Oh, no you don’t. You’re not getting off the hook that easily.
You specifically agreed with his statement that all religions are con games. In fact, I reiterated his claim at least twice, and asked you to explain why you agreed with his assertion. Not once did you say, “Oops! I didn’t mean to say that all religions are scam jobs! No, I really didn’t!”
It’s a little late to be backpedalling away from your claim now.
Prove it.
Tomorrow.
Excellent advice. Except you already added your two cents. Since Clothahump has not returned to follow up, I have not had an opportunity to follow up with him. I’m certainly interested in his take–but I’m interested in yours as well.
Like I said a second ago, I will give my two cents Tomorrow. I would have signed off earlier, but people were making such great points in other threads.
I heard you. No worries.
If you wish. To avoid further shifting of the goalposts though, I would like to remind you of the following claims that you made:
[ul]
[li]That every single religion in the world, without exception, is a con game (i.e. a deliberate deception).[/li][li]That you arrived at the aforementioned conclusion via “inductive reasoning.”[/li][li]That all religions in the world (or if you wish, all major extant religions) claim to be handed down by God Almighty himself.[/li][/ul]
These are the claims on which you are being challenged. No substitutions, please. For example, the statement “All religions have erroneous teachings” is not equivalent to saying “All religions are scam jobs.” Please stick to the specific claims that were made.
I’d also like to remind you that “proof by example” is logically fallacious. Therefore, rattling of a list of religions that are indeed “con games” (if this can be proven) does not demonstrate that religions in general are deliberate deceptions.
I’m curious about what you’ll come up with. This should prove interesting.
I strongly recommend that anyone interested in this question read Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. It looks at the question from a number of perspectives — psychological, historical, sociological, anthropological, neurological — and concludes, fairly persuasively, that religion cannot be boiled down to any short list of simplified causes. Rather, it seems to exist at the intersection of a whole lot of otherwise unrelated factors, which is why so many religions, viewed objectively, seem to be rather a hodgepodge of elements. There’s the “why are we here, what happens after death, etc.” set of Big Unanswerables, there’s the “don’t have sex with your sister, don’t eat the icky crawly things” set of Rules for Health and Safety, and there’s the “once upon a time” stuff that provides a narrative mnemonic for the whole business, among other things.
Some sections of the book are rather less strong than others (the handful of paragraphs devoted to the dread we nearly all feel around corpses, for example, is perhaps the weakest of all), but overall it’s quite a remarkable contribution to the discussion. So get reading. 
In the last two days, I’ve started posts that deal with religion. Neither have asked specifically about the existence of God or the truth of religion, however both have evolved in discussions of those very subjects.
Each post also has a champion of the “because I say so” school of thought. This post’s champion is Scott Plaid. Scott, you may disagree, but we’ve pretty much all had some really horrible stuff happen in our lives, AND we’ve all met some damn horrible people who claim to devout (insert religion)_, but that’s hardly license to say that religion is bad from “just about every angle.” Do you believe in (most of) the ten commandments? “Love thy neighbor as thyself”? Do you believe in not judging people as though you are above them?
If you think religion is all bad, you are judging it by how others that you disagree with are portraying it. Yes?
The truth is, I believe, every “bad” thing comes in tie with just as much good, and, yes, I mean every bad thing. I’m not going to respond to people who ask me about the Holocaust or the tsunami. There is undeniable good that would not have occured had those horrible (and don’t question whether or not I think they’re horrible, I feel like a politician, “I do not support holocausts, tsunamis, or terrorists”) things not occured. One can’t stop horrible things from happening in the world, but I do believe he can choose to focus on what good he can find in any bad situation (I’m not by any means perfect in this sense, I struggle with it a lot, mostly when I get too caught up in the news, but I do believe it).
Now, Andros, you actually came closest to answering my question (or at least starting the debate) when you said:
“I do. But I think that’s a different question than the one you asked. Whether or not I believe that any religion but mine is valid or has any real moral base is irrelevant to my acknowledgement that those other (heretic!!) religions are still attempts (however flawed) to explain existence.”
