Is Atheism Just A Rant Against Religion?

June 2, 2007

I admire you for having been strong enough to question in your teens despite having your identity so closely aligned to christianity.

I was actually 25 at the time. Surprisingly it was really the first time my beliefs had ever been challenged; and I was fairly open about them. Idaho is pretty isolated I guess, and with no internet to speak of at the time...

I'd also like to know the questions that got you thinking!

I wish I could remember the specifics. He showed a few bible contradictions. What I recall is that I didn't have answers. My friends didn't either, so they resorted to just throwing arbitrary verses back at him with the idea that "the word doesn't return void." I found myself in the position where I was actually defending this young man from my church buddies. I think it was their arrogance that was as unsettling to me as the polite challenges from the young Taoist. That, and I was impressed by his intelligence, which stood in stark contrast to the knuckle draggers I was out "witnessing" with.

Ultimately it was both the question of hell, and the contradiction between Solomon's "eat drink and be merry" vs Paul's "bear your cross" that caused my belief to start to crumble. It was just this event with the Taoist that got me to start asking questions about my faith in the first place.

June 2, 2007

I apologize at the outside for the length of this post. I was kind of on a roll this morning.

With all this in mind, “belief” is really in effect acknowledging and embracing the values of that adopted system. Belief influences actions toward the end that the desire by believing/creating them in the first place. It’s a system. It’s a human system. Now the question before us, is it ALL bad? Or is there some baby in that bathwater?

I think this is fundamental to the differences we have on this subject. And first, to be clear, I think what we are discussing is whether or not religion in society is a bad thing or not. Stop. Because I, like you, don't advocate ridding society of religion through any other means than providing better tools for the young to make their decisions with.

IMO, there is some baby in the bathwater, but the bathwater is so toxic that it would be an excellent idea to rescue that baby from the bathwater and to completely separate that baby from any and all contact with that toxic substance.

Just as a minor example. I grew up in a religious family and community that had a lot of good attributes. They were for the most part loving, caring people. There was a lot of baby in the bathwater. At the same time they all supported sexual repression, beliefs that left me and other members debilitated by guilt, etc... The good values (the baby) can thrive without the religion and would have regardless of the poisonous beliefs members of my community maintained.

I think a lot of my thoughts will address a lot of this later in this post (I actually typed a response to your 2nd post before this one). But what you are talking about here is not the bathwater of religion. You are describing society. Take away religion, and these societal conventions will find a new perch to roost on.

Our repressive sexual ideas here in the West, and in the States in particular, are rooted in Victorian England. Of course they run to the Bible to justify it, but not all societies who use the same Bible, read it that way. The Bible is particularly a good source for people to cite to give force to their beliefs. This is why, I’ll repeat, this is why I feel you have such an outcry from the traditionalists, the conservatives, a.k.a. “fundamentalists” to the “liberalization” of the Bible. It’s their particular choice of authority for enforcing cultural norms! The rest is just justifications, but that’s the motive behind it as I see it.

But the Bible is not the only source of authority. Family traditions, cultural identity, conventions, social taboos, etc all exist and come into being independently and are all forces of law in themselves. Get rid of religion all you want, but you won’t get rid of what you hope will go away. It’s not its source. Societies of people are.

We are all adults. Do we really need to wrap up our values in a shroud of "we make god in our own image"? Can't we just focus more directly on the values that we support without cloaking them in religious lingo? For with that religious lingo necessarily comes a lot of really toxic water.

A thought? Maybe it’s not the water itself, but the fact that the water is stagnant? The fact the water is not being “freshened up”? You know, that’s what fundamentalists do. They don’t want to get rid of the bath water. They see the bath water as useful because they’re stinking literalists!

Again, I see religion as a product of human societies that happens for a reason. As societies change, the institutions they create must change with them, otherwise those institutions become a drag on societies’ evolution. Has God evolved in history? Oh, absolutely. Why? Because people create God. Just as societies create police forces to enforce their agreed upon rules, people support priests for the same reason, except for enforcing their languages of myth (the guardians of the sacred words). But laws change, because societies change. Same thing for religion.

The real problem as I see it, is that society has changed so fast and in so many directions, that religion has a hard time adapting to this change. Modern fundamentalism was born at the beginning of the last Century as a response to this change happening. But all they are really are just a pair a feet dragging behind society trying to slow its evolution. An impossible hope.

Frankly, if I were to say this more bluntly, society just needs to grow up and look at religion for what it is, a lot of unfounded superstition. And while I don't support any official detoxification efforts, I would embrace more media, such as documentaries, etc... that exposed the superstition for what it is. I also want to see schools teach children how superstition works and how to recognize it where it exists; a simple course in statistics and in logical errors would be helpful I think.

I see no need in protecting believers beliefs. Helping society rid itself of this cancer won't fix all of societies ills, but it would certainly improve things. This is not a radical position to take even though I'm sure the religionists would insist that it is.

BTW, I don't expect the already indoctrinated to give up their superstitious ideas. It's the younger generation that we have to give better tools to. And I do believe that we need to fight against the religionist's efforts to keep the masses ignorant.

Come back to this later with me if I don’t address it in the following sections I typed before this. It’s really important and needs discussion. But I’m getting really fried at the moment and need to go live my life outside.

