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Originally Posted by willravel
In order to be religious one must allow some reason to be suspended in order to allow for faith. It's not reasonable to believe that Moses managed to get billions of species of animals onto a boat that he built with his bare hands in order to save them from a global flood, therefore a religious person would take that on faith. This capability to suspend reason in order to accommodate faith is easily exploitable by people who wish to use religion to their own end.
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I'm not sure where you get your definition of reason, because belief in a higher power can be perfectly reasonable. Being a christian, let alone a theist doesn't necessitate a literal interpretation of the bible, and even if it did, it isn't necessarily unreasonable to take the bible at face value. I know what you're trying to say, and it has nothing to do with the suspension of reason. It has more to do with you defining your way of making sense with the world as the reasonable one, and consequently those who come to different conclusions are by definition not completely reasonable.
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I will give you an example to illustrate my point: The al Qaeda. This is a group of religious extremists who have twisted the context of their holy book, the Qur'an, to fit in with their war on Western influence on the Middle East. They teach that certain sects are blasphemous and thus are deserving of death simply because of a difference of opinion regarding the linage of the religion following Muhammad. I'm sure as a religious individual you're familiar with the teachings of the Qur'an: they teach that Jihad is not a battle against others but is rather a battle with the darker parts of one's self in order to become a better person. Also, there is no mention of virgins waiting for martyrs. Unfortunately, leaders such as Osama Bin Laden have been able to take advantage of faith and have sown seeds of murderous hatred in the minds of people who may otherwise be simply following the word of the Qur'an.
So what would happen if these people were not religious? How would one convince a man to martyr himself if there was no heaven? No virgins? No glory, but rather simply killing many innocent people?
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How does the u.s. convince young men and women to die for their country? By romanticizing it and making it honorable. I think religion is just one of many ways charismatic people can gain power. I think your blame is misplaced.
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If people have nothing to worship, nothing to love or hate beyond reason, why would they commit great acts of destruction?
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If you mean to imply that religion is the root of all great acts of destruction you are wrong. "Reason" can just as effectively be employed to cause destruction as religion. Hitler's "final solution" was just as reasonable as the decision to bomb hiroshima and nagasaki, at least inasmuch as both were presumably not based on random chance or whimsy. Depending on your perspective either or both or neither was an atrocity, but none of the commonly cited justifications for these positions are necessarily unreasonable.
Reason is a funny thing, because reasonable people disagree; ambiguity and uncertainty can never really be eliminated- only ignored or assumed irrelevant. Except in math, which arguably speaks to things that don't really exist anyway.
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I would put fourth that without religion billions of lives across the history of our planet would likely have not been lost. Imagine a world in which 2 million jews were not executed. Imagine a world in which there were no crusades. Imagine a world where the Middle East is a peaceful region.
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I don't see how you can believe that a world without religion would be any less fucked up than it is already. If you think prevalence of religion reflects some sort of inherent unreasonableness in humanity (which maybe you don't) why would you expect the absence of religion to somehow make people reasonable?