Do We Need an Organized Movement Against Religion?

[The Good Atheist]

If you’re already an atheist, you might feel as though the world around you is awash in delusion. You might also have noticed that although a large number of people find comfort is the fanciful notions of religion, there are others that are entangled in guilt, pain, or violence because of it. The thought may have crossed your mind that a powerful and organized movement is required against religion to free mankind of their bondages of faith.

As I write this, an underground group called “Anonymous” is waging a war against Scientology, a rather recent inductee in the world of organized religion. Unlike most of their brethren, however, Scientology is aggressive and litigious against detractors, and this has spurred hackers and youthful protesters into action. They organize rallies, publish stories and videos, all in an effort to expose the morally questionable behavior of the “church”. So the question arises: should other similar movements be created to discredit and attack religion?

This is a tricky question, mostly because although we are loath to admit it, ideological movements, no matter how well intended, can often fall prey to the machinations of tyrants, who in turn use the momentum and frenzy to gain power. The persecution of religion has a tarnished and rather violent history, especially when these movements were subject to mob will. Ideologues, religious or not, are still dangerous, no matter how noble their original intent may be.

That is not to say that we should remain silent regarding the infantilization of mankind by organized religion, who all generally regard the world of the imaginary as more important, and more real, than the material world. Often, these religions become cults of death, focused almost entirely on a person’s immortal life, rather than the short time they actually do possess. We do need an organized movement, not to fight against religion, since this can only create violence, but rather fight for the rights of individuals NOT to believe.

We must be as visible as possible, to show that a real alternative to religion exists. Atheism is generally mistrusted, since most individuals feel as though it is hopeless and dark. They fail to realize that by embracing the material world, our focus is not on what to do with our immortal souls, but rather how to live well during the brief time we have have here on earth. We need to portray Atheism not as a counter-culture movement, but as the natural progression of belief (or, more accurately, unbelief). Just as our ancestors clung to the primitive myths available to them, many of us retain this need to believe that something, or someone, larger than us is watching out for us. But the powerful desire for this to be true makes it no more true than any other intense dream. This is what we need to convey.

But where do we go from here? Although it seems unfair for us to admit, each unbeliever is a representative of Atheism. The actions of one are interpreted as the whole. As such, it is important to maintain both an austere attitude and demeanor, to demonstrate that Atheism is not the end of hope, but a new one: that although no god may be looking out for us, we can look out for one another instead.

- The Good Atheist

[Mr Comedy]

I think you are delusional. How exactly have you empirically tested that there is no God? If you were an agnostic, then I'd have more time for that. Also you state that every unbeliever is an atheist - I'd suggest the majority are agnostics instead.

In addition, it is wrong to assume as you have that atheism is some form of evolution to a higher plane that is free from the tyranny you associate with religion. The proclaimed atheistic regime under Pol Pot killed 1.1 million Cambodians, the Communist regime in Russia and the Ukraine not only killed millions, but actively persecuted, imprisoned and killed Christians, Jews and believers of other faiths for no other reason but the fact that they had a belief in God. I hate to reduce debates to this, but also the Nazi regime, which was fiercely atheistic, also engaged in genocide.
The majority of the major genocide events in the 20th Century were commited by atheistic regimes. I would suggest that recent history has proved that atheism is a far more pressing threat than religion.

Religion may be a 'fanciful notion', but I'm not sure it is. Definitely religion is much freer of moral bankruptcy that pervades atheism, as the natural outworking of thinking based around there being no God and therefore no consequences of actions is to assume that moral code therefore should no longer apply, as it is at best a human-made construct to protect society from itself, but there is no need to live under it.

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"I am in no way interested in immortality, but only in the taste of tea. " -Lu Tung

[munchingfoo]

None of those people killed "in the name of athiesm".

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“ When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading”

[Gubbins]

Quoting Mr Comedy from 13:46, 15th Apr 2008
In addition, it is wrong to assume as you have that atheism is some form of evolution to a higher plane that is free from the tyranny you associate with religion.

