Religion is infantile!

Great Debates
21

knowing, suspecting and believing are 3 different things. you can know that 2+3=5. you can suspect that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. [assuming of course you think there is some here. LOL!] but you can BELIEVE IN SANTA CLAUS.

i try not to believe ANYTHING. that is why i mention occam’s razor. it is a tool for judging PROBABILITY not truth.

“desperate pleading?” - ever notice people trying to get others to make EMOTIONAL DECISIONS use emotionally loaded words?

there is a plant called wormwood, in english. apparently this plant grew in the vicinity of the chernobyl reactor. of course they could still have named the reactor something else. i have read revelations at least 6 times. A STAR CALLED WORMWOOD? poisoning the air, land, water. stars use fusion and reactors use fission, but what did anybody know about that 1900 years ago. i read a book by frederick pohl about the chernobyl disaster. i didn’t know the name chernobyl had anything to do with wormwood. like i said, what’s the probability? i doubt that there is any way to calculate it, but it seems odd to ME. you judge for YOURSELF.

the “so called” bible code, applies to the TORAH ONLY, the 1st 5 books of the bible. you can do your own research on how ticky jews have been about keeping that exact for 2500++ years. now i have this paranoid theory about religious leaders and what i call RELIGIOUS POWER GAMES. the leaders will manipulate any “sacred” text to serve their purposes. any competent god would know this. LOL! so how could god get a message past the lying priests without them knowing it? a code that could only be analyzed by computers and it would be thousands of years before computers were invented. that would be some cool, sneaky sh!t worthy of a GOD.

disbelievers are merely negative believers that need to believe that they are smarter than believers. BELIEVE NOTHING. do your own research and decide your own suspicions. the internet is TOO COOL.

Dal Timgar

22

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by tracer *
[li]Back when you were a kid living with your parents, they tried to be “fair” with you at all times. If you got an “A” in math, they took you out for ice cream; if you stole a cookie, they sent you to your room without supper. You came to expect parental fairness in response to your every action. Unfortunately for you, the real world is not “fair” – good is not always rewarded and evil is not always punished. Heaven and Hell, then, are an attempt to make the world “fair,” just like it was when your parents were in charge. The good guys get to go to heaven when they die, and the bad guys get sent to hell. So there.[/li][/QUOTE]

Just to give some support to tracer, I’ll say that I think that argument is a large part of the reason why they believe in religion (besides being brainwashed in it from childhood). The idea of an omniscient, omnipotent God who rewards “good people” (e.g., self) and punishes “bad people” (e.g., the people I dislike) appeals to our fundamental sense of “justice.” The faithful dislike the truth that the world is unfair, that good deeds may not be rewarded, and that bad deeds may go unpunished, so they embrace the idea of God who will eventually set things straight.

Or, as “Weird Al” Yankovic put it in “Amish Paradise,”

A local boy kicked me in the butt last week.
I just smiled at him and turned the other cheek.
I really didn’t care; in fact, I wished him well
'cause I’ll be laughing my head off when he’s burning in Hell.

23

But, to an extent, the punishment happens in real-time as well. People suffer spiritually for their misdeeds.

24

For those of you who are interested, there was a very interesting film on the Arts Channel, about the death of the religion (of marxism-Leninism). The only trouble is-the patron saint (Lenin) is still around! (the Russians haven’t figured out wht to do with the mummified corpse). Of course, there are still the “true believers”-but they are old and dying off.
Something tells me that Christianity is founded on something much more profound that the marist cult!

25

Well, some people may experience guilt or a crisis of conscience, but many don’t. Is an unfelt punishment still a punishment?

26

I don’t mean merely the self-reproach which comes from vanity. I mean what the Catholics called “the temporal punishment of sin” (Taoists and Buddhists and Hindus have other names for it.) I’m not sure how to describe it but the idea is fairly universally accepted, at least among religions which promote right-doing – which does lead to the chicken and egg problem again…

27

Perhaps if we stopped relying on God and tried to make the world a better place ourselves none of this would matter so much.

As Darwin would say ‘If you believe or you don’t believe you can still breed, its er, benign ?’

28

jmullaney wrote:

Is this “temporal punishment of sin” thing something that the person-it’s-happening-to is necessarily <I>aware</I> of? Or is it just another black mark on his tally sheet that counts for more time in Purgatory? Would somebody who is hit with a temporal punishment of sin going to <I>feel</I> anything if he doesn’t believe in it or doesn’t know he’s committed a sin?

29

Yes.

As Mother Angelica likes to say in regards to Purgatory: where do you think we are?

Well, without a concrete example, I’d again say yes.

30

Could you give an example of said punishment? I’m not sure what you mean by it.

