You're getting into "No true Scottsman" territory by claiming that. The definition of "religious" is simply "believing in a religion". You can believe in a set of tenets and not follow all of them--or any of them, really. — JustSomeGuy
You're free to believe whatever you want to believe, but don't act as though we have any sort of proven causal relationship between religion and people doing "bad" things. — JustSomeGuy
It has been firmly established that there is zero correlation between guns and violent crime. — JustSomeGuy
An ideology, as I define it and under which category I would include religious fundamentalisms, is an aggressive, repressive, and oppressive system of prescription and proscription. An ideology say how things are and what you must believe or be punished, — Janus
So say, I set up a cult which had a s its central tenets, opposition to slavery, the sanctity of free speech and the fact that the earth was hit by a meteorite 65 million years ago. You happen to believe in all those things too, are you now a member of my cult? No, of course you're not, your independently arrived at opinions of metaphysics, ethics, and earth history just happen to coincide with my. — Inter Alia
What would make you a part of my cult would be if you absolved yourself of personal judgement and adopted the tenets of my institution on faith. — Inter Alia
Both require a faith, but one continues to allow independent judgement on other aspects of metaphysics, world history and crucially ethics. — Inter Alia
That's how priests get away with abusing children such as recently with Cardinal Law's diocese, or here in England where we have recently heard of the Catholic orphanage which had three time the national average child mortality rate for nearly a hundred years and no-one stopped them. I thought I was in some war-torn state when I read the actual wording of the press release "the nuns declined to comment on how many bodies were in the mass grave". Are you seriously telling me that an institution which buries the children they've beaten to death in mass graves deserves one shred of respect? I don't care how many Catholics do good work for charity, if there's even a minuscule chance that something about their religion allowed or encouraged them to do this it should be banned immediately. — Inter Alia
I can't believe you're being so heartless about this, this is absolutely proven mass child abuse we're talking about and you're suggesting we wait until we have absolutely conclusive proof that the structure of religion helps abusers get away with it before we act. Why? — Inter Alia
It's not just religion, the same is true of institutional schools like boarding schools and many other organisations. The rate of offence in religious schools is no different to that in ordinary institutional schools — Inter Alia
1. Where? — Inter Alia
I never claimed that religion causes people to want to carry out these atrocities — Inter Alia
One way or another religion has 'caused' all these things — Inter Alia
The point is the guns help, without guns you cannot shot someone, so why not ban guns? — Inter Alia
so why encourage them? — Inter Alia
What makes a person a member of a religion is if they identify themselves as a member of that religion. Nothing more. Religion doesn't require you to absolve yourself of personal judgement. — JustSomeGuy
How prevalent is this sort of thing in Judaism? Or other branches of Christianity, for that matter? Where is the epidemic of Protestant molestation victims? — JustSomeGuy
I never claimed that religion causes people to want to carry out these atrocities — Inter Alia
*Earlier*
One way or another religion has 'caused' all these things — Inter Alia — JustSomeGuy
Without knives you cannot stab someone, so why not ban knives?
Without cars you cannot hit someone with a car, so why not ban cars? — JustSomeGuy
Because knives and cars are useful. To make the same claim for religion you would have to point to some purpose that cannot be equally served without religion. Demonstrating that there is no such purpose has been the point of my comments — Inter Alia
You've missed the point of the harms religions have done. It's not to say "do not be religious because they are burning people at the stake" it's to say "do not be religious because they have burned people at the stake and this reveals something unsavoury about being religious, something potentially harmful" — Inter Alia
Modern secular culture may well have plenty of evils, but none of them are demonstrably the result of secularism. The inquisition was demonstrably the result of a fanatical devotion to the Catholic religion. The covering up of child abuse was definitely the consequence of unquestioned faith in the church. "Swap you chemical warfare for the Inquisition any day of the week" is a ridiculous argument, chemical weapons are not caused by secularism, the inquisition was caused by Catholicism. — Inter Alia
What has happened here has been that you've misunderstood my argument, — Inter Alia
My argument is, and always has been, as above. — Inter Alia
There is no more point arguing against anti-religious prejudice than there is against religious prejudice
there does come a point in which no more benefit is to be gained from a particular exchange. — Mitchell
There is no more point arguing against anti-religious prejudice than there is against religious prejudice. — Wayfarer
And who's going to decide what's prejudice and what's justified belief? You, I suppose. — Inter Alia
The people on that could never acknowledge that religions were capable of any good, or at any rate, that whatever good they did accomplish was a result of something other than their faith. And besides, atheists were just as giving as the religious, along with stats and arguments and the rest. — Wayfarer
There is nothing that can be said to someone who simply believes that religion is evil. — Wayfarer
So what exactly is wrong with that opinion, — Inter Alia
What exactly do you mean when you say "outright rejection of spiritual reality"? — JustSomeGuy
How can anybody believe anything without evidence? — WISDOMfromPO-MO
Faith: strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof.
So, faith, by that definition, is irrational — TheMadFool
everything is faith-based. So, we can't criticize religious faith and turn a blind eye to the fact that everything is faith based. — TheMadFool
The belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is a very rational one, yet we have no proof that it will. Proof is not a requirement for rationality. — JustSomeGuy
So, faith, by that definition, is irrational — TheMadFool
But evidence is. — Mitchell
But I guess I didn't make it explicit enough.there are various degrees of faith required for various beliefs, and the more faith required, the less rational the belief is — JustSomeGuy
Evidence need not be, and indeed with regard to empirical knowledge, cannot be, "proof". — Mitchell
What else would proof be if not a piece or multiple pieces of evidence? — JustSomeGuy
Glad you agree, but I just want to add one point, albeit a crucial one. Which is that, ultimately, I blame religious orthodoxy for this problem. And the reason for that goes right back in history to the emergence of the dominant orthodoxy in the Western tradition. After all, 'orthodoxy' means 'right belief'. And the Church put such an enormous premium on being correct, on conformity to dogma, on Correct Belief, that they left many in the intelligentsia with no choice but to rebel. After all, you either believed correctly, or you were shown the door (or much worse). That rebellion against orthodoxy manifests in many forms, of which scientific materialism is one example, but a very influential one. So in a way, I certainly respect the rejection of religious authority, with the crucial caveat that this can't involve the outright rejection of spiritual reality, which we are getting dangerously close to. — Wayfarer
That is always said with the apparent conviction that none of the religious literature of the Judeo-Christian tradition actually constitutes evidence. I mean, it is simply swept off the table with the gesture of it 'not being empirical science', as though it is thereby settled that nothing in it ever happened, that the whole corpus is simply the superstitious accretions of the pre-scientific mentality. Never mind that it is read out at weddings and funerals, and that billions of people still live by it; there's no 'evidence'. — Wayfarer
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