How is religion "encroaching" on everyday life?

Great Debates
61

Your question makes no sense. The codification of religious laws IS part of human history. You’re asking if history is irrelevant to history. Your question is gibberish.

What do you mean by “systemization?” If you’re talking about cultural “legalism,” then I’m saying that the most basic social contracts (don’t kill people in your tribe, don’t shag their wives, don’t steal their shit) are a result of evolution. They are an effect, not a cause.

Yes.

No. Human behavior is deterministic but that doesn’t mean it’s all pre-determined. The determinant variables are ongoing and ever-changing throughout the life of the individual. The right kind of stimulus or information can change an atheist into a theist and vice-versa. That still doesn’t really make it a “choice” in the strictest sense of the word. It’s still just a result of how the ping pong balls hit you.

62

I think you’re confusing the arguments (not deliberately). If someone’s pro-life, it may well be that their defining, priority argument is that zygotes have souls, and thus shouldn’t be killed. No tangible evidence; it’s based purely on spiritual thought. You’ve then flipped it over and looked at the same point from the pro-choice side, but you’ve missed out the point that a disbelief in souls is not the primary reason to be pro-choice. Really, a disbelief in souls as the sole argument would just suggest it doesn’t matter what you do with zygotes. But people aren’t arguing for abortion based on “I believe zygotes don’t have souls” they’re basing it on “People should be allowed to have a freer choice; shouldn’t be forced to have that effect on their body for the better part of a year; shouldn’t be forced to accept the responsibility of a child/the responsibility of giving them up for adoption; not allowing it would cause a huge population increase; women will just go to backalley places and could get hurt”, and so on. All these things are tangible effects.

So i’m pretty much fully with you were there some person whose only reason for wanting legal abortions was “zygotes don’t have souls”, or any other purely spiritual position. But hey, most pro-choicers don’t* only * work from that argument. And that’s the difference, mon ami. I’d probably say all, in fact, but there’s probably some nutjob that thinks it makes sense. :slight_smile:

Of course, just as pro-life atheists have been brought up, I’ll bring up myself and say my own argument for allowing abortions bypasses the “soul” argument entirely.

63

Fuzzy thinkers. No one ever said that people can’t be self-contradictory.

For the purposes of this thread, I would define a religious belief as a belief neither necessitated nor supported by any empirical evidence. The lack of such beliefs is not religious.

ID proponents believe (and want to force the government to teach other people’s children) something that is neither necessitated or supported by any empirical evidence and they want to do so purely in the service of easily identifiable religious agendas.

64

I’ts a collection of myths, not a “history book” And to the extent it’s defined our values it’s done so by promoting irrationality, slavery, genocide and tyranny. It’s an evil book, promoting an evil belief system.

By evolution, as Diogens said. Chimps have a crude form of the moral impulse; moral societies and people simply tend to survive better.

And that’s an empty non-rebuttal from someone with indefensible beliefs.

The history of religion is a history of blood and death and tyranny and irrationality. Arguing that we would not have been better without it is like arguing that would not have been better off without racism or sexism. There simply isn’t any possible good that could make up for all of it’s evil. My proof is all the evil and madness committed in the name of religion.

To a large degree I think so. It does seem built into the brain; I’ve read of drugs that induce religiousity and brain surgery that causes fundamentalism.

65

Chiming in: you can’t tell the history of moral argument in society without religion, but you also cannot credit religion with morality anymore than you can credit art. It’s just not that simple. It’s quite clear that morality has existed far longer than recorded human history. Our closest ancestors, the apes, exhibit many of the basic elements of moral thinking that we show in a more developed form, and the basics seem there in nearly any complex social species. Most basic societies simply could not have functioned without some moral codes, and while they could have had religious beliefs as well (mostly pagan) which came first? And why is religion definitely to credit. Many ancient cultures had gods that were downright evil, lazy, and nasty: the idea that there is one true god that is morally perfect is a more modern development (and, I suspect, more of a game of endless “my god is cooler!” one-upmanship than anything)

It’s also clear that much of the moral thinking we hold to today was developed against all the things most religions traditionally stood for, and a heck of a lot of it was developed by the insight that we should apply reason to the problem rather than checking to see what religious authority had to say. While many of the greatest moral thinkers were religious, their religion is often at most tangential to their reasoning: it is an assumption they didn’t see beyond, but also not something that really isn’t the core of their insights, which stand on their own. Many religious absolutists tend to see religion as a sort of “one drop rule” (the idea that if you have ANY non-white heritage, then you aren’t white): that is, if religion was involved in any way in the life of some thinker, their every thought and insight traces back to and owes everything to religion. Simply put, that is a remarkably silly way of doing intellectual history.

66

Since no one brought this up, I note that the eevil atheist Soviet Union had all these laws also. Yeah, the state killed people, but religious states do also.

Do you think early H. sapiens killed each other, before they had religion? Neanderthal’s? Band of chimps don’t kill within the group, only outside - just like we do. Do they have an altar hidden somewhere?

Why do all cultures, with varying beliefs in varying gods, have rules against all these things? If God is so clever about broadcasting rules, why not be as clever in broadcasting information about his nature?

