what religion?

james_dean · Post by **james_dean** » 16 Feb 2007 22:17

What good does christianity do? That's not the issue Jeremy.

The point is that I believe it's true, so whether it's useful or not is irrelevant to my belief.

james_dean · Post by **james_dean** » 16 Feb 2007 22:21

Jeremy wrote:I don't think it's obvious at all - I think your arguments are actually common misconceptions, and that the evidence actually shows that they are false.

Are you saying christians only do good because they're scared of going to hell?

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 17 Feb 2007 08:36

No, I'm saying that as per the scientific evidence that I have quoted, people do good things because we have evolved a sense of morality, and Christianity, or any other religious belief does not make us any more likely to do good things. The only impact religion has is that some religions teach that particular groups of people deserve punishment. So essentially the scientific evidence suggests that no good actions occur because of religion (but do occur because we've evolved that way, and the people carrying out those actions would do them regardless of their religious belief) and plenty of bad actions occur because of religion. That's the scientific evidence. I have sourced it a number of times. You are entitled to disagree with it as much as you like, however if you can't put forward any other evidence, I would hope that any rational people reading this topic would be able to see that the only actual evidence we have on this topic (as opposed to speculation of how people would behave if they did not hold their religious views) shows that the only influence religion really has on the world is a negative one.

james_dean · Post by **james_dean** » 18 Feb 2007 03:24

Dude, how about you read what I write. That's what I said. How did you manage to get that impression from what I wrote? I've even told you before that I don't think religion is necessary for people to do good. Anyone with half a brain can see that.

My agument for religion has never been based on that. You're making out like it's something to choose because it has some sort of positive impact on the world. People believe because they believe not because they've looked at it logically and decided they'll be better people with it. What are you arguing against again?

Also, I know your opinion on choices not based on logical reasoning. That doesn't interest me, you're free to run your life logically, as I'm free to believe what I believe, so please don't bring that argument up. Against me, anyway.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 18 Feb 2007 04:04

I only made one assumption in my last post about what you thought.

I said that I thought the only impact religion has on the world is a negative one, that it actually has no redeeming value that we can see (may some positives that we can speculate about, but no evidence that those events only occur because of religion). My assumption was that you would disagree with this sentiment.

If I am mistaken, and you agree that religion has only a negative influence on the world, I humbly apologise. I thought it was safe to assume that you think religion has at least some positives, perhaps that was not a safe assumption. Assuming things does sometimes lead to be wrong, and if that is the case here, I have learnt a valuable lesson.

People believe because they believe not because they've looked at it logically and decided they'll be better people with it.

That's exactly right - that's the entire problem with religion. People oppose homosexual marriage without any evidence that it is a bad thing. People blow themselves up without a strong rational reason why to that. People think that completely unscientific things should be taught to children and present on an equal footing with statements that are based purely on evidence. Americans die of easily preventable stds because of how people feel about sex, rather than what the evidence shows. Hospitals refuse to offer counselling to rape victims because of how they feel, rather than letting the rape victim decide how they feel. Millions of people die, or hate, or retard the pursuit of human knowledge, not for any rational reason, but simply because of what they believe.

A close minded person is somebody who believes things without looking at the evidence.

There really is no difference between the Pope and a terrorist, or any religious person. They all just believe that certain things are true of the world without any logical or rational argument to support those beliefs.

If you are open minded, instead of believing what you are told, question the world and look for things you can really see. If you see strong evidence that God actually exists, document it and present it to me, and if it is strong evidence I will believe it. If, as the last 200,000 years of humanity has so far shown, there is no evidence, can't you consider the possibility that it is more likely that you are wrong about your beliefs than right about them? Would you rather live your life based on beliefs about the world that are simply not true, or would you prefer to live just as good a life, but based on a truer perspective of the world.

Can you see how incredible and fantastic the world is if God doesn't exist? Can you see how lucky we are to be alive, and what an amazing opportunity we have before us? Can you see how wasteful it would be to be alive but not to live your life to its fullest, not to pursue your greatest dreams with the up most vigour? That's how I feel about the world, there is not a day that goes by that I don't marvel at how incredible it really is, how we live in such complex and simple and breathtaking spectacle that is occurring around us. The more knowledge we gain, the more questions we have and the more amazing the world becomes.

Can you see what you're missing out on, by believing things, simply because you were brought up to believe them, simply because you'd like the world to be like that? 80% of people have the same religious views as their parents, be somebody to break that cycle. Don't believe what you're taught to believe, believe in reality. Believe in what is here and now. Believe in what we have, not what we'd like to have.