The persecution of religion has a tarnished and rather violent history

I don't think that's what is being said.

Anyway, an organised non-religion seems a little oxymorical to me. Almost by definition, it doesn't have the same drivers behind it.

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...then again, that is only my opinion.

[niall]

Quoting munchingfoo from 13:57, 15th Apr 2008
None of those people killed "in the name of athiesm".

No, but the people were athiests killing those that believed in a god.

[Jono]

Quoting munchingfoo from 13:57, 15th Apr 2008
None of those people killed "in the name of athiesm".

[hr]

“ When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading”

But it doesn't need to be "In the Name" of religion, or non religion. That highlights the point.

Good Aethiest: What you're talking about regarding tyrants and demagogues is true of any kind of organization. It's not restricted to organized religion.

When you get an organisation with resources; whether a government, and army, a church, etc. You have the potential for abuse. It only takes a Pope Innocent III, or an Emperor Charles V, and those resources are suddenly spreading violence in the name of the church. By the same standard, a Milosovic, or a Pol Pot are capable of just the same with secular government, and political creed.

Whenever you let an organization become powerful, there is potential for it's power to be turned to violent ends. I don't think it's beyond the realms of possibility to have war genocide committed in the name of Organized Aethiesm.

[Humphrey]

Oh fuck not another religion thread.

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http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[Humphrey]

Quoting munchingfoo from 13:57, 15th Apr 2008
None of those people killed "in the name of athiesm".

[hr]

“ When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading”

The wonderfully insane (Atheist) philosophizer John Grey has a new book out about this. Here is an extract from the Independent to give you a feel.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/stor ... 95,00.html

"In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of "scientific atheism" - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies. But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom? It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project."

[hr]

http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[Hevelius]

Quoting Mr Comedy from 13:46, 15th Apr 2008
I think you are delusional. How exactly have you empirically tested that there is no God? If you were an agnostic, then I'd have more time for that. Also you state that every unbeliever is an atheist - I'd suggest the majority are agnostics instead.

Perhaps, like me, the OP is a de-facto atheist. I don't preclude the existence of a god or gods, but think their existence so unlikely that I am effectively an atheist. Describing myself as agnostic is not incorrect, but it implies that I ascribe the existence and non-existence of god similar probabilities.

Similarly, I don't deny the possibility that there could be faeries at the bottom of my garden, or a giant teapot orbiting in the asteroid belt. While I suppose I am technically agnostic to such things, I prefer to consider myself atheistic to them.

the Nazi regime, which was fiercely atheistic

No it wasn't. Why do you suppose Pope Pius XII 'turned a blind eye' to the Nazi's crimes? Because they spouted Christian rhetoric and were opposed to the Soviet Union who were atheists.

Even if it the Nazi regime was atheist, your argument is irrelevant, as others have pointed out.

[Haunted]

DEFCON-4

OP:
Atheism is not a movement, nor a group. It is a lack of belief in gods (sometimes generalised to the supernatural in general). To say you are an atheist says nothing about you, only what you are not. For example a person who didn't collect stamps would never write "not collecting stamps" under hobbies in a form.

If your looking for an intrinsically athiest group with which to identify there are quite a few e.g. humanism.

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Now with 100% more corn

[Bizarre Atheist]

How bizarre!

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[Humphrey]

It seems that atheism is becoming the cause celebre of our generation just as Marxism and CND was to our parent’s generation. Are we all now to ditch the Che Guevara t-shirts in favour of Bertrand Russell memorabilia?.

[hr]

http://humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/humphrey_clarke/

[Scurve Kano]

Quoting Haunted from 14:59, 15th Apr 2008
If your looking for an intrinsically athiest group with which to identify there are quite a few e.g. humanism.

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Now with 100% more corn

I suspect Martin Luther would object to the labelling of humanist as "intrinsically atheist!"