And, not to mention, some of the very strongest rules of our culture, like gay sex with children, didn’t exist for the Greeks and Romans. Did God forget to broadcast those rules through their gods? Marriage being between one man and one woman doesn’t seem to have been a universal either, even from your God. Explain that one.

67

Well I can see how a President who closes every speech with God Bless The United States would be a big thorn in their sides. I don’t consider myself an atheist but I don’t think it’s right, either.

68

That’s not true.

That’s likely true.

Almost all marriage laws that were on the books in the fifty states prior to the last few decades would have not stopped gays from getting married. Courts might very well have stopped such marriages using various leaps of logic, but the laws as written would have made gay marriage perfectly legal and valid. If that wasn’t the case, then there would have been no need for the huge push to change the laws across the country. The homophobes didn’t want the existing laws to get tested, as there was a damned good chance that a judge sticking to the text of the laws would have found in favor of gay marriage, so they changed the laws.

In many places, gays can’t adopt children, and there is a strong push to increase the number of places that this is true. Feel free to bring up the “that’s because a child needs both a mother and a father” argument, as I’ll gladly demonstrate that those same locales allow single heterosexuals to adopt.

I could give a damn about the words on the money, although I agree that they should be considered unconstitutional. I care far more about the pledge. While it’s often argued that kids could just skip that part, peer pressure can be quite powerful among children in school. So in this case, we have something I consider unconstitutional and which can cause harm to children whose beliefs are in conflict with “Under God.”

You list three things that would make religion encroach on someone who didn’t want it (and we’ve listed several more). Can you name a single thing in which atheism is having similar effects on non-atheists? Can you name anything that atheists are proposing that you would consider unconstitutional?

69

Various philosophies provide moral conhesion but they are not religions. Communism, legalism, capitalism, objectivism, and utilitarianism aren’t typically regarded as religions.

Marc

70

:eek:

What a scary thought…imagine if the Western world actually operated as the Bible instructed us. Usually the people who run for political office on such a platform are castigated as lunatics.

Anyway, since you seem to have put forth this assertion with some seriousness, I’m going to have to ask, have you actually ever sat down and read the Bible? It’s actually pretty dry and uninspiring, considering its supposed source. There’s a lot of really mundane happenings along with a codification of bizarre and outdated customs, especially with regards to diet. There’s also just a lot of downright nonsense. Where it does touch upon morality it is often shockingly barbaric, as if it written by an actual devil. Where there is something that doesn’t offend all senses of equality and modern liberal thought it is either very simple and buried under masses of twisted, strange text, or somehow impugned by a foul detail or two only a page or two away (OK, OK, I agree, I should treat my fellow man with due respect…wait, what? Slavery is seemingly condoned by Jesus? Hold on a minute…).

71

This is inaccurate. In most of these states, the laws were written quite broadly to deny gay (and in some cases unmarried heterosexuals) any legal benefit or recognition whatsoever. Now, we’ll have to see how these play out in the state courts, but the likely result is that under these laws and consitutional amendments, gay couples will be deprived or rights and benefits that they had previously (such as domestic partner benefits for state employees). To state that there is no change to a gay person’s life is false. At least one change is that gay people in these states will now have to fight in court to protect rights and benefits they previously had (and my guess is that they will probably lose these rights and benefits).

72

You can justify it with an economic argument. I’ll explain this below.

It could be, but it doesn’t have to be. Look at anything you own. Does it have value? Why? It has a value because you assigned it a value. Now, the way you made that assignment is complex and going to be based in part on how the rest of us value it, but ultimately you had to assign it some value, right?

I’m going to make this argument with a theft example, because I think it’s easier to illustrate. But you can apply this argument to murder and slavery if you want to:

Let’s say Person A has a painting that he values at $10. Person B wants to buy it, and B values it at $30. So B offers A $20 for it and A agrees. Now, B is ahead $10–he got a painting valued at $30 for $20. And A is ahead $10. He sold a painting for $20 he valued at $10. This transaction is economically efficient* and the total wealth of the system has increased $20.

Now, instead, lets say that Person B smashes a window, breaks into A’s house and steals a painting. B is ahead now $20 (remember, he valued the painting at $20). But A has lost $10 (the painting) and another $15 (for the broken window). So, B is $20 ahead, but A is $25 behind, and the total wealth of the system has decreased by $5. This is economically inefficient.

So, if you don’t want the total wealth of society to decrease, you ban economically inefficient transactions such as theft.

I can do this argument for murder and slavery if you want, but it’s pretty much going to be the same.

*I realize I’m using a specific definition of economic efficiency, and we can spend a lot of time discussing whether this is the appropriate definition to use. But, this isn’t an economics thread, and I just wanted to show that one can make economic efficiency arguments in favor of laws that prohibit murder, or theft, or slavery.

73

You can make these arguments, but only if you take their basis for granted. Why is “economic efficiency” the summum bonum?

Atheists are caught in the usual bind. All morality is based on faith; that is, by appeal to principles that cannot be empirically established. Thus they argue that Biblically-based morality is bad because it cannot be justified without a faith-based appeal to the Bible, but gay marriage is fine, even though it cannot be justified without a faith-based appeal to some principle equally subjective.