Essentially, what I’m looking for is a discussion about how relavent reasoning like that is. You see what I’m saying? For instance, does it really matter if someone believes that it’s Brahman, Chi, or the holy spirit, does it change what it is?
I’ll admit that I’m having a lot of trouble finding out how to word this question. I’m not an expert in world religions, I’m just an amateur of humanity. The more I interact with “different” people, the less I think anyone’s saying anything different. We just all perceive difference…man I’m digging a hole. I might technically be hijacking my own post, I don’t even know.
What happened to Moses wife? Didn’t she follow him into the desert with, like, every single person on the planet Moses was related to? She didn’t stay in Egypt, did she?
[QUOTE=gitfiddle]
My own experience is similar to what you described in your OP. I was a member of a Christian denomination and bought into the beliefs. After I stopped attending I encountered other beliefs and did a lot of reading about them. I began to notice a lot of similarities in the nitty gritty of their beliefs with some of the differences being just terminology. example ; some christians don’t like the word karma but the bible says you reap what you sow.
Another similarity I noticed was how the basic simple truths taught by someone were ritualized and distorted by those that followed. It seems to be an inevitable part of humanity. Often the teachers themselves were deified far beyond their own teaching and myths began to be incoorperated about them.
What I came away with was the belief that most major religions are a curious mix of some basic truths and some myth and ritual. None offer the whole truth.
For me the termnology doesn’t matter. God, Allah, Great Spirit, the Force, it doesn’t matter. What matters is how we walk whatever path we choose and where it leads us
btw I have a very cool book called Jesus and Buddha as brothers. It points out with side by side comparisions that Jesus and Buudha taught many of the same things even though they lived 600 years apart.
Which version? I’d say any atheist can chuck a minimum of four of them, and depending on how you feel about coveting, honoring your parents, and various other things in different versions, it could easily be more.
What religion did Moses found? Just wondering.
Sorry, Unc, I disagree with that. The goals of any religion are the accumulation of wealth and the gaining of power over their adherants. There are no questions being “answered” in any aspect not directly related to those goals. In other words, tell the sucker what he wants to hear and take his money for doing so.
I have to start out by saying that for the first 12 years of my life, I was actively Christian - baptized in the Episcopal Church, Sunday School, the whole nine yards. Now, obviously, this was because my parents were Episcopal, so they dragged me along and not knowing any better, I believed because they told me it was true. But I had questions. And when I started asking questions about things that confused me, it became rapidly apparent that something was rotten in Denmark. I was given answers that ran the entire gamut from “You simply have to have faith” to “You filthy little heathen, how dare you ask something like that.”
I started studying on my own and did so for all of my teens and most of my 20s. I started by reading the bible and went on to read the “holy” writings of other religions. I then started reading commentaries on these writings, both pro and con. It was kinda like clicking hyperlinks: everything seemed to lead to something else.
What I found is that organized religion of any kind is nothing more than a massive con game. How so, you have asked.
Well, let’s take Christianity because it’s current and everyone is passingly familiar with it. Let’s add the Roman pantheon and the human sacrifices of the Aztecs. Nowwe have a widely diverse group of religions, both in physical location on Earth and in time as well.
Question: what do they all have in common? Stop here, research it yourself if you like (and I very strongly suggest that you do) and then compare your answer to mine. Look at them from an historical and social point of view, because the theologies are all different and you can’t compare apples and oranges.
They all have the common goal of accumulating wealth and gaining power over their adherents. They accomplish this by feeding off the universal fear of every human on the Earth, and that is death. No one wants to believe that this life is all there is, that we go out like a candle flame when we die, so they grasp at anything. Along comes the con man/priest/shaman/guru/whatever and says, “Here, believe in this doctrine and obey our rules. Give us your money and give us your children so we can brainwash them and foist ourselves into the next generation. In return, we’ll give you a warm fuzzy: you are permitted to believe that when you die, you will go to heaven/nirvana/elysian fields/whatever. But you gotta do what we tell you to do, or we’ll take the warm fuzzy away from you and you will burn in hell/sheol/gehenna/wherever. And give us more money while you’re at it.” And people buy into it out of sheer desperation., and sometimes sheer terror because the religion will kill them if they don’t.
