No, but there has to be reason to develop a new invention.
What did they print in China?
Yes, the scientific method and it’s philosophies. That is really what I am talking about.
I am not saying that the church was directly responsible for inventions and discoveries. Of course many inventions were made before christianity. How much the religion of the inventor influenced it would have to be done on a case by case point. What I am saying is that Christianity allowed a specific mindset to evolve which brought about the scientific revolution. It influenced how we thought, not controlled what we did directly.
Universities and centres for learning were not a christian invention, they had been around much longer than christianity, in one form or another. They merely were the drive that allowed so many to spring up and prosper, thus educating those that might not normally have been able to get to it.
Jesuits, an order of the catholic church made many discoveries while in the employ of the church.
Yes, libraries were nice, but the average farmer, that with a proper education could have become a great mathmatician or philosopher, could not read, so those libraries were pretty pointless to them eh?
You cannot compare the past with today. The way we think, the way our society is set up is totally different from back then. There were no big, widespread privately funded anything or states to sponser things. Sure, some rulers had dreams of an educated society. The library in Alexandria for example, the learning centers in Greece, et al. None of which really prospered or were noted for their influence and lasting abilities.
If the church had not existed, what do you suppose would have replaced it? A magical mindset popping out of nowhere and suddenly a large, benign corporation spontaniously forms to fund and run universities and libraries?
I say that the development that lead up to modern science would not have happened without christianity. Too many implosible actions would have to occur to replace the gradual changes that led up to it, the changes that christianity allowed.
The changes in perception and literacy levels that led up to the inspiration, need and thus idea of the printing press occured because of the direct influence of the church. Without the church, it is not very likely that widespread literacy would have occured, and thus there would have been no need for a printing press. The fact that it happened in china long before doesn’t really change anything, after all, China was way too isolated to have much influence on the world. The problems associated with that are a different debate.
Everybody mentions this “something” that could have taken the place of the church if it had not occured, but no plausible reasons for what would cause the social and perceptual changes in society to necessitate these things has been introduced. Methinks nobody understand the term of social evolution or what a gradual change in perception throughout history entails. Ideals don’t just pop in from nowhere, some magical revelation by a farmer hoeing his field, with no reading skills or education. They are a gradual stairstep, take away one step and it all falls. Christianity was a MAJOR influence on modern science and philosophy. Which effects the way we think, the way we talk, the ethics we have, everything in society.
As a practising Christ follower (Christian, if you must. However I find it harder and harder to use that term because of all the religious connotations) I feel that YES, absolutly, the world WOULD be a better place without religion.
I think Christ himeself agreed with that principal and I think you in your OP are a wise man to see that yourself. However, I think that God is not to blame for the acts of the religious. After having sent his son to condemn religion.
When you “wash your hands” of something, you are saying you take no more responsibility for it. Problem is, people hear this ir-religious message and think “what a great philosphy! Let’s make a religion out of it!” :smack:
Epithemus, it is misleading to CREDIT Christianity with the birth of science, enlightenment, etc - because these things eventually came into prominence IN SPITE of religion, not BECAUSE of it. The centuries of barbarism during the Middle Ages is more indicative of the church’s real influence on humanity.
Yes, there were Christian educational institutions - universities, philosophers, theologians, but all this says is that humans are thirsty for knowledge and will find means to progress in face of adversity. How much sooner would the scientific revolution have occured if Constantine had never accepted Jesus and Christianity was relegated to die off as a small Hebrew cult?
Take for example, ancient Greece (and the Roman Empire). They were far more secular than the Europeans of the Middle Ages. The Rennaisance was the attempt to recapture the classical majesty that was stifled by Popes and Christian Kings.
Would the world be better off it there were no Religion? I don’t know. But I DO KNOW ONE THING - the world would be VASTLY better today if there were no CHRISTIANITY. Christianity has cost us dearly, and it continues to do so. It (and its cousin, Islam) need to be expunged from the Earth if we are to progress.
In spite, because of- influence is influence. Without it, there would be no IN SPITE of.
