There was a story about a man in Bali who after teaching the people how to use birth control to limit their families they began to prosper. He showed them that with less mouths to feed their children could be healthier and would need less people to farm the small plot of land they had to till.
To have a child you are pretty sure is going to die of starvation is a cruel way to raise a family. Have them and let them starve? You make the case for birth control even a more necessity!
If Christians really followed what the writer is said to have quoted Jesus as saying, they would be good to their enemies, to love them, Jesus is quoted as saying by doing such you heap coals of fire on their heads. I do not see that today nor has it been in the past.
There is no objective way to “know” if we are morally correct. We feel we are morally correct according to our own conscience and the standards of our society. On some issues we will agree. On many and in the details we may not. That’s part of the ongoing process of building and maintaining our society.
It seems obvious that in general religion and religious beliefs have permeated our moral code to some degree and even atheists are affected. Still , many tend to reject a morality based on the dictates of some religious authority figure and writings in some ancient tome to claim the freedom of their own inner thoughts and feelings. You’ll note that even the religious don’t agree in the details of what’s moral.
So there’s the conundrum. We cannot have an objective basis for morality and yet we must form some consensus through which we reject certain world views and accpet or tolerate others. That’s part of the ongoing process. I think an idea enters the public forum and may exist for generations within the consciousness of people before it becomes part of our moral fabric and widely accepted by a society. Look at human rights issues. Traditions and the fear of the upheaval caused by change seem to have a tenacity that we struggled with.
I agree. It’s humanity plain and simple. Religion and all it’s guises are simply people who tend to be a mix of good and bad. I think the thread title is ludicrous and discussions about a world better off without religion is meaningless speculation.
Humanity has been overwhelmingly religious since written history and before. Still mankind has continued to push forward and make improvements. To think that some of those improvements weren’t done by religious folks is just stupid. To argue that they didn’t do it because of religion or they would have or could have done it anyway is more useless speculation.
Who was he and when did this happen?
Since communism is much more than just the statement “wouldn’t it be great if we shared stuff”, then no they weren’t.
Hmm, few seem to agree with you.
Under First International Organisations in Wikipedia
(bold mine)
from Politics Defined:
John and his followers were communists and Christians (Anabaptist)
Now you might argue that these folks were a bit extreme, not True Scotsmen, or whatever, but the same could be said of other famous communists.
Because if you’re going to somewhere to kill people and likely be killed yourself, the possibility of new trade routes for those on whatever level above you probably aren’t going to excite you all that much. For the most part, you wouldn’t even be able to quantify exactly what benefit there would be, and likely you wouldn’t see how you got that benefit, assuming you did get that benefit yourself.
Quite possibly. I’m not arguing that this couldn’t be the case. Rather, i’m arguing that it isn’t reasonable to say that removing religion and philosophy would lead to a guaranteed no change in warfare. We can guess there might be, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be. And it would remove some of the reasons for war - perhaps that might only lead to more effort being put in on some of the other reasons, but again, perhaps it might not.
I would tend to ascribe this to there not really being as many Buddhist-led scourges - or, at least, not as many popularly-known Buddhist-led scourges.
Out of interest, though, what would you say is behind this unique level of criticism?
I do not remember his name and I think it was about 10 years ago and the story was on the PBS channel.
If I can locate it I will let you know.
I haven’t read this rather lengthy thread, but my two cents on the topic is that “religion” has been throughout human history the mechanism through which humans have arranged their social relationships, philosophical and moral musings, legal codes, and inquiries into the origins of things. It is positively absurd to state that “religion has never bettered the world”, unless what one means by that is that “human civilization has never bettered the world” - the two are so intimately intertwined that they cannot be disentangled.
The fact that we, in the 21st century, do not particularly require mythology for any of these matters (and that the mythology may in some cases be positively hampering in some of them such as scientific enquiry) isn’t an excuse to dismiss the entirety of human social evolution.
I’d say that it’s in part because we are discussing this on an English speaking, mainly American message board. The people here don’t hear nearly as much about the evils of Buddhism largely for the same reason you don’t hear about the evils of Shinto; it’s just not much of a factor in most people’s lives or even something they hear of very often. Also, there are other factors besides it’s disdain for the real world that make Christianity worse than most other religions. Buddhism just isn’t ideologically as amenable to encouraging crusades and conversion by force as Christianity is, or to claiming it’s own perfection, or as prone to view everything but itself as part of a conspiracy against itself.