You are indeed free to believe what ever you want to believe, and, unlike many religious people, atheists have never argued that we should stop people from believing whatever they want to believe. I want you to really think about the choices, and which world you want to live in?

dyalander · Post by **dyalander** » 18 Feb 2007 18:11

What about the possibility that the scientific research is biased - and I don't mean that the results of the studies themselves are undermined by some internal bias but rather that scientists are biased towards disproving the importance of religion as a formulative influence on an individual's morality. WHat I'm getting at is that if science has shown that people undertake "good" acts regardless of religion and would undertake those acts without it, surely it could also show that the same can be said with "bad" acts. I don't see how you can say people would be good without religion so it has no redeeming factors, but people are bad because of religion so it is bad. Surely if you break the causitive link between good behaviours and religion, you need to break the causative link between bad behaviours and religion too.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 19 Feb 2007 03:03

No because the "bad" acts I'm talking about are viewed as good acts by the people who follow those religions. You and I may think the mutilation of children's vaginas is an immoral act, but many people think it is the right thing to do. In fact not only do they think it is the right thing to do, but there is no indication that there is anything wrong with them mentally, the only reason they think it is the right thing to do is the strength of their religious belief.

Very few people commit acts that they personally accept as the wrong thing to do. Certainly not a significant amount. The problem is that lots of people commit acts that are not based on reason or logic, that they cannot defend in a logical manner, but require a faith that what they think is true about the world is actually true. There is no doubt that people do good acts in the name of religion but there is also no reason to think that those people would not still do good things without their religious beliefs.

Splint · Post by **Splint** » 19 Feb 2007 15:10

How about becoming a Judah-ist or Judist and turning in the christians for their crimes against humanity!

dyalander · Post by **dyalander** » 19 Feb 2007 16:40

I understand that those acts are undertaken because they are not considered bad at all, but in the same way that core morals are the result of evolution these other beliefs are also the result of evolution. If you remove the religion something else would take its place.

There is no doubt that people do good acts in the name of religion but there is also no reason to think that those people would not still do good things without their religious beliefs.

I think the same thing applies in reverse. There is no doubt people commit bad acts in the name of religion but there is no reason to think that those people would not still do bad things without their religious beliefs. Religion exists due to evolution, it is one of the ways in which we formulate our moral beliefs into codes of behaviour. If we removed the religion the evolutionary pressures would simply find another way of informing behaviour.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 19 Feb 2007 17:38

dyalander wrote: There is no doubt people commit bad acts in the name of religion but there is no reason to think that those people would not still do bad things without their religious beliefs. Religion exists due to evolution, it is one of the ways in which we formulate our moral beliefs into codes of behaviour. If we removed the religion the evolutionary pressures would simply find another way of informing behaviour.

I would like to see your source for the claim that "religion exist due to evolution."

While the scientific evidence from people like Richard Dawkins, David Sloan Wilson and Robert Winston does indeed say that we have evolved to be religious, it is not likely that this is a direct occurrence, but rather, religion is just the result of psychological traits that do give us an evolutionary advantage. There is no evidence that religion gives us a sense of morality, but rather, because we have a sense of morality, but did not understand the reasons why, we felt like we needed to back it up. Because we lived in dangerous times, we needed to believe what we were told from a young age, without having to see things for ourselves. The scientific evidence shows that we do not need religion at all, that it's just a secondary outcome to the evolutions that we do need. Richard Dawkins gives the great analogy of how moths will fly around a candle in a spiral until they get so close they run into the candle and burn to death. Clearly this is not an evolutionary advantage. However the reason they do that is because they've evolved to navigate by the Moon - in most cases this is a very strong evolutionary advantage. Unfortunately because they don't get much exposure to candles, they are prone to those evolutionary traits misfiring.

The evidence shows that religious belief is essentially the same. A combination of various evolutionary traits accidentally led us to having a higher chance of believing completely irrational stories that have a negative effect on our society.

There are a number of great books about this subject;

The God Delusion - by Richard Dawkins
The Story of God by Robert Winston
Dawin's Cathedral - David Sloan Wilson

Note how I'm not just putting forward my opinions, but I'm backing them up with the work of three of the worlds leading scientists, who in turn, rely on the work of many other scientists. Lets not speculate, lets look at the facts.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 19 Feb 2007 17:44

I also think your assessment that people who do bad things in the name of religion would do bad things anyway is false. Atheists doing "bad things" falls into the standard natural occurrences bell curve (about 5% of people do not have the same sense of right and wrong) - according to Mark Hauser -"Moral Minds; How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong"

Religious people, however, are much more likely to have opinions that are outside this sense of right and wrong.

Is being gay wrong? How many religious people oppose homosexuality? How many non-religious people do?

Again, the scientific evidence, which I am sourcing, suggests that religious belief actually does lead to actions that would otherwise be considered immoral.

