Pretty much.
Athiests: Do You Hate Religion?
by shamus100 22 Replies latest jw experiences
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Homerovah the Almighty
Spiritualism, mysticism, ignorance and fear at the end of the day whats really good about ?
When I think religion, I'm also thinking of backward intellectual social endeavor that inevitably harms humanity.
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B_Deserter
I don't like religious belief in general because it glorifies the suspension of the mechanism to sort out truth from falsehoods. The average person, religious or not, doesn't believe everything he or she hears or reads. That would result in disaster. Con-men would rule the earth and society would crumble. But, religion is something that is drilled into us when we are young so that our attachment to it is beyond something rational, it's emotional. I don't think most Christians could honestly say that they wouldn't laugh at the idea of people taking the Bible as the literal truth of God if they hadn't been exposed to it until adulthood. How do I know that? Because those same Christians snicker at the idea of Joseph Smith reading golden plates or that our brains are all infected by alien ghosts, despite the fact that there is no objective, logical evidence to suggest that those stories are any less likely than the one about Jesus. The only reason they don't laugh at the latter is because they were rasied with and are therefore used to that story.
Religion is the temporary removal of our critical thinking processes in order to accept a certain set of beliefs based on emotional rather than logical criteria. The same people who say "The Bible Says It, I Believe It, That Settles It" would be among the staunchest skeptics if it came to the Koran or the Vedas. Even theistic biologists like Ken Miller seem to suspend their critical thinking skills when it comes to the existence of God.
Even that being said, if religious thinking kept to religious ideas I wouldn't have a problem with it. If you want to believe that the Lord Jehoover is the Most High over all the earth and go to meetings every week to talk about it, more power to you. The problem comes when religious thinking starts occurring outside the bounds of religious belief. The problem is that people who suspend their logical and critical thinking centers for religion often end up doing so for other things, sometimes sinister, sometimes neutral. Religion puts many people into a "mode" where they are like children and will accept anything a perceived authority figure will tell them. This is precisely why I think quack medicine is making such a comeback in the United States. It's hard not to notice that these so-called "alternative cures" are often pushed by the most religious.
Although positive actions are often promoted by religions, the fact that they have religious reasons behind them don't really make them genuine IMO. How is one to objectively know that God said to feed the hungry or to kill the dirty ethnic group? Both have about the same rational backing, and both have the same real authority behind them: the word of a man. There is a lot of hate in the world that would disappear overnight if there were no religious or otherwise irrational justification available for it.
That said, it isn't just religion that's the problem, it's irrationality that is the problem. Religion is just one irrational behavior. The non-theist totalitarian governments of this world may not be religious in the normal sense, but they are every bit as irrational as the Scientologists or the snake-handlers. The same critical thinking centers are suspended in order to worship Kim Jong-Il as they are to worship Krishna.