I could refute this line by line, but it has been done many times before(and apparently deliberately ignored by you just as many times), so I’m just going to sum it up:
Wrong.
You didn’t say it was the first religion (which was wrong), you said “those things (“don’t kill people or take their shit”)didn’t really enter the human consciousness until Christianity came along”
I think the existence of Judeo- and Indo-Hellenism give the lie to that. Clearly they thought their philosophy was universally applicable, or why would they spread it to other people? Plus, if you read the actual ophilosophers, more than once you come across the idea of a universal ethic - it was, in fact, the Great Project of most branches of Hellenistic philosophy.
Such as?
I agree. When I use the word “religion” I mean water and oxygen. And no one can live without those! Therefore no one can live without religion, according to my own personal definition of the word.
Bollocks.
No it is not. Get a dictionary.
That’s not religon, that’s called culture.
Religion is unnecessary, but nobody is claiming the government should stop it. Especially not in the US.
The only way to diminish religion is to stop doing it. Everything else is trying to diminish the power of religion over other people, which is an obviously good thing to me. You probably don’t agree.
Atheism is not a religion.
What are you talking about?
Yes science is (mostly) indifferent to religion. There are however plenty of religious people who feel that their religion should attack science when it happens to contradict some of their precious feelings.
Again, that’s culture.
You’ve reduced following a religion to the same level as being a fan of a particular football club. Fine. Now why is it important again?
Again, you have to squint pretty hard to get “Government should abolish faith schools” from that video. He says that faith schools are wicked and it’s not fair that state money funds them. I missed the bit where he says the government should abolish them.
You seem to have made up “proper role of Government schooling to deprogram kids” from whole cloth. He actually says
Still think that’s identical to a fundamentalist?
If this was a little too snarky, I’ll simply point out that the word religion means either the worship of God or related supernatural beings, (Bob is a very religious man) or the systems and rituals in place for worshipping said deities, (Christianity Judaism and Islam are commonly regarded as the great western religions). Religion is not the “forms and rituals which govern our cultural life.” That just isn’t what the word means, and I have to admit it really annoys me when people try to win debates by adopting an idiosyncratic meaning for a common word, and then argue as though everyone was using that idiosyncratic meaning as opposed to the common one.
We’ve had this argument before, I’ve supported it before.
No it’s not. Culture is informal, religion is formal.
Actually religion has a deeper meaning than that. It specifically means the rituals surrounding a ‘belief in a higher power’. The state is a higher power.
Using your definition, atheistic religions such as Taoism and Buddhism would not be considered religions.
So courts of law, the democratic election system, driver’s licenses, choreographed dancing and the presentation of the nobel price are all religions?
I believe that’s how the term was used in ancient Rome actually. And none of those things would be religions. They would be forms and rituals.
I note that it’s now 2000 years later and meaning of certain terms have changed.
formal forms and rituals. Which you claimed were religions (or religious, it’s not very clear to me what you’re saying).
Depends on which faction you are fundamentalizing for.
No, I didn’t claim that. What I claimed was that the SET of formalized forms and rituals constitute a religion. A court proceeding is no more ‘A’ religion than ‘A’ church service. It is a part of a larger set of forms and rituals of the civic religion.
Thank you ever so much, mswas, for showing us that it is not just the strident ignorance of Fundamentalists that atheists need to combat-it seems there are some “moderate Christians” that are just as stridently ignorant.
Oh come on. The meaning of words change all the time. I really don’t think you’d be able to find that many people TODAY who would define “religion/religous” as just a “formal ritual” or the other way around.
So what you’re saying is that beliefs are not part of religion and that religions are a set of formalized behaviours, while at the same time claiming (I think) that things like courts of law etc are not (part of) religion/religous AND that nobody can live without religion since ALL forms of formal behaviours are religious. It doesn’t make any sense.
