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What is Love/Hate?
The Love/Hate campaign is aimed at providing a forum for people in the William and Mary community to share their opinions about various topics. There are 10 different threads for people to comment on.
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- What do YOU Love or Hate about LOVE/HATE?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about WILLIAM & MARY?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about CHRISTIANS?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about FAMILY?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about FRIENDS?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about DATING?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about JESUS?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about THE CHURCH?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about RELIGION?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about GOVERNMENT?
- What do YOU Love or Hate about GOD?
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March
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I hate the insincere, meaningless ritual so many so-called "religious" people go through.
ReplyDeleteI love the fact that so many people can come together to proclaim their faith, and that no one has the right to judge them for it. Or they to judge others (the hate part comes in when hate is exercised through religious forums.)
ReplyDeleteAnd as far as the comment above, if it has meaning for those who practice their religions and what you call "rituals," then what is there for you to hate?
I hate grappling with moral relativism.
ReplyDeleteI think there is a difference between religion and faith.
ReplyDeleteI hate the hypocrisy of those that are a part of organized religion. I hate how people think that it is required to learn or develop morals.
ReplyDeleteWhy is there so much hate about "organized religion" ?
ReplyDeleteOne of the few things that I like about organized religion is that it is one of the few places in society that legitimizes human spiritual experience.
ReplyDeleteI am an Atheist, and I think that the supernatural beliefs held by adherents of most religions lack evidence and are dangerous to society.
However, there are many transcendent and deeply personally meaningful spiritual feelings (experienced during meditation, sex, a eureka moment of personal growth, etc) that can be explained without supernatural beliefs (via psychology, biology, literature, etc).
The problem with most of the non-theistic authorities is that they don't take seriously meaningful spiritual events in the lives of individuals.
Many people go to church not because they actually believe a lot of the foolish things that are said and taught there, but because they want to feel deep spiritual experiences.
Atheists as a group need to legitimize these spiritual experiences (provided the explanations of these experiences make no unfounded supernatural assumptions) if they are going to be successful in leading people away from ill-conceived beliefs.
Alan, was Jesus Christ dangerous to society, or his followers?
ReplyDelete"Alan, was Jesus Christ dangerous to society, or his followers?"
ReplyDeleteWhether or not Jesus of Nazareth was dangerous to society depends, of course, on what he was really like. Constructing an accurate historical picture of Jesus is difficult, because you must rely on a small number of texts (the synoptic Gospels, John, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Hebrews) that were written as many as 60-70 years after Jesus' death (and as such are subject to inaccuracies and the cultural and political biases of their writers). Different parts of these texts seem to paint two conflicting pictures of Jesus:
1) Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher that claimed that he was God-king, that world was ending, and that he was the way to salvation.
2) Jesus was a traveling teacher that never claimed he was God, preached nonviolent social justice and personal enlightenment through living in the here and now ('the Kingdom of God/Heaven').
If the first picture of Jesus is true, then he is, in my opinion, dangerous to his FOLLOWERS because:
A) He asks them to close their minds and cling to a belief without evidence
B) He asks them to live for a ill-promised future at the sake of the joy of the here and now
and is dangerous to SOCIETY because:
C) His idea that the world is ending leaves no incentive among his followers to be good stewards of the world by living a green lifestyle
D) His belief in his own kingship and the elected nature of his followers (really: subjects) over non-followers promotes potentially violent divisions between believers and infidels (see the crusades, the holocaust, northern ireland, or for a Islamic spin on the same idea, the 911 attacks)
In my opinion and the opinion of many biblical scholars (read John Dominic Crossan for a good start), the historical Jesus was more like the second picture. So, if he were alive today, Jesus would probably not be dangerous to society, but rather, very beneficial.
Nevertheless, what matters, of course, is that Jesus is portrayed by most Christians as akin to the first picture, which in my view makes common Christianity potentially very dangerous to the spiritual life of Christians, democratic society as a whole, and the health of our planet.
I appreciate your comment. I talk a little more about how I see a belief in a theistic God as dangerous on the "God" page.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f0ZHaoSnf0
ReplyDeleteI love that religion once taught that we should treat all men as our brothers, that it was wrong to steal and defraud, that one is always judged even with no mortal witness. Now "God is dead." Anything goes. You make up the rules. If you want to know what will happen, read the bits that explain what God does when his chosen people go astray (chosen to make an example of!)...
ReplyDeleteMed Dog:
ReplyDeleteIf anything, religion is responsible for immorality in society.
First, people are abandoning religion in large part because of the strong tendency of religious leaders and religious texts to advocate outdated morals like the condemnation of homosexuality, the inequality of women, and 'sex negative' viewpoints.
I believe that the only way religion has survived in free, educated countries is by liberally interpreting potentially offensive moral teachings within religious texts to match the positive moral changes that have happened within cultures long after those texts were written.
Additionally, religious people have had the tendency throughout history to hate and kill people of different religious beliefs.
I'd argue that it the gradual decrease in the power of religious beliefs in the western world starting with the renaissance and continuing through the enlightenment into the modern age has been one of the greatest factors in fostering peace among the countries of the West.
Today, one couldn't imagine religious leaders ordering armies of faithful Christian soldiers to kill Muslims, Jews being terrorized for killing "our Lord," or a century-long world war being fought between different types of European Christians.
Even so, in areas where religious beliefs are still very important, they result in violence: Between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, and particularly in the Muslim world, where theists believe so strongly that their God is the one true God that they vow to kill everyone who does not pledge allegiance to him (sounds like Christians during the highly theistic middle ages).
