Pssst: It wasn’t his OP. It was Salvor’s.
A bit of epoxy should help with that.
:eek:
:smack:
Thanks.
One thing all people should know and consider that we in reality take the word of some other human to be what God Said and our beliefs are really in the person and what they say God said. Muslims believe an angel of God told Muhammad what God wanted, Each religion has it’s own beliefs, and I belive were meant to help people get along together.
Keep in mind most Americans knowledge of Ghandi begins and ends with the movie.
The commandments are not divinely inspired. Things like don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t lie, etc. are common sense.
Personally, I think religions need to be abolished. They are the single most harmful thing that we humans have ever dreamed up to inflict upon ourselves.
The only thing worse than religion would be abolishing religion. Whether through genocide or just mandating certain beliefs or lack thereof, the cure is worse than the disease.
But if you just want to talk about it online and hope that people are therefore convinced to give up religion, I suppose that’s cool.
The issue with this sort of moral logic, as with many forms of moral logic, is that it’s essentially a stalled development of moral judgment. As such, the way to “defeat” it is by continuing the form of logic, and since this issue occurs in many people, theist or atheist, let’s put religion aside for a moment.
Consider a young child, he’s perhaps able to understand certain basic moralities like particular actions cause him pain or others cause him pleasure, and so he learns from that. Chances are his parents are teaching him basic moralities through some form od discipline, whether it’s with physical pain via corporal punishment or others such as deprivation of toys or attention. In time, a child learns that what is good is what mommy/daddy says. A young child doesn’t inherently know that, say, stealing is bad, as, at least based on my understanding, children young enough don’t even really have a full grasp that other people are as complex as they are, lacking theory of mind and all that. As such, it’s not only reasonable, but expected that a part of one’s moral development is, in fact, deferment of judgment to some sort of external authority, whether it is a parent, a teacher, a policeman, lawmaker, or God.
From there, I’m sure we all know people who are older than they should be and they’re still kind of stuck there. They have various opinions because that’s what their parents had, they haven’t really thought it through and challenged it. As an example, we’ve all met someone who can’t articulate an argument about why something is right or wrong other than that it was how they were raised or because it’s legal/illegal. But, also as we all know, at some point in most people’s development, often as a teenager, we rebel against our parents’ teachings, do some exploration on our own, sometimes we reconfirm those teachings and come back to them, sometimes we decide they’re wrong and we change our core beliefs. This sort of stuff often includes things like music taste or social groups or experimenting with drugs and sex or whatever, but somehow even more basic things like religious/political views and basic moral lessons are typically either partially or completely overlooked.
Why is this? I think part if it is a social/cultural one, where we’ve been conditioned to such a point where these types of views are critical to defining who we are as a person. As such, questioning them is less “figuring out who I am” in the way of trying new foods to see if they fit our taste, than it is "changing who I am at a fundamental level. This is why when people change these sorts of beliefs, they don’t just change them, they tend to also make other drastic life changes. Someone changes religions or political views is often also associated with a major or complete overhaul of one’s social circles, wardrobe, tastes in food/film/music, how they relate to or often rejection of one’s family, etc. It’s a terrifying prospect to consider that one’s self-identity could utterly change, one of the few things one has real certainty over is suddenly no longer so.
That’s REALLY the problem, we place FAR more significance on these things than we should, as individuals AND particularly as a society. Seriously, how often have we seen someone support someone who is objectively pretty heinous because they share similar religious or political beliefs, or gravely dislike someone who is generally pretty awesome because of differences there? It’s ridiculous in-group preference bias, and it betrays and overwhelming attachment to ideas as being defining of who we are, when they have so little to do with it. Consider, in my own experiences, of the people I’ve known, I see little difference in who is awesome and I get along with in terms of their personality and basic thought processes and who I don’t across pretty much all religious and political views. Genuinely kind or mean people are still that, whether they’re devoutly religious or strongly atheist. People may try to force certain behaviors to fit whatever they think the mold of some set of views is, but it’s also clear when those behaviors are forced and when they’re genuine.
And that’s where it comes back to the moral development. We ALL have a place we start from, whether it’s parents or God or whatever, but we owe it to ourselves and to society to not be attached to those ideas, experiment and see whether they’re consistent or not, try out situations and see what they should be. If you were raised religious and you try to pull morality not from within your religion and it matches closely, it actually will help to reaffirm one’s beliefs, just like when one experiments and finds out whatever other lessons we’ve learned from our parents might be right and it gives us faith or destroys it if they were really wrong s we grow older.
And that’s the path of how I got where I am. I didn’t rethink my religious views until a dear friend of mine asked me some tough questions. At first I had a strong attachment to how I was raised, but as I thought through it more and more, I realized that those parts that were harmonious with who I really am didn’t need that reinforcement and those parts that weren’t were, in most cases, covering up something so much better. I still believe in God, but it was exactly that exploration that showed me I wasn’t attached to MY view of God, I was attached to someone ELSE’s view. It was someone else telling me who I was and what I should believe, how I should think and behave, and that’s really the greatest thought crime.
