Einstein believed in God, and he’s smarter than I’ll ever be, so on appeal to authority, I believe there is a God.
[QUOTE=Einstein]
Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
[/QUOTE]
I think your anger at religion is clouding your ability to assess its functions. Religion can, and does, both increase and decrease social cohesion, depending on the context. A truer statement would be that religion has an effect on social cohesion. Your statements about faith are true of Christianity, but not of religion in general. Faith is not nearly as important as praxis in many religions, including Roman Catholicism for some of its history.
I tend to agree about the “basis of a system of ethics” quote, but only because religion essentially codifies ethical decisions already made by the culture at large.
I have posted in other threads about my JW relatives, whose religion has basically destroyed my family, so I have experience the psychological and social evil that religion can bring. That said, it is simply ignorant to claim that religion as a phenomenon is inherently bad. You might as well be upset at the advertising industry, which similarly promotes ideas it knows not to be literally true.
The trouble with that approach is
(1) It’s debatable exactly what Einstein believed about God. (We’ve had whole threads about this.)
(2) There are lots of people who are smarter than I am, who believe all sorts of different things. They can’t all be right.
(3) Einstein was a brilliant physicist, but that doesn’t make him an authority on matters of religion or theology.
Just wanted to chime in that this is a really interesting thought experiment. If we became effectively immortal, what would the perception of the afterlife be?
For all our knowledge and understandings, would the arrival of an alien race be parallel to Cortez and the Aztecs?
No, support for slavery in the US did not originate with religious fundamentalists. Your statement is false.
Since you cannot and will not produce a cite that, overall, religion decreases social cohesion, this also can be considered a false statement.
All systems of ethics, without any exception, are faith-based and axiomatic.
It’s a pity - you have been corrected over and over on these false statements, and it doesn’t help.
Regards,
Shodan
Ah, well… there we go. Things have changed even less than I thought they had.
So I’ll amend my post to use animal sacrifice as further proof for why religious practices are not going away in 100 years… and probably not even in 10,000 years.
I’m a Christian, and a biologist, but this is a really terrible argument.
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Einstein didn’t believe in God in any sense that most serious theists (myself included) would recognize. He called himself a follower of Spinoza, and Spinoza was just this side of being a full blown atheist.
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Scientists, outside their field of knowledge, are not necessarily any more ‘expert’ than anyone else (and when it comes to something as murky as the divine, I doubt that anything like ‘expertise’ really even exists). There have been scientists who embraced everything from Nazism, to Stalinism, to racial segregation, to talking with fairies (that would be Alfred Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution), to the healing power of Vitamin C. One of the greatest scientists and statisticians in history, R.A. Fisher, went to his grave vociferously denying that cigarettes caused cancer.
That’s certainly true, and birth rates seem to account for the biggest portion of the decline. However, the Pew ‘Changing Religious Landscape’ survey from a few years ago also looked at conversion trends broken down by denomination, and those two churches have a higher rate of people decamping for atheism/agnosticism (20%) than any other.
You have a fair point about homosexuality, but public opinion about abortion has more or less been at a stalemate for several decades, and I don’t see any reason they are going to liberalize. (As a legal matter, abortion rights have been pretty much stable since 1973 as well). There are some countries which have liberalized their abortion laws in the last couple of decades, but there are also some that have tightened them up.
One sort of religion-namely those that are theologically liberal and that try to split the difference will be dead-the orthodox churches will continue to stand and the number of agnostics/atheists will probably have increased greatly but such institutions as the Church of England or the mainline denominations here will either be dead or taken over by their conservative bretheren. Otherwise it is difficult to make specific predictions-Christian orthodoxy will survive even if greatly diminished in numbers and (especially) influence but the forms that will be the strongest are an open question-I doubt contemporary Evangelicalism will be particularly popular by 2114 for example, we may instead see a revival of traditionalist Calvinism or perhaps a renewed popularity of the liturgical churches as found in LCMS and the conservative breakaway factions of the Anglican Church.
The Atheismblob-esque comments of some posters here are quite amusing.
And Islam?
Or Buddhism?
So you are saying that being a good hardworking parent is a looser? Anyone who makes a statement like that I would have to call a jackass.
I don’t think I’m knowledgable enough to make predictions regarding those religions beyond that they’ll almost certainly exist as major religions a century from now.
Religion is important. It does as much good as it does bad (arguably more good, if you look at the individual). I’m not even religious, I’d guess I’m agnostic, but I ***know ***religion won’t ever really fade out. People need a religion, a god, and maybe a church. Saying religion will fade out, or that the world would be better off without religion is both ignorance and arrogance. Its infuriating to hear.
What if there are competing formats? You don’t want to be an early adopter and then get frozen out by a lack of software or a weird OS and wind up having to worship Mithras.
I don’t buy that. I don’t think it’s even possible; the evil that religion does is so massive, so overwhelming that I don’t think it’s even possible for it to do as much good. I certainly don’t buy that it actually does so.
Demonstrably wrong, given that people function just fine without all of those things.
Why is in infuriating arrogance to say that it would be good for religion to fade out, but not infuriating arrogance to say that religion is good and people need it? They’re mirror images.
What evil does religion actually do? People commit violence or acts of perversion for its own sake, and do it under the guise of religion. Churches open their doors for the homeless. It provides closure and strength through faith. Its easy to say “religion is evil” but when my grandmother lost her husband she turned to god. When my friend lost his mother he went to church. The only sense of community in my neighborhood comes from the people who pray at the mosque, or go to church.
Its easy to say religion is evil when you’ve never needed it, or never seen people who would have suffered worse without it.
But I will adamantly defend the notion that people need religion. Those who have found god, found Him when they had nothing else. But its easy to trivialize something you don’t understand, and try to judge objectively when it isn’t meant to be judge objectively.
Believers kill and oppress other people all the time in the name of religion. The Catholic Church’s efforts against condoms in Africa have probably killed millions, and that’s just one example off the top of my head of the destructive nature of religion.
It’s doing good that generally requires defying religion, not doing evil.
I don’t buy the idea that anyone has ever needed religion. Humanity would be far better off if it never existed.
Yet the believers claim all the time that their beliefs should be considered objective, absolute truth; in fact that they and they alone have access to objective truth.
And I “understand” religion just fine; there’s nothing profound about it.
I really won’t bother arguing it since you are clearly cemented in a black and white view of the world and this isn’t the pit.
Those numbers don’t sound right, but a hundred years ago, almost all scientists believed that the Milky Way galaxy was the entire Universe, that it was static, and was ruled by Newtonian physics. If you had proposed the ideas of quantum mechanics, they would have had you carted off to the madhouse.