Are you saying there IS a God who gave us various flawed institutions of religion, just in order to be mean?
Or, if religion came from human beings, then aren’t the problems with religion actually problems endemic to human beings?
I’m more curious as to how we would have cured cancer 10,000 years ago without religion, myself.
All scientists = atheists.
All religions = suppressing the atheists.
All religions = suppressing all scientists.
Therefore, all scientists suppressed = no cure for cancer!
Do I win a no-prize?
My understanding of anthropology and archaeology is that it’s pretty much a basic assumption that human societies have always had, and will always have, religions of some kind. So I’d have to wonder about someone who thinks that 10,000 years ago, religion didn’t exist. What does he think all those Pleistocene fertility figures and standing stones were for? Not to mention cave paintings…
I would also have to wonder about someone who thinks that religion is solely responsible for war, and I’d want to know which religious beliefs were responsible for, respectively, the French-Indian War of 1763, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World War II, the Chinese civil war of 1949, the Korean War, the Vietnam civil war, the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraq-Kuwait war, and the current Iraq war.
Yeah, Kytheria, and suppression of human potential has a long history that isn’t tied to any particular religion (though some religious institutions have played a role).
Religion gives us means for tolerance and love — and persecution and genocide.
By the same token, science creates problems even as it solves them.
Basically, human beings are just fucked.
And…glorious, as well.
No one ever seems to mention the efficacy of religion as a tool to disseminate knowledge in pre-rational cultures.
True.
I’m wondering how long human beings will survive post-Reason (not sure exactly where to pinpoint that moment) as opposed to pre-Reason. Descartes, maybe? Sometime around 1600? You really think we’re gonna get another 9,600 years out of this run? With our ever-increasing means of destroying ourselves? I doubt it.
Oh good, a Pit thread. It would have been such bad form to point and laugh at the retard in the thread where he posted his retardation.
When he comes up with some, I don’t know, scientific basis for his PoV I might have to do something other than point and laugh, but that’s all it deserves up to now.
Actually there were religious tensions underlying/contributing to a number of those conflicts, though they didn’t play a paramount role in starting most of them.
The Iran-Iraq war, for example owes much of its origin to hostility between religious sects and the threat of fundamentalist expansionism:
*"Iranian Shia Muslims had carried out the successful revolution against the shah’s secular government. Their success excited many Iraqi Shias with the possibility of similar gains in their country. Although Shiaes also constitute the majority of Muslims in Iraq, the Sunnis (Sunni Islam) had long held political power in Iraq’s secular government. Cautiously, the domestic opposition to Hussein’s strong-handed government became emboldened. One Iraqi religious leader in particular, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, emerged with ideas very similar to Khomeini’s. Al-Sadr was soon arrested and executed, bringing protests from some Iraqi Shias as well as a crisis in Iranian-Iraqi relations.
While these events were unfolding, some Iranian officials made no secret of their desire to have other Muslim countries follow their path of Islamic revolution. A crisis between Iran and Iraq escalated during 1980 as the two countries accused each other of border violations and interfering in each other’s internal affairs. Iraq responded to the escalation by repudiating the 1975 agreement giving Iran access to the Shatt al Arab. On September 22, Iraq further escalated the conflict, launching the full-scale invasion of Iran that initiated eight years of warfare."*
Nope, you win aprize.