution with us atheists on one tail and popes, imams and ministers on the other. All the talk in the world will not change this fact.

I don't think this really holds up look at Sweden vs Saudi Arabia for example. Also I used to be extremely devote with lots of religious feeling when I prayed to Jesus I could feel his grace wash over me, feel his love and feel the joy of the spirit inside me. I was an absolute believer, didn't stop me losing my faith though.
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Your exactly correct Ser Scot my anecdote doesn't really prove anything. But since some countries are so dramatically more religious than others I think maarsen's fatalism is misplaced. Sweden and the Czech Republic are already majority non-religious. He seems to be saying that will never happen because people are hardwired to be religious.



maarsen feel free to correct me if I misunderstood what you were saying.


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Statement: I traveled far and wide through many different times



Query: What did you see there?



Statement: I saw the saints with their toys



Query: What did you see there?



Statement: I saw all knowledge destroyed





Statement: I traveled far and wide through prisons of the cross



Query: What did you see there?



Statement: The power and glory of sin



Query: What did you see there?



Statement: The blood of Christ on their skins


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  • 1 month later...

Why the survey of British Muslim attitudes is so profoundly disconcerting by Maajid Nawaz


Beyond this, we must break this trend by pushing back against underlying narratives. This will require not just the voice of Muslims, but the whole of civil society standing in solidarity with those Muslims who are brave enough to challenge extremists in their midst. Islam is an idea: like other ideas, it must be open to scrutiny. But supporting secularism and challenging Islamism is not fighting “Islam”. It is moving from extremism to liberal pluralism. By neglecting to challenge extremist views, we will only increase anti-Muslim bigotry.
This is what happens when you ignore Islamist ideology. It’s time for a wakeup call.
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I think I have mentioned this before but the human brain is wired to be religious. We atheists can fulminate as much as we like about this but nothing will change. Religion seems to be something that lets cultures survive. As with everything else, the strength of religious feeling is a gaussian distribution with us atheists on one tail and popes, imams and ministers on the other. All the talk in the world will not change this fact.

And what seems to cause many others to fall into ruin. Abrahamic religions and those that follow them have brought about more atrocities than anything else in human history.

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Aerion,

Read the book then come back to talk.

Here's the NYT's Review:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/books/review/fields-of-blood-by-karen-armstrong.html?referrer=

From the review:

Fields of Blood can be thought of as a long, wide-ranging and overall quite effective rebuttal to the outlook expressed in that comment. In the West, the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident, Armstrong says on the books first page. It follows that the main hope for peace is to keep faith and statecraft separate.

Armstrong, a onetime Roman Catholic nun and the author of several influential works on religion including A History of God, argues that this is an incorrect diagnosis leading to a flawed prescription. The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if you reduced its complexities and tangles to their essence, they would amount to these three points:

First, through most of human history, people have chosen to intertwine religion with all their other activities, including, notably, how they are governed. This was not because ambitious churchmen had mixed up two essentially distinct activities, she says, but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance.

Second, this involvement with politics means that religions have often been tied up with violence: Crusaders, conquistadors, jihadists and many more. But a point Armstrong cares about so much that she makes it dozens of times the violence almost always originates with the state and spills over to religion, rather than vice versa. This, she says, is because any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence, and because violence and coercion . . . lay at the heart of social existence. The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence by police within their borders, by armies between them was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.

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I've read/listened numerous interviews with her, and it is quite clear she does not actually have anything of much worth to say, as in, nothing that followers of Abrahamic religions have not been regurgitating over and over for years. I also remember reading a few of her older books a few years ago when I was still impressionable and in quite a religious community, and they did not really hold much weight either, and so if that is any indication of the quality of this product, I can not say I wish to waste any amount of money on her.



It is quite easily to claim that your religion is not as harmful as it is made out to be, and even more so when the books and knowledge of the cultures they have intellectually oppressed have been destroyed.



Of course economics, resources, land, etc are all very prominent driving points for conflict and war. Yet it is very absurd to reject the idea that the complete eradication of an entire continent's religious beliefs and, to an extent culture, was not because of religious reasons. An entire race of people were subjugated and oppressed for centuries because of religion. There is no toleration for dissonant voices in the midst of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.


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