And no, read my links, do some reasearch. All science and philosophy didn’t develop in spite of christianity. Philosophy, of which science is just a branch, was HEAVILY, and directly influenced by religion. Cite- History of Philosophy
Again, there is this misconception that people thought the same way back before christianity. That societies were the same, and that modern ideas held true back then. Chrisitanity led to the formation of the modern ideals and concepts which you use to judge it.
I don’t see any evidence that Christianity caused the barbarism in the dark ages. If anything It held together society during it. Were the barbarians Christians? No, what caused the dark ages was drought, the little Ice age, the fall of the Roman Empire, and disease. The church held together what it could of society, though perhaps not intentionally.
Sure, today christianity might not have no purpous or influence. Or it might. I certainly don’t adhere to its dogma, or believe in it’s god. That doesn’t mean that I can’t see quite clearly that chrisitanity had a serious and irrocovical influence on modern thought.
Perhaps a little research is in hand, the lines of influence create a web that is vast and fascinating. Read some of those books I listed, visit some of those sites, instead of relying on your bias and incomplete knowledge of history.
(notes that History is merely a hobbyhorse of mine, and there are many better qualified SDMB members to be discussing this, and I wonder where they are) ** Libertarian** for example is very knowledgeable about the history of philosophy from what I have seen. Surely the SD has some Historians as members?
ABSOLUTELY! I agree wholeheartedly. But I didn’t get the sense that you were arguing equivalence of religious vs. non-religious world; rather you seemed to suggest that the world is BETTER because of religion. I think human nature is going to be human nature regardless of religious beliefs. Sorry if I wasn’t clear; I’m not defending the O.P.'s position. I’m responding to your assertion that “everything we have today we owe to religion”.
And that differs from every other thread in this forum, how?
Well, I don’t think they stopped having universities in Stalinist Russia, did they? Who funded them? Who funds the universities in Communist China? For that matter, the college I went to obtained the majority of its funding from non-religious sources. So there are your examples of universities NOT funded by religion.
What do you mean by “mechanism”? Humans developed bigger brains than other species as a means of survival. It is natural for us to be inquisitive about our surroundings. I don’t know how science “started”; I wasn’t there at the time. I suppose a cave man banged a couple rocks together and made a spark, and then figured out that he could make fire at will. Another person figured out that you could take the seeds out of fruit and plant them. Others looked at the stars and noticed that they moved in predictable patterns. I fail to see how religion was a causative factor in discovering such things. In fact, if anything, religious beliefs would be a hindrance. If you “believe” that the sun is a chariot being pulled across the sky, it’s just going to take you that much longer to discover that it is actually a gigantic nuclear reaction and that the Earth orbits it. If you “believe” that seizures are caused by evil spirits inhabiting the body, it’s not going to help you discover that it is caused by abnormal functioning of the brain. Sorry, but I just don’t see the connection.
Well, since socialism is a very recent ideal, I think this is not a very good analogy. Did russia have alot of universities and many breakthroughs in science and philosophy? Where was all their universities from sixteenth cenutry untill the very recent 20th century? Just because religion influnced (past tense) the way we think today, doesn’t mean that it still has its hand in influencing (present tense) the world today. Those examples are not good enough, they are based upon a history that is delved in religious roots.
Again, I am not the best person to explain this, I did post links to books that do it very well. The evolution of how we think is a very complex process that would take me a month to write a very good synopsis on. What I mean by mechanism is, by what process do you propose that humans went from “the stars are holes in the skin of a wolf, held up by the gods” to, the scientific method which allows us to achieve the objective and detailed information and perform the experiements it takes to determine that they are great balls of gasses burning under enormous pressure. There are so many steps from there to here, that it is impossible to trace them all. Chrisitanity, in specific, was a MAJOR player in the evolution from superstition to science. Meaningfully or not.
Without that relgion (christianity in this instance), we would probably not have achieved the steps that were taken in the grand evolution of thought, that brought us our modern day philosophies. That is just Christianity. How much influence did Greek Mythology have on the Ionians?
Again, like most of my links say: for example from this site I listed earlier:
bolding mine.
