Anything possible outside of religion is by definition secular, so if you exclude arguments as to the frequency of secular acts influenced by religion, as well as religious arguments such as salvation and revealed wisdom, your question is meaningless.
If religion increases the frequency of positive secular events, then that’s a valid argument for its existance.
Oh, and in my experience the religious are more likely to do something (for good or ill) because they and a bunch of their friends are told on a weekly basis that it’s the right thing to do. Supernatural reward or punisment doesn’t really enter into it.
Well, if you can prove salvation or revealed wisdom it would definitely be something that only religion could do. Until then, we can continue to lump them in with ‘belief’.
What if it also increased the frequency of negative events?
So, they’re sheep? Really, that’s what this sounds like. If you believe something just because you’re told it repeatedly, then that’s probably bad.
If you mean that without religion, would the same evils have been committed but for a different reason, then no. Religious people commit many evils that have no sane reason behind them; remove religion, and they simply have no motivation.
Killing people simply because they belong to the “wrong” religion for example; remove religion, and they have no reason to kill each other. They might kill other people, for other reasons - but those religious based killings simply won’t happen, and there’s no reason to believe that secular reasons to kill those particular people will appear. Religion adds an extra motivation to hate and kill; a way to divide people into “us” and “them” that doesn’t exist without it.
Then there’s the occasional practice of kidnapping children, with or without killing the parents, to raise them in the “right” religion. Eliminate religion and it’s unlikelly anyone would do so for secular reasons.
And then there’s killing people because you think they are witches and your religion demands the death of witches. Or hurting or killing people in an attempt to exorcise a demon. Or refusing medicine because your religion says so. And any number of other things that have a purely religious motivation, and wouldn’t exist without religion.
And religion is the greatest excuser of evil ever existed; people who will hesitate to hurt or kill others for other reasons will slaughter without compunction if they think God wants them to. It provides a motivation that few other things can match, and excuses that nothing else can - no secular fanaticism can threaten you with eternal punishment or reward, or tell you that you are preventing infinite suffering by saving just one soul. Which justifies virtually unlimited brutality as long as you “save” one person in the process; torture a billion sinners to death to save one soul, and you’ve done an infinite amount of good.
In short, religion provides motivations and excuses for evil and stupidity that wouldn’t exist without it. And it drives people farther than non-religious reason for evil tend to take them; you don’t see many politically driven suicide bombers. So, religion does produce evil that wouldn’t exist without it. One can argue that it creates more good than it does evil, of course, but the evil caused by religion is so immense and overwhelming that I don’t think that it’s even possible for it to do that much good, much less likely.
The question isn’t about the physical impossibility of doing something outside of religion, it’s about whether or not that act could be ideologically taken without religion as its sole basis.
So, again: name one thing that is a positive secular that necessitates religion as its only conceivable basis.
As for religion’s existence being ‘valid’ if it increases the frequency of positive secular events, that’s somewhat off thread but in any case it would have to be stated alongside the frequency of negative secular events its equally likely to induce; either ideologically/theologically or because of their like-minded friends.
That’s pretty good. That, then, would appear to be one thing. We can’t know if their secular aspirations were just being channeled through the societally appropriate zeitgeist of the times (religion being so ubiquitous) and nowadays it seems that a lot of that energy is channeled into Chris Brown, Madonna, and cults of personality along with other such vehicles. But I think it’s reasonable to attribute those artistic masterpieces to religion insofar as what motivated them at the time.
Hmm. I’ve read the bible and don’t think much of it as literature, but yeah I’d say that falls into the category of art inspired by religion. But good literature can be written without religion so that disproves any assertion that religion is **necessary **for good literature even if it serves as one particular people’s inspiration.
Thanks, you made a good point though. Yours was just more about a closely related pragmatic question. I’m being more abstract here about the notion of snap causing religious concepts to vanish and what would we have left. A lot, I think. Basically, the John Lennon song.
