Antonio1 - 12 May 2009 08:15 PM
The arguments used against faith and religion are basically because of the hatred and the evil it causes.
That’s just one side-effect, actually, or a pair I suppose, but I think you’re making the mistake of reifying religion to begin with, and that’s shifting your focus (it’s one of reified Religion’s specialties). Religion isn’t a thing unto itself, it’s just a category of human traits and behaviors and ideologies. We are it, so to speak, or probably more accurate and less obfuscatory, it is part of us. When we consider religion we’re just analyzing human nature, but when we consider Religion (reified) we tend to separate it from us, and that’s when we get the idea it acts upon us rather than that it’s just us acting upon ourselves and each other.
My biggest issue with religion, personally, is that it’s a serious compromise to intellectual integrity, or the integrity of healthy human mental functioning. Religious faith by-passes the bullshit detecting mechanisms by which we understand reality and through religion (dressing up that pure presumption in awe and wonder to look like nobility and virtue) believers give themselves the sense that it’s perfectly okay, even that it makes sense. In fact a basic tenet of at least Western pseudo-monotheism is that it’s the highest virtue, without which humans can’t please God. Ups the stakes so religious faith and religion aren’t questioned. In spite of that believers sure do devote a lot of bullshit rhetoric to obscuring what faith really is! If you consider only what the evidence indicates you get a radically different picture from what you see in the gushing, self-serving, completely abstract and detached apologetics.
Antonio1 - 12 May 2009 08:15 PM
Surely religions and faiths have a good part in society, but we can all do good things for ourselves and society without religion. What we must do is to ‘fight’ all social groupings that cause harm to society and religion is a good example.
Start by separating what’s truly characteristic and definitive of religion from the rhetoric and what’s just normal human social behavior. Then you begin to understand what religion really is and how it really functions.
Antonio1 - 12 May 2009 08:15 PM
What I argue is, the same reasons we use to ‘fight’ religion are the same applied to other social groups: eg. Football clubs affiliation. Football clubs are sport activities and they surely have good intention, but they raise hatered and, in many cases, they cause social disturbances between clubs. Many of us are born to become linked to a club and we don’t even argue why. Many times our club is loosing and still we support it. It’s beyond rationality. What I would like to know is if this situation is comparable and if we should treat all these social groupings the same way by condemning them. What makes the difference? (Presuming there is…)
Football clubs don’t teach, institutionalize and in every way encourage and nurture self-deceptive, obstinate and very often destructive and harmful thinking that its members are expected to proliferate though.
Byron
