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Why can't we abandon religion the same way we abandoned the gold standard?


chuck norris 42

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I thought both ideas below common knowledge and the link between them is obvious but live and learn. 

A common defence of religion is that it is the basis of our morality 

The original basis of the value of our currency was the gold standard, but getting rid of the original basis was a good thing. 

 

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19 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I don't think it being the basis of our morality is a particularly good defence of religion, and I'm religious, but comparing religion/morality to the gold standard/currency is a ridiculous idea.

It is a common defence of religion though, and from that perspective a counterexamples are any examples were the  original basis of something was removed without damaging it at all. 

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3 hours ago, GAROVORKIN said:

When people  cease to believe in God or the hereafter,  they ultimately  to believe in everything, including  themselves. 

Funny, I think it's the other way around, that people start truly believing in themselves when they abandon their imaginary friends and crazy ideas that there is any such thing as divine/karmic justice.

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14 minutes ago, chuck norris 42 said:

It is a common defence of religion though, and from that perspective a counterexamples are any examples were the  original basis of something was removed without damaging it at all. 



But if for example you removed the base of the Eiffel Tower it would fall down. So better keep religion.

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3 hours ago, GAROVORKIN said:

When people  cease to believe in God or the hereafter,  they ultimately  to believe in everything, including  themselves. 

Is this the "Not having a crux IS a crux" defense?

Sounds like an extraordinary position you've carved out for yourself there.

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56 minutes ago, chuck norris 42 said:

It is a common defence of religion though, and from that perspective a counterexamples are any examples were the  original basis of something was removed without damaging it at all. 

Religion is as close to a human universal as anything. I don't think there has been a human society without some sort of religion. I don't know enough about the history of the "gold standard" but it obviously is not universal.

Religion does not have to be the logical basis of morality (I don't think it is in the sense most people believe) but it can still be the practical basis or in any case very important for both morality and lots of other things. Now we get the "counterexamples" about devoutly catholic mafiosi and ethically impeccable atheists (I am pretty sure the former exist, and let's grant the latter for the sake of argument). But these "counterexamples" miss the point. Single people are mostly irrelevant. On a societal level it is far too early to tell what happens after the removal of religion because that experiment is less than a century old, still very much in progress and subject to strange pendulum swings (i.e. there were still very religious periods and regions after Nietzsche ;)).

In any case it is interesting that the regions that seem the most areligious or irreligious (at least wrt traditional religions) today, namely (northwestern) Europe have been shaped by christianity for more than a millenium and often by fairly strict/devout forms of protestantism for almost 500 years. Such societies have internalized lots of aspects of these religions and then "removed the basis" in some sense. But the "action" of religion during these centuries was not simply giving a foundation. It was more like a web being woven through all of life and society. You get rid of some more explicitly religious things but you keep others or you keep secularized variants. And that now these societies seem to work fine and produce "virtuous atheists" since a few decades does not prove anything about the general case of a society without religion.

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7 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

On a societal level it is far too early to tell what happens after the removal of religion because that experiment is less than a century old, still very much in progress and subject to strange pendulum swings (i.e. there were still very religious periods and regions after Nietzsche ;)).

Although it doesn't contradict your overall point, I understand that historians have shown that societies in the past were not as religious as we tend to believe. For example, Europeans in the Middle-Ages could have an outlook on religion way more comparable to ours than you would expect. And needless to say, polytheist societies had a completely different approach to morality anyway. Not to mention the way small tribes of humans can separate faith from morality.  [disclaimer: I don't know much about these things, but I am very curious about them]
This being said, it is true that we have no idea what a society without religion really looks like. Recent experiments have been short-lived and past ones are difficult to assess. I would also agree with your analysis that a society imbued with religion-based morality can eventually get rid of religion because it will keep its basis for morality.

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11 hours ago, maarsen said:

If religion is abandoned, how long till a cryptoreligion is created to fill the void? 

This made me genuinely lol. :lmao:

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1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Funny, I think it's the other way around, that people start truly believing in themselves when they abandon their imaginary friends and crazy ideas that there is any such thing as divine/karmic justice.

Huh?? Aren't you both saying   that after you Abandon god you start believing in yourself

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7 minutes ago, chuck norris 42 said:

Huh?? Aren't you both saying   that after you Abandon god you start believing in yourself

Ah, maybe, I assumed that Garo-kun had forgotten a word there, but come to hink of it, yeah, maybe we're saying the same thing.

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