So, in essence, religion isn’t inherently bad, but just buying or rejecting the whole thing is missing the point. It’s a starting point, lessons from our ancestors, and we’ve learned and evolved as a society since then. Hell, like it or not, Christianity has been the majority religion in Western culture for like 1700 years and it’s so much a part of our culture that even someone “common sense” ideas aren’t so much to other cultures not so influenced. In that sense, even for atheists, to some extent religion is some degree of a starting point. And it really isn’t all that different from people acting like the American Forefathers were infallible too, despite the fact that things like slavery or very limited voting rights were written into the constitution or various other things were left out (like privacy), yet those are seen as virtually universally horrible concepts by today’s standards. Some of their ideas were great, some were horrible, most were probably somewhere in between.
Well, it goes even deeper than that. Why should “human flourishing” be the standard?
So is the standard of human flourishing. All moral standards are axiomatic. You simply have to accept them, Or not, as the case may be.
“Such-and-such is moral because humans should flourish” is not different from “such-and-such is moral because God said so”. Both require that one must accept the axioms on which the moral system is based. If you could prove the axioms, they wouldn’t be axiomatic. If moral systems are invalid when they are based on axiomatic statements, then neither is valid.
Regards,
Shodan
Not sure what you’re talking about here.
If what you’re referring to is the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition, you’re aware that Gandhi was opposed to it, right?
At least those who’ve seen the movie probably know how to spell Gandhi’s name. :rolleyes:
If you don’t see a great problem here, there is no point going further. It’s like seeing a man standing in torrential rains asking where the water is.
:rolleyes: If you don’t see a great problem with using an Islamophobic hate site as your cite for why Islam is uniquely terrible, then the ignorance-fighting mission may not be for you.
To clarify, nobody is arguing with the well-documented fact that ideological terrorism and oppresion worldwide in this particular historical moment are much more prevalent in radical Islamist extremism than in extremist forms of other faiths.
Where your logic (and that of thereligionofpeace.com) fails is in jumping to the conclusion that this must be caused by an innate essential theological difference between Islam and other religions.
That’s like assuming that because a certain strain of Tay-Sachs disease is much more commonly associated with Jews than with other groups, that must be due to some unique peculiarity of Tanakhic thought. Actually, it’s due to other characteristics that many modern Jews happen to share that are only tangentially related to the content of the Jewish scriptures.
Similarly, modern Muslims live in a global political and socioeconomic situation that is affected by lots of other factors than their ancient holy book. Trying to reduce modern radical-Islamist terrorism and oppression to a theological trait makes no more sense than ascribing the incidence of Tay-Sachs to something in the Hebrew Bible.
So yeah, OldOlds is quite right that you haven’t done jack-shit to show that “Islam is Ebola and Christianity is the common cold”. The fact that you believe you have just reflects your own failure to think the matter through logically.
What evidence would you or old find acceptable? Clearly the vastly over represented cases of Islamic supremacy seems to mean have zero bearing on any of your impressions of the faith. I must confess I have not read the Quran/Sura/Hadith through and through and done some analysis with The bible and compared those with Buddhism and Hinduism and Jainism. All I have done is something much higher level. Look around the world and see that more often than not, it’s the muslims that tend to be the perpetrators of religious violence.
Islam is the dominant religion in Bangaladesh, why do we repeatedly hear cases of muslims butchering atheist bloggers? Where are the buddhists butchering atheists? Christians? Found some? How many? is it even CLOSE? Numbers matter, scale matters.
Pakistan, Kashmir, Chechnya, Bangladesh, India, the US, the UK, Germany, Israel, Sweden, etc etc
Problem after problem, now perhaps all these different nations with their different histories are all conspiring in such a way to make the muslims more violent, more murderous, or… perhaps we can put SOME weight on the idea that MAYBE the common variable of Islam might have SOMETHING to do with the increased propensity for violence.
No? I see, I forgot, some people are fond of rejecting the validity of extremely correlation data when it goes against the holy grail of left wing sacred thought. The misapplication of equality. The idea that ALL religious beliefs are equally tolerant, equally wicked, equally beneficial or harmful, that the hundreds of different collections of beliefs and ideas serve as some CONSTANT and IDENTICAL effect on the minds of men across the entire earth, such that we’d see NO DIFFERENCE if the population of Bangladesh were say, Christian or Hindu instead?
Everything is equal, and so when we notice much higher signal to noise correlations of religious violence to Islamic doctrines, we pretend there is no link there, there is no greater signal.
Poisoned minds, enslaved to a false application of an egalitarian ideal. IDEAS/BELIFS are NOT to be assumed to be equal. That maneuver is not allowed, and I think that is one of the major reasons so many people grade on a curve when it comes to the correlation evidence they accept or reject when it comes to linking higher incidence of violence with a specific religion.
Back to the original topic at hand though, how to solve the issue, we have these believers, many from a faith I find far more problematic than others, so how do we break the spell? I want to get more religious people, especially muslims to the point where even if Muhammad himself rode down from the heavens on his winged horse and told them that he had a message from GOD himself that they are to butcher their neighbors, that the muslims would get to the point ethically where they would stand and face this divine avatar of God and GOD himself and say NO!