Obviously some religious people will disagree with my sentiment that homosexuality is wrong. Try to be objective.

dyalander · Post by **dyalander** » 20 Feb 2007 16:23

There is no evidence that religion gives us a sense of morality

This is from your own summing up of your own sources.
My point is that based on this fact the moment you disconnect the 'good' acts people undertake due to their religious belief and say that they would do them anyway because of their underlying sense of morality which pre-exists religious belief, the same must apply to the 'bad' acts undertaken by religious people. Subsequently you can't argue that religious people would still be 'good' without religion, but wouldn't still be bad - because the reality is that their religion is not the root of their actions the underlying moral code is. However, you can still argue that religion is a bad thing because it clouds over the truth - that truth being the underlying morals and their root causes, and personally I believe that this is afar stronger argument than some of the others you have quoted and presented in some of your posts.

In regards to the statistic you quote in which only 5% of athiests having a different sense of right and wrong what exactly was the measure of the "sense of right and wrong", I think varying measures would give greatly varying results and subsequently the particular relevence of that statistic is largely dependent on the exact nature of the measure. As you ask, how many athiests believe that homosexuality is wrong? Was that part of the 5%?
Also what was the sample size, was it culturally biased. Is it even possible for it not to have been, given that morality is a specifically culturally biased trait - did it find that African athiests held different beliefs to American athiests, for example, or was it limited to American subjects? Does that 5% indicate the difference within cultural groups or does it operate across them? What does it really mean?

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 20 Feb 2007 17:21

You misunderstand.

The "bad" acts that people commit because of their religious beliefs are actually "good" acts - they believe that their actions are good, and they carry them out thinking that they are doing the right thing. They are motivated by a sense of wanting to do the right thing and make the world a better place. These actions are the same as any other action any person, regardless of religious views, may decide to make, in order to make the world a better place. When I went back to a newsagency last weekend and gave them the $10 they over changed me, that's motivated by the same psychology as when a Christian protests at the funeral of a dead US marine, claiming that he died in Iraq because of the US tolerance of homosexuality. While from an objective point of view, we may judge the morality of these two actions very differently, both of us thought we were doing the right thing and were happy to go out of our way, and indeed to give up money, trying to make the world a better place, be it in a small and insignificant way.

My statistic that only 5% of atheists have a different sense of right and wrong was an approximation, but it comes from the work, which I constantly quote, of Dr Marc Hauser, who studied moral beliefs on every continent on the world, and found them to essentially be the same. He's a professor at Harvard and he's been studying evolutionary psychology for years. He doesn't actually state specifically that 5% of atheists have a different sense of right and wrong, he states that 95% of the global population (approximately) have the same sense of right and wrong. This is completely what you would expect under the long standing laws of natural distribution, and would have been predicted by science long before Dr Hauser actually carried out the studies and found the observational evidence.

So the evidence applies to all people, not just atheists and not just Americans.

I don't know how many atheists believe that homosexuality is wrong, but I have a very strong feeling, and I'm sure you would agree with this, that it is a very small percentage.

This study shows that in America over 55% of secularists support gay marriage, of which, atheists would make up only a tiny portion (atheists are about 12% of the US population {off the top of my head}). Secularists were the only religious division that had over a 50% support for gay marriage. Certainly rationalists and humanists have a long standing support for gay marriage, and I am confident that were you able to find a study, it would show that a large majority of atheists support gay marriage. Given the statistics presented in that link, from a mathematical perspective, I would expect about 75% of atheists to support gay marriage (given the cultural bias that 38% of the general population supports it, 12% of people are atheists and the natural distribution of morals). I'm just speculating about this, of course, but I do know that there are many religious opponents to gay marriage, and I can think of no non-religious opponents.

http://pewforum.org/docs/index.php?DocID=29

dyalander · Post by **dyalander** » 20 Feb 2007 18:23

No, I get that religious people undertake 'bad' acts completely believing they are good, my point is that if you remove religion as the means by which those acts are rendered good they would, in many cases (it is imposible to know how many), simply be justified by something else - the core reason many of these people believe homosexuality is wrong is not because some God says so, but because they find homosexuality morally abhorent on a more fundamental level, whetehr they are willing to admit it or not. Removing religion will not necessarly undermine that fundamental moral abhorence, it will simply force people to find new ways to justify their acts.

I do agree that the percentege of athests who believe homosexuality is wrong would be small, however it is my belief that if you made everyone an athiest that percentege would grow because while there are a large number of people who beilieve homosexuality is wrong simply because their religion says so and they haven't actually given it any independent thought, I also believe there are a large number of people who believe homosexuality is wrong on a more fundamental level and would continue to maintain that belief even if their god was proven not to exist.

