Figuratively, it works just fine to describe the same dynamic. Genetic “tribe” is only one possible criterion for how humans identify a social community or in-group. Religion is another. It’s still the same impulse.
But my whole point is that Christianity does not contain any social innovations. It just amounts to one more tribe. Human beings adapted non-genetic social identifiers long before Christianity. Christianity does not contain a single truly unique idea.
Funny but I had highly similar thoughts when I read this comment of yours:
You have no evidence that ants are religious using any normal definition of the term, and you are just redefining religion to mean altruism.
I made no such equivocation. I said that if they are altruistic they might also be religious. Not that the two things are the same.
Diogenes the Cynic The commonality is that they are both types of community, but it’s hard to have a discussion if we don’t have a broader palette to discuss. Yes the impulse to organize socially is the same, but how one defines who is the ‘in’ group is different. IMO what makes Der Trihs’ arguments valueless is that he claims that religion makes people violent, whereas I would argue that it is the mere separation of social categorization and the competition for resources that does that. Christianity in particular was an attempt to universalize religion so that one could move beyond the tribal paganisms and share in a common experience that was broader than the traditions of the kinship group. If one were to discuss this with Christian philosophers you’d get a lot of response and a lively discussion. If you were to just equivocate that tribe and religion were the same thing, there would be no room for discussion because you are removing sophistication from the semantic palette. Anyone who studies the history of various religions will see this theme of providing a universal mythos rather than a tribal mythos as a common thread amongst the great religions. It is this attempt at universalization that is at the core of the worlds great religions. Religion has innovated as time went by, just as other concepts have. Perhaps Christianity is outmoded now, but it wasn’t at the time of its creation, it was revolutionary. This is the problem with an argument like Der Trihs puts forward. His argument is inherently superstitious. He cannot even comprehend the unique organizational aspects inherent to particular faiths that differentiate them and cause the people within those hierarchies to behave differently, to him it’s all just ‘evil’.
There is an interesting argument to be had that Marxism is a Christian heresy by an atheist. It takes a lot of the social organization principles but removes the notion of the supernatural higher power in favor of the material higher power, the state. However, it’s an argument that I am not terribly qualified to make, but find endlessly fascinating when I hear it made by people more educated than myself.
Christianity was not the first attempt at a universalist religion. Buddhism did the same. I would actually argue that the assertion that Christianity was really all that universalist is questionable from the outset. Even the sayings of Jesus are filled with divisionary themes – rich/poor, “first/last,” “sheep/goats,” etc. He said he “came with a sword,” he would set familes against themselves, and so on. There was a definite in-group/out-group dynamic from Christianity’s oldest, traceable rhetoric and it continues through the Epistles (where even the wrong kind of Christians are anathemized and excoriated as “antichrists”) all the way to the blood fueled revenge fantasy of Revelation.
There have always been individual Christians who see past divisions and see human beings universally as brothers, regardless of cultural or religious lines, byt the same can be said of individual Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and atheists. No matter what the highest ideals of a given religious institution may state, the human impulse to divide and tribalize always subsumes the ideal and bogs the instututions down in us vs. them distractions.
Even Karl Marx had a genuinely humanistic and compassionate ideal at heart. That humanism and compassion never seems to translate into institutions, though. I think that’s because it’s an individualistic, organic, biological impulse that can’t be externalized or mechanized. Religious institutions are artificial hearts.
Having said all that, I will agree with you that religion is not the cause of human violence. Violence is as biologically innate in humans as sex and breathing.
Well you’re right, I haven’t got to the crux of the problem. Let me try again. You have no evidence that ants are religious. You are simply assuming that altruism derives from religion, then assuming without evidence that an ants may have religion, as an explanation for their altruism. Watch:
Diogenes counters:
And the crux of your response is:
You simply baldly assert that acting altruistically (ie other than in immediate self interest) is a religious concept, and then assume that where there is altruism but no evidence of religion, there might be religion so you may be right.