Part 2, EQ:

There is a difference between emotions and intelligence. Beliefs in God are not based on intelligence. They are based on emotions, despite what any teleological argument some evangelical apologist may try to persuade you with.

I agree that god belief is grounded in emotion. Nevertheless, the emotion is built on a foundation of poor rationale. It's a superstition and the superstition is fed by a poor understanding of how the brain operates and how statistically probable or improbable certain phenomena happen to be.

I’ll take a slightly different position. I agree completely that emotions follow thoughts, and that building up a whole rationale based on incorrect assumptions leads to superstitious ideas, which in turn leads to an emotional response to those superstitious ideas, which in turn reinforces those ideas through a tangle manifestation of those thoughts. We “feel” the idea. We respond to the thought. The idea becomes reality to us through this process.

Then going one step further, when we now either suspect or even “know” something to be true because of how strong an emotional impression it leaves us with, when confronted with a “reality check”, it seems our first instinct is to “believe” our emotional experience first and then we go down a path of seeking to validate our belief. Our belief is in what we “feel” to be true.

Let’s keep going with this. If emotional needs are being met, if the beliefs are working for the person giving them a set of tools to function in their lives, then they are bound even further to this perception of “truth”. I always like to put it this way, “Truth is what works”. And when it comes to personal beliefs operating in someone’s life, the importance between objective reality and a personal sense of reality becomes different sort of argument.

What happens in conversions (either to or away from one belief to another), seems to be a process which begins with someone’s needs not being met. Doubt, has emotional needs as its driving force. If someone’s needs are being met, they have little motivation to doubt they have truth, as “truth is what works” when speaking on this level. If they live in an isolated community where all members speak the same language about reality and have learned to function within this framework, there is little reason to abandon this system for another. It is truth to them.

Now to you or me outside those communities, where our emphasis on reality is more “scientific”, their ideas seem silly and would never work for us. And that’s a fact. They would never work for us. But they work for them. Our needs are different. We are part of a greater, more diverse, more modern world in the Industrialized Nations where there are many long-standing, inherited language systems functioning within those individual societies on many levels for the people who are part of them.

But we are in a great cosmopolitan community, and we need to interact with many cultures across may borders. The needs of this global society are very different from say, an Amish community. We have to interact with other cultures. We have to socialize with them. We have to trade with them. We need a way to view the world together in a language that is easier to agree on. We have a need to see reality in a way that we can agree with outsiders on if we hope to move beyond our own borders.

Not everyone wants to move beyond their own borders.

All this to say that leaving the safety of one’s community to talk with foreigners (those with different world views), is a difficult thing to do for most people, and frankly they may have little reason to do so. The need to do this generally must be strong enough to propel them to alter how they look at things in order to satisfy a changed need within themselves.

Either they want something as a tribe from the other tribe and they need to learn how others see things in order to relate to them, and as a result their own views evolve to incorporate others (this is how God evolves, BTW); or it happens as an individual looking for something larger than what is in their own borders. That individual has seen what’s out there and it appeals to a personal quest to satisfy a desire for a greater understanding of the world and to enlarge their own world view (this describes me). We are explorers.

For example, we look at a complex world, and without tools to know better and/or intelligence to understand available tools, it stands to reason that something intelligent created what we see around us. Prayers offered up in request for healing, new jobs, etc... have no better chance at being answered than just pure chance. It takes a certain degree of intelligence to understand this concept. A lack of intelligence almost automatically dictates that a fantastic explanation is best just due to the evolutionary make up of the human mind, which searches for patterns and contrives them even when they don't exist.

But it’s part of a system of how to perceive the world. If someone prays for a new job, and something or even nothing happens, they have gone through the exercise of focusing on their idea of a god in the whole process, and it’s that focused thought that is the reward for the person, not the end result. Their idea of God is much bigger than whether or not he answered a prayer. He is a symbol of culture; He is a means for focused meditation; He is a language for humans to put a face to universe so they can relate to their own existence, etc.

Back to what I said before, that the emotional belief is what’s important, and people seek explanations for those disconnects between the expected and actual outcomes. Theologies ensue trying to “explain” God. The seemingly “irrational” intellectual dishonesty in defending this belief actually does have some rationality behind it. It’s defending a belief that functions as tool for them. It’s when it no longer functions due to changes in need as mentioned above, that these self-apologetics become “irrational”. They become irrational because it’s defending a belief that fails to offer usefulness to them anymore.

Intelligence doesn’t really apply in these areas. They are about non-intellectual things. This is all about completely non-scientific abstractions like “meaning”. This is the irrational side of humanity. If you were to answer rationally the question, “What is the meaning of life?” the answer is there is no purpose to existence except if anything, to simply exist and consume energy. Anything beyond that is a mental construct that has irrationality as is source. The meaning of life is what we choose for it to be. The belief in “meaning” being something to pursue rationally, is only rational to the point that it gives us a sense of stability, a framework for us to function as both reasoning and irrational beings. “Meaning” is not a rational question in any scientific sense. Yet we all are drawn to seek it.

Do you see why I say that to call for a world of pure rationality is to ask humans to not be – human? Humans are both rational and irrational. It’s the pursuit of that irrational question, that irrational side of ourselves that we create things like mythology, art, philosophy, music, etc to explore who we are; to try to tell us what is meaningful as humans in societies, and to help us express our own individual voices with this non-rational language. These expressions, these languages are a means of self-exploration. People are drawn to explore the irrational question of meaning.

