Please list in point form what you think are the major problems with religions. Either in general or specificly about a religion.
Basically what are the adverse effects on individual/society religions might cause/have already caused.
Secondly, if you had a chance to create a new religion, what would you think are best suited for today’s world?
Thank you for participating in this discussion. 
There are no real problems with religions, per se. Generally speaking, if you live the life that they prescribe you’ll be a good person and a productive member of society.
The problem comes when people try to impose their beliefs on others, thinking that their beliefs are the only possible ones that anybody can or should have. That’s when the problems happen. It’s one thing to believe something, it’s another thing entirely to try to force others to believe it. And it’s another thing altogether when people will not back off a ridiculous position when faced with reality. But that is not a failure of religion. Beliefs can be modified, as my beliefs, my father’s beliefs, and my (deceased) grandfather’s beliefs have been. For Pete’s sake, my grandfather was a professor of biophysics at Pitt, he knew that the Bible wasn’t literal, and yet he was a devout Catholic.
It’s the “you’re wrong and I’m right” people that give religions a bad name. But religions, nah, there’s nothing really wrong with them.
Doesn’t that depend on the religion and what lifestyle it prescribes? You know, for example, the Aztec religion was all about courage, honesty, and ripping people’s still beating hearts out of their chests. Most people nowadays says that a good person is brave and honest, true, but our values have changed in regards to the whole heart thing.
My point being, a religion’s teachings could very well be evil or destructive.
Well…Of course, the main problem I have with most religions is that I’ve no reason to believe there’s a god, an afterlife, etc…
But apart from that, the main issue I would have is that I find the tenets of religions I’m familiar with inconsistent and/or non-sentical.
Amongst the monotheist ones, the christian religion seems the worst offender from this point of view. The whole “god sacrificed himself to himself so as to allow himself to allievate the punishments he had himself decreed” just doesn’t make any sense to me. Not even mentionning the fact that there’s one god and people worship all the three of him.
I would then rule out the Jewish religion because I don’t like much its legalism. Practicing Jews look to me more like lawyers than believers. Besides, I really don’t like YHWH as depicted in the Old testament. He really isn’t a guy I would want to be around.
So, amongst the three monotheistic religions, I would pick Islam, if I really had to. That’s the one that makes the more sense to me. And Allah is merciful.
Dualists religions are interesting, because they provide an explanation to the issue of the existence of evil. So I might pick Zoroastrianism rather than a monotheistic faith. But apart from the fact one can’t convert to zoroatrianism, I actually don’t know the real tenets of this religion.
Buddhism seems interesting and attractive. There are some major elements I like a lot but unfortunately some others I believe are comletely off-base. For instance I think that desire is the engine of life, and that’s quite at odds with Buddhism. Besides, to say the truth, I don’t really understand this religion. No…scrape that. I really don’t understand this religion. I can’t wrap my mind around it. I could be lured into it, though, if having a religion somehow became mandatory.
As for other religions, I just don’t know enough about them to have any opinion.
My ideal religion is no religion. Religion is about faith ( which is denial of reality ) and hatred. Hatred of others or hatred of oneself or hatred of the world itself. It is irrational, intolerant, corrupts people and is a tool for the power hungry and sadistic.
My biggest issue with religion is that many of it’s followers believe that it should rightfully bleed over into secular/political areas. Believe whatever the hell you want (one religion is more bizarre than the last, if you ask me). Just don’t try to involve the rest of us. The fact that “most” people in a given society buy it doesn’t make it any more real.
The biggest intellectual problem I have is that none of them correctly describe the universe. They were all set up at a time of less knowledge, by those with agendas, and no matter how much some of them adapt to the times, there is a core of unjustified belief.
My biggest moral problem is that some religions have a core value of special access to the absolute truth. This absolute: that whatever God tells us to do is moral, and by the way we the leaders of the religion know what God wants, is what leads to bloodshed and oppression. This is often driving by mundane political concerns, but you don’t ask no questions when God’s on your side.
I’m with Der Trihs - no religion works for me.
I disagree. Religion is about Faith - but Faith is not denial of reality. Faith fills in the gaps about the parts of reality we can’t observe. Some fanatic sorts tend to cleave to religious pseudo-historical sources (as distinct from religion itself) despite reality’s evidence to the contrary, but that’s not really the religion’s fault. The source was written by people, who inserted their own agenda and biases into it.
I’d say your last sentence is interesting, except backwards - People are intolerant, and irrational, and corrupt religion, not vice versa.
A religion’s just an idea. Ideas don’t corrupt people - other people do.
The real question is, isn’t this a standard effect of religions?
For instance, the adherents of Christianity and Islam, who comprise about half the world’s population, seem to have a recurring habit of insisting that others adhere to their standards of conduct. This hasn’t been true of all Christians or all Muslims, but it’s been true of enough of each to sure make it seem like the ones who don’t are the exception.
They are vocal minorities, RT. According to Wikipedia, there are approximately 2.1 billion practitioners. You only here from the lunatic fringe. The rest maintain their beliefs in dignified silence.
In a group that big you’re bound to have people that think they know what you should be doing at all times, no matter what the group is. In the old days these people were known as zealots, now they’re just loony.
Lots of religions are tribal; those gods are only particularly interested in Their specific people. Of course other people have other beliefs and practices; if they shared them they’d be One Of Us.
