< shrugs > OTOH, everything I’ve ever seen supports the idea that religion is bad for society. That study is just one more rock on the pile. Wherever religion is powerful, that society or subculture suffers from it.
As an atheist, I find my life enriched by the vast amounts of art, music, architecture, literature, &c. inspired by religion and funded by religious organizations. The Bible itself, taken as a work of fiction, is often quite beautiful. As a work of philiosophy, it contains many useful ideas. I find the so-called “Golden Rule” to be the best, most succinct, most practical summation of humanist philosophy I’ve ever read. The study of theology, and the emphasis it placed on thought and rigorous logic, laid the foundations of what would eventually be known as the scientific method, the benefits of which we are too numerous to list. The practice of religion makes millions of people happier, leading to more productive lives and happier believers, who are resultingly more pleasant to be around (barring those who use their religion in a coercive, antagonistic manner, of course, but this is about the benefits of religion, not the drawbacks.) The extensive charity works carried out by various religious organizations likewise make society as a whole safer, healthier, and more pleasant to live in.
I’ll also add that the OP, as originally formulated, does not represent “the atheistic point of view.” I’m an atheist, and I do not find religion in general to be pointless, specious, idiotic, shackling, or primitive, although I do find certain practices and beliefs within specific religions to be one or more of those things. One does not have to scorn religion to be an atheist. One merely has to feel that there are better explanations for the universe than those that involve one or more deities.
Speaking only for myself here…
My attendence at church is, at best, irregular. However, I don’t feel my time is wasted there. I like the music, it gives me time to meditate and reflect and reminds me that there’s something out there that’s bigger than me. Plus, I get some time for what churchgoers call “fellowship” and what the business world calls “networking.”
If I had never read the Bible, I would know less about the intense connection the Jews have with Palestine. Therefore I would have less understanding (and less motivation to learn more) about the history of Middle Eastern conflict.
If there were no religion, there would be no Notre Dame (either the cathedral or the football team), no ceiling of the Sistene Chapel. Dante would not have written “The Divine Comedy”, Leonard Bernstein would not have composed “Mass” and P.D.Q. Bach would not have composed “Missa Hiarious.”
If there were no religion, there would be no Harvard University, nor many other institutions of learning which started out as seminaries or schools of theology.
If there were no God, the writers of the Declaration of Independence would have needed another rationale for proclaiming we all had certain unalienable rights.
If there were no religion, perhaps there would have been fewer wars. Unfortunately, Stalin, Pol Pot and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (to name a few) did not see the need to either invoke nor blame religion for their actions.
That’s a few off the top of my head.
I find the OP rather poor, but to take on the thread title, which did have promise, I’d say on balance, in the modern era, probably not this atheist. I don’t feel superior for not believing, as I don’t think it makes a person stupid to believe, and suspect we might not have much of a conscious choice in the matter.
What I do feel is threatened, because too many religious people think I’m evil for the way I think, and would probably seek to harm me in some way if they knew about me and thought they could get away with it. The state of being or not being religious, as far as I can tell, has absolutely no bearing on whether or not a person is social, compassionate, empathetic, really posessing any intrinsic quality I’d want to associate myself with. However, because at least some who hold religious views believe God (however they conceive of this being) is the source of goodness and morality, they’re lead rather inexorably to conclude non-believers lack it. Even among the most otherwise sympathetic, it’s a fact, as far as they’re concerned, that atheists are, by definition, depraved. I know this because some of them have told me themselves. That leads, of course, to the real potential for danger to myself, because I don’t see how “good” people can easily tolerate depravity, and they’ve stated they wouldn’t.
Hence, I really can’t be honest about myself with them, but they can be perfectly honest with me, because they operate under the assumption of innocence from society at large, and are held blameless for assuming my guilt by default. That’s a rather uncomfortable disparity for me. So, religion is clearly an independent variable from other human qualities, and brings with it to me only the additional potential for ostracision and other forms of harm in troublingly common circumstances.
No, no demonstrable gain, and a small, but real and legitimate source of fear. Net deficit.
I think, though, that in order to submit most of those as being the result of religion that you would first need to show that without religion we wouldn’t have had them, or gotten them slower.
