Yeah, wanting to do what would actually help people instead of what appears on the surface to be warmest and fuzziest is cold. It’s pretty cold. :rolleyes:
Letting them starve to death isn’t what is best for them. I can say that with 100% certainty that in every case starving to death wasn’t what was best for someone.
It might seem that way if you want to appeal to the warmest fuzziest most mindless solution. But if you feed people who cannot otherwise feed themselves, they are going to produce another generation who can’t feed themselves (once our need for food is taken care of, we reproduce.) Now, you give them food? And what do you do with the generation they produce? Feed them too?
See, what seems best on the surface might not be the best.
My suggestion is to bring them (voluntarily, of course) to a part of the world where they can support themselves, and their futures generations can too. The US, Canada, Europe, parts of Asia, Australia, etc.
That’s not “cold”. That would actually be doing some good. But I’m sure most westerners would rather throw money at Somalia than have Somalian neighborhoods start popping up in their towns, hence, keep throwing food at them, keep watching them produce new generations that need food thrown at them. Take no real action to break the cycle. That’s cold, the way I see it. It’s a net increase of suffering.
I only have so much patience for such silly ideas. Saving someone from starving isn’t about warm fuzzies. Besides Christian missions build farms and other such sustaining institutions.
No, I understand the point you’re making.
And how is that under the control of Christian missionaries exactly? Personally I think going to Africa and helping setup institutions that will help its sustainability is a better model rather than overpopulating highly populated continents.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about do you?
Excellent. Go away, then. I’ve made my point, so I don’t need to volley with you ad nauseum when I already know what you’re going to say each time. You’re predictable and close-minded.
I believe your assessment is incorrect. Look, it’s one thing to say that religion has done more harm than good in the world. I don’t know how you’d judge that, but it’s possible to make the argument. On the other hand, it’s just silly to say “Religion has never bettered the world.”
You haven’t made your point. I am not the one who is closed minded. You are.
You act like you are the first person to ever think of, ‘Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.’, as though Christian missionaries are too dumb to think of the same parable when they apply it to aid.
:rolleyes:
I’m closed minded because your smacktalk misses the mark by several light years. :rolleyes:
Maybe you’re right, maybe they shouldn’t go over there to build farms, dig wells, teach people to read and first aid. It’d probably be better if they just let them starve. :rolleyes: It’d be better for them, after all everyone knows that Christians are just doing it because they want to…build a church.
Right, because these are exactly the same thing. It’s rare to see goalposts so quickly and blatantly moved, but it sure is enjoyable!
Look, it’s obvious that you’re butthurt because your religion is getting slammed in this thread, and you’re taking it out on someone who suggested you guys aren’t necessary to helping others, and may in fact be irritating the situation. Just relax, man. There are 2 billion of you guys. A few people having an open discussion on a message board shouldn’t threaten you so much. You’re a juggernaut. We bow before your world dominance and blah blah blah.
Is it then also silly to say that Nazism never bettered the world? I’ve heard that they had a pretty good forestry policy. And without them we’d be out some really good villains.
Or in other words, when something is overwhelmingly bad, the fact that it has done a few trivial good things doesn’t make it “silly” to say that it hasn’t bettered the world. No, in the most technical sense it’s not true that religion has never done anything good for the world; but for all of it’s history it’s been an overwhelmingly negative force. The occasional charity doesn’t make up for the war against women and condoms and gays any more than Indiana Jones and and the Raiders of the Lost Ark makes up for Auschwitz.
Oh, come on. For all its history, religion has been an overwhelmingly negative force? How do you even prove that? Religion is a cultural universal. It’s been around for all of human history, and quite probably a large part of human prehistory. It’s existed pretty much everywhere, and it’s remarkably diverse in belief and practice. It encompasses everything from the people who did the cave paintings at Lascaux to 21st century American Unitarians.
The fact that it’s always been wrong while insisting it be treated as right by itself makes it negative. It’s a massive drag on human progress and rationality by it’s nature. And it only looks “remarkably diverse” from the inside. To someone who doesn’t care about details like rituals it doesn’t look all that diverse.
And being universal doesn’t make it good any more than murder being universal makes it good.
