Then of course there is the SDMB’s favorite monk, William of Ockham.
The fundamental mistake here is that people are valuing only critical thought. I don’t see a lot of atheist communities a la churches forming. When you get rid of religion what do you replace the church with as the center of community life, because honestly, I do not see very many secular analogues.
Even the secular playgroups I take my daughter to from time to time are hosted at the Lutheran church.
Science and learning are not everything.
"Religion Has Never Bettered The World."
In a short essay on NPR, one man said that being a Jew makes him a cheerful, optimistic man. He said Jews are instructed to thank God upon waking, for letting them see another glorious day. He finished by saying he answers everyone’s “How ya doing?” by saying, Great! Never Better! 
Well, there are fan clubs-a-plenty dedicated to sports teams and whatnot, as well as political parties, trade unions… any number of voluntary secular associations.
The fundamental mistake I see in your statement is the assumption that atheists would naturally group together simply because they’re atheists, and because they’re not there must be some fundamental flaw with atheism. Atheists have no more reason to form a club than do, for example, people who are indifferent to strawberry ice cream.
Anyway, I’ve no problem with religion organizations continuing to exist, but their roles in the fields of politics and science, while once significant, has been supplanted by more efficient structures. Thus we don’t need religion any more, but if you want it, be my guest. Just keep a leash on it.
The Social Democrat party in Denmark have – or rather had – many social settings, from party events, vacations, schools, scout groups for kids, tours, etc. Much more comprehensive than any church here ever had. The same were true in places like Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. It is quite possible to build alternative to church based organisations.
Those do not fill the same role as a church.
No, I am not assuming that at all. I don’t know where you get that from.
What I am saying is that you are claiming we need to get rid of something without providing a suitable replacement.
Shrugs, their role in politics will never be supplanted as long as we have a Democracy. Anything that people organize a community around is a political entity.
There is no analog to that in the US that I am aware of. I never said it was impossible, I just said that it’s not happening with any great frequency.
If you say so.
From your observation that you “don’t see a lot of atheist communities a la churches forming”. Why would they? Atheists getting together to not talk about God, or something?
I’m not talking about outlawing religion or burning down churches and whatnot, just firmly drawing lines that religion cannot sneak across: No, you can’t require a reference to “God” in an official oath. No, you can’t force Intelligent Design into a high-school biology class. No, you can’t blockade an abortion clinic without repercussions. What we need to get rid of is religion’s power, not religion per se.
Sure, but when it comes time to write laws, there is a constitutional authority that trumps all manner of gods.
You’d have to be woefully ignorant of what services a church provides to think that a sports fanclub fills the same niche.
Yea, you really do not understand what I am saying at all do you? I’m not talking about what atheists ‘should’ do. So I won’t really give much commentary to this straw man hijack.
Heh, do you even understand how Democracy works? If a lot of people are religious, and they vote as a bloc then they have power. You can’t get rid of the power without getting rid of the religion in a Democracy.
Which in this country would never have happened if of course a lot of religious folk didn’t agree it was a swell idea.
I’ve long suspected that a lot of religious folk only think that seperation of church and state is a swell idea only because they fear some other church being in charge. Not out of valuing of religious freedom in and of itself.
The Holy Order of Krispy Creme once tried to batter the world, but then the market fell out.
Is “Religion has never bettered the world” a falsifiable proposition? What kind of evidence would you take as an example of religion bettering the world?
Message boards also don’t make people intolerant of one another, nor do they hold back the progression of science.
I’m pretty sure anti-vaccination message boards hold back the progress of science?
Care to defend the Stormfront board?
As an adamantly anti-religious atheist, I’d say that’s an obviously false statement. “Never” means “not for any period of time”, which means that you only need to find one moment of time when religion bettered the world. Religion encourages a man to contribute to a charity. He does so when he otherwise wouldn’t. The world is bettered. Poof! Disproven.
The only way to defend it is to play word games. “Oh, I meant bettering the whole world, at once, total sum of all religious effects in aggregate, over a time span of at least a day” or some other thing which most people wouldn’t read into the original statement.
Often enough, but perhaps not factually enough.
That aside, I do think that religion has contributed greatly to society as a whole. I think the argument lies in whether or not those contributions were positive.