This is also why I always say “We are the God we seek”. People put a face on what’s inside ourselves as we are trying to “explain” what we on a very primal, even biological level tell ourselves actually exists. We feel its existence. We are programmed biologically to “think” this. And as a result, we feel it exists. That in turn creates the sense of its reality, and everything following this is all our pursuit in reinforcing that connection to what we perceive and experience as reality.

To ask someone to abandon the idea of meaning by holding it to the light of reason, is to go against what is very likely a genetic programming of what makes us human! To me, this is why the end and the beginning of the journey for man is the realization that there is no God. It is that realization to me that liberates us into the fullness of our uniqueness and our commonality. All of humanity stares into an abyss as we look to find meaning to our own existence; where when we look deeply enough and clearly enough we will see only our own faces staring back at us!

This is the terror of being rational; the terror that drives the languages of thought created to both pursue this realization, and to protect against knowing it. Religion is the guardian of the Great Secret that they themselves dare not look at. To look upon God is death. Or so it is feared. But to me, to remove that veil is to open the windows to ultimate truth: the truth that exists in our own humanity. We create God. We are God.

You can perceive this as ”intellectual dishonesty” (as I’ve called it myself a thousand times), but really it’s more about an emotional quotient of how able someone is to look at something like this. They are certainly capable intellectually of processing information and problem solving. They do it everyday of their lives. But emotional ability, now that’s something altogether different. It has little to do with IQ..

I see your point here, but then it begs the question, what makes us different? I also felt a strong identity with my belief system. I to felt threatened by alternative explanations. I struggled through that all because I wanted truth, even if it hurt. My process of deconversion started with an honest and prayerful quest for wisdom and truth. Others told me not to think so much, but something burned in me that forced me to examine my beliefs. So would I be reading you right to say that I'm not necessarily more intellectually honest than others, but that it is more accurate to say that my EQ is somehow higher than average?

This is mostly addressed in what I said in this first part of this post, but I want to restate this a little and add one other thought to this.

Your EQ was what allowed you to act, but someone’s EQ may also be as high as yours but they may not feel any motivation to change, due to many possible circumstances. If however presented with sufficient motivation, people with a higher EQ would be more easily able to change. So just because someone remains in their belief system, it may have nothing to do with their EQ (in other words, don’t be too quick to judge).

Your system of belief quit working for you due to a wide variety of factors in your life (as it did for me), and your EQ allowed you to make that change. As a result, you are now truer to yourself. And that to me is what defines being able to grow as a human being. Those who stay where they were and compromise in that way will never become the potential of who they really are. If I was to believe in some God, I would see his first commandment to be, “This above all: to thine own self be true.”

But a thought on this: someone can be true to themselves, genuinely, sincerely true to themselves, and believe in God. It’s when it’s not working for them, and they try to justify it to themselves to continue to believe it that they are now living in conflict with themselves and are acting insincerely. At this point, God becomes a lie and a detriment to them.

June 2, 2007

Get rid of religion all you want, but you won’t get rid of what you hope will go away. It’s not its source. Societies of people are.

Hmm, I'm not sure I completely agree. That implies that I do partially agree. Certainly Victorians are much more repressed sexually than Catholic Italians, though I'm not sure about Latino Catholics. So, I'm sure that the repression is at least partially rooted just in the culture as a whole. On the other hand, I guarantee you that I was raised in a far more sexually repressed environment than my unchurched peers, who aside from church were raised in the same cultural community environment. My unchurched peers were lucky to escape with a much healthier attitude about sex growing up than I. It's been a real struggle for me to overcome deep seeded repressions instilled in me by my born again relatives.

In other words, my family spurned contemporary community standards (to borrow the Supreme Court's terminology) and raised me based on the strictest standards of the protestant meme. Had my parents not been exposed to the meme I would have very likely been raised according to the community standards instead, which were, as I said, much healthier.

Again, I see religion as a product of human societies that happens for a reason. As societies change, the institutions they create must change with them, otherwise those institutions become a drag on societies’ evolution. Has God evolved in history?.

It's been my unscientific observation that European societies have changed even as their religion has stagnated. Rather than reinterpreting their religion or the language of their religion, they have merely drifted further from their religion to the point where it has become merely a traditional icon that is not taken seriously. America is still very young culturally-speaking, but I think she to will separate herself from religion rather than evolving the religion further.

I think what you are saying has been historically true. Religion has in fact evolved as societies have evolved. Now, however, with broad access to education and better understanding of science and philosophy available to the masses, societies are losing their need for religion, and pushing that religion to the undereducated margins. This is why Europe, and US urban areas, are becoming more and more secular even as the Americas look to the European centers of religion (Vatican) for continued guidance.

This is why I think that better education needs to be made more accessible, rather than focusing on helping religion along in its evolution.

Now to you or me outside those communities, where our emphasis on reality is more â€œscientificâ€, their ideas seem silly and would never work for us. And that’s a fact. They would never work for us. But they work for them.

Their reality may indeed work for them, they their reality does not work for society and this is my issue. Truth may be what works, but we can, I think, determine at least what is not true. For example, it is not true that God is trying to usher in Armageddon. It is not true that God wants us to wait to have sex until we get married. It is not true that the world is 6k years old. These are all harmful beliefs and these "truths" don't work for the rest of us who have to live with them who they do work for.