And, if the Sinner would permit the intellectual bankruptcy of using Wikipedia as a reference...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_humanism

Humanism covers any belief system centred on humanity rather than divinity, it does not inherently deny the existence of the divine. Unless my esteemed compatriot was referring specifically to secular humanism.

Richard Dawkins has a lot to answer for...

[hr]

"Take me to the Gardens of the Sinner,
Bury me and let me rest in peace
Now the time of truth has come for everyone
The fallen angel stands in victory"
-Gamma Ray

[Haunted]

Quoting Scurve Kano from 15:17, 15th Apr 2008
I suspect Martin Luther would object to the labelling of humanist as "intrinsically atheist!"

Martin Luther really was a piece of work.
"But since the devil's bride, Reason, that pretty whore, comes in and thinks she's wise, and what she says, what she thinks, is from the Holy Spirit, who can help us, then? Not judges, not doctors, no king or emperor, because reason is the Devil's greatest whore." - Martin Luther, 1546

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_humanism

Humanism covers any belief system centred on humanity rather than divinity, it does not inherently deny the existence of the divine. Unless my esteemed compatriot was referring specifically to secular humanism.

Now the mistake you made there was to call religious humanism all humanism. Allow me to counter your wiki with another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism

"humanism rejects the validity of transcendental justifications, such as a dependence on belief without reason, the supernatural, or texts of allegedly divine origin."

What is god if she is not supernatural?

Richard Dawkins has a lot to answer for...

Relevance?

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Now with 100% more corn

[exnihilo]

Ha. You do know that the demographic evidence suggests that NRMs are growing a lot faster than atheism. People are deserting organised religion, or not being brought up in it by their parents, but they're not going to enlightened atheism, they're going instead to things like Paganism which is perceived to be more individualistic than the mainstream religions.

Nevertheless, most people in the world (by a long, long way) identify as part of one religion or other, even if culturally more than in practice. Persecution of religion qua religion would be impossible. Persecution of anyone because of their beliefs is abominable, and certainly persecuting someone for beliefs you think they hold but in which they would see nothing of themselves is abhorrent.

So, don't.

[Haunted]

This is a rather long reply, be sure you are sitting comfortably.

Quoting Mr Comedy from 13:46, 15th Apr 2008
I think you are delusional. How exactly have you empirically tested that there is no God?

I can't see where the OP made that claim.

Also you state that every unbeliever is an atheist - I'd suggest the majority are

agnostics instead.

No doubt this is a semantics issue. The definition of athiest I use is "the lack of belief in gods or the supernatural". Consequentially I use the term "strong atheist" to describe those who know there is no god. An atheist does not believe, which is not the same as knowing there is nothing to believe in. This is there agnosticism and atheism overlap since agnostics think that such a question is unknowable, but they also do not believe (though exceptions do exist).

In addition, it is wrong to assume as you have that atheism is some form of evolution to a higher plane that is free from the tyranny you associate with religion.

I agree, such a presumption on it's own is without merit. Though I do not see the OP making that claim. Indeed the wording chosen was "alternative", not "succesive".

The proclaimed atheistic regime under Pol Pot killed 1.1 million Cambodians, the Communist regime in Russia and the Ukraine not only killed millions, but actively persecuted, imprisoned and killed Christians, Jews and believers of other faiths for no other reason but the fact that they had a belief in God. I hate to reduce debates to this, but also the Nazi regime, which wasfiercely atheistic, also engaged in genocide.

The logic here is:
1. a, b and c were atheists.
2. a, b and c were bad.
3. so atheism is bad.

The majority of the major genocide events in the 20th Century were commited by atheistic regimes. I would suggest that recent history has proved that atheism is a far more pressing threat than religion.

I've heard this claim from so many apologists as well as the full blown creationtard morons so many times so it is worth a length reply. Someone who address this point marvelously is Christopher Hitchens, and I reprint his lengthy reply below:

[s]A little background first[/s].