It seems to be fairly well accepted that the more intelligent you are, most probably the less religious you are. Assuming to hold this true back through the ages, there’s no reason to assume that most of the great discoveries and creations of man were by people who were particularly pious. And given that in general the more religious a society is, the less creative and productive it is, again you could say that had we been less religious, the populace as a whole would have been more likely to have produced great works.
In other words, there’s no possibly way to answer the OP in the affirmative. Anything one claims to be beneficial about religion could be handwaved away with exactly the same specious objection. Of course, one could do exactly the same thing about any alleged drawback to religious belief. Scratch any religious atrocity hard enough, and there’s almost always a sound political or economical pretext to carry out precisely the same action.
Accepted by whom?
Leaving aside the fact that it does not hold true today, even the most cursory knowledge of history would quickly put the lie to this statement. Prior to the 20th century, virtually all the leading figures in the advancement of science were also people of deep faith.
Ultimatly, science and religion both spring from the same basic human characteristic: a desire to understand the world around us. A human species that never invented religion would almost certainly lack the intellect and curiosity to ever invent science.
I’m not sure this is always true, but there’s plenty of evidence suggesting it. But if so, that doesn’t necessarily mean that religion is bad for society, just that powerful religion is bad for society (or that power is bad for religion. “Power corrupts,” y’know).
I hardly think that’s fair. The assertion was that religion had an enormous influence on art, music, literature, philanthropy and even the scientific method. To simply dismiss that by saying without religion we’d still have all those things is like saying without a Constitution we’d still have a United States. Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t and maybe it would be in a form none of us would recognize.
As for the second paragraph, I reject the generalization. And even if it is true in specific cases, it is impossible to guess the influence such a dominant force as religion had even on people who weren’t notably pious. For example, we could take hours discussing the influence of the printing press on the mass distribution of the Bible, and the distribution of the Bible on the growth of literacy in Europe.
In a generic, “Religion made all of everything better than it would have been!” way, no there’s no possible way to give an affirmative. For individual technologies, we can say that yes a certain thing was developed by and for a certain religion. But of course, there’s no reason to believe that the same technology or idea couldn’t have been developed earlier.
You say that the scientific method was based on Christian-based “rigorous logic.” Yet so far as I am aware, most of it came from the Greeks who did so due to…well essentially geekness. Socrates was put to death because his studies into the way the world works was at odds with the accepted party line.
The leading inventor of the idea that any idea must be scientifically tested and proven was Galileo Galilei, again condemned for his findings, though only put under house arrest.
Geeks through history developed rigorous logic and the scientific method. And just as today, some are religious and some are not. The question is whether religion, in the long run, aided those geeks or not.
In Europe, I would have to say it didn’t. Even ignoring cases like Socrates and Galileo, the ban on usury was probably one of the biggest hindrances on technological advance that one could ever point to. For a large chunk of our history we only had one or two brilliant minds. Yet today, wherever you look, vast percentages of the population are actively working at improving technology, philosophy, education, and law. Then you look back at Ancient Greece and how much stuff they figured out way back then, and their economy and it pretty much falls together. You give people the ability to earn money, to advance themselves in life, and a proper education, and humans figure out new stuff. All of that has a lot more to do with law than religion.
By the Wikipedia. Religiousness and Intelligence
And yet still probably less religious than the general populace.
Cite that atheists are less creative than religious people?
That’s my point. I’m just saying that attributing the existence of those to religion is unfair. Maybe it was due to religion, and maybe it was in spite of religion.
Indeed, as has been pointed out here many times before, the greatest mass murderers in history were all atheists.
Which is why regimes that attempted to stamp out religion have done SOOOO much good, right? The very epitome of benevolence, they were.
And yet, the same technology or idea wasn’t developed earlier.
If I understand your position here:
That a specific technology or idea that was developed by or for a specific part of civilization (i.e., religion) could have been developed earlier if that part of civilization had never existed?
Wow! I’m dazzled! We could have benefitted from nuclear energy decades earlier if we hadn’t just sat around waiting for World War II and the Manhattan Project.
Well, not so much the findings, but for presuming to make a theological issue of the conclusions, which he he felt urgently would put the Church at risk of heresey. Plus, he just thought geocentrism was stupid, it pissed him off, and he did not suffer those he deemed as fools very tactfully. Major chutzpah, no matter how you slice it. Of course, it was majorly wrong for him to be threatened with torture and robbed of his freedom of movement and expression for raising a stink. If it wound up being a blight on the Church’s reputation, it was richly deserved.