Further, on the basis of any common definition of religion, there is not merely no evidence that ants are religious but evidence that such an assertion is absurd. So you are just distorting what “religion” means, in order to water it down to the point where you can posit that ants might be religious, in order to protect an unsupported (and probably wrong) assertion, namely that acting altruistically is a religious concept.
If anyone believes that nonsense they are fucking idiots. That is not an insult - it is pointing out the blindingly obvious.
Off the top of my head:
The Times ran an extremely negative article on them on 1991. Good read. With lots of substance.
The BBC ran an extremely negative piece on them recently with some prime video footage of really creepy, obviously calculated, made to be edited and manipulated for propaganda, as well as clearly hostile behavior of scientology leaders towards the BBC crewand a brief piece of propaganda from scientology’s side with their own video footage and voice over, basically accusing the news media to be crooked and evil (it’s really surreal). The video is available online
All sorts of respected judges said that scientology was BAD ™ for all sorts of reasons.
Basically, the church of scientology is a caricaturically evil, greedy organisation. Its continuous success despite the overwhelming mounds of evidence of its misdeeds and the general unsavoriness of its assertions: Morning sickness is the mother trying to hurt/kill her baby, psychiatry is a scam and an evil scheme (really!), and on and on.
While I in no way intend this as an endorsement of Scientology, I’m firmly of the opinion that nothing would have made the mediaeval Catholic Church blush. From Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, I present to you Robert of Geneva, who promised the protection of the Mother Church to the desperate citizens of Cesena, who were resisting yet another “taxation” by the nobles (basically, the nobles wanted to come into the city and take everything of value). The town opened its gates because of Robert’s promise, and, crying “Sangue et sangue!” (“Blood and more blood!”) he entered at the head of the condotierri column and laid waste to the city, massacring its inhabitants in a several-days-long orgy of rape and slaughter.
Later, he was elected Pope.
Sorry for the hijack, but I don’t feel like letting the mediaeval Catholic Church off the hook in any particular discussion.
Sailboat
So what ? That doesn’t change the fact that they exist, that they work, which proves that you are wrong.
Because if that standard was applied to religion, none would pass. They are ALL stupid, ALL irrational. Scientology Hinduism or Christianity or whatever; there’s little to choose between them in terms of plausibility or rationality.
Also, as far as christianity goes, there is a built in defense against such ridicule. Jesus said believers will be mocked and shunned. No one in the faith wants to be Peter, and hear the cock crow for them. So any type of ridicule will only go to harden their faith. Then, eventually, they just counter such ridicule with even more ridiculous arguments… before you know it, you have Kirk Cameron on the intertubes with a banana. At what point, do you just stop making fun, and walk away?
I never said any such thing. You are reading more into it than I said.
I am actually not using an abused form of the term religious. There are a lot of philosophical discussions about the nature of religion, but they cannot be had with people who are simply looking for a reason to hate people. I won’t get any deeper into it, because I don’t believe you are willing to discuss the topic in good faith. You want me to defend a straw man argument that I didn’t make. Not gonna happen.
What position is it that I am holding that is wrong? I’m actually curious if you even know what position I hold. I’ve said it, but I don’t think you know what it is.
On the topic of religion:
I keep seeing this notion put forth as if it were fact. My friends and I got into heated but cordial debates about religion as early as 12th grade. For the next 20 or so years I was ready and willing to debate anyone. Then I finally woke up to the fact that I was never going to convince anyone other than myself. A true believer can always fall back on “that’s where faith comes in” or “I know it in my heart” or “my own experiences have convinced me” or “the Word of God says so” or “it’s a mystery,” leaving me to bang my head against a wall and rue having wasted the past 30 minutes trying to rationally discuss the irrational. But nobody has ever told me I’m not allowed to debate or criticize on matters of religion. Now if I were start arguments that disrupted the classroom or workplace, or if I resorted to calling my adversaries fools and idiots, there would be repercussions, but that would be true no matter what we were discussing.
Back to the topic, compare these two statements:
Scientology are a bunch of violent wackos out to dominate the Earth.