Not everyone wants to move beyond their own borders..

Absolutely, and I have no problem leaving these people behind. The world will continue to progress without them just fine. Reality will more than likely force them to adapt.

But I feel my responses to the last two quotes are getting away from your points and the points that I feel are most important in this discussion. That is, that modern societies are moving necessarily away from religion rather than forcing religion to evolve the way that it always has in the past. This, again, is my own unscientific observation, to which I offer the hypothesis that it is occurring due to the change in accessibility to broad education, which up until recent history, just was not available to those outside a handful of elite.

The god of European societies has evolved, just as you are pointing out that he always does. I think where we differ here is in what it takes to move a society forward. You seem to be proposing that society will move forward if you help their god evolve. I offer that society moves forward as better education becomes more infused in that society and that their god evolves out of necessity.

Their idea of God is much bigger than whether or not he answered a prayer. He is a symbol of culture; He is a means for focused meditation; He is a language for humans to put a face to universe so they can relate to their own existence, etc.

No argument here. But I do think that I described the process by which their god is created in the first place. From there he became much bigger than the rational by which he was created. Ah, hell, I'm just nitpicking here. Sorry.

Do you see why I say that to call for a world of pure rationality is to ask humans to not be – human?

Certainly, and I agree. Even those of us who have rationality as one of our highest values are irrational in many areas. I don't expect or even need everyone to be rational. I think it's irrational for others to believe in ghosts, for example, but their belief in ghosts is not a threat to me. It's only when irrational beliefs become a hindrance or a danger to societies and the offspring of the believers that I have a problem.

however presented with sufficient motivation, people with a higher EQ would be more easily able to change.

I'm still not sure I follow here. My motivation was not to change. I was afraid of hell and had my identity more than grounded in my faith. When my faith was challenged, I was forced to look at the challenge seriously because it was a serious challenge. Stop. I was scared to death to do so, but I had to. It was the honest thing to do and I value honesty.

June 3, 2007

Get rid of religion all you want, but you won’t get rid of what you hope will go away. It’s not its source. Societies of people are.

Hmm, I'm not sure I completely agree. That implies that I do partially agree. Certainly Victorians are much more repressed sexually than Catholic Italians, though I'm not sure about Latino Catholics. So, I'm sure that the repression is at least partially rooted just in the culture as a whole. On the other hand, I guarantee you that I was raised in a far more sexually repressed environment than my unchurched peers, who aside from church were raised in the same cultural community environment. My unchurched peers were lucky to escape with a much healthier attitude about sex growing up than I. It's been a real struggle for me to overcome deep seeded repressions instilled in me by my born again relatives.

With respects to the struggles you have from this, I can’t help but see this as a case of putting the cart before the horse and an oversimplification of cause and effect. I can think of many different ways of looking at this that make it a far more complex dynamic, than simply assigning blame to a particular church’s teaching.

Our parent’s generation and their parent’s generation had very repressive ideas about sex. Again I don’t see those ideas as having been created by the Bible. Our view of the world is largely shaped by our culture’s adopted values, and people will turn to books like the Bible as read it in ways that will fit what they want so it can serve as a symbol and validation of their own ideas.

Even if your family were some other religion, they were still part of the culture they grew up in and those values were instilled into them by it. Your friend’s parents may not have had those same values instilled into them by their parents. Even if your culture around you that your un-churched friends moved in was more open sexually, this doesn’t mean anything.

My father is not religious, yet he is a product of the culture of his generation. He has these outdated ideas of roles of women that were programmed into him, where there are times I catch him saying things like, “Little ladies shouldn’t act that way.” I can see this sort of thing manifest itself in applying double-standards of things like not saying anything to me about smoking when I did, yet frowning with both subtle and not-so-subtle disapprovals at my sister smoking.

The same thing applies to double-standards about sex between men and women. He sees that women having sex with multiple partners somehow magically makes them immoral and dirty, where with men it is somehow to a less the degree of infraction. The tone used in criticisms is inconsistent. There’s lots of reasons historically these ideas developed, and did so independently of some prophet of God). My father’s outdated notions are not his by virtue of his belief in Jesus and the Bible. Hardly. His views on religion are not favorable. He himself is un-churched.

What I’m suggesting as a possibility in regards to your family’s sexually repressive ideas are that took those and found a home in the church that aligned with their ideas they got from the parents and the culture they grew up in. Your friend’s families may have had very different upbringings. They would not have chosen the church world of your family, because it didn’t align with their values.

Even yet another possibly: the reality of your friend’s home life may have been considerably different that what you perceived. I’ve learned how my perception of something, especially years after the fact may have little resemblance to the reality of it. You may have been imagining the grass was far greener that it was on their side of the fence, when in reality it was a reality of your own creation, etc. I’ve done this many times too. The list of possible explanations could grow nearly to infinity. In short, we’re dealing with hugely complex human issues, and I can’t help but feel that putting the blame on religion as it as a gross oversimplification. It sounds reactionary.

Even within the cultures of our own, and those of our parents and of their parents you had diversity surrounding these sorts of issues. Not everyone walked in lock-step on these ideas. You had enclaves of ideas that all found perches on which to roost. It’s what societies do.