Be the alternative version of Abraham, where instead of dropping down to ones knees in deference to the commandments of God, the man, free of his moral chains stares the creator of the universe in the face and says NO, no I will not kill my own son, no I will NOT bend to your will. We need a bit of Ahab in the face of the white whale of theological morality. We can’t snap our fingers and make people lose their faith, but perhaps we can make the kinds of forceful cases Hitchens used to make against the kinds of religious rationales that infect the minds of men.
That sounds like something that would be a reasonable assertion if it was the conclusion of some formal statistical analysis. Is it?
One of the conservative talk show hosts I listen to regularly, Michael Medved (A conservative jew), sometimes gets a call once in a blue moon criticizing religion. When this happens Michael will often get around to asking if the atheist does not rely on god, where does he get his sense of right and wrong from.
The answer is surprisingly difficult for the callers to answer, they never said what I would say in that situation. Myself. I am the arbiter of right and wrong, I am the decider. Of course this did not come about in a vacuum, I got some of my ethics from the society I grew up in and the ideas I’ve come across, but at the end of the day, I am the one who has to sign off on the validity of an idea. ME. Not God. I suspect this answer will drive the religious insane and seem completely unsatisfactory, even arbitrary, which it is, but then so is all of human ethics in an absolute sense. We are a product of our wiring by nature, and culture and society, and the combination of all of that with our own person hood produces our ethics.
I don’t give a rat’s ass about too many holy grails, but if a thousand years ago, Islam was an intellectual powerhouse, problems nowadays are not the fault of Islam, per se.
What moral claim do you have on someone who, with equal confidence, declares that you should be sacrificed to the Giant Spaghetti Monster?
What God told someone may be a lame-sounding basis for an ethical code, but vibes and what gives you the heebie-geebies isn’t any better.
Nowadays that’s very true, and as I already pointed out, there’s nobody here who doesn’t readily admit that that’s very true.
But it hasn’t always been true. Where you make your fundamental logical error is in assuming that because a certain characteristic is disproportionately prevalent among Muslims at one particular historical time, it must be caused by some intrinsic fundamental and eternal aspect of Islamic theology itself.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
Where are the buddhists butchering atheists? Christians?
[/quote]
Wow, you really don’t keep up with the news, do you? Buddhist atrocities tend to be committed not against atheists but against Muslims and Christians:
[QUOTE=Salvor]
[…] the validity of extremely correlation data […] much higher signal to noise correlations […] correlation evidence […]
[/quote]
:rolleyes: As Mangetout pointed out, this is just throwing around some sciencey-sounding terminology with no recognition of the fact that you haven’t got anything like an actual scientific analysis of this phenomenon.
Studying the global historical sociological/political impacts of particular religious doctrines, and how they interact with all other global historical sociological/political factors, is a tremendously complex issue.
When you pick a specific historical phenomenon such as 20th/21st-century radical-Islamist violence and try to ascribe it to intrinsic eternal factors in Islamic theology per se, you are not actually analyzing “correlation data” or “correlation evidence” or “signal to noise correlations” or any of your other loose statistical buzzwords. All you are doing is jumping to conclusions and clinging to them because they give you a feeling of truthiness.
[QUOTE=Salvor]
[…] perhaps we can make the kinds of forceful cases Hitchens used to make against the kinds of religious rationales […]
[/QUOTE]
:dubious: The last thing we need in this situation is more closed-minded sloppy thinking and ill-informed irrationality of the sort constantly peddled by the late Christopher Hitchens. Need I remind you how credulously this self-described devotee of rationality and truth swallowed a bunch of neocon fables about the necessity for invading Iraq? A blunder that he never had the elementary honesty or clearheadedness to admit and apologize for?
Atheists are not intrinsically smarter or more rational than anyone else. Stupid and arrogant arguments by atheists against religious belief won’t do jack-shit to ameliorate religious intolerance, even if (as I, a lifelong atheist, personally believe) they happen to be right about the ultimate invalidity of religious belief.
:rolleyes: Dude, could you please do that away from the keyboard? It’s a bit embarrassing to listen to the panting.
Seriously, I think it’s kind of pathetic when self-proclaimed hardheaded rationalists make it so evident that what really excites them about their so-called defense of rationalism is the opportunities it provides for elaborate authority-defiance fantasies.
Guys, just enjoy reading your superhero comic books and stop purpling up the prose in serious debates with imaginary heroic posturing before autocratic superhuman entities that all we atheists agree never actually existed anyway.
I am shocked. Shocked!
Looking at effects and imagining what the cause might be isn’t “higher level” than anything. You could use this reasoning to convince yourself that the US Constitution causes obesity, or that Christianity causes colonialism.
The list of countries with the highest homicide rates is dominated by Christian countries, mostly in Latin America or the Caribbean.
What’s the source for your claim that Muslims are “more murderous” than average?