31

Well, Chuang Tzu’s self titled book is full of examples – since Taoist don’t believe in an afterlife, their morality is based on “spiritualism.” Hindu’s have their idea of Karma, although I think the Western version mixes it up with luck too much.

Give me an example of some act that should merit such punishment IYHO and I’ll see what I can come up with.

32

jmullaney wrote:

Um … well, okay, if that’s what it takes to squeeze a concrete example out of ya.

I see a 20 dollar bill on the street. I pick it up, and walk away. It turned out to belong to a mute cripple standing right behind me that I didn’t see. He can’t yell at me to give him his 20 bucks back, and he can’t chase after me. That 20 dollars was all the money he had to buy food for the week, and he may very well starve without it. I have no idea that I’ve just stolen this man’s sustenance and, thereby, committed a pretty rotten sin.

What form would this temporal punishment of sin take?

33

Well, there may be a sin involved here, but it isn’t theft. The property isn’t marked as his; he, for all extents and purposes, isn’t there in a way to manifestly communicate to you that the property is his; thus it is on that level a perfectly legitimate ground score.

34

Let me make it more clear cut then. The same blind, crippled beggar is standing on the corner, cup full of money. I purposely knock him down, grab his money, spit in his face, then take off. What kind of spiritual punishment do I undergo, assuming I am a bastard with no conscience whatsoever that actually gets a kick out of screwing people over?

35

My reaction to the thread title:

Sure, some religious people are pretty infantile (so are some atheists), and some people take a very infantile approach to religion. But there are also plenty of religious people with a great deal of depth and maturity.

My reaction to the OP:

I think your hypothesis applies very well to some people, particularly members of religions or (sub)cultures that essentially see people as children who have to be given a lot of structure and limits and rules to follow to keep them out of trouble. And then there are probably a lot more people who have a little bit of these attitudes mixed in with a more mature approach to life and faith. But then, there’s room for growth in all of us.

36

Isn’t being such a person punishment in and of itself?

37

Let us not discount the influence of instinct, the instinct to survive in particular. We also have self-awareness and the (limited) ability to foresee the future. This means:

  1. We want to live.

BUT:

  1. We are going to die.

AND:

  1. We are aware of Fact (2).

These facts cause conflict. A conflicted mind is a handicapped mind and is less fit to do what is necessary to survive. In an attempt to resolve this conflict and return to tranquility and to better ensure survival, religions were invented.

IOW, the forces of evolution caused us to create a belief that says, in part, there is no such thing as evolution. (Though there are exceptions.)

jmullaney: If a person who has undergone spiritual punishment is supposed to be unhappy (unhappiness being the prime motivator to change one’s ways), then I say that being a bastard with no conscience who actually gets a kick out of screwing people over is not necessarily a punishment, because I have met several such individuals who seemed perfectly happy. Our jails are full of such people.

38

Um, if screwing people over makes them happy, how can they maintain this happiness if they are in jail? :confused:

Anyway, these people aren’t happy. Of course, if they have always been unhappy, they may merely not know what happiness is.

39

Ah Joel, this is starting to sound a lot like the No True Scotsman line. There are people out there who involve themselves in activities that the rest of us, and sometimes even they themselves, define as evil or sinful. If they insist they are perfectly happy doing so, what gives you or anyone else the authority to say otherwise?

The argument that there is a temporal spiritual punishment only seems to make sense if the people are imposing the punishment on themselves. People who truly don’t care simply aren’t punished at all as far as I can make out.

40

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were crossing Hao river by the dam.

Chuang said, “See how free the fishes leap and dart. That is their happiness.”

Hui replied, “Since you are not a fish, how do you know what makes fishes happy?”

Chuang said, “Since you are not I, how can you possibly know that I do not know what makes fishes happy?”

Hui argued, “If I, not being you, cannot know what you know. It follows that you not being a fish cannot know what they know.”

Chuang said, “Wait a minute! Let us get back to the original question. What you asked me was ‘how do you know what makes fishes happy?’ From the terms of your question you evidently know I know what makes fishes happy. And besides, I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river.”

:confused: You mean like the drunk (Otis?) on the Andy Griffith Show who always turned himself in for public intoxication? If we are all human, and all of the same nature, then there is no reason for me to believe the consequences for evil actions somehow affect others any different than it does me. Sure, there may be a difference in how, where, when, if, and to what degree the punishment manifests itself in the physical plane – but the root punishment comes on a spiritual plane.

If someone has to rob blind beggars in order to be happy, they obviously are not happy when they aren’t robbing blind beggars. Thus, they don’t have true happiness, even when robbing, since the joy they experience is fleeting. Then they go back to being unhappy. If they were already happy, they wouldn’t be commiting such an act in the first place.