Originally posted by Moongoose
So much love in the world
If you take it at face value and only interrogate the intent meant to be measured by the public, at the imam's arguments, then it does reflect poorly on religion. If you look at it for what it really is, however, and see that it is nothing but a positioning statement leveled by a pathological narcissist, much like Trump did with his birther campaign, no such argument against religion stands.
mr.bison
quote:
Originally posted by EddieZilker
If you take it at face value and only interrogate the intent meant to be measured by the public, at the imam's arguments, then it does reflect poorly on religion. If you look at it for what it really is, however, and see that it is nothing but a positioning statement leveled by a pathological narcissist, much like Trump did with his birther campaign, no such argument against religion stands.
So you dont think the world would be better of without religion?
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
EddieZilker
quote:
Originally posted by mr.bison
So you dont think the world would be better of without religion?
No. I don't. I also don't think it's a better place because of religion.
quote:
Originally posted by mr.bison
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
Stanley Milgram says otherwise.
srussell0018
I think the world would absolutely be a better place because of religion. Look at some of the major wars over the course of history. A lot of them had a large portion to do with religion. Religion also breeds contempt towards other religions, intolerance towards races that typically practice those religions, etc. I think if people were just people, and not identified as Catholics, or Jews, or Muslims, or whatever, then people could identify better with one another, and there would be much less violence in the world.
Also little boys would feel safer at Sunday school.
mr.bison
quote:
Originally posted by EddieZilker
No. I don't. I also don't think it's a better place because of religion.
Then why do different religions have different behavioral outcomes? Why do people practicing one kind of religion tend to be more dangerous/violent then people practicing another kind of religion. Jainism for example?
Do you seriously think that no religious teaching is capable of convincing a good moral person to do horrific things?
I think Sam Harris makes a good point in this video. A point i have never seen refuted. What are your thoughts of the point he is trying to make?
The Problem with Islamic Fundamentalism are the Fundamentals of Islam
mr.bison
quote:
Originally posted by EddieZilker
Stanley Milgram says otherwise.
Just watched his Obedience to Authority Experiment. Really interesting.
EddieZilker
If you're interested in psychological experiments gone wild, you should also check out the Stanford Prison Experiments.
quote:
Originally posted by mr.bison
Then why do different religions have different behavioral outcomes? Why do people practicing one kind of religion tend to be more dangerous/violent then people practicing another kind of religion. Jainism for example?
Do you seriously think that no religious teaching is capable of convincing a good moral person to do horrific things?
I think Sam Harris makes a good point in this video. A point i have never seen refuted. What are your thoughts of the point he is trying to make?
You've been posting in nothing but syllogism, false choice, and straw-man fallacy to get to this point, which is some money shot featuring Islam as your target. The most valid question pertains to why differing regions have different outcomes which is easily understood because nearly everyone in those regions either is or has recently been subject to the rule of an authoritarian regime that made use of hard-line Islamic clerics in order to focus the anger of their populace onto something other than the regimes they operated under. That's not to say that all people who've suffered under authoritarian regimes are prone to being terrorists. In fact it's an astonishingly small fraction of that population accounting for terrorism, in general.
Saddam Hussein said, "Where there is a person, there is a problem. Where there is no person, there is no problem." The essential annihilation of self and subsequent loss of power is given redress in the narcissistic solution on offer from extremists. A meaningless, banal existence of servitude is granted a means of escape in the noble sacrifice, on the order of (even orders of magnitude greater than) winning the lottery in its reward. A source, for all the World's evil, is fictitiously characterized and targeted for divine retribution and to the young idiot, bedeviled by poverty, he is given the means to become a hero.