Maybe. But it’s gonna be harder to convince recruits to die for your cause if you can’t promise them that heaven awaits. Or a harem of virgins. Or something.
Show me someone who’s interested in arguing either point, please. I don’t think either is true. I think religion is a tool, like any other.
No, I’m emotional about having some random person insinuate that I’m a closed-minded ass who only believes in a religious course to certain ends. Someone was suggesting the concept of getting rid of religion; I responded pointing out that religion aids some people towards a set of goals that most people would agree are positive. I get a, “Well, surely you would concede that that can be done without religion?” Which rather suggests that I had said or implied something about the state of having-no-religion in the first place.
That is irrelevant and changing the subject: I am defending something important to me from those who think that nothing good comes of it. I am doing so by pointing out the good that comes of it in my own life and in the lives of others. What I think of other routes to those good things is irrelevant to the point that the OP suggests removing a tool to accomplish those goals, specifically the tool I and a number of other people use most readily and to greatest effect.
I’m not the one arguing the case for the restriction of choice here, and I will not tolerate having my arguments turned around to suggest that I am. If I wanted to say religious faith and practice were superior or the only way to important goals, I would have said so; I am only arguing the point that it is a valid tool to get there, and so discussions of other valid tools are distractions from my point that I find myself suspecting are being used as rhetorical tools to call my credibility and honesty into question, or at the very least distract from my point.
It’s just muddying the waters and introducing tangential and irrelevant points to swamp mine. Misleading debating tactics enrage me.
As a matter of fact, they developed nuclear reactors and put men in space independently of efforts in the U.S., so I would say yes. They also made a transition from an agrarian to an industrial society. I’m not defending Stalinism, obviously; it was disasterous. But the point is, religion is not a necessary prerequisite for scientific and technological advancement.
So what you are asking for is an example of a university that was not funded by the Catholic Church, but during the time when the Catholic Church controlled all the universities. Hmmm…give me an example of a blue car that is red.
I disagree. Those ideals were already strongly in place WAY before Christianity. As was already pointed out, the rise of Christianity signalled a big step BACKWARDS from the Greek ideals of philosophy and scientific inquiry, not to mention the ancient Chinese.
I don’t see any causal relationship between Greek mythology and science, either. You might as well posit that they couldn’t have made any scientific discoveries if they had worn pants instead of tunics.
You should have quoted the rest of the sentence:
“Whether Christianity was uniquely capable
of fostoring such development is more debatable but sound,
non-chauvinistic arguments can be and have been made for
Christianity’s special compatibility with scientific discovery.” [bolding mine]
You would then expect him to go on to prove Christianity’s UNIQUE ability to enable science to develop, but he really doesn’t do that. If you wish to argue that Christianity was necessary to foster scientific advancement, you need to show not only that it DID happen that way, but also that it couldn’t have happened any other way.
—Lilairen: That is irrelevant and changing the subject—
No, sorry. It’s not irrelevant to ask whether people, many of whom benefit from religion today would be better or worse off if religion had never existed. The illegitimate tactic here is speaking as if this were a matter of forcibly taking it away from people now, for whom it certainly would be a loss, as opposed to it never having existed it the first place, in which case its not clear that it would have been (because other tools may have developed that play the same role and gained the same appeal).
—Show me someone who’s interested in arguing either point, please. I don’t think either is true. I think religion is a tool, like any other.—
Well okay… look: you! You are arguing that it is beneficial in an absolute sense, in that without it, many people would be “miserable.” But that is simply not the sort of “would” concerned with a question of alternate history.
—Epimetheus: Again, the magic wand waving. We COULD say that if Einstein would not have existed, somebody else would have popped up and allowed America to discover the Atomic bomb. I would say otherwise myself.—
You’re one of those people who repeats basically the same thing I say, and then pretends that we’re in disagreement and I’m an idiot, aren’t you? Though you don’t go far enough: BOTH claims (better, worse) are magic handwaving because they ask a question about what history would have been like without a factor that played a major role in most of the history that actually took place. We can’t say what might have happened without Einstein: for all we know, Einstein set back the theories of quantum gravity by decades, or the Nazis would have developed the bomb, or what have you. We just have no idea: there are too many factors to consider: and that’s even with just ONE MAN.
