edgy veggie

I read the thread started yesterday by Jagella on his/her plan to eradicate religion, the discussion quickly turned to an argument revolving around the participants own personal convictions, and decidedly named all atheists as fascists. I quote the original statement

"outrage regarding the harm done to our precious civilization by religion"

OK if we destroyed all religious artifacts there would still be a deep sense of religion in humans that would not go away this is our innate sense to find shared experience in a crazy world.

This discussion must address that religion is only a sidecar to other technological developments that have been developed to create a more intertwined vision of society. Only after humans learned to read the night sky and communicate how it appeared to them did representational ideas of earth come into the heavens. I do believe however since its inception religion has been holding the rudder of mass consciousness. The experience of life cannot contend with the experience of death and organized religion is a hierarchal construct of opposition to this idea. Religion is made up of rituals to ensure mans domination over woman, religion is an idea that started with the chicken, crack yo eggshell mind. You can try to defend religion with explanations that go for ideas of life and reproduction-

"While some humanists and other freethinkers might despair over the inevitability of religion and its attendant evils, I am not so pessimistic. I believe that we can not only survive our primitive instincts but that we can thrive and see the visions of luminaries like Gene Roddenberry and Carl Sagan come true."

"Gene" and "Carl" used ideas of a pretentious survival instinct and combined them with theoretical sciences to create another world that although closed to humans apparently seemed convenient and practical, I would go as far to say that these two are religious figures in our modern society. Our modern society is not nonreligious but directing spirituality at a montage of common daily experiences with super technologies.


My personal belief is in technophobia in a technocratic world. This has everything to do with religion and how it is a simulated response to technology. I enjoy responding to a world of goodness, sounds and lights but without god .

LambdaCalculator

Humans tend to respond to the unknown with magical thinking. The mystical instinct is in no way a bad thing, as when properly applied it can be used as a tool for self-discovery, not to mention great art, music, etc.

The problem comes when the mystic instinct is left uncontrolled, so that people believe in ridiculous ideas willy-nilly. That's essentially the problem that plagues much of Western Civlization and America in particular. Most do not know how to use their mystical instincts in a proper way.

Orthodox_Freethinker

That is a straw man and you know it. Those who desire to abolish religion are fascists. Religiosity, the desire to seek spiritual truth from whatever religion one finds it, is only part of being human. PEOPLE ARE BORN THAT WAY. Therefore, to eradicate religion would be to eradicate religious people.

Peace.

edgy veggie

I don't believe in mystical instincts, I understand Poe wrote of depression with the most magical style, vivid imagery underminded by an acute understanding of the human psyche.

edgy veggie

I just don't think were born with any sense of religion, religion is a instution, we are born with an innate ability to turn our senses off from the illogical and irrational connections between us and nature.

Straight A

History has shown Christianity has not had an issue with eradicating religious people for their beliefs, but it would be wrong to employ these Christian techniques.

The suggestion is to remove religion through education over decades, even hundreds, of years. If this fails, the big mouse trap thing with a bible in it still has legs.

me1492

the first memory i have of really thinking about religion (as opposed to just accepting what i was told) is way back when i was an altar boy (i think i was around 10 or 11). the priest that day was talking about the eucharist (sp?) really being the body of christ even though it was really just bread. i think that was the first time it really hit me that even though i wanted it all to be true it just didnt make any sense. for the next ten years of my life i wanted to believe but in the back of my head was always the thought "how can that work?" it wasnt until i was out of college that i realized that it cant work and that all my life ive wanted to believe. but wanting to believe isnt enough and i know now that what was lacking was faith. i dont know if i was born with the desire to believe or not but i was certainly born without the capacity for blind faith

Orthodox_Freethinker

As long as people are born seeking religious truth, that will never happen. Why not just educate gays to not like butt darts? That's basically what you are saying.
There is a difference between organized religion and organic religion. Organic religion is the spiritual truth one discovers through personal experience and reflection, the truth one finds because we were born to seek it. Remember the God gene?

Peace.

LambdaCalculator

Perhaps "instinct" is the wrong word. But I don't think it is disputable that there is a range of experience that, for lack of a better word in the english language, may be called "mystical".

newtype_alpha

In the first place, people are not born seeking religious truth (yes, this has been said to you dozens of times, and I know this time will just go in one ear and out the other...). At best, it can be said that many are predisposed to achieve conditions of self-transcendence that can only be achieved by cultivating Peak Experiences. This isn't easy to do, but for many people religion makes this process both easier and monsterously confusing. I disagree with the atheists with regard to elminating ALL religion and repeatedly maintained that the best and most realistic goal would be to simply vaccinate children against lunatic sects like fundamentalism and Christian Reconstructionism. These can easily be irradicated and probably should; even in the event that ALL religion were somehow irradicated, most people would still manage to get by without it and without any particular loss of life.

And the only reason anyone ever calls that "religion" is because they have no idea what else they're supposed to call it. A "deeply spiritual reverence for the universe and a belief in some higher power" is something even some atheists posess.