I think that for the most part i’d agree with this. Religion’s been around far too long for us to be able to predict where we would be and how without it. I do tend to think that we would be better off without it now and into the future, but I don’t think it’s possible to compare it against something we know nothing about.
As to religion being hostile to democracy, I’d say: Not necessarily. Some established churches such as the Roman Catholic Church are very hierarchical (even authoritarian) in their structure, but others are not. In the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Anglican Communion, spinoffs from the Church of England), for instance, all bishops are elected, and clergy are called to lead parishes by vote of the governing bodies (vestries), which are themselves elected by the members of the parish. Many other mainstream Protestant churches are similar.
Also, ISTM that religions are more likely to thrive in democracies which have a First Amendment or its equivalent. In dictatorships they have historically been suppressed, co-opted or controlled; in theocracies they wield power but at the cost of losing their moral standing, which ultimately erodes their influence.
Yeah, it’s sort of like asking, “What would happen if we’d never learned to cultivate rice?”
I think that using phallic projectiles capable of breaching the hull integrity of the human body is the root of all evil!
I’m more interested in sex, lies, property ownership, ignorance and other such ideas as being the root of all evil. Religion, well, it’s too vague to really answer one way or another.
“If our nitwitted ancestors had been born without ignorance, would we have war today?”
There’s a lot of speculation in this thread about how beneficial religion has or has not been for certain individuals or groups. How it can or cannot thrive in this or that environment. What would have happened had it never been invented. But the basic question of this thread is: Has religion been a net good or bad thing for humanity? I say it has been a net bad thing, regardless of how helpful or hopeful some people may choose to find it. The Dark Ages alone, just that one example, set us back 1000 years in development, thanks to the Catholic church.
I recognize this is a question that no one can agree on. The deeply religious HAVE to see it as a good thing, while those who can step back and take a big-picture look without the emotional baggage often see what a travesty it has been. And bear in mind that I’m not talking about, say, spirituality or anything like that, but rather organized religion. I’m more than happy to let anyone believe what they personally want to, as long as I’m not being sacrificed on an altar or prevented from buying a beer, but formal religious organization has been one of the truly great evils of this world.
What fantastic ignorance you exhibit.
- The Romans were a religious people.
- The Dark Ages lasted for only about 500 years.
- They were generally referred to as the time succeeding the fall of the Roman Empire.
- In some respects the Emperor of Rome was considered to be a living God.
So I am going to assume that what you are talking about is the time from 476 AD to 1476, or the times known as the Dark Ages and Middle Ages.
Yes it was a time of profound ignorance.
From one of the links I posted above:
People who actually know what they are talking about credit the church with the maintenance of the intellectual tradition in the Middle Ages. Others cherry-pick some high profile examples of the church coming out spectacularly wrong and try to apply it across the board.
I gave that as only one example. You can consider me ignorant if you want, but as I said, there will be no agreement on this issue.
Even considering the major evils that can be attributed to religion I don’t see how we can accurately judge to make any definitive statement. How do we measure the millions of positive incidents against the million of negatives? There’s just no way to measure it one way or the other IMO.
I’m also not so sure you can separate less formal spirituality from organized religion.
:rolleyes: How egalitarian. Just like there will never be agreement on the Evolution/Creation debate. Like with that one, the facts support one point of view, and they don’t support the other. It’s funny how people will just simply accept the dogmatic answer that somehow the church is responsible for the ills that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Roman Empire, when one can see quite clearly that as the church got more of a handle on things as time went by, Europe progressively returned to and exceeded the advancement of the Roman Empire. That’s why this argument is so irritating. Otherwise reasonably intelligent people have no desire whatsoever to disabuse themselves of some ignorant dogma that can be done away with, in 20 minutes on Wikipedia, as I just demonstrated. It’s not a matter of fucking opinion. One side is correct on that issue, and one side is incorrect. Intellectual advancement did not suddenly stop after the fall of the Roman Empire, and where it advanced it was due to the dilligent work of highly religious people, not in spite of them.
I mean fer-fucks-sake, Occam’s bloody razor is named after a FRANCISCAN FRIAR! Yet, it is atheists who are the most likely to turn around and tell you how anti-intellectual the Christian religion is who are the most likely to hold up Occam’s razor as though it is some sort of holy doctrine. Funny that.
