Have you ever met someone who is completely incapable of running their own lives? I have met many a person like this.
Only religion or the military seems to help them. There are people for whom religion is a better option than to be allowed to make their own decisions. If religion were completely abolished, these poor lost souls would have no one to tell them what to think and how to behave. Although religion is not necessarily for people who are capable of independent, productive thought and action, it does have its place no?
I’d be interested to see if there is anybody here who thinks religion should be abolished. I know we have several posters here who take a dismal view of religion, but that’s a far cry from advocating that religious practices be prohibited by force of law. And other than some communist regimes, I’m having trouble of thinking of any government which actually tried to abolish all religion (as opposed to abolishing religions that weren’t regime preferred).
Abolishing religion is a bit like King Canute trying to hold back the tides. See how quickly it was reestablished in Russia after the Soviet Union died. I do think that all-in-all, organized religion is a negative force in the world. Someone once said that the main advantages of arganized religion accrue to the organizers.
How do you know they can’t function by themselves and are only capable of religion or the military helping them until you deprive them of both, and watch the experiment to its conclusion? If you wait a few years and give them religion, isn’t that kind of like interrupting the control group?
Non-religious or military people can tell them what to think and behave
The pass that religion gets for its supposed righteousness is nonsensical. No one can be sure letting them become religious would make them any better off than if they were taught by teachers, psychologists, life coaches, hippies, etc.
I have no love whatsoever for religion, but even I would balk at abolishing it.
That said, if religion were abolished, I think that people would either figure out to handle life themselves, or (perhaps more likely in some cases) find somebody else to tell them how to behave. Parents will still attempt to instill some sort of moral code in the absence of religion, and failing that politics can give you a pretty comprehensive behavioral outline if you let it.
I think the OP isn’t talking about abolishing religion but rather about abolishing cults. Most religions don’t give the hypothetical person who can’t run his own life enough direction to be very helpful, so abolishing them won’t matter one way or another to this person. So this isn’t a good argument against abolishing religion in general. There are far better ones.
A person’s religious views and their relationship with god have to be among the most personal feelings and thoughts a person can have… I just wish they’d keep them that way.
I think he was talking about “abolishing” as in “to do away with,” not by force of law, but by reason. If we could convince everyone that religion is invalid, would that be a good idea?
Pssst, hey man, you wanna get high ? I got good shit, man. I got Genesis, I got some Luke, I got half a page of the Tao Te Ching…I even got a Koran sura if you’re into the hard stuff, but that’ll cost you extra.
First, I think that the OP is confusing cause and effect; IMHO, the people who can’t run their lives without everything they do being dictated by their religion have been generally been crippled in that way by the religion which has infected them. Second; such people are a danger to themselves and others, since by definition they will do anything their religion asks of them - the OP implicitly assumes that religion is benevolent, and sane. And third, if they are truly that crippled they probably belong in an institution ( I expect that many such people do end up in one; prison ), not as the pawn of religion or as the sort of soldier who would not doubt massacre children if so ordered. It’s simply not healthy to be incapable of making your own decisions like that, or safe for anyone around you.
I would prefer that humanity be genetically modified to eliminate whatever mental defects cause religion. I regard religion as a mental disorder, not as a rational choice. And I do think that in the long run that either we will erase religion from ourselves, we will destroy ourselves under it’s influence, or religion will manage to drag humanity into a permanent Dark Age or a mind control based tyranny where it can utterly dominate humanity permanently. Religion is insanity, and it and a sane society are fundamentally incompatible; in the long run either it dies, society dies, or sanity dies.
In all honesty, I think I would tend to say that if someone needs to be told what to think then there is no “person” there in the first place.
Really, i’d tend to imagine that religion in cases like that would gradulally lead to a stigmatization of religion on a very wide scale; it’d be generally accepted as being simply something for unthinking people who need direction in life to live. And while i’m often not a huge fan of religion, that would be a terrible reason for someone not to look into it.
Russia lacked a socially conservative movement other then the die hard communists after USSR’s collapse, but the Russian people still wanted an excuse to hate gays and drug addicts, so they flocked to the church. Its just a method of channeling hate and xenophobia for them, and probably the rest of the world. China is an officially atheist state and it looks like one of the few things their government is doing right.