The word "totalitarian" was probably first used by the dissident Marxist Victor Serge, who had become appalled by the harvest of Stalinism on the Soviet Union. It was popularised by the secular Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt, who had fled the hell of the Third Reich and who wrote "The origins of Totalitarianism". It is a useful term, because it separates "ordinary" forms of despotism (those which merely exact obedience from their subjects) from the absolutist systems which demand that citizens become wholly subjects and surrender their private lives and personalities entirely to the state, or to the supreme leader.If we accept that latter definition, then the first point to be made is likewise an easy one. For most of human history, the idea of the total or absolute state was intimately bound up with religion. A Baron or King might compel you to pay taxes or serve in his army, and he would usually arrange to have priests on hand to remind you that this was your duty, but the truly frightening despotisms were those which also wanted the contents of your heart and your head. Whether we examine the oriental monarchies of China or India or Persia, or the empires of the Aztec or the Incas, or the medieval courts of Spain and Russia and France, it is almost unvaryingly that we find that these dictators were also gods, or the heads of churches. More than mere obedience was owed to them: any criticism of them was profane by definition, and millions of people lived and died in pure fear of a ruler who could select you for a sacrifice, or condemn you to eternal punishment, on a whim. The slightest infringement (of a holy day, or a holy object, or an ordinance about sex or food or caste) could bring calamity. The totalitarian principle, which is often represented as "systematic" is also closely bound up with caprice. The rules might change or be extended at any moment, and the rulers had the advantage of knowing that their subjects could never be sure if they were obeying the latest law or not. We now value the few exceptions from antiquity (sich as Periclean Athens with all it's deformaties) precisely because there were a few moments when humanity did not live in permanent terror of a Pharoah or Nebuchadnezzar or Darius whose least word was holy law.George Orwell, the ascetic unbeliever whose novels gave us an ineradicable picture of what life in a totatlitarian state might truly feel like, was in no doubt about this. "From the totatitarian point of view," he wrote in "The Prevention of Literatutre" in 1946, "history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible." You will notice that he wrote this in a year when, having fought for more than a decade against fascism, he was turning his guns even more on sympathisers of Communism.The urge to ban and censor books, silence dissenters, condemn outsiders, invade the private sphere and invokean exclusive salvation is the very essence of the totalitarian. The fatalism of Islam, which believes that all is arranged by Alaah in advance. has some points of resemblance in its utter denial of human autonomy and liberty, as well as its arrogant and insufferable belief that its faith already contains everything that anyone might ever need to know.

Thus, when the great antitotalitarian anthology of the twentieth century came to be published in 1950, its two editors realised that it could only have one possible name. They called it "The God That Failed".

The mordant analyst of the new religion was Betrand Russel;, whose atheism made him more far-seeing than many naive "Christian socialists" who claimed to detect in Russia the beginnings of a new paradise on Earth. He was also more far-seeing than the Anglican Christian establishment in his native England, whose newspaper of record the London Times took the view that the Russian Revolution could be explained by "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion". This revolting fabrication by Russian Orthodox secret policement was republished by Eyre and Spottiswoode, the official printers to the Church of England.

[s]And now onto the meat of his arguement[/s]

Given its own recored of succumbing to, and of promulgating, dictatorship on earth and absolute control in the life to come, how did religion confront the "secular" totalitarians of our time? One should first consider, in order, Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.