This isn’t about my opinion. I’m not Catholic. It’s simple. You’re wrong.
I’m hardly an atheist, since I admit I don’t know. But see how worked up just you alone get? But don’t mind me, I’m just ignorant, as lots of Christians have been kind enough to inform me in the past. :rolleyes:
I didn’t call you an atheist. That was just an aside. However, I just went through for your benefit and found a few dozen counter-examples to your post. You clearly didn’t even look at my cites. Yes, I find this particular little bit of dogma to be extremely irritating. It is just accepted without second thought that the church held back intellectual advancement for a thousand years. You aren’t the only person who advances this view, and yet is completely and utterly wrong, and easily shown to be completely and utterly wrong. This has no bearing on my religion or not. As I’ve said before, I am a vague Deist. I am just tired of this blithe dismissal of 1000 years of history.
Here is a great wiki article that basically encapsulates everything from my post above. It’s just one link that you need to click on.
It will show you many Catholic scholars who promoted the pursuit of reason during the period you blithely dismiss.
Bah! If I were in a room full of you, I’ll bet I’d be burned at the stake in no time flat, and THAT is the nature of religion, regardless of any perceived benefit of any particular institution for one particular group of people.
I should say that actually, I do recognize many of the advances during that time. But I bet there would have been so much more if religion had not held society back.
:rolleyes:
It’s great to hold to a position that is impossible to know one way or the other.
While we’re eliminating Priests saying the world would have been so much better without them, why not warriors? If there were no warriors there never would have been any war, and everything would be fluffy and we’d love bunnies and flowers as much as they deserve!
Because one side - the religious side, of course - is entirely composed of fools and lunatics. The serious debate has been over for a long time. The whole “debate” is an example of how fundamentally insane and worthless religion is; how it is hostile to reason and truth.
Because he notably didn’t apply his own Razor to his own beliefs, or he wouldn’t have been a friar. I find it amusing that he created an idea that is utter poison to his own beliefs.
If they were on the side of reason, they wouldn’t have been theists. They wouldn’t have helped support and promote religion. By definition, they were all on the side of madness; the enemies of reason.
It has been over for a long time. You just don’t realize you’re on the wrong side of it. All you do is hurl invective and personal attacks.
Irrelevant. You are expecting someone to be perfect and not a product of their times. A standard you would not apply to someone you were sympathetic to. The reality is that Occam’s razor, one of the most critical advances in scientific history was created by a Franciscan Friar. No matter how uncomfortable with that simple fact you may be.
Again, ahistorical opinions have nothing to do with the facts. You are engaging in speculative history, which is a form of sci fi/fantasy and is faith based. Totally irrelevant to the discussion.
Look, I am not getting into the completely worthless and pointless debate about whether it was good or not, which is really only a matter of opinion, can’t be substantiated in any way because there is no way to know what the world would have been like. You might as well ask what it would be like if no one had ever invented the wheel, or if there was never a country called Germany, or if the world had ten populated continents instead of five. They are all puerile fantasy. However, what can be shown is the massive contribution to science by the Catholic church and its adherents. That can shown as factually as anything in history can be. Your own little Faith-Based Fantasies about what the world might be like if it was different have no bearing on that.
Just in case it irks people that I don’t think the OP question is worthwhile. The reason I am posting in this thread is to point out some of the fallacious reasoning being presented in order for people to justify their jingoism. Whether the world would have been better without religion, I do not know, I cannot know, and neither can you. But when someone says all that the Catholic church ever did was hold back Scientific advancement, well that’s just flat out wrong, and easily proven to be so.
Agreed. That’s what I said. Who knows? Maybe it WOULD have been worse. My gut feeling, puerile as it may be, is that it would have been better. But that’s just my opinion.
I still feel the bad much outweighed the good.
shrugs I can’t say one way or the other because I don’t have some kind of notion of bad or good as applies to all of history. History happened, people suffered. Trying to pin some particular onus on a particular group of people above and beyond that applied to anyone else, seems to me to be, unfair. Socrates is a big glaring example of how politics in a non-Catholic setting can sometimes eliminate our luminous intellects. History is a long series of battles waged between ideas and their proponents.
From what I understand the Romans did little to advance what would later become known as science, because they thought the Greeks already knew everything there was to know. So while the Romans built a pretty amazing empire, had a vast infrastructure and a high literacy rate, they weren’t exactly advancing human knowledge on the whole. Though, I concede I might be just as wrong on this as I believe you are about the Middle-Ages in Europe.
