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| quote: | Originally posted by NeoPhono
"Correctness?" What does that mean? |
You set a condition for my response with your last post - you said that if I could demonstrate that religions inflict direct harm on people, you would "stand corrected", as if to imply that you are already correct in your assertions.
| quote: | Anyway...if a belief system physically harms people by a) requiring believers to directly harm themselves or others or b) requiring that believers withhold reasonable medical care from themselves or others, then I do believe that is on another level from belief systems that preach closed-mindedness or just simply deny science or logic. I'm not saying belief systems that fall into the later category don't still have problems, but at least they're not directly telling their followers to kill themselves or others.
I find a religion that says "kill all nonbelievers" or "deny yourself life-saving medical treatment" to be much more reprehensible than one that might say "evolution is fake" or "homosexuals are sinners and going to hell." While I don't agree with any of those statements, at least the last two aren't going to cause anyone physical harm unless perverted beyond their context. I think they're all wrong, but directly preaching physical harm is the worse of the evils. |
Whilst I do indeed agree with many of your views, I believe there to be a chasm of difference between systems which encourage infliction of harm and systems which discourage what is believed to be harmful - both things that most any religion has been guilty of at some point. I am defending neither, but the conscious choice to abstain from treatment is a personal decision that has little effect upon anyone else - one truly indicative of belief based upon supposed "evidence" of faith, a fault, but still resembling thought; possession. More affecting are those faiths which seek to polarize people through violence - a dangerous separation humanity has never known release from. Yet more dangerous still is an amalgam of these two: the violence of faith to proselytize people into desiring asceticism, shame, self-denial, all the while denouncing desire in the first place. It is indirect and slow, but far more affecting on a mass scale, even more so than the most advanced weaponry we can conceive of, as it is mnemonic in transmission, memetic in the face of opposing fact.
The directness of effect is a deceptive thing, which is why I deem it important to consider objectively. Physical violence is a surface effect - direct as could be, but religion is merely a conveyor of the polarization which incites violence on a social level, rocket attacks and rape all being an extension of our innate wills to consume or annihilate on an ideological level. When faith however espouses not only science or evidence, but the very process of distilling truth through the world we live in as opposed to the lofty descriptions of ancient bedouin scribblings - that is a far more dangerous, detrimental thing.
I am no expert on scientology, and I do not agree with most all of their tenets, but their crusade against psychiatry in general is not a black and white issue so far as I am concerned. Modern medicine is a product like any other, an enormous machine that sells both fact and myth alike, its own best interest supported by convincing people it's in their own interest to adhere to it at all times - hence this thread. People take what doctors say as fact for fear of illness, but how often are the maladies of mental illness cured through prescription? And how many of those could have easily been treated by other means and to more positive effect? I am not arguing with science nor with medicine, as I am not a scientologist, but their beliefs stem from the evidence of medicine's psuedo-economic appeal and subsequent over-prescription of what could totally be imagined or untreatable illnesses. Action taken by those who call themselves Doctors in the interest of themselves and their organizations, rather than the needs of people; another memetic transmission of cultural science gone awry.
Don't mistake me though, I am not professing to know more about medicine than anyone, much less Doctors, nor am I saying that the particular case in question was untreatable by current medicinal standards. Personally, I feel as though it was quite wrong for them to refuse the chance of alleviation despite their obvious beliefs that it would be dangerous to appeal to pharmeceuticals. But is Scientology as a whole more damaging, more dangerous, than religions that denounce personal belief, flourish in hegemonies, incite personal violence and destruction of individual freedoms when considering it is merely a secular faction critical of popular practice that, by their definition, has resulted in great harm to people and continues to do so? They may be fanatically critical, but their reach scarcely exceeds their weighty bank accounts and there's no indication that they seek to convert the world into their vision of reality, as with other, more vehement, tax-exempt superorganisms.
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