One example I’d like to bring up that touches on this whole culture before religion connection is the Oneida community . Here you had a man in the mid 1800’s who had an idea of a utopian society where men and women were complete equals. He believed that marriage was against these values and that everyone communally was married to each other. Exclusive relationships were against this ideal, and that members were to circulate with each other, with at least three different partners per week.

Guess what? He based this on what it teaches in the Bible. He saw this as bringing about the perfection of heaven on earth. Did the Bible create this view? No. Did he find support for this in the Bible? Sure. Would someone argue that his reading was wrong? Of course, but the point is he turned to it – just as your family’s descendents did to support their ideas.

There were many of these social experiments that were happening at that time, such as the Amana Colonies (of refrigerator fame), and many that didn’t survive. The Oneida community dissolved eventually, and of course we are familiar today with the line of Silverware products that came out of that community.

In other words, my family spurned contemporary community standards (to borrow the Supreme Court's terminology) and raised me based on the strictest standards of the protestant meme. Had my parents not been exposed to the meme I would have very likely been raised according to the community standards instead, which were, as I said, much healthier.

Back to my example of my father and his notions of women inherited from his culture. He’s not religious, and the issues about gender that the women of that family will carry forth into a world of differing sensibilities will likewise affect them as things to overcome. It has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with cultural ideas inherited from many previous generations that had social rules around women, that actually based on the economics of the day and the lack of power socially that women possessed, were largely to protect them from sexual predators, etc.

These notions are hangovers from another culture which had reasons outside the Bible that created these rules. They are grossly out of place today in this culture and economy, and you have the residual effect of programming to overcome now in people like my father, and your family.

Really, what I hear in all this argument against religion is essentially a frustrated plea to those hanging on to the past with outdated ideas to loosen their grip on these antiquated ideas and move into the 21st Century. The Bible or Religion is a symbol to the atheist activist also… but as representative of a social problem. It’s not the teachings of the Bible. It’s people who read it a certain way to hang onto to what have now become unhealthy ideas.

This is what my complaint is about. It’s gross oversimplifications of highly complex social and human issues. This is why often compare it to that same type of Black and White thinking of the religious fundamentalists. It’s a reactionary conclusion.

It's been my unscientific observation that European societies have changed even as their religion has stagnated. Rather than reinterpreting their religion or the language of their religion, they have merely drifted further from their religion to the point where it has become merely a traditional icon that is not taken seriously. America is still very young culturally-speaking, but I think she to will separate herself from religion rather than evolving the religion further.

You are describing the very struggle the mainstream church is faced with: Relevence. There is this balance that they have to find if they hope to remain a viable institution of the people. Very true. This comes to what I said about the rate of change. The church strives to speak to a new generation while not alienating an older generation, such as our parents generation.

Think of churches as businesses. They sell a product to people. They need customers. In our market economies you have target audience for products. These will typically fall along certain demographic lines. Car manufactures sell the Red Convertible, to mid-life crisis males within a certain income bracket. Jeans designers target teens within a certain household income. It’s relatively easy to target your product to certain audience within a certain age group – an age group with a certain set of cultural values – like American teens, or Russian teens, etc.

But the church is sells services, and they sell them to a target audience of ages and cultural ideas completely across the whole demographic scale. They need to offer something to people from 5 years old all the way to their late 90’s. Yikes! Think of this as a business owner who sells services that have to somehow maintain an image of consistency with your business identity. You sell your services as a trusted institution that rises above pandering to market demands for the sake of money. You have an image to maintain that you are for all people. Wow. That in the face of an audience that is diversifying across generational lines unheard of at anytime in the past!

That’s the struggle of the church to remain relevant in today’s world. This is why you have rises in fundamentalism with false promises to the target audience of simple answers, to unbelievably complex choices. Our culture is a consumer culture. We’re a convenience culture. It hates complex menus to choose from.

We want simple choices, easy answers in a dizzyingly complex world. We demand simple, easy choices like on the fast-food menu at the drive through of McChristian’s. Of course their Jesus Burger with Cheese has a nutritional value that’s pretty awful and is even detrimental to human health. But isn’t the easy answer of “get rid of religion” pretty much the same thing? Is it offering anything better, or just another simple menu item to choose from? Human beings are highly complex organisms, and cheapened, easy, processed market goods are killing us from the inside.

I think what you are saying has been historically true. Religion has in fact evolved as societies have evolved. Now, however, with broad access to education and better understanding of science and philosophy available to the masses, societies are losing their need for religion, and pushing that religion to the undereducated margins. This is why Europe, and US urban areas, are becoming more and more secular even as the Americas look to the European centers of religion (Vatican) for continued guidance.

This is why I think that better education needs to be made more accessible, rather than focusing on helping religion along in its evolution.

What we have with the increased access to knowledge is more choices. This is the problem that gave rise to fundamentalism in the first place.

This goes even deeper than knowledge. It’s ideas. Ideas that have shifted the focus in our post-enlightenment Western culture to the individual. Concepts of the individual holding such a high place in society are much more a modern concept. Along with this is leisure. Our large middle class has allowed us this great luxury that you and are at the moment indulging ourselves in.

I started at thread sometime back that said that “God owes His existence to Technology”. That’s true. While others are out there getting the food from the ground and shipping it across the country to our markets, while great turbines generate electricity to power our ovens, I sit here in leisure thinking about human issues of society, and considering luxury ideas like God. God is a luxury.