My point is that, yes, the way in which religion is used to justify immoral acts is terrible, but it will always be offset in the minds of believers by the potential for religion to justify moral acts. The best way to undermine belief is to show that it is no more than a human construction to justify a particular moral code by attributing that code's authority to an unseen, originator. It allows people to shed responsibility for their morals. People feel empowered by religion when in reality it disenfranchises them in regards to their beliefs as they must always finally defer to the authority of their god over that of their senses. I prefer to speak to these problems with religion as it keeps the argument in the same framework believers use to justify their belief and attacks the core notion that they can know what their god wants for them beyond what they want for themselves.

james_dean · Post by **james_dean** » 21 Feb 2007 00:30

*deep breath* OK.

If Christianity is true then it has an immensely more positive impact than negative, because eternity in hell far outways any evil on earth.

But as I already said, I believe in God because I'm choosing to.

You keep repeating the same things though. I know all the negative influences of religion, you've told me 5 times already.

I don't think of myself as close minded. I've been thinking about it a lot the last couple of months, talking to a lot of people about it, reading the stuff you've been posting etc. But put yourself in my position, my heart screams out that it's true. Is it just because I was brought up that way? Quite likely. But I can't go against my heart like that, there's more to life than logic Jeremy. Right now I'm just going to seek after God. I don't like the idea of organised religion in general. It's a bit hard to avoid it as a christian of course, but I'd like my spirituality to be based much more on a personal relationship with God. That's what the bible teaches, and what I've always believed, I've never sought after it though. Now I am, and believe me, if I get nothing back, I'm not going to keep believing. This could take a while though, so until then I'm just going to keep beleiving and keep striving for it.

I don't understand though, how God's existence would have a negative influence on the incredible and fantastic world we live in. I see the same things you do, I think to be alive is amazing. I thank God for the beautiful world He's given me, the amazing family. I thank Him for my job, and my friends, I thank Him for footbag, and the awesome times I've had through that. I thank Him for loving me and caring about me, and giving me such a great life. Why do you think I'm not living life to it's fullest, because I believe in God? What am I missing out on?

But I do appreciate the tone of your last post to me, admittedly I've been guilty of getting too argumentative too. We should discuss more and argue less...

dyalander · Post by **dyalander** » 21 Feb 2007 16:04

If Christianity is true then it has an immensely more positive impact than negative, because eternity in hell far outways any evil on earth.

Sorry but I don't get how the bit after the "because" proves the bit before it.

I don't like the idea of organised religion in general.

Then don't participate in it. Don't attend church or church gorups, certainly don't contribute money to them, and endevour to explore your spirituality independently through reading and experience.

I'd like my spirituality to be based much more on a personal relationship with God.

Such a relationship just isn't possible. You can interpret your surrondings and your feelings to be messages from god as much as you like but it will always be no more than you're own interpretations and projections. Why don't you take possession of the good you wish to do instead of looking for it to be authorised by god. The bible is a collection of books written by men, if there is a god he has never directly communicated our purpose or his desires to us. Any morals you have, you have built and accepted yourself. Your parents haven't forced you to attribute them to a god; you live in a largely free society, and it hasn't forced you to attribute them to a god; and if some god-like voice in your head is commanding them to you then that voice is your own.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 22 Feb 2007 21:14

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QERyh9YY ... ed&search=

Hilarious attack on Richard Dawkins.

RawSko · Post by **RawSko** » 23 Feb 2007 07:06

One of the things I love about Islam is that they teach that the Qur'an is fucking true. If you find something that's not 500% perfect about what it says, that means that you're reading it wrong.

As is the nature of existence, Religion is what you make of it. You can interpret any religion ANY way that you want. Religions were invented by people, and I wont deny that they were created for a purpose... but, since so many people believe in the teachings, truth can be found in them. Religion is a fascinating thing that I plan on studying for the rest of my life. Although religions/religious teachings can quite easily be misinterpreted, with proper understand, or even a desire to understand, any religion can help anybody in any way.

Jeremy · Post by **Jeremy** » 23 Feb 2007 22:53

I think that's a gross generalisation. There are plenty of moderate Muslims, just like there are plenty of Christians who believe the Bible is the word of God and plenty that don't. Just like the Bible, the Koran has numerous contradictions and claims that are false according to the historic evidence, as well as plenty of very questionable moral teachings - that most Christians and Muslims choose to ignore.

Uranos · Post by **Uranos** » 26 Feb 2007 05:01

james_dean wrote:
I don't understand though, how God's existence would have a negative influence on the incredible and fantastic world we live in. I see the same things you do, I think to be alive is amazing. I thank God for the beautiful world He's given me, the amazing family. I thank Him for my job, and my friends, I thank Him for footbag, and the awesome times I've had through that. I thank Him for loving me and caring about me, and giving me such a great life. Why do you think I'm not living life to it's fullest, because I believe in God? What am I missing out on?

So what do you say if you were an African who lives in a shithole with no family who has no job and friends, he cant hit nemesis, he is under the impression that God might not like him. Well i guess you were lucky to have a good life Jamie, you should thank God for it. I know i do.