As far as religion “encroaching” on everyday life, I suspect it is a lot like the “war on Christmas” debates of a while ago. It depends on your point of view. If you define a change in the status quo as encroachment, then not much is happening. If you define no change to a status quo that you don’t like, then encroachment is happening all over the place.

Regards,
Shodan

74

Shodan, does it bother you at all that the best defense you have to support your point of view is that the other side is equally as bad? I’d like to think that making important decisions involves more than just flipping a coin.

75

Well, yes, if Person A says he values the painting at $10, I am taking it for granted that he actually does value it at $10. We could do a variation of this argument where Person A doesn’t know what he values the painting at. But that doesn’t change the argument for situations where a person does know what he values the painting at. And even if A doesn’t know what value he places on the painting, that wouldn’t suddenly make theft economically efficient.

Who said it’s the greatest good? It has utilitarian value because people like to do stuff like eat and own stuff. A society which increases wealth has a greater likelihood that people can do those things than a society which decreases wealth.

Which has nothing to do with the question I was answering. The question was asked if laws can be justified on a basis other than religion. I presented an economic argument. Does your definition of religion include capitalist economics?

Subjective != faith.

76

Double post.

77

Didn’t we just cover the illegitimacy of this sort of equivocation in the faith thread? Values are not factual principles subject to being false or unjustified claims of knowledge. Claiming to know that the Bible is true in the sense that it accurately reflects events that really happened is not the same sort of claim as claiming that genocide or torture is immoral. This sort of bait-and-switch argument no longer fools people.

You clearly have not been listening very closely to anyone’s arguments. Biblically-based morality is bad because it does not justify itself period: by and large, it offers no justification for its claims, and indeed offers few if any moral principles to begin with, just commands. That’s not to say that it is always wrong (no one thinks it is wrong about the wrongness of theft, though of course the Bible’s idea of who it is wrong to steal from is pretty constrained), but rather that bare assertions without explaining the value or the moral reasoning is untrustworthy as a guide to morality.

While moral judgments are indeed subjective in the sense that they are only made by feeling beings, again, I think is pretty plainly a lie to call them “subjective” if you mean to imply that they are subjective in the same way as a belief about some assertion of fact. Most moral arguments seek to find first common premises: decency, fairness, liberty, etc. that people already share, and then reason from those: pointing out how people are violating or misapplying these things. We assume that most human beings have these same basic values, and by and large, outside of sociopaths, I think we mostly all do, and so moral arguments are both possible and useful. Arguments for gay marriage are of this sort, like most modern moral arguments. I don’t really see the honesty in trying to conflate these sorts of arguments with assertions that a woman who lived and died thousands of years ago now appears to people on toast.

Good to see you up and posting again,

Apos

78

Ya know, that sounds almost like you’re calling me a homophobe who thinks gays shouldn’t adopt children. I know someone as smart and logical as you wouldn’t stoop to such a thing.

I’ve never understood this argument. It’s the frickin’ pledge! No one pays attention to it and everyone is just droning on with the rest of the class before they’re old enough to understand what it even means. Do I think the pledge should be done away with completely? Absolutely. But to say there’s peer pressure to say the words “Under God” is ludicrous.

My best friend in grade school was a Jehovah’s Witness and I didn’t even know he wasn’t speaking the pledge with us until he told me in high school.

Peer pressure. Jesus.

Now, I was under the impression that atheists didn’t have some cohesive, organized movement to “get back” at religious people. At least, this is what the SDMB told me. Are you saying all the atheists on this board are liars, or are you just throwing up a strawman?

79

Wrong. Morality is based on subjective (and evoloved) emotional responses to external stimuli. Such things as my aversion to violence and my desire to take care of my kids has nothing to do with “faith” or with anything I think I “should” do. It’s exactly what I want to do. “Moral” behavior (more precisely, a desire to avoid engaging in “immoral” behavior) is as biologically innate as desires for food and sex. I don’t have moral “beliefs,” I have a moral aesthetic. Moral perceptions are like taste in music. If I like it, it’s good, if I don’t like it, it’s bad. There are no objectively “right” or “wrong” answers. Morality is an effect, not a belief. You either feel it or you don’t. No faith required. I am the final arbitrator. I am right because I say I’m right. No one else’s opinion, including God’s is relevant.

That is, unless an individual lacks the empathic response (as in the case of sociopathic personalities). In that case, I can understand why those people would need religion as a prosthetic – an artificial and inferior substitute. Trying to be good only by following a religious code is like trying to see with a glass eye.

Oh, and it’s impossible to CHOOSE a religious morality without arrogantly and arbitrarily deciding that it’s the “right” thing to do and that this religion is better than that one. We’re all making it up out of our asses at the end of the day.

80

Forgot to address this.

same-sex marriage does not need to be “justified.” ALL behaviors are “fine” unless and until a given behavior can be shown to be damaging in some way to the public interest. No behavior has to justified a priori. Only attempts to restrict behavior have to be justified.