You’ll get “our gods are the best gods and those sorry saps who don’t have them have to deal with substandard gods, neener neener” a fair amount with tribal systems, but not so much with the conversion. Closest you get is Roman style, which was “We conquered you and thus proved your gods are weaker than ours; worship ours too and pay your taxes and we’ll leave you alone.” (Sometimes ‘worship ours too’ took the form of, “Your sky god Bob? He’s really Jupiter-Bob. Change the name in your liturgy, pay your taxes, and we’ll leave you alone.”)
About 1 billion of that 2.1 billion are Roman Catholics. Maybe most of them “maintain their beliefs in dignified silence,” but they’ve shown no reluctance to throw their weight around in this respect. (They might should pluck the log out of their own eye first, morally speaking, but they seem to be ignoring that particular teaching of their Lord.) Ditto evangelicals and conservatives of a wide variety of Protestant faiths, from Southern Baptists to Anglicans.
No offense, but it seems like the “you’d better obey my rules of conduct” school of Christianity is the one which is actually running the denominations with most of the Christians.
You make my head hurt. You really do. Even if 1 million people are banging the drums and making the noise, that amounts to 1/10th of 1 percent of all self-identifying Catholics in the world. Even if you allow that all the nuts are here and there are, say 5 million of them and they’re all Catholics AND they all want to control every aspect of your morality, that amounts to approximately 1/60th of the total population of the United States and an exceedingly small number of Catholics as a whole. That’s a lot of assumptions, not the least of which is that Catholics are not the driving force behind most of this nonsense, and if we include the Protestants and Muslims in this the numbers only get smaller.
I dare say that characterizing an entire religion by the most socially inept adherents is irrational at best, and I’d appreciate it if you would stop doing so.
Institutionalization. I can’t think of any religion that doesn’t seem to have originated in profound insights, but all of the ones that have an official clergy, an administrative hierarchy, a budget, and some degree of political power as an official organization look to me to have morphed into something very different and very ugly.
Most institutionalized religions are adversarially poised against the existence of ongoing spiritual insight and revelation from people other than those people and those insights that are already very much a part of the institution; many of them have effectively dragged a manhole cover over the whole phenomenon and stated that all that stuff happened in the past and that God has nothing more to say, etc
See above paragraph, then add: ossified social control, oppression of people who don’t espouse belief in the institutionalized belief system, violence and warfare against foreign tribes and nations that have different belief systems, promulgation of indefensible and horrifically destructive values and priorities, rapistic seizing of resources on behalf of the church, and ritualistic destruction and infliction of pain and misery for no particular purpose other than the generation of awe.
Already in the business, although I’m not very good at the apostolic thing. Overviews and details are available here
Unfortunately, sometimes those extremists are the only religion people are exposed to.
Christians are far too often the worst witnesses for christianity.
Faith can begin with the answer to something that is unknown. That’s fine - except it soon morphs into certainty. But once the answer becomes known, many of the faithful refuse to abandon their faith for the new knowledge. That’s where the problem is. Not all religions do this, but it is prevalent.
Do you deny that religion has bee used as a tool for evil?
People create religions. Do you say that all religions started off pristine, to be corrupted by people? Actually, people sometimes clean up religions. Judaism today is a far more civilized religion than that defined by the Torah.
Is rationalism at the heart of your definition of religion? If all religions adopted rationality and became evidence based, we’d wind up with a bunch of deists, but that’s about it. What we have today ranges from the fundamentalists, who will believe the Bible no matter what we find, to those groups who basically admit that there was no Adam and Eve, but still think they ate the forbidden fruit,. to reform Judaism who rewrites Biblical commentary to reflect the latest findings in archeology, but who still finds God in there somewhere.
Look: Joey the Rat is NOT the RCC’s “most socially inept adherent”; he’s freakin’ Pope. And while the RCC isn’t exactly majority-rule, they can’t rule without some popular support: he wouldn’t be Pope if 99.9% of the Church was against him.
Agreed, up to the point where you jumped the track and anthropomorphized religion by saying it did something. The fault lies in the adherents.
Anything can be used as a tool for evil. Care to start railing against rock and roll music, and comic books next? Hell, a screwdriver makes a great tool for evil. But the fault doesn’t lie with the screwdriver. It’s inanimate.
Can a religion be founded by people, and in its original form, hold ideas that other people find immoral? Sure. You can build badness into any structure. You can write a comic book espousing white slavery - that doesn’t mean the medium is inherently bad, or that all comic books are evil.
Rationalism is neither excluded or included explicitly in the definition of religion. Irrationality is a Bad Thing. Some people are irrational about their religion, and That’s Bad. Religion itself is not inherently one or the other, though.
No it doesn’t - it can’t. Knowledge cannot come from faith.
Yes it is; without that, there is no religion, in most cases. If you don’t believe the Bible/Koran/whatever, there’s no reason to be a Christian/Muslim/whatever.
I disagree ( surprise ! ). The people who try to do good, constructive things with religion are the ones trying to corrupt it, by making something fundamentally evil and destructive useful. That’s why they thend to do badly at it; religion is not the proper tool to do good with.
The standard “it’s just a tiny minority” speech, which I don’t believe for a moment. The widespread support for banning gay marriage is an example of mass religious bigotry at work.
No. Any sufficiently complex social structure has a abstract existence of it’s own ( IMHO ), like the economy or the government - or religion. It has it’s own purpose, much like a virus. It hijacks minds to make them it’s tools.
Religion is irrational by definition, since it’s based on faith.