On the other hand, perhaps they would have created better art, or a broader range at least without the straightjacket of religious patronage. If Pepsi has complete dominance over the country and is the major or only source of artistic patronage, then you are going to have great artists making Pepsi commericals, because that’s the only outlet they have. No doubt that would result in some very impressive Pepsi commericals, but the impressiveness of those commericals doen’t mean those artists couldn’t do better work outside of such a limiting arrangement.
That’s true; and actually you’d only need one work of art equal to any religious art to disprove the necessity of religion for producing great art.
By the way, I’m generally on your side but what about secular killing (secular ‘bad’) done in the name of a communistic utopia? That’s been done.
The idea that religion causes everything bad would be a ridiculous one to posit (and that’s not being done here), but as to whether its elimination would reduce secular bad is interesting given earlier attempts at doing just that.
Quite a few people, including me, consider Communism a religion in all but name. Just change the words and symbolism and a Communist dictatorship would look like what it is; a theocracy. Swap hammers and sickles for crosses; God and Jesus for Marx and Stalin; statues to the Glorious Workers or Heros of the State for statues of saints and Jesus, and so on.
But even so, it’s not as dangerous as the “official” religions, which generally teach the existence of an afterlife. A Communist is much less likely to consider their death, much less the death of the world desirable.
Christianity did introduce to Western Civilization the idea that every human soul has value. Before it was always taken for granted, in all the Mediterranean and all the Middle Eastern cultures, that some people matter and some people don’t. (Even Judaism was guilty of this to some extent.)
The problem, as I see it, with that insofar as secular ‘good’ is that it teaches that every human **soul **has value which supercedes, by definition, the value placed on the human being’s worldly realities. So, you might have a slave for example but if you’ve done the right things insofar as teaching that slave about your religion and the afterworld and what has to be done in this world to save that ‘soul’, then the here-and-now worldly values (economic, etc.) are by comparison almost moot. Many slaveowners seemed to sincerely believe that from their writings.
Which strikes me as arriving at a secular ‘bad’ as a result of ideologically believing that this world doesn’t ‘matter’ **as much **as the afterworld.
Having said that, I do wonder if xianity isn’t perhaps a good transitional belief for secular purposes if it’s teaching are then secularized and non-literalized to create a state of mind that’s more progressive like the idea that every human life – in this world – has value that isn’t tied to any afterworld considerations. Even if that’s so, it would have shown itself to be an extraordinarily costly and brutal transitional belief for the human species to have held and the millions that were tortured and died as a consequence of other extrapolations of that initial belief and their implementation.
Is it really possible to answer the OP’s question? For better or worse, religion or some form of mysticism or spirituality has been part of human society for many thousands of years. Its presence is still pervasive enough to affect exactly what we do believe and what we don’t. Even what a hardcore atheist believes depends upon the existence of religion if only as counter-arguments to the claims religion makes.
I don’t buy this. Atheism only places itself in direct opposition to theism on one issue: the truth of claims about God. And that’s why they’re atheists, not because they’re atheists. On pretty much every other issue atheists construct their beliefs in ways they feel to be independent of god-beliefs, not in opposition to them.
There are plenty of heinous evils done that have no sane reason that have nothing to do with religion.
Killing people because they’re a different color or different tribe.
I can’t agree. There are plenty of ways to divide people into us and them without religion.
Unless you wanted them as slaves.
Your opinions are well known. There’s no denying many horrible things done in the name of religion but I think we can find just as many secular reasons and examples for those same acts. Either way , since we can’t construct any realistic way to measure it’s a moot point. It’s also not the subject of the OP.
Even if we agree with Hitchens point, I don’t see that it has any use at all. Then again, maybe it isn’t supposed to be useful.
It may very well be impossible to answer the question of one thing that requires religious belief that is a secular good.
In fact, I believe Hitchens had – or still has – a huge money reward for coming up with an answer (I believe, a bet made with someone he was debating).