[s]Fascism[/s]

Arising out of the misery and humiliation of the first world war, fascist movements were in favour of the defense of traditional values against Bolshevism, and upheld nationalism and piety. It is probably not a coincidence that they arose first and most excitedly in Catholic countries, and it is certainly not a coincidence that the Catholic Church was generally sympathetic to fascism as an idea. Not only did the church regard communism as a lethal foe, but it also saw its old jewish enemy in the most senior ranks of Lenin's party. Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him, known as the Lateran Pact of 1929. Under the terms of this ideal, Catholicism became the only recognised religion in Italy, with monopoly powers over matters such as birth, marriage, death, and education, and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini's party. Pope Pius XI described Il Duce as "a man sent by providence." Elections were not to be a feature of Italian life for very long, but the church nonetheless brought about the dissolution of lay Catholic centrist parties and helped sponsor a pseudoparty called "Catholic Action" which was emulated in several countries. Across southern Europe, the church was a reliable ally in the instatement of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal, and Croatia. General Franco in Spain was allowed to call his incasion of the country, and the destruction of its elected republic, by the honorific title La Crujada, or "the crusade". In central and eastern europe the picture was hardly better. The extreme right-wing military coup in Hungray, led by Admiral Horthy, was warmly endorsed by the church, as were similar fascistic movements in Slovakia and Austria. (The nazi puppet regime in Slovakia was actually led by a man in holy orders named Father Tiso.) The cardinal of Austria proclaimed his enthusiasm at Hitler's takeover of his country at the time of the Anschluss.

In Ireland, the blue shirt movement of General O'Duffy (which sent volunteers to fight for Franco in Spain) was little more than a dependency of the Catholic Church. As late as April 1945, on the news of the death of Hitler, President Eamon de Valera put on his top hat, called for the stagecoach and went to the German embasssy in Dublin to offer his condolences. Attitudes like this meant that several Catholic-dominated states, from Ireland to spain to Portugal, were ineligible to join the United Nations when it was first founded. The church has made efforts to apologise for all this, but its complicity with fascism is an ineffaceble mark on its history, and was not a short-term or a hasty commitment so much as a working alliance which did not break down until after the fascist period itself passed into history.

[s]Nazism[/s]

The case of the church's surrender to German National Socialism is considerably more complicated but not very much more elevating. Despite sharing two important principles with Hitler's movement (those of anti-semitism and anti-Communism) the Vatican could see that Nazism represented a challenge to itself as well. In the first place, it was a quasi-pagan phenomenon which in the long run sought to replace christianity with pseudo-Nordic blood rites and the sinister race myths, based upon the fantasy of Ayran Superiority. In the second place, it advocated an exterminationist attitude to the unwell, the unfit, and the insane, and began quite early on to apply this policy not to Jews but to Germans. To the credit of the church, it must be said that its German pulpits denounced this hideous eugenic culling from a very early date.

The very first diplomatic accord undetaken by Hitler's government was a treaty with the Vatican. In return for unchallenged control of the education of Catholic children in Germany, the dropping of Nazi propaganda against the abuses inflicted in Catholic schools and orphanges, and the concession of other privileges to the church, the Holy See instructed the Catholic Center Party to disband, and brusquely ordered Catholics to abstain from any political activity on any subject that the regime chose to define as off-limits. At the first meeting of his cabinet after this capitulation was signed, Hitler announced that these new circumstances would be "especially significant in the struggle against international Jewry". The twenty-three million Catholics living in the Third Reich, many of whom had shown great individual courage in
resisting the rise of Nazism, had been gutted and gelded as a political force. Their own infallible Holy Father had in effect told them to render everything unto the worst Caesar in human history. From then on, parish records were made available to the Nazi state in order to establish who was and who was not "racially pure" enough to survive endless persecution under the Nuremberg laws.

The Catholic heirarchy also ordered the annual celebration of Hitler's birthday on April 20. On this auspicious date, on papal instructions, the cardinals of Berlin regularly transmitted "warmest congratulations to the fuhrer in the name of the bishops and dioceses in Germany," these plaudits to be accompanied by "the fervant prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars." The order was obeyed and carried out.