—No doubt there will be some more pointless hand waving about how something would have replaced it, when to erradicate religion entierely wipes certain steps, that were necessary to reach what we consider modern day science, would not have existed without religion.—
Again, you are doing just as much handwaving! You have no idea if the steps taken were really hurried along or impeded by religion, especially since we don’t know what we’re heading towards. It’s unlikely that, without religion, people would have ceased to think and wonder and inquire about the world around them, much less seek to improve their surroundings. It’s not at all clear that such a drive must necessarily have been envisioned as a project meant to appease the gods or dogmatise ideas about the metaphysical.
And I am hardly downplaying religion to a secondary influence, which you can see if you actually read my post. I’m just saying that you can’t play the “guilt by association” game when society is dominated by that association in the abstract, but not always in the everyday, for every person.
You are calling a coin after it’s already been flipped and revealed.
—And if there were no religion, what would we have, “non-religion”?—
No, not if you mean “non-religion” in some sort of active, affirmative sense.
We’d have a bunch of people doing and thinking stuff, like before. What sort of things we don’t have any clue.
Did they independently discover the ideologies of western science? Did they reinvent all the tenants of modern thought? No, they used that method to “independently” develop nuclear reactors and put men in space.
Gotta run to work though, like right now, so I will answer the other parts of this thread when I get back.
Apos- perhaps I just misunderstood the point you were making. Not saying you were an idiot.
I said no such thing.
No he wasn’t, he simply asked if the world would be better. He didn’t say “get rid of religion”. And if I elect to disagree with something YOU said, it does not mean that I agree with everything the O.P. said. In fact, I disagree with much of what the O.P. wrote.
No, it is extremely relevant. If you argue that religion accomplishes good things x,y, and z, then you better believe it’s relevant if x,y, and z can be accomplished WITHOUT religion.
Dude, you need to get a grip.
Ha! Color me whooshed, because THAT was damn funny! 
Yeah, and I think a lot of people would be miserable if someone took their cars away. And you can posit an alternate history without that tool, and see the huge amount of stuff that would have to change – food distribution systems, whether or not people can easily move away from their deranged relatives, ease of transporting goods, speed of travel – and fewer people would die in car accidents. In my opinion, that’s less than the scope of what the OP posits, especially given that scientific thought and religion are indistinguishable in their initial stages.
Besides, you also need alternate biology.
http://webmd.lycos.com/content/article/1728.77081
Religious experience is tied up with a surprising lot of brain structure, and I’d personally be really reluctant to fuck around with that without knowing exactly what’s going on.
Just because something can be done does not mean that everyone wants to do it that way, nor does it mean that everyone should be required to do it that way.
I don’t drive. I’m happier not driving. I can accomplish the stuff I want to accomplish without a car. If I suggested seriously the question, “Would the world be better off if there were no automobiles?” I’d be laughed out of the SDMB, even if I supported it with the posited destructiveness of “car culture” and the proliferation of suburban sprawl, the death rate due to car accidents, the limited nature of fossil fuels and the environmental effects of their byproducts, road rage, and the Oklahoma City bombing.
And if someone were to take me seriously enough to point out to me that a majority of car users don’t run over little old ladies in crosswalks, use their cars productively to get to their jobs or to their friends, that not all cars are pollution-spewing hulks and a danger to society, and it’s only a few loonies who fill their trunks with explosives and run them into public buildings, I’d have to allow as how they might actually have a point, and that my notion that cars were nuisances kept around by the less enlightened might do with a little refining. If I were to instead respond, “Well, I can do all those things without using a car, and other people can too!” I bet I’d be thought a little daft.
Just because a region of the brain has been identified as being closely tied to religious thought, does not mean that structure exists FOR THE PURPOSE of religion. Electrically stimulating a particular region of the brain can cause a person to experience religious feelings, but I am unaware of any cases of such stimulation causing an atheist to convert.