The truth is that religious people for the most part don't get their morals from religious texts, but the other way round:
Religion gets its morality from
A)the moral drives strongly implicit in our biology that were necessary for us to thrive as a very collectivist, social species
B)the sometimes valid, sometimes invalid logic and reason of contemporary political and social leaders who tried to establish sound principles for successfully relating to other members of society
Religion, because it is by its very nature dogmatic and therefore outdated, has made people cling inflexibly to ineffective ways of relating to others and, by promoting "us vs them" thinking, has made people hate and kill other people.
Therefore, religion has more often corrupted naturally good people than it has guided naturally bad people (few naturally malevolent people exist - because antisocial genes are fairly infrequent - approx 5% of the population).
People aren't stupid; they for the most part have an intuitive sense of right and wrong. As for the gray areas in-between, lets look to rational discourse and philosophy to clarify those issues rather than ancient, dogmatic religious texts.
I don't think any religious people, or at least Christians, would claim morality comes from the Bible. I think it would be more accurate to say morality comes (ultimately) from God and the Bible is a record of that.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous:
ReplyDeleteCan you please clarify how Christian morality ultimately comes "from God?"
Are you claiming that God has actually talked to Christian leaders in words and says plainly this moral precept is right, wrong, etc?
I'm extremely skeptical of anyone who claims to talk to God in this way because there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that said person is doing anything other than making the entire encounter up.
The burden of proof is on the person who talked to God to prove that they talked to God, not the other way round.
It seems a WAY more plausible explanation (that makes fewer unnecessary assumptions) that religious leaders and bible writers were either
1) merely claiming to have talked to God in order to lend authority to the moral principles that they had thought up
2) insane or otherwise disoriented
I feel like (based not on a scientific poll, of course, but just on interactions with my mainstream denomination Christian friends and family members) 80%+ of Christians in the US today would regard a pastor who has claimed to "talk to God" as either
1) a liar/charlatan or
2) insane.
Why can't we view ancient religious leaders in a similarly rational way?
Not just "Christian" morality comes from God. You can look at humanity in general and see that morals are very similar, even across times and cultures. I say that this is because God has implanted his moral law on humanity, by various means (natural selection, etc).
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry you misunderstood me to mean that God vocally spoke to all religious leaders, although I believe that that has happened and could still happen today.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteI understand your position much better now.
I still think that
1) "natural selection and cultural factors created morality" is a much better belief than
2) "God created natural selection and the cultural factors that in turn created morality", because
1) there is no convincing evidence to suggest the existence of a personal creator God
2) the first point (vis-a-vis Occam's Razor) is more "parsimonious:" It fully explains a range of phenomena without making any unnecessary assumptions
Nevertheless, I respect your reasoned position. I really enjoy engaging in polite discussion with intelligent posters like you and several of the others I've encountered on this blog.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAlan,
ReplyDeleteI agree that morality is evolutionary. Our species interacts and trusts small groups (no more than about 20-100, reason why military divisions still follow the ancient extended-family size). You seems to confound religious teaching with secular ambition. I would say anyone who kills another man in cold blood is as far from God as you can get. Organized religion, the kind that sends off people to kill and die for the ambition of a pope or as an excuse to take land, valuables, is simply not true, personal religion, as true personal religion is love.
What I mean is that religious morals extended the idea that one should be nice to an extended group of like-thinking people. It was one of the important group-determining characteristics which allowed people to trust each other (when God was taken seriously). Now people are no more or less trustworthy: the only difference is that anonymous theft - by governments and large corporations are now much less personally unpleasant when you are not defrauding "children of God" but idiots who believe voting gives them a say in government or investors who believe they are really getting a sweet return. I am not talking about some abstract organized religion as a motivation for violence. That is obvious. I am talking about the subtle social decay caused by an elimination of an absolute moral arbiter higher than any human law. We live partly under arbitrary human law, which is inherently corrupt an self serving. Natural law, derived from evolutionary and practical survival principles (or God, whatever you like), will always come out on top in the end - hence our current state of active collapse in this country.
"You seems to confound religious teaching with secular ambition"
ReplyDeleteThis argument is semantic. You are trying to prove your point by shifting the definition of the word religion.
In other words, when a religious teacher/community says or does something you agree with it is called "real religion," and when a religious teacher/community says or does something offensive, it is "bad religion." Therefore, this is not a valid argument.
The truth is that what almost everyone would consider to be religion has done something that almost everyone would consider evil at some point.
If I am misreading you and you are trying to make a distinction between "organized religion" and "spirituality;" namely, that organized religion leads people astray but spirituality is true, why organized religion, religious dogma, and religious texts?
"subtle social decay caused by an elimination of an absolute moral arbiter higher than any human law"
You need evidence to back up such watchwords as "subtle social decay." This is one study that finds no short-term casual relationship between decreasing religiosity and crime.
http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlawec/y2006v49i1p147-72.html
In the long term, I regrettably haven't looked at any data, but there's no doubt that in the Western world in the past few centuries crime has dropped as standard of living and social freedom/equality have increased, all while religiosity has declined.
I'm with you that respect for complete strangers and people outside of our "tribe" so to speak is not written into our DNA, and so it must come from teachers, social leaders, and philosophers (though I think to characterize humans as inherently self serving is without basis, a gross simplification, and unfair as hell).
What you don't seem to recognize is that there have been many social teachers that have rejected the idea of a personal God and other supernatural beliefs but have nevertheless preached equality and respect for all humankind.
Here are a few notables: Confucius, Carl Rogers, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Clement Atlee, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Buddha
It doesn't follow that social teachings that engender respect for all humankind necessarily require dangerous/detrimental supernatural beliefs.