To be fair, this disgraceful tradition was not inaugurated until 1939, in which year there was a change of papacy. And to be fair again, Pope Pius XI had always harbored the most profound misgivings about the Hitler system and its evident capacity for radical evil. Pope Pius XII was succeeded to the office in February 1939. Four days after his election His Holiness composed the following letter to Berlin:

To the illustrious Herr Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich! Here at the beginning of Our Pontificate We wish to assure you that We remain devoted to the spiritual welfare of the German people entrusted to your leadership...During the many years We spent in Germany, We did all in Our power to establish harmonious relations between Church and State. Now the responsibilities of Our pastoral function have increase Our opportunities, how much more ardently so do We pray to reach that goal. May the prosperity of the German people and their progress in every domain come, with God's help, to fruition!

Within six years of this evil and fatuous message, the once prosperous and civilised people of Germany could gaze around themselves and see hardly one brick piled upon another, as the godless Red Army swept towards Berlin. Catholics are supposed to hold that the pope is the vicar of Christ on earth, and the keeper of the keys of Saint Peter. They are of course free to believe this, and to believe that god decides when to end the tenure of one pope or (more importantly) to inaugurate the tenure of another. This would involve believing in the death of an anti-Nazi pope, and the accession of a pro-Nazi one, as a matter of divine will, a few months before Hitler's invasion of Poland and the opening of the second world war. Studying that war, one can perhaps accept that 25 percent of the SS were practising Catholics and the no Catholic was threatened with excommunication for participating in war crimes. (Joseph Goebbels was excommunicated, but that was earlier on, and he had after all brought it on himself for the offense of marrying a Protestant). Human beings and institutions are imperfectm to be sure. But there could be no clearer or more vivid proof that holy institutions are man-made.

Thus, those who invoke "secular" tyranny in contrast to religion are hoping we will forget two things: the connection between the Christian churches and fascism, and the capitulation of the churhces to national socialism.

[s]Stalinism[/s]

Lenin and Trotsky were certainly convinced atheists who believed that illusions in religion could be destroyed by acts of policy and that in the meantime the obscenely rich holdings of the church could be seized and nationalised. In the Bolshevik ranks, as among the Jacobins of 1789, there were also those who saw the revolution as a sort of alternative religion, with connections to myths of redemption and messianism. For Joseph Stalin, who had trained to be a priest in a seminary in Georgia, the whol thing was ultimately a question of power. "How many divisions," he famously and stupidly inquired, "has the pope?" (the true answer to his boorish sarcasm was, "more than you think.") Stalin then pedantically repeated the papal routine of making science conform to dogma, by insisting that the shaman and charlatan Trofim Lysenko had disclosed the key to genetics and promised extra harvests of specially inspired vegetables. (millions of innocents died of gnawing pain as a consequence of this "revelation".) This Caesar unto whom all things were dutifully rendered took care, as his regime became a more nationalist and statist one, to maintain at least a puppet church that could attach its traditional appeal to his. In a much neglected passage of Animal Farm, Orwell allowed Moses the raven, long the croaking advocate of a heaven beyond the skies, to return to the farm and preach to the more credulous creatures after Napoleon had vanquished Snowball. His analogy to Stalin's manipulation of the Russian Orthodox Church was, as ever, quite exact. (The postwar Polish Stalinists had recourse to much the same tactic, legalising a Catholic front organisation called Pax Christi and giving it seats in the Warsaw parliament, much to the delight of fellow-traveling Catholic Communists such as Graham Greene.) Antireligious propaganda in the Soviet Union was of the most banal materialistic sort: A shrine to Lenin often had stained glass while in the official museum of atheism there was testimony offered by a Russian astronaut, who had seen no god in outer space. This idiocy expressed at least as much contempt for the gullible yokels as any wonder-working icon.

A political scientist or anthropologist would have little difficulty in recognising what the editors and contributors of "The God That Failed" put into such immortal secular prose: Communist absolutists did not so much negate religion, in societies that they well understood were saturated with faith and superstition, as seek to replace it. The solemn elevation of infallible leaders who were a source of endless bounty and blessing; the permanent search for heretics and schismatics; the mummification of dead leaders as icons and relics; the lurid show trials that elicited incredible confessions by means of torture...none of this was very difficult to interpret in traditional terms. Nor was the ceaseless invocation of a "Radiant Future", the arrival of which would one day justify all crimes and dissolve all petty doubts.There is nothing in modern secular arguement that even hints at any ban on religious observance. Sigmund Freud was quite correct to describe the relgious impulse, in "The Future of an Illusion", as essentially ineradicable until or unless the human species can conquer its fear of death and its tendency to wishful thinking. Neither contingency seems very probable.