Jews are a bunch of violent wackos out to dominate the Earth.
If you want to experiment and see which ones are fair game, go around and share these opinions with 50 people each out on the street. See what kind of response you get to each. Write the responses down and compare them at the end.
If you want to add a flourish. You can use a second sentence. “Something must be done!”
I am not entirely sure how meaninfgul this is. I think there would be some agreement that Scientologists are a bunch of wackons, but also some agreement that Jews are violent and are out to dominate the earth. What exactly would this tell us?
He did, but that’s sort of my point. Clement got elected as a French puppet while the Templars were still in existance. You were sort of saying, the Templars got wiped out and therefore the Papacy came under French control. It was the other way around, in reality.
You misunderstand my point: I’m not defending religions as being unassailable. I’m arguing against your statement “I do not mean it is all right to call their adherents idiots or such. Individual dignity must be respected.” in conjunction with “You believe that the Book of Mormon is actually a record of ancient America found by Joseph Smith and translated using magical translating stones? That is fucking lunacy, man!”. You cannot make the second statement while simultaneously claiming to be taking the high road and not insulting the adherents directly.
The statements “Anyone who believes what you believe is an idiot” and “You’re an idiot” are not that different; in both cases you’re calling the other person an idiot. The only difference at all is that in one case, you’re explaining why.
So get off your high horse; you can’t call a religion lunacy without calling its adherents lunatics. Deal with it. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t attack their religion, but this this faux-polite veneer while stabbing from the other side is a load of crap.
Case in point:
If you really feel that a person who “believes that nonsense” wouldn’t think this is an insult, then you’re a fucking idiot. That is not an insult - it’s pointing out the blindingly obvious.
Der Trihs, you speak of plausibility and rationality as if these were eternal absolutes. I’m sorry to break it to you, but they’re not. What seems perfectly obvious and logical to *you *will not necessarily be viewed as incontrovertible fact by every intelligent person. Aristotle famously dismissed the ethereal teachings of Plato and embraced the physical world as true reality, yet found a universe without a prime mover to be an unacceptable breach of logic. Many of the keenest minds to have graced the world’s stage have found there to be no fundamental conflict between a belief in the divine and the pursuit of reason. I have read no argument from you or any of the other religion bashers on this board that might even remotely tempt me to suspect that you have a superior point of view, let alone a monopoly on the truth. You’ve mentioned a few examples of atrocities committed in the name of God and drawn sweeping conclusions that show no evidence of logical thinking. To the contrary, the venom in your tone whenever religion is discussed only reinforces my opinion that your views are motivated by a deep seated and potentially violent degree of irrational bigotry.
:rolleyes: You have repeatedly said that religion is necessary to society; I’m pointing out that it’s not, and in fact is destructive to society. All over the world, the stronger religion is, the more dysfunctional society is. The claim that religion is just one of the standard false claims that the religious like to claim.
So ? He was an ignorant primitive, no matter how smart he was.
And they were wrong, and their keenness rather blunted by being religious. Religion is the opposite of reason; it’s faith. Religion is hostile to everything but itself; those “keen minds” either avoided applying those minds to anything involving their religion, or were too ignorant to know how wrong they were.
Your attempt to claim that religion is something other that stupid founders on the little problem that religion has been consistently WRONG. Whenever it makes a claim that can be actually checked out, it’s been wrong. If being wrong all the time isn’t stupid, what is ?
You do realize that you could use the same argument to defend Fascism or Communism ? Just “a few atrocities”, indeed. I hate religion because of the harm it has caused, and is causing.
And this is yet another attempt to claim special privileges for religion. Why is it “bigotry” to hate religion ? Is it bigotry to hate racism ? Imperialism ? Fascism ? Colonialism ?
It tells us about the level of acceptibility of the criticism. In this thread I am talking about how acceptable it is to criticize, not the relative truth of common criticisms.
I didn’t mean to make it sound like that. I don’t disagree with what you are saying in any way.