Let me just step in here and point out that facts A and B (Occam dude was a Franciscan Friar, Occam’s razor was thought up by Occam dude) don’t necessarily have a causal relationship. Occam didn’t think up his razor because he was a FF, saying so is only as valid as someone saying: Occam was able to think up the razor despite the fact that the he was a FF.
Actually you are wrong. The rise of efficient agriculture and consequently surplus food led to greater specialization, productivity and wealth. It was only after this point when the foundations of civilization had been set down, that people could get down to really specialize in religion–hence the rise of classes like the temple priest or pharaoh. If you disagree, please explain how religion alone could do the things that I claim the rise of agriculture did.
After going through your links, I will freely admit that great science was accomplished within a very religious infrastructure. But thats all it was! Great infrastructure. The church provided a group of people with the power to leech off of many others, and a whole lot of friars were left with a lot of time to do one of the following: eat, shit, pray, read the bible, chant…and hey! do really exciting stuff like use the brain evolution gave you and uncover entirely new truths about the world! So you get people breeding bean pods writing shit down. Everyone else was too busy surviving to do much inventive thinking–science is a luxury. That’s just my take on it, and I speculate that if you gave any group of people the comparative luxuries that the friars and Thomas Aquinases of the middle ages had, *minus *the religion, well, you know where I’m going with this.
I think this little insight deserves repetition just in case anyone missed it.
At any rate, I think it’s a natural progression of this debate that we ask: ok I believe religion has had this and this effect on humanity so far–what place does religion have in the 21st century? It’s easy to speculate on the past, but whatever benefit you think religion has had, can you honestly say we still need it?
Perhaps a good modern-day example is stem-cell research. It’s just about criminal the way the religious crazies have undermined that even though it holds real promise. It seems it’s always the religious zealots who try their darndest to quash innovation and advancement.
Sorry, haven’t followed along very well…just going to pick up some quotes from Siam Sam (not to pick on you Sam):
How would society have even formed without early religion to bind larger groups of people together? Can you show any examples from known history where large groups of people ever came together without some sort of religion?
The only large scale non-religious societies I can think of are all modern…and most of them are pretty murderous (such as the various communist nations). Far from holding society back early religion was the glue that originally put it together and HELD it together.
I think a lot of people in this thread are thinking only in terms of modern religions…and even then I think most are looking at only the negative aspects and only in terms of filtering it through modern, western quasi-secular society. There would BE no western society, secular or otherwise without the input from the Greeks and Romans…both societies which were heavily religious and who were heavily influenced BY their religion.
But what do you base this assessment on? Religion in one form or another has probably been with humans for tens if not hundreds of thousands of years…and perhaps from the time we first started burying our dead instead of leaving them out for snacks for passing scavengers. Obviously it had a HUGE impact on making us what we are…and arguably it was essential to forming early societies, providing a commonality and matrix of belief that forged small family groups into clans and tribes. Unless you think we’d have been better off as small families of hunters and gatherers I don’t really see how anyone can think the bad outweighs the good. What I think is happening here is that people are seeing religion as some how equating to Christianity…and as I said, only seeing the negative aspects of that.
Granted, there are a LOT of negative aspects to Christianity (as well as many of the modern religions). But even if you could make a case that the last 2000 years was all bad because of religion ( :dubious: ) you are talking about weighing the last 2000 or even 5000 years against tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of years before that when religion was the steel that forged society together.
To be sure…religious fanatics do try and quash innovation. And yet…innovation happens despite them. Think about western society today. Think about all of the innovations that have taken place in the last 2000 years. Then recall…a more secular viewpoint is a modern thing, and really only has been a major factor since, what? The Renaissance? Even then it was only just beginning. Yet innovations happened both before and after that…despite (or if we are honest because of) religion. Much of our modern scientific outlook comes from men who were deeply religious (for example, guys like Newton).
Yes, stem-cell research has been hampered somewhat in the US…but that hasn’t stopped other nations from forging ahead. And even in the US it hasn’t exactly halted that research…just hampered it (and actually it’s forced researchers in this country to think in new directions which may actually be a good thing in the long run). And that is changing even now as our brand of fundamentalism rises then ebbs.
-XT