From where I sit, violent extremist fall into three sub-types: The born extremist has been sent to Madrassas, from an early age, and taught an extremist ideology. These morons are owed the credit of the nightclub bombing in Bali and the The 2008 attacks in Mumbai. The home-sick extremists, most of whom are credited with attacks in England and attempted attacks within the Continental United States, are made up of highly educated yet misplaced souls who are unable to find personal fulfillment in other activities, have found themselves isolated and therefor susceptible to radical cells operating within the periphery of local Mosques or on the internet. While more educated, this subtype more closely resembles Timothy McVeigh, who returning home, found himself isolated and gravitating towards interests he felt would allow him to serve a "higher" purpose. The third type is the disgruntled Muslim, who, were it not for the fact that they were Muslim, would not be so closely associated with having committed an act of terror and would be more known for having committed a spree killing. Resembling many mass-murderers, Nidal Malik Hasan was just as well known for his professional incompetence, among his peers, as he was for being a Muslim.
Klebold, Harris, Cho, and other non-Muslim (and presumably non-religious) shooters collectively outnumber my disgruntled Muslim, partly dismissing the association you're trying to make. The non-religious shooters are more closely related to the final two subtypes to a degree that religion being a factor, can nearly be ruled out. The Muslim perpetrators of violence, while doing so in the name of their religion, had made that vain association out of a need to rationalize their decisions opposing having it be as much of a motivator. Timothy McVeigh displayed traits of Paranoid Personality Disorder which roughly approximates the surrogate belief system inculcated in terrorist recruitment.
So, short answer: No. It could just as well be Christianity. In fact, it has been. Jim Jones and the People's Temple speaks eloquently to that. The Branch Davidians in Waco also illustrate that violence is non-denominational. Don't forget about Heaven's Gate, which had nearly nothing to do with religion, at all.
Fledz
It's natural and can be expected that religion for the majority of the world will naturally become a minority view. As education about the world increases, the belief in unexplainable deities will drop off.
How many gods did we believe in thousands of years ago? Many more than now, but they dwindled down and they will continue to dwindle down. Until eventually all people have faith in is the possibility of a higher being but nothing even remotely linked to any of our current deities.
Then again we'll probably all die out within 200 years anyway due to other causes.
Halcyon+On+On
quote:
Originally posted by Fledz
It's natural and can be expected that religion for the majority of the world will naturally become a minority view. As education about the world increases, the belief in unexplainable deities will drop off.
How many gods did we believe in thousands of years ago? Many more than now, but they dwindled down and they will continue to dwindle down. Until eventually all people have faith in is the possibility of a higher being but nothing even remotely linked to any of our current deities.
Are you speaking of the variety of pantheons that encompassed the world, or just the sheer number of Gods each one had?
Reason being, monotheism brought about a rather militaristic, authoritative cohesion to swaths of mankind; As the technology between travel and communication evolved, so did the transmission of likewise belief which merely galvanized unity to an unheard-of scale, what with the Persian and Roman empires becoming the new standard for nation-states, Proselytization through force, as well as the evolution of mankind's standard for "survival".
Religion, itself, has only ever been a primarily social institution fixated on tribal cohesion - reducing things down to one God, one portfolio of tenets, is more of a consolidation dynamic than it is a phasing out of mystical thought.
srussell0018
quote:
Originally posted by EddieZilker
If you're interested in psychological experiments gone wild, you should also check out the Stanford Prison Experiments.
Was there a movie made about this with Forrest Whittaker and Adrien Brody?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0997152/
rdevito
quote:
Originally posted by srussell0018
Okay, a reasonable answer. The soul is not the essence of life, and probably isn't even a real thing, so use that to answer all of your other questions.
Just because we have the capacity for thought, and are the only species that are aware of our own mortality doesn't really make us "special." The idea that we have these special souls just because we have the ability to think that we do is kind of circular.
All we have is energy. Since energy can't be created out of nothing (or at least to our current extent of knowledge it can't), our "soul" (energy) probably just gets recycled back into the vast pool of energy when we die, like I said before. So "you" cease to be "you" as you would identify yourself now, when you die. You're broken down into the basic building blocks of life, and it starts all over again.