This is what you said earlier:
“I cannot conscienably consider the violent works of some to outweigh the comfort, the balance, the sense of personal place, and the motivation that is my experience of faith, not only personally, but in observing the majority of religious people I know.”
You clearly state that the positive aspects of religion OUTWEIGH the negative. But at my suggestion that those positives might be had without the religion, you immediately became defensive and hostile. NOBODY said ANYTHING about requiring things, abolishing things, or performing brain-surgery. Please try to get on board here.
Actually, that’s a legitimate question, but outside the scope of this thread.
If your strawman analogy had anything to do with the subject at hand, I might consider that an insult.
Lilairen, I think you are seriously missing what people are actually discussing.
For instance: “Religious experience is tied up with a surprising lot of brain structure, and I’d personally be really reluctant to fuck around with that without knowing exactly what’s going on.”
Considering the context of this discussion, what do you mean by “fuck around with that”? The disucssion very quickly went away from the OPs “religion does some bad stuff today, and I resent it” to a question, essentially of alternate history, and that’s what my comments, at least, have been in reference to. So talking about messing around with people’s brains is totally out of left-field. NO ACTIONS are being advocated: it is not actually possible, as far as I know, to have history be different than it has been: the question is: can we know what it would have been like without a certain element? My flat out answer, with regards to this element, is no, we can’t possibly know, and hence can’t possibly have any way to judge whether it would be better or worse.
Indeed, your argument seems to be pointing in a direction that’s actually a very different aspect of this question, namely, is it possible that religion might not have developed, given man’s evolutionary course? That, again, is not a question I think we have enough evidence to answer, though many of the more archetypal ideas of religion certainly fit what Daniel Dennet calls the “good tricks” of evolution: i.e. ideas and solutions to certain problems and dilemnas that crop up naturally during any survey of the field. A being who relates to himself and the world in a deeply psychological and deeply personal manner is quite likely to hit upon the idea that maybe the world relates back to him in the same way: or that there is an ultimate reflection of his own agency in everything.
Now, I think it would be downright impossible that no human (or even proto-human) would never have hit upon this sort of thought at some point even early in intellectual development. The question is: would it have been possible that that and other such thoughts never became the basis for particular sorts of social organizations and routines? Again, at that point, I don’t know. There are many many philosophical “good tricks” out there (and some may even be right!) and not all are religious in nature (unless you define "religious exceedingly broadly)
The recent research on brain structures that are used most often in activities associated with religious practices are interesting, but it hardly necessitates religion per se as their explicit purpose. Religious impulses are, rather, one way in which people interperet the expiriences these parts of the brain provide, and religious practices are designed around eliciting some of their effects: but it’s not at all clear what their original context was, or where they could play into all the various ideas mankind has about himself and the world around him. Most likely these structures developed long before mankind had intellectual development to even concieve of things such as religion.
For instance in terms of the mystical experience (which not even very many believers actually ever have), any sort of intense concentration and repeated action can trigger it: or even electrical stimulus in the lab. Plenty of atheists have had these sorts of experiences without necessarily associating them with a god.
—Just because something can be done does not mean that everyone wants to do it that way, nor does it mean that everyone should be required to do it that way.—
Again, I don’t think either blowero or I are arguing anything about “should.”
As for the car analougy, I’m not sure what you are trying to prove with it. Obviously, if we are going to have a discussion about whether something is more beneficial than harmful in the long run, and we expect that there is some actual answer to this question, then of COURSE the answer to some things will be “yes,” just as the answer to others will be “no.” So pointing out a specific thing that you think is a “yes” doesn’t much help to explain anything in regards to whether religion is a “yes” or a “no.”
Further, “cars” may be too broad anyway, depending on what you mean it to encompass. If it encompasses all personal motorized landbased vehicles that take people from point A to point B, then you’re pretty much ruled out ANYTHING that can serve the purposes that cars serve. However, it’s not clear that the same can be said for religion (and even you seem to agree), given the purposes for it as you have defined them.
