I can’t think of a single idea that religion has given us that we didn’t know already. So what’s the point?
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Hmm…posts have to be at least two characters. Ok, I can adapt to that rule.
A huge percentage of the great works of art throughout the ages, in any culture, have been inspired by religious feeling (and/or funded by religious organizations).
For some people, it helps encourage them to be better human beings. It gives them a moral/ethical framework to guide their actions.
It helps unify and create a bond among folk who might otherwise have nothing in common.
There are more - but really, the first one is enough.
No. Take Bach for example, he wrote a lot of religious works but only because the religious organisations were the ones paying. For a while he wasn’t getting paid by the religious establishment so he just started writing secular stuff.
Artists will do what they do anyway - it’s just that throughout a lot of history the religious establishment were the ones with the money so artists worked for them. But artists will work for anyone who pays them.
As regards the moral framework - we knew all that anyway. Thou shalt not kill - we didn’t need God to tell us that was a bad thing.
How do you know killing is wrong and not simply incovenient?
This is one of those ideas that sounds profound on the surface until you loop it back into everything else it is tangled into and then it turns out to be one of the most profoundly idiotic claims anyone can make. That happens a lot with independent thinking types early on in their development. All human societies have developed because of religion even if it is just to rebel from it. Religious development is a core human trait and has influenced shaped the development of all cultures and societies. You can’t separate the two any more than you can try to dream up any type of alternate history you wish combined with a different version of alternate human psychological traits.
The OP is a little on the short(bus) side. Do you care to elaborate?
Nietzsche 0
God 1
(final)
Religion has given us longer life, vaccines, better housing, ample and cheap food, fast transportation, not to mention technical things like cellphones, TV, movies, and Twitter.
Oh, wait…that was science. Religion? Not so much.
How did we know that killing is wrong?
Imagine you live in a stone age village. Ug in the next door hut is pissing you off one day so you kill him. You carry on living there. You will notice the grief of his female and his relatives every day. And all the other people who kinda liked old Ug even if he was a stubborn so and so. You will notice their hatred of you every single day for the rest of your life.
I don’t think there has ever been a time when we didn’t know that killing someone was a pretty big thing.
That’s a big claim. Human societies would have developed anyway, with or without religion. They wouldn’t have just stopped in some way and then not developed.
Fair point and I agree that it has influenced human cultures and societies but my question is: did it actually tell us anything we didn’t already know?
I think no.
Never mind, I see your quotes are extracted from shagnasty’s posts.
Methinks *this one is gonna take more than opinions. Moving to Great Debates.
samclem Moderator, IMHO.
[sub]*just for you, Czar[/sub]
Christianity implemented the moral concept that all humans are brothers and fundamentally equal.
And Col. Colt made it a reality.
Religion has brought wars, delusions, destruction, ignorance, and a multitude of other evils. So yes, it has given us something. Just little or nothing good; it has been an overwhelmingly destructive force throughout history.
Hardly. It “implanted” the idea that nothing but Christianity matters; that anything whatsoever is permissible if it spreads or protects Christianity. It has taught that if you are not Christian you are not just wrong, but an agent of utter evil; that any acts whatsoever are justified if it converts or kills an unbeliever. Torture a million people to death and “save” one person from Hell? You’ve done an infinite amount of good, so those millions of corpses are justified. For this reason and others Christianity is the greatest single evil that has ever existed.
Few phrases exemplify Christianity better than “kill them all, God will sort it out.”
That’s rubbish and you know it. Jesus explicitly said “Turn the other cheek”.
Irrelevant, and nonsense; a two for one. He also said “I come not to bring peace, but a sword”; if you want to play the quote game. It’s easier to use Christianity to justify brutality than it is to use it to promote peace; easier by far. Brutality, ruthlessness, and aggression are a direct result of the Christian worldview; they are if they take their beliefs seriously required to go forth and do whatever is necessary to convert the unbelievers whatever the cost. The infinite punishment of hell, the existence of the soul and all the rest of its delusions demands it.
Which brings up the other problem with your claim; Jesus is irrelevant. He’s a semi-mythical dead man who has as much control over Christianity as Mickey Mouse has over Disney. What Jesus did or did not say won’t change what Christianity is.
Well buddhism was expounding very similar themes 500 years before. I appreciate you coming up with a concrete example though - that’s what I was after.
And do christians really say that all humans are brothers? You need to get baptised to enter heaven. So if you’re a human who hasn’t been baptised you lose out when it comes to the business end.
That is the most ignorant thing I have heard in the last 5 minutes. There are plenty of practicing Christians who try to follow the philosophy of Jesus as best they can. I am agnostic myself but I do attend a very good Episcopal Church who does lots of very good and concrete acts for the community and the world as a whole and I have benefited from it personally. We don’t have a stable of horses with knight’s gear ready to chop off anyone’s head and anyone is welcome and the more needy the harder we try in concrete charitable ways. You need to get off your own (very high) horse because your ignorance is embarrassing this board yet again. There are also Quakers, Mennonites, Methodists and lots of other Christian religions who teach the philosophy of Jesus and not much more. Do you honestly think the whole Christian world consists of the Crusades and the Westboro Baptist Church?
This thread is primed to go off the rails in any number of ways. The term ‘secular humanism’ makes me projectile vomit because it is a religion pretending that it isn’t and it has done a lot of harm as well.
No, I think that Christianity is far weaker than it used to be and can’t get away with what it used to. So, it pretends to be civilized because the government won’t typically let them just assault and kill unbelievers anymore. But when the government does let them do so, that’s just what the Christians do. If the cops in a town are known to look the other way on gay bashing or other types of religious hatred, then the Christians will go forth and persecute the sinners just like the good old days; it happens all the time. And the pressure from Christians to impose their hatred for humanity through the law is relentless.
They gave us most of the ideas that made us humans, especially initially. They united peopled into more than simple bands of hunters and gatherers by giving them a sense of shared community in belief. During the dark ages in Europe Muslim and Christian churches kept alive much of the knowledge of the fallen Greek and Roman world, preserving what little we have today of that world and of the philosophy and writings from those times. Religion and the idea of the gods gave us much of the great early architecture, which were almost universally build DUE to religion and religious purposes or ideals (the Pyramids for instance).
I’m not a huge fan of organized religion by any means, but to deny that it had ANY ideas or impact on human culture, society and civilization is just misguided and historically inaccurate. Religion, to my mind, has been a mixed blessing to humanity. For every good thing it’s spawned horrible events in our history (though whether that would have been different without religion, or whether we, being human would have done them anyway, just used other excuses, is a matter for debate itself). But it HAS been a mixed blessing…the good with the bad. As is the case with just about anything human.
-XT