Religion may not have bettered the world, but my religion batters fresh fillets of Atlantic cod, deep-fries them and serves them piping-hot with french-fires, Tatar sauce and freshly-basked rolls. Instead of holywine, we drink malt vinegar and hemlock - with an antidote at the end of the meal - and chant “Death to Socrates.” Through Ballardian psychology we persuade young, fair-haired maidens to fuck us and politicians to covertly allow us to slip through every conceivable legal loophole. We have access to the best food, Maltese peppers and fresh fish with lemondrops; instead of prayers, we recite incantations from comic-books and Selectavision manuals. Best of all, we have the freshest fish. You too can join the Church of Argent for only five easy payments of $299.99,
I’m failing to understand what your meaning is here. Yes, charitable organisations can fail. Yes, a considerable desire is required to keep a charity running. Yes, organizations might not step in. Why are secular organizations in particular singled out in this instance?
How can you be sure that secular and philosophcal groups weren’t affeected by than religiously moral groups? The world isn’t seperated into one and the other, and proponents of each intermingle. Without fully understanding to what extent one affected the other, to say that removing one would not affect the other doesn’t work out.
Good God (if he exists), be serious. Don’t you watch the news? The U.S. that country that once upon a time uttered a phrase like “Give me your poor…”, has lately built a wall to prevent the aforementioned poor to enter the country. Europe, a country that sent millions overseas, is beyond contempt.
That’s the atheist scientific solution to starvation to Africa? I prefer praying for mana.
It’s too vague a point to argue. There could be churches where most of the membership shows up for an hour a week to mindlessly mumble prayers solely out of habit and just want to get it over with, and there could be hard-core softball leagues where the members dedicate multiple hours per week and find significant emotional fulfillment in the games. Only the members can decide how important a particular social organization is to them. Churches don’t get an automatic significance just because they are churches.
If that attitude offends you… too bad. I’m busy protecting freedom with that pesky eternal vigilance thing, and indeed watchful for all potential usurpers, be they religious or otherwise. I fail to see why this is a bad thing, nor why metaphorical gorillas need be involved.
As cosmodan points out, this is the No True Scotsman fallacy writ large.
We are not talking about hypothetical societies, but those that exist now, today. In the US, which exists now, today, religious people run charities much more than secular people. That is how the world is now, today. It is the world that you assert has never been bettered by religion. So citing all the examples of how religion has made the world better is entirely on point.
Lutheran World Relief and the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities and the subsidized day care center and food shelf that my church supports are all in the real world. If you want to assert that these would all exist in a world of atheists, the burden of proof rests entirely with you. This can probably most easily be addressed by pointing to some equally large, equally efficient organizations dedicated to charitable relief, to which no one is compelled to donate by force of law, that is run by atheists. Got any?
Regards,
Shodan
To support your OP you summarily dismiss the positive things people point out.
Whether they would have done something similar without religious influence is pointless and rather useless speculation. It does not discount what actually happened. IMO it is your argument that is beside the point.
I’ve seen this type of argument before and it’s ludicrous. I’m not saying that in defense of religion but in defense of decent logic.
Off the top of my head, I believe that the Red Cross’s various subsidary organisations have been headed by atheists and the like in some countries. And then there’s Médecins Sans Frontières, which I had to look up to find out where the punctuation goes.
While I agree in your disagreement with Sage Rat in general, i’m not certain the point you’ve raised here is completely reasonable, though certainly it’s a question that should be asked. Churches (as well as other religious organisations) have a benefit when starting charities in that much of the organisational ability is already in place - of course, this wouldn’t mean that atheists have less organisations because of their atheism per se, but still, pre-existing organisation is a fair point on which to point out religion’s better ability in this area. On the other hand, I for example am atheist, yet i’ve donated to religious charities on occasion. Quite a few of the larger charities are quite old, so really for a lot of people if there is a desire to aid people, you may not need to start up a whole new organisation if there’s already one in place whom can be donated to, and avoid all the costs of setting up an entirely new charity and sorting it all out. Having an equivalent atheist organisation for every religious one is therefore not exactly necessarily a reasonable prerequisite; we do, unfortunetly, have to delve into possibilities.
So really, i’d say a better question to pose to Sage Rat would be to answer how we might be sure that, were religion and religious organisations not around, there would be secular organisations instead who would do similar levels of good.