I don’t think so; I think that given that there’s a part of the brain that provides the stuff that goes into feeding religious impulses for some people, positing a universe without religion requires that that part of the brain does not exist. Suggesting that while this brain structure exists, it does not lead to a conceptualisation of the divine for anyone strikes me as being incredibly implausible. For such a world to exist and look plausible to me would require either fundamentally different biology or for certain philosophical developments that resulted in part from religious study in this world to have been developed somehow without that context (I’m thinking of no-mind and other meditation practices here).
People are, as a rule, social creatures; they share experiences, and build communities on the basis of those experiences. For someone to have this god-experience-thing, whether it’s some external experience or just a weird nerve firing in the brain (the one being the stereotypical theist argument explaining the brain structure in question, and the other being the stereotypical atheist argument for the same), and not seek out others who have also had it strikes me as implausible in the extreme. For there not to develop rituals and patterns and superstitions around trying to induce the god-experience-thing seems also implausible; I find that it feels good, and most people I know are pretty drawn to that sort of thing. If it’s rumoured to be a good thing, there are going to be people who can claim to give it to others successfully, or who know better techniques, or can get the good thing to happen more regularly, and bang, you’ve got a priesthood. In a lot of places you also get secret initiatory practices – this is where the word “Mystery” comes from – where people have come up with elaborate ways of inducing satori in others, and have either protected them from being debased or concealed them from unbelievers and insufficiently believers or people they don’t think qualify.
I also tend to experience that the god-feeling-thing comes to me most often either at points at which I have figured something about about the universe I live in, whether large or small or at times when I feel at peace with the universe and connected to it; this experience is something I’ve found to be consistent with other people with whom I’ve discussed the subject. I would be very surprised if figuring out how the universe worked for the sole purpose of figuring out how it works were not driven, in many, perhaps most people’s minds, with an urge to get that feeling to trigger off again. As such, I strongly believe that religion and science draw from the same roots, and that ending one would at best cripple and most likely kill the other. They’re both ways of trying to explain the world.
It’s a tool; it’s a tool that happens to suit my hand, a set of ways of looking at the world. I think a world that did not have that tool available would be much poorer, lacking the variety and span of insights that have been brought about not only directly by that tool, but by the context that the tool brings. I use the set of tools that suit my temperament, my perceptions, and my interpretations; I think a world that lacked an availability of those tools would lose a great deal. A number of religious people I know use the same tools I use and call them by different names, or call different things entirely by the same names, which confuses the issue; an atheist I know assigns the experience I find to be god-experience-thing to a different category of phenomenon, but nonetheless has the pattern.
Just because I’m satisfied with the train, my bicycle, and my feet doesn’t mean that I think it’s reasonable to expect other people to be. Religion comprises a huge set – more a superset, really – of symbols, modes of thinking, approaches to the universe, and points of inspiration; it seems even sillier to me to presume that there is nothing in there that might be of value than it is to deride the automobile as useless.
The patterns of thought trained in some parts of Orthodox Judaism have honed the minds of some brilliant physicists – because the discussion of the Law in its detail is the same sort of process of thought. Many of the ancient stone buildings record the passage of the stars and planets; the morning star/evening star pattern of Venus is recorded in the story of Quetzalcoatl. The Islamic world preserved the writings of ancient Greece while Europe was in its Dark Age. To set aside the comfort, the artwork, the good deeds, and all such things brought about because of some people’s choice to practice their religion as they believe they ought, religion and religious people have generated and preserved actuall real thought and data about how their world worked.
Yes, one can argue that those things can happen without the faith – but I do not believe that one can successfully argue that all of them would. Some people need certain tools to do certain things. I need a ladder to paint my hall; if I didn’t have a ladder, the idea of painting the hall would never have crossed my mind as something worth doing or even plausible as an exercise.
I collect symbol sets. This is one of my major foci in life. The idea that a world with fewer ways of thinking about things would be a better one is honestly incomprehensible to me. Though these days I’m more liable to agree with my father on bitter and sarcastic days that the world’s problems can be blamed on monotheism.
No religion = no wars.
Leader: “Go charge that hill full of spears”
Soldier: “No way! I’ll die!”
Leader: “You may, but after you die, you go to paradise”
Soldier: “CHARGE!!”