The fundamental aspect of the atheist dogma is that atheism is value neutral, that this somehow supplies it some kind of authenticity that religion lacks. But the reality is that it’s an anti-narrative. You cannot have atheism without theism. You can have a lack of belief in God, but the ‘FORM’ atheist specifically defines one by what they DO NOT believe. So the belief in God is prior to the lack of belief in God. Atheists attempt to use this anti-narrative of value neutrality to claim that the world would be a better place without religion. That they are open-minded and realistic as opposed to the religious fundamentalists whose belief exists prior to the atheist’s anti-narrative. Without the religious, there is no such thing as atheism. But as Supernatural Religion has prefactored history up until this point, atheism as such can exists because it rests upon a foundation of a well-worn religious tradition upon which it can build its foundation of opposition. As such the anti-narrative attempts to supplant the other narratives to create itself as the dominant thought-form underlying the civic consciousness of the surrounding culture. But it does this in a subversive way, by denying equity between its own groupthink and the groupthink of others, trying to characterize itself as something wholly different due to its lack of unifying rituals. The only thing that unifies the atheist is the opposition to supernatural religious belief. As such there would be no unifying cultural aspects to keep a society cohesive. Culture in and of itself is not a passive, but an active entity. Culture is passed on intentionally by people, and as such the very act of passing on this culture builds up the language of tradition, and takes on religious forms and ceremonies. Without some kind of standardization of ritual, a society cannot continue to exist as a cohesive unit.
Yes, an an honest person would recognize that there is a very different view of how that word should be used between theists and atheists. Theists do not buy into the canard of value neutrality that atheists attempt to peddle.
The word, ‘just’, is often over-used. The way to come to the definition of the word is to distill the common characteristics of all of the subcategories the super-category describes. There are merely two characteristics that seem to fit with all religions. The belief in a higher power, and a shared set of forms and rituals. This is the only way that Buddhism and Christianity can both be considered a religion. By your definition, Buddhism is not a religion, because it does not believe in a supernatural God or Gods.
I didn’t say anything like this.
I am not a solipsist. I am quite certain regarding the absence of a woman in this room, a beer in my hand and chocolate in my desk. (I have, through a series of simple investigations, reduced the probability to near nil).
I agree that for questions where certainty is more elusive, the probability of a thing can still be reduced to near nil. I do not think that is the case with the existence of a supernatural god (not an Abrahamic God, per se). I’ve ignored it as a silly throw-away comment until now, but analogies to the Easter Bunny, Santa and Pink Unicorn fall short. Beside the fact that we know roughly when and by whom those ideas were created*, the removal of these concepts does not create the same dilemma as does the removal of the concept of a god(s) - namely, who, how, why, from whence? Some of these questions are the sole province of philosophy - science cannot and should not be expected to answer them. It might be that god is not the answer to these questions but that has nothing to do with the fact that Santa, the Easter Bunny and unicorns do not exist.
I am fine ending this hijack (a result of someone not understanding a very clear initial post that could have stood on its own). Just let it be said that there are people Der Trihs being one, who feel they can “know” that a god doesn’t exist. Thought they might be right about the existence of god, they are quite mistaken about their knowledge.
*Don’t say we know roughly when and by whom the idea of a god was created by referring to various religious myths; remember, I am not necessarily referring to any conventional existing god-mythology. I am referring to the god concept.
It doesn’t claim to be more than it can demonstrate. If that’s what you mean.
You can, but there would be no point in any kind of “atheism as an active belief system” without theism. Without theism, we’d all be atheists. And what the hell is an “anti-narrative”?
I’m quite sure that you know that the TERM atheist was coined by the believers so that they could take this line of argument.
The history of science could be written using the exact same forms as you did, and it would still not mean that Plato had better scientific theories than Newton just because he was born earlier.
The only thing that atheists feel any need to oppose as a group is the ridiculous influence of religion. Why is that a bad thing? Would you feel better if all atheists would unite to form a new Randian state?
Religion is (or can be) part of culture. Culture is not religion. Religion is not all of culture. People without religion can still live in reasonable harmony and have plenty of shared culture.
An insult without a substantive reply? For the record, if the goal of your combat is to reduce ignorance by educating, then you’re doing a very poor job. If the goal of your combat is to condescendinling declare victory quite prematurely, well, steady as she goes.
Road apples.