Thanks for response bada. We disagree at times, but I think we understand each other.
Originally posted by Badabing
That's the point I was making about Einstein and Newton. With all the scientific progress we make every year I have to disagree with you on the "epidemic problem". I would like to know how religion has adversely effects your life though.
I feel like answering this because I feel strongly about it.
Personally, it hasn't negatively affected me. But I'm again trying to look at the larger picture. Individually, a lot of people do good things through their faith, and even institutions like churches, mosques, synagogues, etc. The problem comes at a larger level, where religious distinctions (caused by faith in a particular belief) create division between people. And I'm not even talking about extreme division like religious terrorism. There's a cultural schism between, say, Catholics and Born-Agains, or Jewish and Christian, or Lutheran and Baptist, or Islam and etc. etc.
And the reason for that is because each of those religions has a dogmatic Truth that can't be wavered from, and which puts it at odds with other religions. Eastern religions wisely avoid this trend (largely) because they don't view their way as rigid, literal truth. Stories about the Buddha, for example, are intended to help the listener understand something on the path to Enlightenment. If it never really happened just as the story says, that is inconsequential to the message. But if Jesus wasn't exactly as the Gospels say, or if Mohammad wasn't really God's final prophet, then there's a problem....a split in the unity of humanity based on faith. And then that same faith turns those divisions into holy wars and subversive legislation and attempts to undermine scientific inquiry. The horrible stuff that faith is responsible for isn't all in history...it's esconced in our modern culture. And these forces, at the moment, are >>> scientific community in terms of fervor and influence in the world, if only because of the nature of religious followers and their penchant for grouping together.
Scientific discovery, it seems, merely holds these sects at bay, and also because the non-religious don't usually have "banners" to follow together, and are much less likely to act in unison.
But within belief structures, there are shared messages, unifying themes and practices, even aspects of the same Rituals and beliefs, across all Western religions (and many, many other myths, philosophies, and practices throughout human history). There is unity in that. But we shun that unity in favor of having "the one truth". Rather than an adult version of Aesop's Fables, intended to teach us something without believing the strict details of it, we turn it into the center of our being. Of course, this is coming from someone who feels like religious stories should be treated as myth, not historical fact, and that there is ample evidence to support that way of thinking...so I realize not all are in a place to be able to embrace this style of thinking.
So that's what faith is to me. Irrational, potentially harmful. If one wants to believe in a God or religion, so be it. If there is a rational justification behind it, I applaud it. But faith means without evidence. Intuitive. Blind hope. Quite honestly, it scares me, and faith of that kind isn't something I could ever submit to.
Take away faith...hell, take away all religion and you might still find atrocities committed by humans on a large scale. Perhaps culture wars would replace religious wars, or something similar. But the good that religion does wouldn't disappear either, and would still exist in other forms as well. The good is in people, not in archaic pagan moral laws and tradition. And that's why I can't say, in good conscience, that I feel like religion (and faith) does more good than harm.
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...again, as a disclaimer, this isn't directed at bada or those like him, though I do think anyone with blind faith in a religion or God has misplaced their trust. In any case, he doesn't strike me as the irrational fundamentalist type. It's just my soapbox manifesto on religion.