I think religion is the salve of anxiety.
People have anxiety about death and their purpose, and religion relieves that anxietyI think a lot of people need religion to compensate for what society does not give.
Society has failed and it is going nowhere
Or society has failed because of religions indoctrination and lack of critical thinking.
Both can be true, two very different sides of the same coin
I’d say it’s more accurate to say the abuse of religion/abusive religion uses the abuse of anxiety. Yes, abusive religious organizations exist, and they all use anxiety about some cosmic punishment to excuse and enforce their abuse. I absolutely agree with you on their existence and how terrible they are.
I don’t think that’s universal and inherent to religion. There are religious groups that are simply good sources of community with either no focus on any cosmic punishment, or that don’t agree that any “cosmic punishment” exists.
There are religious groups that are simply good sources of community
Which is an important factor for social animals like us humans. This also underlines that there is a lack of alternatives for people who seek community, social support, etc… Thereby inviting more people to become indoctrinated.
There are religious groups that are simply good sources of community
Houses built on sand.
A community built on lying to the gullible and anxious can never last long. It inevitably gets taken over by abusers because it’s an easy target.
A community built on lying to the gullible and anxious can never last long.
There is multiple thousand year+ lineages of morons worshiping gods that they are willing to die for. Its a pretty solid system of control.
Oh, I meant the part where the community is supportive and a positive force for good. But yeah, once it’s coopted, it can still last a long time. Just not in a positive way.
Overly simplistic. Lots of things are the abuse of anxiety.
“Lots of things are the abuse of anxiety” doesn’t make my statement any less true. As far as extent of abuse goes, I would say religion is near if not the top of the list though.
true; religion can act as therapy for anxiety
but similar to other self-help like activities it can easily abused to be the exact opposite and even like a cult. like the commies here and trump’s cult
They’re oversimplifying a complex situation to the point of no longer adding anything useful to the discussion.
Depends on the religion. Catholic, yes.
Most religions play with fears to get people aligned with the respective religious agenda. I can’t name a religion that does not do this in some form. Got an exmple?
Buddhism
Definition “Religion”: identity-anchoring, axiom-based assumption-river, which usually disallows falsification.
Fundamentalist anti-theism is every bit as “religious” as any other religion, even though it orients around absence-of-deity instead of deity.
The Physicalist/Materialist assumption-river/religion which prohibits that mind is real, is every bit as identity-anchoring AND every bit as rejecting-of-falsification as any other religion.
Were Physicalism/Materialism true then mind would only be effect, never cause of the behavior-of-matter.
So, engineered airliners wouldn’t exist.
The fact that they do exist, and are produced by intentional-mentation being expressed by matter … is powerless to falsify Physicalism/Materialism simply because Physicalism/Materialism’ is axiom-based, & doesn’t allow falsification.
Therefore it’s a religion.
Hofstadter’s “Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” was about ideologies, prejudices, religions, & formal-systems. The 2nd edition of it explained that it wasn’t only about formal-systems, in the new Preface, because nobody ( Western ) had gotten that implication.
All of those, ideologies, prejudices, religions, & formal-systems, … ignore evidence that isn’t obeying their view.
Empiricism, which is outside-centered, seems to be the only religion/method worth holding-to.
& that means that all spiritual-religions which are empiricism-rooted, also have some chance of being valid.
But without outside-centrism, the biblical Greek “eklegos”, then it’s an “already-lost war”: self-centrism isn’t capable of knowing universe, only its own assumptions/beliefs.
That is consistently demonstrated by humankind’s history.
Self-consistency-of-view vs completeness-in-knowing-Universe: 2 mutually-exclusive paradigms.
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It is. But it is also a common moral code and the foundation of a society.
If someone needs religion to be moral, it says quite a bit about them.
Some people need to be put in prison to stop them from killing.
For some, even that isn’t enough to stop them, and they will use prison itself as the excuse - or even the justification - for the killing.
I agree with you.
Needing religion, laws, prison sentences, psychiatric help, etc., to
understandfollow basic rights and wrongs, each say something about the person.As a species our view of what is morally acceptable has evolved and become more, for the lack of a better term, civilised, over the millennia. And it continues doing so – see the treatment of wives; in Finland only in 1996 it became against the law to beat your wife.