All that the totalitarians have demonstrated is that the religious impulse, the need to worship, can take even more monstrous forms if it is repressed. This might not necessarily be a compliment to our worshipping tendency.

[s]the end, phew, this is me talking from here on[/s]

I would be interested to see someone argue that the secular nations of scandanvia will inevitably fall into tyranny because they are so intrinsically atheist (with upto 85% of Swedes and 70% of Norwegians being atheist/agnostic/non-religious).

Religion may be a 'fanciful notion', but I'm not sure it is. Definitely religion is much freer of moral bankruptcy that pervades atheism as the natural outworking of thinking based around there being no God and therefore no consequences of actions is to assume that moral code therefore should no longer apply, as it is at best a human-made construct to protect society from itself, but there is no need to live under it.

Atheism is not a thing to compare religion to. You do not compare your hair to someone who is bald. But to say that it takes religion to be moral is a very telling thing to admit to. Perhaps you are only good because you fear eternal punishment from your brand of supernatural patriarch? Is it not enough to be good for the sake of goodness? If the only reason you do not commit acts of evil is because you are afraid of what the all pervading CCTV judge, jury and executioner may think of you, then you truly are in need of help.

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein, 1930

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Now with 100% more corn

[d_24]

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Before Bauer...There Was House

[Haunted]

Yeah saw that coming

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Now with 100% more corn

[WashingtonIrving]

Yeah, I hate the whole 'morality needs religion' thing. Rubbish. Murder isn't wrong because God said so/the moral order said so (depending upon how you answer the Euthyphro dilemma), it's wrong because it's murder. I don't see why you need anything more than that. Morality is all about our emotional attitudes.

God is world-denying, thats my take on it. I don't believe in a God because I feel no personal need for one. Because of this I have no desire to convert anyone, and I think some people need their religious faith. Some people need a God, we all need something.



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"I said farewell honey, I'll see you Judgment Day"

[Mr Comedy]

Quoting Haunted from 18:35, 15th Apr 2008
But to say that it takes religion to be moral is a very telling thing to admit to. Perhaps you are only good because you fear eternal punishment from your brand of supernatural patriarch? Is it not enough to be good for the sake of goodness? If the only reason you do not commit acts of evil is because you are afraid of what the all pervading CCTV judge, jury and executioner may think of you, then you truly are in need of help.

I've not read all of that yet, as I'm still in work and want to go home at some point this evening. It also looks like something I can't get away with skim reading! Just wanted to mention that under Christianity, there is no way to measure up to the moral standard, and everyone miserably fails, no matter how good. Therefore no-one is good enough. This differs wildly from every other world religion, as your actions won't get you in - instead it is only through grace (and the actions of God as opposed to man) that people can escape eternal judgement. Christians escape judgement by trusting in Christ's sacrifice on the cross, not by their actions, either in whole or in part. This is somewhat difficult to explain in a couple of sentences adequately, and Romans 1-7 is basically unpacking this in more detail. This also makes Christianity naturally controversial, as it automatically precludes any other religion, and clearly states that being good isn't going to help at all.

This leads to the obvious question why would Christians want to be good at all, if there are no consequences, but that is a different question and therefore one I'll address later if people are interested. However under Christianity as a model, there is no need to be moral because of fear of some supernatural patriarch inflicting judgement for sin, as Christians believe that their forgiveness and therefore stature before God is not contingent on their actions, rather it is contingent only on the actions of Christ.

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"I am in no way interested in immortality, but only in the taste of tea. " -Lu Tung