Religion provided a framework for government in European countries for centuries. Various religions have provided for the education of many poor people who otherwise would receive none. Priests/shamans etc. acted as the primary ministers of the sick and wounded during plagues and wars. We have countless works of art and architecture inspired by religion.
Now it could be argued that those same religions which provided a governmental framework also eroded that government from within, that the education provided was nothing more than a front for conversion and that if not for the religion a lot of those wars would not have happened, but to assert that religion has contributed nothing throughout history is just flat out wrong.
Just like many atheists would love to see toleration of any religion at all gotten rid of. shrugs Very few people actually believe in religious freedom for its own sake.
I don’t agree with this at all. First of all, you need to define “quality of life”. Like most people, I don’t define quality of life entirely in material terms. Even if I did, however, your claim is untrue. The average person in, say, Rhode Island in 1799, had much improved material circumstances compared to a serf in the Dark Ages or a nomadic tribesman from ancient times. He or she had a larger house and farm property, a more consistent food supply, better clothes, and better tools. If we include non-physical improvements, we’d also see freedom, democracy, legal rights, educations, and so forth. Bluntly, there’s no way you could defend the claim that “quality of life was largely consistent” from the dawn of humanity to the start of the 19th century.
Assuming that I’m parsing this correctly, the answer is a definite ‘yes’. Take the Franciscans, for one obvious example. They were completely opposed to war for religious reasons, were they not?
Many nuns would have been quite surprised to hear this.
In all honesty, this claim is just wrong. In Ancient Rome, during Pagan times, the law was “Patria Potestas”, which probably has a Wikipedia article if you want to look it up, but it basically meant that the father could do what he wished with his children, up to and including killing them. Thanks to Christianity, the law was changed, so that (among other things) murder was a crime. If you agree that the Christian approach was better, then apparently religion has bettered the world.
This could all be debunked, but I don’t have the time right now.
Now are you honestly saying that there was no significant difference between any places before the 19th century? No place was better or worse than any other? If you were going to be sent back 250 years, you really think that going to a civilized places such as Italy, England, or the colonies would be no better than going to Mongolia or Australia? Are you really willing to defend that idea?
The rest of your post I won’t tackle now. Lonesome Polecat has already written a good response to the idea that the last couple centuries were a time of wonderful moral improvement. The real problem that we’re having here is that you seem to believe a version of history that is, to speak bluntly, false. For example, your statement that “everybody was religious at that time”. It just isn’t true. Not at all.
Your main explanation for religion, as stated in another thread, is childhood indoctrination. Apparently you think that religious parents somehow manage everything that their children are exposed to in order to lead them into religious belief. Well, if you think that’s possible, can your mind stretch to consider the possibility that maybe your upbringing has managed to expose you to certain false “facts” while sheltering you from various true ones?
Feeding people who live on land that cannot support them only creates more people who live on land that cannot support them. A net increase of suffering. If I really wanted to help out starving Africans (and I’d love to, but I don’t have the means), I’d move them somewhere else. Giving them food isn’t doing anyone any good.
I do hope you recall your first sentence the next time we have one of the periodic silly fights over whether the U.S. was founded on religious principles so that you can quash all the claims that “the Founders” were all deists or borderline atheists. 
= = =
In point of fact, the anti-slavery movement has been the exclusive province of religious thinkers since the first denunciation of slavery by Pope Eugene IV in the fifteenth century.
Clearly, many religious people also embraced the idea of slavery and it did, indeed, take the Industrial Revolution to provide the economic means by which abolition could make it into Law. However, every actual effort to promote abolition came from the ranks of religious people. Voltaire and Rousseau gave lip service to the “equality” of humans, but neither ever made a strong case for abolition, with Voltaire denigrating Africans on a few occasions. Montesquieu gave lip service to human equality, then rationalized slavery as economically prudent. Hume and Kant never even opposed slavery. Of the Founding Fathers, once we get past the hypocrisy of Jefferson and Washington, we find the strongest opposition to slavery coming from the religious Adams and the conventionally religious Hamilton. The one Deist, (never really a secularist), who opposed slavery was Franklin.
Chattel slavery was first and always opposed by members of religious groups while the rationalists either accepted slavery, ignored slavery, or gave lip service to its opposition while benefitting from its continuance.