Anyway… back to this. I still maintain that based on the inherited nature of humans, and our propensity to irrationality, science is insufficient to meet human needs on that level. This is why people will always find something that looks a lot like religion. I don’t see people loosing their need for religion, I see them diversifying. If anything is true, they don’t need religion to explain the process of nature anymore. However, there remains that “mystery” to existence, that pulls at the human imagination. It’s in there that people look for meaning, and where irrational concepts such as God offer a degree of satisfaction.

Beyond that, religion offers even more than this for people. They are social institutions; they meet human needs for rites and ritual, for custom, traditions, anchors to the past, plans for the future, a repository of cultural identity, etc. These human needs find a home in institutions like the church. What is society offering to replace this in something that speaks across the demographic like religion attempts to do?

This is what I’m talking about saying it’s way too simple an idea to hope for religion to just disappear.

Their reality may indeed work for them, they their reality does not work for society and this is my issue. Truth may be what works, but we can, I think, determine at least what is not true. For example, it is not true that God is trying to usher in Armageddon. It is not true that God wants us to wait to have sex until we get married. It is not true that the world is 6k years old. These are all harmful beliefs and these "truths" don't work for the rest of us who have to live with them who they do work for.

I agree that the radical approach to religion is detrimental to humans, just as the McDonald’s cheeseburger is. But a minor restating of what you said about God trying to usher in Armageddon: It isn’t objectively true, but it is a perceive truth by them. It’s how they see the world, it’s the language they apply to their notions of reality.

If you confront them with facts, it’s not going to matter because they are choosing to view what the Bible says in a way that supports their views of society. It’s about their attitudes, not what God says. What made you change your ideas about hell? Was it because you were presented with an alterative reading of scripture? Or was it because you had some sensibility emotionally that the logic of it not being true made more sense to you? I will bank on the latter every time.

When group’s sensibilities about the world change, so will their reading of God’s word, so to speak.

But I feel my responses to the last two quotes are getting away from your points and the points that I feel are most important in this discussion. That is, that modern societies are moving necessarily away from religion rather than forcing religion to evolve the way that it always has in the past.

This is how religion evolves. It adapts. People moving away from it will do one of two things to it. It will either change to survive or die.

But a new point to make. It may be that Christianity dies in this process, just a Zeus is no longer relevant, but religion will survive because of human need for something that this seems to offer them. Religion is religion, not a particular idea of it. Religions die and are born all the time. But religion survives and is very much alive.

You seem to be proposing that society will move forward if you help their god evolve. I offer that society moves forward as better education becomes more infused in that society and that their god evolves out of necessity.

Oh not at all. I’m not at all saying that society will move forward “if you help their god evolve.” I’m saying the particular God in question will have to move forward if it has any hope of surviving the process of social evolution. Society will move forward with or without Jehovah, or Allah, or Zeus’s help, and it’s totally up to the ability of the particular system of religious belief to adapt that will dictate its survival or demise. But if it dies, another will replace it that can live in the new society. It’s what humans do. They create gods.

If anything I am suggesting is that it will help society to move along with less volatile or even violent upheavals if they are able to find a way to reconcile changes in sensibilities with traditionally inherited religious ideas. Maybe it is impossible for Jesus to adapt to today. Maybe it has too many dogmatic roots that are too hard to loosen for it to bend like a willow in the high winds of global change. Time will tell.

It's only when irrational beliefs become a hindrance or a danger to societies and the offspring of the believers that I have a problem.

Me too. If you interfere with nature, you mess a lot more up than just the one thing you’re manipulating. Can anyone say FrankenFoods? (Now there’s an act of irrationality for you).

I'm still not sure I follow here. My motivation was not to change. I was afraid of hell and had my identity more than grounded in my faith. When my faith was challenged, I was forced to look at the challenge seriously because it was a serious challenge. Stop. I was scared to death to do so, but I had to. It was the honest thing to do and I value honesty.

You know, I don’t want to presume to know your life, and believe me I am sensitive to what you feel about your past and everything, but I have a hard time believing the process of change wasn’t already deeply at work under the surface inside you. If your needs were being met, if you were truly happy, then even though someone presented you with an alterative or even contradictory view of things you truly felt comfortable with, you would not have abandoned them.

You may not have needed to go so far as to be illogical or raving in defense of your beliefs. You could have simply have found a comfortable way to synthesize your beliefs with a different way of looking at them. People do this all the time. Or, if they’re EQ isn’t really strong, then they may resolve to live with internal conflicts. You didn’t. You chose to take action. You were able to move through it and resolve the conflict by changing. That’s what defines EQ to me: the emotional ability to do this.

Your motive wasn’t to change. Your motive was to deal with conflict. That conflict came because something that made sense to you and appealed to you, and it made sense to you because it appealed to you. Very subtly, almost invisibly, it became like an itch by a gnat, but the idea offered an emotional appeal to you, and that’s what led to taking action to resolve the conflict it created in you.

You were scared to death, but you had to do so, as you said. You value honest and felt compelled to be honest. It was exactly that for me too. What I had to do was be true to myself to deal with something emotionally inside of me. Both you and I had the emotional wherewithal to go through that. Other’s don’t have the stamina to endure that, and will find excuses to stay where they are in spite of their conflict.