You gotta admire a con that has run this long with absolutely no proof whatsoever that what they say will happen, actually does happen. I imagine that it all traces back to old Ug the caveman, who had this brilliant flash of insight one day. “Hmmm…it’s thundering and lightning and everyone is scared out of their minds. I’ll bet that I can blow a bunch of smoke up the tribe’s collective butt and get them to believe that I can interpret the thunder. Let’s see, I’ll call it…god. And in order for me to interpret this stuff, they’ll have to give me food and their daughters. And I don’t have to go out hunting and run the risk of getting trampled by a mammoth or eaten by a tiger. This is COOL!”
This con game has been the source of more grief and misery in the human condition that we really can imagine.
Okay, so you have rattled off a small subset of the world’s religions. It’s a start, albeit not a very thorough one.
Since you have urged me to do the research, I will hold you to that very same standard.
And how did you determine this to be true? You are, after all, making a very broad claim about every single religion in the world. How did you determine that every single one has the goal of accumulating wealth and gaining power over its adherenets.
Clothahump, I asked you to prove your assertion that every single religion on earth is a mere con game. So far, you have merely repeated that assertion, albeit with a great deal more verbiage. This is not an adequate answer.
Perhaps you should start by naming all of the world’s religions. If you have indeed evaluated every single religion on earth (as you claim), then this should be a simple matter indeed.
Thanks, Clothahump, I appreciate your response.
I think I would continue to argue, as JThunder is doing, that “con game” would have to mean intent to deceive and insincerity on the part of the founders and operators of religions. By that definition, I can’t agree with you. But, as with Scott, I understand your anger and frustration.
(Aside: I’ll stop making turtle jokes. Especially since I keep having to resist the urge to call you “Clothyrump.” You’d get it, but the mods would chastise me. ;))
(Aside aside: I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it, but believe it or not, back in '99 I very nearly registered here under the name “Mudge.”)
Ummm…you apparently missed the point in my post where I pointed out that I HAVE done and spent quite a large part of my life doing it.
Perhaps you should try actually doing the research yourself. I started with a subset of religions, but to date every religion that I have “tossed into the mix”, so to speak, has produced the same results. It’s all about money, it’s all about power.
Have I touched every religion that ever was? Probably not yet, but with each one that I look at with absolutely no change in the results…well, what else can I say? If I ever find one that is based on truth and fact - ie, there actually is a god of some sort and what they say about him/her/it is true - then I will publicly retract my statements and become a disciple of that religion.
You can start with the same three or throw your own into the mix. Toss Scientology in for good measure; there’s a classic example of a religion. Founded on a bet and it made the founder filthy rich.
On Topic
Hrmm… well I’m not sure about the ‘all’ religions’ (and the same will apply to my off topic response)
It’s certainly possible that [most] ancient religions started out to explain the world around them… Not the inexplicable, just the inexplicable to them at their current state of knowledge. They called the ‘inexplicable to them’ “god”
Off Topic
On the derail… Yes oraganised modern religions are mostly about the power and money. However, consider Bhuddism, Confucianism etc… Have you visited a Bhuddist monastery? Not much money and power accumulation there…
More later, gotta go
I didn’t miss it. I simply see no evidence for your (implicit) claim that you’ve examined every single one of the world’s religions. So far, you have only rattled off a small subset thereof. It’s a start, but it doesn’t come close to proving your assertion.
Wait a minute. You’re the one who made the claim. I’m just asking you to substantiate it.
Why are you suddenly so eager to foist the burden of proof onto someone else?
Once again, you’re merely reiterating your claim. You haven’t provided any actual evidence so far.
Well first of all, you have yet to demonstrate anything… but even if you have observed no change so far, what then? You are now admitting that you haven’t actually examined all the religions, ever. Heck, it sounds like you can’t even list all the extant religions today. Doesn’t this suggest that your claim is (at the very least) overly broad?