I know religion causes a lot of issues in society one way or another. Money is probably spent like crazy on it, for one, but I'm looking for some common sense numbers to put to that and other points. Basically I just want to be able to support the statement "religion is a social problem" with sensible facts. I guess I'm advocating the "religion is poison" stance which is pretty hard to justify, I think, but I want to try. Just trying to enlighten myself on the position religion has in society.
Religion teaches obedience and demonizes critical thinking and rebellion. That's a big enough reason for me. It was easier to exploit when people didn't have access to nearly as much information as they do now. Like, in Elizabethan England the establishment would feed anti-rebellion, pro-obedience messages via church sermons because that was the main source of information for the illiterate public.
How is the protestant revolution relevant at all? I'd say it confirms what I said rather than refuting it.
Believing in religion and speaking about it as if it is a defensible position is definitely detrimental to the quality of public discourse. But a lot of things are. Religion isn't any more detrimental than the lack of quality standards in major media outlets and news corporations. Religion isn't poisonous at all. Whatever evils man is capable of performing are done for their own motivations, and the justifying rhetoric is inconsequential. Some of the greatest acts of love and terror have been executed in the name of God. Obviously there's no correlation. Whenever someone mentions religion in their argument, it can always be determined that the religious aspect of it is irrelevant and designed to give force to a position they've come up with for human reasons, whether good or bad. So no, religion is not a social problem.
Of course not. People do things for their own reasons. Religion is one among many memes people attach to as a justification. Any reason a fanatic can find to prove to himself that he is sane will work, and many other reasons are often used. Class warfare, nationalism, racism, economic disparity(class warfare), it's inconsequential when a person is set on his agenda. Plenty of atheists are assholes, too. I'm just such an atheist.
I think religion just contributes to class-oriented discrimination. Some people think their religion is better than another, and another thinks theirs is better than some, and it just becomes a matter of who has bigger guns or more money. Not to mention families broken because of religion or extremism in a religion. Suppose dad loves his faith and kid doesn't, dad as an extremist asshole throws kid out of the house. Pretty sure it happens often. It's my situation but I'm not about to use anecdote to prove anything. Also health hazards. If reading serves me well Muslims thought the polio vaccine was a conspiracy and allowed the disease to spread. The Catholic Church said condoms didn't work in a reaction to the HIV infection in Africa, and people didn't use condoms. Faith healing. It's bullshit and is just unnecessary.
I recommend reading Sam Harris's The End of Faith. Note that Harris doesn't have a problem with spirituality; merely with faith-fueled dogma (or is it dogma-fueled faith...? )
Intolerance and fear of other cultures is a natural product of our survival instincts. With reason we overcome that but it has been done many times even in the presence of religion. Religion is just one among many faces that different cultures have, and when we attack people who are unfamiliar to us, we will attack those things which exist as the most stark disagreements, but if it were not religion, other things could be assumed just as quickly. Intolerance takes whatever form is pleasing, which it always is. A father who expels his son on the basis of religion did not love his son in the first place, the religious contrast was one among any number of incarnations the final excommunication could have been based on.
Same problems different name. God, don't be so naive. Also, stop saying "religion" when you mean "assorted branches of Christianity". It makes you sound and look ignorant.
People here like to act as if there aren't hospitals, schools and world aid organizations everywhere that were inspired by and conceived in the name of Jesus Christ. People will do good or evil, "Religion" is just one of many possible rationalizations.
Isn't pretty much every period of rapid human development followed by one of relatively poor technology and advancement? Like after the fall of the Roman empire and stuff.
The hell are you talking about? Monastaries kind of kept to themselves. Remember how monks didn't speak? Gutenburg, if anyone, saved our asses from the dark ages, by making the printing press and getting what little info there was out to people and allowing for it to not be centralized. A spreading of the wealth, by a little, if you will. Still, did Christianity cause the dark ages? Not by any means. Geocentrism was entirely wrong. Yep. And when you die, what the hell does it matter that the earth is a sphere not a disc, and is not the center of the universe? Not jack shit. Congrats. The real reason there was a dark ages? Disease and the collapse of that which governed everything. The Holy Roman Empire had significant power, I grant you, but it wasn't enough to influence the relatively diverse region of Europe at the time. You want to blame someone for the dark ages, you can probably, actually, blame the ANCESTORS of the primarily Germanic hierarchy of The Holy Roman Empire. Let's face it, all other attacks and pitfalls aside, the barbarians played a pretty big role in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Their religion at the time though probably had very little to do with Christianity. Does religion perpetuate conflict on the whole? No. It poses for heated debate routinely, and allows us to make lulzy graphs with little or no validity to them (see above), but at the end of the day it's the societal requirement of being affiliated to some plane of religious belief that tags our actions to our belief system and makes it seem at times as though the religious construct is at fault when in reality it's the people.
No, no. The monasteries preserved the texts. That's how they came up with the sort of Christian reading of Plato. They were the only ones that knew anything about it and translated Plato, Aristotle, etc., into Latin.
Correct. This also served to eventually fuel the Renaissance, along with knowledge developed/stored in the arabic world.
Fair point, but the preservation still doesn't justify the reservations they kept on the texts they copied, if you follow me. Keeping the books around is all well and good, but having them as free domain is better. The monks preserved for themselves and the church, but they didn't really preserve knowledge of the people. The press, however, did... when it finally came about. The fact that they kept the knowledge is what I'm saying. They didn't preserve society's knowledge in so much as they preserved themselves, and it was only incidentally that their relatively exclusive and privatized knowledge came to be a more public and commonplace thing. Entirely safe to assume that tHRE could have won the crusades and continued to restrict knowledge, and as such, it's safe to say that there was not an entirely educational interest in the monks preserving of the texts.
let's take christianity: the tree of knowledge and banishment from paradise ten commandments doubting thomas "sin" (why do you need the concept of sin at all, if you can just rationalize what is good and bad behavior?) respect the establishment (can't remember where exactly that is, it's been a while since i've read the bible)
Well for a significant period of time it wasn't practical for them to make the texts public domain because the printing press did not exist and people would spend lifetimes transcribing books by hand. As well most people did not know how to read and there was no system of public education to teach them, and no one would have thought to establish such a system because books were not readily available enough to make it useful to know how to read.