So…your submission for the OP is that religion slowed down human innovation long enough that we haven’t already blown up the planet? Alright… :dubious:
Assuming that to be true, it’s irrelevant. First, unlike religion atheism can’t impel anyone to do anything. It’s not a belief system, just a single belief; it says nothing about behavior or morality. Religion is a belief system, it can and does compel behavior and impose a morality; usually a bad one.
Second, as I’ve said many times I consider Communism a religion ( very similar to Christianity in fact ); massacres were committed in it’s name for the same reason Christians have done so; to eliminate the competition. Atheism was not the cause; Communism was.
Third, I notice that your link leaves out Ghengis Khan ( 13 percent of the world population, and almost certainly a theist ), and the Nazis ( who had God on their belt buckles ). Not to mention the Crusades, the Thirty Years War and so on.
Fourth, how do you explain secular Europe being generally a nicer place than rabid-fundie America ?
Nope.
Only sorta.
Does not support your claim.
The Greeks took an approach that attempted to apply systematic logic to problems, but there was very little in the way of “scientific method” among the Greeks. While Aristotle (second generation following Socrates) did actually spend some time looking at natural phenomena, he simply took his observations and attempted to apply logic to them to come up with explanations without ever going back to see whether his logic was proven by further observation, and since much of his logic was based on a contemplation of how things ought to be in an ideal world, a substantial amount of his claims about the natural world are wrong. (In fact, Galileo was persecuted for not following the Aristotelian/Greek model of accepting authority, since authority in the Greek system was considered superior to observation. Galileo’s greatest contribution was not actually in promoting the Copernican system, (the Jesuits would have probably stumbled onto that within a few years, anyway), but in challenging the Greek model of adherence to ancient authority in a way that forever broke its hold on inquiry. And while Galileo certainly helped bring about the scientific revolution, he had enough quirks that he cannot be given full credit for it by himself.)
Socrates, on the other hand, was not simply martyred for going against religion, but for stirring up the youth to the point where a couple of his students attempted to overthrow the Athenian government. (That’s the part of the story that rarely seems to make it into the philosophy texts.)
Regardless that Galileo was persecuted by one faction of the Church, he, himself remained a devout Catholic to the end of his days, so you have to put him on the “religious person” side of the ledger.
Of course, I haven’t been arguing that “Relgion made all of everything better than it would have been.” I pointed out several specific instances where religion was a positive influence on the course of human events. Yes, it is true that if things were different, they wouldn’t be the same, which is as cunning an insight as I’ve ever read here. Would they be better, or worse? There’s no way for us to say one way or the other.
tom fielded this one better than I could have.
How do you know that, in an atheist society, these people would still have not been persecuted? Both of these men were, when you get right down to it, jerks who didn’t know when to shut up. They offended the power structure of their respective societies. There’s no reason to believe that, if the power structure had been secular instead of theocratic, these men would have come to different ends.
On the other hand, the Catholic Church was for centuries the only source of literacy and education on the European subcontinent. Socrates may have died because of religious intolerance, but you and I would never have even heard of him if it weren’t for orders of Christian monks endlessly copying out what few manuscripts of his we still have, over and over, until Guttenberg invented his printing press. For the purpose, let us remember, of printing Bibles. Religion has not been a uniformly positive force in human civilization, but then, there’s very little at all in human civilization that is uniformly positive or negative.
Cite?
Neither have I argued that religion was the sole, or even most important, influence of scientific development.
As a general rule, I do not trust Wikipedia for answers on any subjects that are remotely controversial.
Prove it.
I’m not in the habit of provding cites for arguments I’ve never made.
You’re saying then that the basis for most logic and science doesn’t come from the Greeks? I didn’t say, nor imply that they perfected the system, just that logic and rhetoric came from a bunch of Greek geeks, not the church. This was later fixed into the Scientific method, after establishing that you needed to verify your logic through tests.
Which is why I said, “leading.” Almost no movements in science are the work of a single person. Just some people pushed it further, or publicized it better.
But did he do what he did because he was a geek, or because he was religious?
I think there’s a ridiculously long Pit thread calling the OP’s name. He might want to pop in there, vent, and, when he comes back to GD, bring both an argument AND pie.
But mostly pie. Pie is good.