However, the ability to understand why something is right or wrong is very person specific; the grand majority did in fact not beat their wife still in 1995. Only the select few had to be stopped with a law, and some still haven’t stopped.
Now if you bring religion into this example, in many religions it gets rather fuzzy on the subject of how to treat your wife, so I’m just going to leave that right out.
I was using prison as an allegory for religion, not as a justification in and of itself, and certainly not as a rationalization for religion.
Let me copy one of my comments so you can see it:
Religion helped to use moral rules against “others”. ‘You should not rape your friends wife, but you can do anything with yours.’ look at the Bible and those marriage rules.
‘You should not do business outside the tribe’ - several current religions still have this rule, a bit more softened.
And so on.
Those are morals set by ruling class = religion or god kings (example: pharaohs). They are the foundation of society. And that’s what I keep saying. Morals and society has the foundation in religion. And morals are not good by default.
Areligious people aren’t inherently immoral and it was the foundation of some societies because it was used to control people while at the same time pass blame to an intangible entity
Historically speaking all of morals were established by religion. Good or bad but everything is based on it.
I’m genuinely not trying to argue and just trying to understand your train of thought. Do you truly believe that humans were incapable of empathy prior to religion?
Empathy and morals and laws are different. And no empathy is luxury, when your dream is not to get eaten by a predator or not to go to sleep hungry - there is no place for empathy.
Monkeys and even apes eat their own kind.So you don’t believe that humans are tribal by nature?
Tribal by default means shared morals. And organized from the top - by religion and shared anxiety
The conclusion I’m coming to is that you believe religion came before society, or do you mean something else?
Objectively false my friend.
How would animals have morals if that was the case? Why would they have a sense of fairness baked into them if it came from a religion they couldn’t possibly comprehend?
The reality is that morality as we perceive it, is mostly just the natural rules that let us work together. This little known scientific concept called ‘apes strong together’, meant that the people who possessed a basic sense of morality could work with others and accomplish more, then those without it, and those without it, died off.
That’s all morality is. It has nothing do with any magical creature.
Empathy is luxury. If you don’t have food you will not care. Morals is the thing that stops you.
You can’t have food, and in result act egocentrically, disadvantaging others and still feel bad about it. Having empathy does not necessitate acting on it.
No you won’t have empathy towards your enemies when you don’t have the luxury to do so.
How many conflicts are going on right now where religion and local society is killing ‘others’ without any mercy?
Do you think those brain washed massses can waste to feel emphatic towards the enemy that is ‘evil’, ‘bad’ or ‘unclean’ and deserved to be killed?
If they would - they freaking would stop all these friggin wars. Morality wins - and morality still not a good thing.
If religion is what stops you from doing bad things, please don’t ever give it up.
In my hitchsperience “it takes religion for a decent human to commit atrocities”.
I like how a comment about religion being the foundation of morality historically - makes people believe that I am bashing atheist people
People just like to “correct” others…
For instance I think religion is historically the foundation of immorality. A practice used to exclude, hate, opress, kill and worse.
If god told you to go and kill a child, would you do it ?(1 Samuel 15:3)
People don’t need to believe in an invisible sky wizard to have a common sense of either of those things. and I’m not particularly impressed with religious morality, nor with many of the societies that religion has built.
But such a belief is very useful as a common means to control and exploit people, both individually and en masse.
They don’t need to do it anymore. Go back couple hundred years and could be killed. Or even now in couple of places.
Do not judge by one very very short snapshot.Could be killed by religious people? 200 years isn’t exactly the stone ages.
Go to some arabic backwater town and start talking about Allah. Let’s see how long you would last.
Nevermind you can be a cartoonist in France.So you confirm your position that one could have been killed by religious people ~200 years ago. That doesn’t really support your argument, which centers around the dawn of civilization.
No my argument is that morality is based on religion. Your argument is that you don’t need religion for morals.
I reiterated that you do not need religion for morals any more. And I made a point that you needed religion 200 years ago to stay alive and that even some places you still need it to stay alive.
Then you were confused about the 200 yrs - and I pointed out that you still need religion in couple places to stay alive.
And now you are having a gotcha moment because religious people kill people just like any fanatics do. Just look around to all the freaking conflicts going on right now.
And btw in their eyes they are on the moral high ground - they are right - so religion is a basis of morality and society.