Yet again, another long post! I don’t know how long I can keep this up.

June 4, 2007

With respects to the struggles you have from this, I can’t help but see this as a case of putting the cart before the horse and an oversimplification of cause and effect. I can think of many different ways of looking at this that make it a far more complex dynamic, than simply assigning blame to a particular church’s teaching.

That's funny, because before this reply I was actually thinking of invoking Occam's razor, arguing that you are making this more complex than it needs to be. I haven't read your reply yet, so we'll see if you can change my mind.

Our parent’s generation and their parent’s generation had very repressive ideas about sex. Again I don’t see those ideas as having been created by the Bible. Our view of the world is largely shaped by our culture’s adopted values, and people will turn to books like the Bible as read it in ways that will fit what they want so it can serve as a symbol and validation of their own ideas.
.

Ok, so far I'm still of the opinion that you are overcomplicating the issue. Yes, I agree that the recent generations of xians interpreted xianity based on their current culture and not necessarily on a literal interpretation of scripture. Nevertheless, what we are discussing here is culture within the church, which has been influenced by the society they live in, but still stands separate from secular society. Again, my family raised me based on religious values not secular society's values. Those religious values, I will give you, were influenced by current culture, but they are still separate from secular culture. I can, again, guarantee you that I was raised with far more oppressive values than the values that existed simultaneously in secular society. How those religious values evolved is not so important to me as the fact that the values wrapped in the religion are more oppressive than secular values. This then continues to feed my bias that religion is harmful to the individual and to society. Lest I be accused of blaming religion for all societal ills, let me assure you that I don't. Just some of them.

My father is not religious, yet he is a product of the culture of his generation. He has these outdated ideas of roles of women that were programmed into him, where there are times I catch him saying things like, “Little ladies shouldn’t act that way.”
.

Yes, and I have no problem accepting that. This is different from the religious oppression that exists in the church. Religious oppression goes much further and it wraps a little bow called the threat of hell around it. Again, I understand that religion evolves along with the society in which it resides, but then it turbo charges those values and blows them way out of proportion.

For example, I think you, and the rest of us can easily acknowledge that membership in a cult such as the Hari Krishnas, which uses sleep deprivation, familial separation, and starvation to control it's followers is oppressive and that it's values do not perfectly align with the society in which the cult resides. Why then is it so difficult to recognize that mainstream religion also does the same thing, even if it doesn't do so for every member. It did do so for me and my family and many of those who sat next to me in the pews. It was very different from secular society and it was much more harmful than the values adopted by secular society.

Guess what? He based this on what it teaches in the Bible. He saw this as bringing about the perfection of heaven on earth. Did the Bible create this view? No. Did he find support for this in the Bible? Sure. Would someone argue that his reading was wrong? Of course, but the point is he turned to it – just as your family’s descendents did to support their ideas. .

Yes, I don't disagree that xians do this. A major factor in my own deconversion was the recognition that the different cultures I visited interpreted scripture based on their own culture.

Back to my example of my father and his notions of women inherited from his culture. .

And again, your father's notions didn't have the teeth that those notions my parents instilled in me did. Did you feel the threat of hell for disagreement or non compliance with your father's notions? Did you in any way feel the wrath of the almighty for the same? Did you feel that you couldn't live up to his notions to the degree where it kept you awake at night, night after night after night with fear, trembling and tears? Only a religion or a physically abusive father can do that to you.

You are describing the very struggle the mainstream church is faced with: Relevance. .

And it's my hope that they feel that struggle until they die out in a whimper.

What we have with the increased access to knowledge is more choices. This is the problem that gave rise to fundamentalism in the first place. .

This is where I mainly disagree with you. Knowledge rather than giving more choices, uncovers the untruths of fundamentalism. Why didn't fundamentalism rise in Europe as knowledge increased amongst the general population? Instead most of their churches "liberalized" and even that didn't keep members from leaving. Europeans now merely consider religion as a cultural identifier, they don't attend church, and they don't take its teachings seriously. The Vatican, on the other hand, is but a squeaky noise in the background to the Europeans, but holds power of thought only over the lesser educated Americas.

Knowledge destroys a society's need for religion.

I started at thread sometime back that said that “God owes His existence to Technology”. That’s true. While others are out there getting the food from the ground and shipping it across the country to our markets, while great turbines generate electricity to power our ovens, I sit here in leisure thinking about human issues of society, and considering luxury ideas like God. God is a luxury.
.

If that's true, then it has gone the way of industrialization in the European states.

What is society offering to replace this in something that speaks across the demographic like religion attempts to do?
.

I don't know. What has replaced the church in the lives of Europeans and non church going Americans?

June 4, 2007

I agree that the radical approach to religion is detrimental to humans,
.

But the radical wing has not been marginalized in the US, but has found its way into the mainstream. It tells US society that nipples at the Super bowl are bad, it has a President working on ushering in Armageddon, it has politicians that have give it a seat at the table at the expense of the liberals and secularists. It has done all this because ignorance abounds in the country amongst a large majority. You can't just offer them a less harmful version of "truth." They will reject it and you as the enemy. Only by raising education standards amongst their youth will you see a kinder and gentler version of "truth" emerge, and I think with it, a marginalization of serious religion that has exemplified European society.

When group’s sensibilities about the world change, so will their reading of God’s word, so to speak.
.

Yes, and here we find agreement once again.

It may be that Christianity dies in this process, just a Zeus is no longer relevant, but religion will survive because of human need for something that this seems to offer them.
.

But does society really need religion? Historically you can show that they have always adopted it, but this is not proof that they actually need it. As I stated before, we are at a historical frontier that started with the Age of Enlightenment. Now with massive breakthroughs in knowledge and technology, societies are faced with a world they have not experienced yet. We atheists seem to function ok without it and European society doesn't seem to be crying in its beer nor does it appear to be creating new myths and rituals.

Oh not at all. I’m not at all saying that society will move forward “if you help their god evolve.” I’m saying the particular God in question will have to move forward if it has any hope of surviving the process of social evolution. Society will move forward with or without Jehovah, or Allah, or Zeus’s help, and it’s totally up to the ability of the particular system of religious belief to adapt that will dictate its survival or demise. But if it dies, another will replace it that can live in the new society. It’s what humans do. They create gods.
.

Ok, sorry I misunderstood you. Yes, you certainly have history on your side here. Time will tell if my own hypothesis that we are at a fresh historical frontier that will alleviate this need is correct. It's just a hypothesis.

Can anyone say FrankenFoods? (Now there’s an act of irrationality for you).

.

Yes, with or without religion, society will be faced with great and complicated challenges on into the future.

Yet again, another long post! I don’t know how long I can keep this up.

.

Agreed, it's getting rather difficult to stay focused on one topic. I can see probably 30-40 topics to discuss within our discussion here and it's pretty difficult to nail down just one issue in order to try and find common ground or a resolution. It's a good mental exercise nonetheless and as long as we can come out of it smiling and don't frustrate one another too terribly much, I can say that at least I am richer for it.

June 4, 2007

It is fun to see Christians cry when you attack their precious god.

Really? It gives you pleasure to make people cry?

Normally, no. But my contempt for religious nonsense is more than skin deep. I fear that it often brings out the worst in me. I do not feel the slightest bit sorry when I punch a hole in someone's faith. I feel the world becoming a better place every time it happens. Religion does not deserve respect. Respect is earned, not given.

I have been an atheist for a decade (my entire adult life). I have seen nothing worthy of respect out of religion. I did community service for the National Honor Society when I was in high school. The place I was working at was a meal hall for the homeless. These guys and gals came in for what they thought was a free meal, but had to endure a sermon and much religious B.S. before getting their hot meal. None of these people seemed the least bit interested but they endured because they were hungry. This to me stands out as being very dishonest and underhanded. If you are going to do something good, then why not just do it without an underlying dark motive? This is not an isolated incident.

Is religion all bad?

Let's see:

1)Child abuse - Telling children about a horrible place called hell where you burn in writhing agony for all of eternity. This causes mental and emotional harm. No "good" organization would tell such things to young children.

2)Bigotry - Encouraging anti gay and lesbian attitudes is counter productive to an evolving society. This practice sets us back several decades.

3)Ignorance - Attacking science and teaching crackpot fantasies in its place.

4)Intolerance - The whole "My invisible man is real and yours is fake so I am going to kill you" attitude. Muslims are especially guilty of this one.

5)Immorality - This is probably the worst. All of the example above are also in this category. The list is so long on this one that I am only going to be able to scratch the surface. The pope discourages condom use! Youth are taught that there sexual urges are somehow wrong, leading to repression and hindered emotional relationships in the future.

I am sure there are more, but you get what I'm saying. Why should we be understanding and respectful of any of this just because it brings some comfort to some peoples lives. There are many joys in life that are actually positive and that should be encouraged. Religion is not one of them.

Down with religion and down with those who benefit from misleading others. Society as a whole is harmed by this. Defending religion and believers is a disservice to your fellow man.

June 4, 2007

With respects to the struggles you have from this, I can’t help but see this as a case of putting the cart before the horse and an oversimplification of cause and effect. I can think of many different ways of looking at this that make it a far more complex dynamic, than simply assigning blame to a particular church’s teaching.

That's funny, because before this reply I was actually thinking of invoking Occam's Razor, arguing that you are making this more complex than it needs to be. I haven't read your reply yet, so we'll see if you can change my mind.

This it not my full reply yet, as I only have a few minutes. But I wanted to respond to this one thing. Be careful about invoking Occam's razor. You may find it supports what I am saying more.

Occam's razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's razor) is a principle attributed to the 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. The principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon

should make as few assumptions as possible

, eliminating, or "shaving off," those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae ("law of parsimony" or "law of succinctness"):

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem,

which translates to:

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

This is often paraphrased as "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one." In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle

recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions

and postulates the fewest hypothetical entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood.

Overlooking the complexity of a system in pursuit of a simple explaination is not what the Razor is suggesting. I see a large amount of assumptions being made that don't provide a sufficient theory from which to invoke Occam's Razor in choosing the simpler theory. It's overlooking extreemly complex variables that are inherent in any topic about sociology and anthropology. Complexity is a defining characteristic of those systems, and trying to build a theory with the least amount of assumptions (lack of supporting data) that takes into account those complex variables, making it equal in most respects, then to choose the simpler of those two theories is where the Razor applies.

Overlooking variables in favor of a simple explaination is more "Cause and effect and corelation" A logic fallacy.