fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2095 ]

[ SECRET POST #2095 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2095 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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I keep thinking of that comparison the Dalai Lama made recently about religion vs ethics:

Ethics are like water. You have to have it to survive. It's pure, it's good, and you can live just with that.

Religion is like tea. It's something added to the water. Different cultures make it different ways. Different people drink it different ways. Some people don't care for it at all. That's fine. You won't die without tea. You will die without water.

If you start with crap water, you're going to have crap tea.

It does kind of warm my heart to see so many people pointing out that people are kind of awful with or without religion (is that sad?), when usually you see the quote-unquote-edgy types talk about how religion is the worst thing ever and the cause of all strife and war.

*shrug* I don't think religion is the worst thing ever because of strife and war; those have been around long before religion. I think religion is the worst mistake we've ever made as people because the very structure of religion hampers free thought, discourages asking questions, and facilitates manipulation on a very large scale. It tries to keep people too confused, exhausted, and scared to step back and ask themselves why they even believe this crap. Any institution that expressly requires its participants to leave their brains at the door, I see as something inherently dangerous.

It tries to keep people too confused, exhausted, and scared to step back and ask themselves why they even believe this crap. Any institution that expressly requires its participants to leave their brains at the door, I see as something inherently dangerous.

And that's still a misrepresentation of religion. That's not at all what religion "tries" to do. Or, at least, not what faith does. Religion gets misrepresented, even to the religious, as something like that. It's a human folly, and an absolute crying shame, that the battle cry of the Religious Right and others like that is, "Ta heck with facts, Ah got my Bible (that I never read critically)!" But that attitude has far more to do with human power plays (the ignorant are easier to lead, and the ones at the top of that are rarely particularly good people, however "religious" they may identify themselves). I won't deny that religion, like any ideology, facilitates manipulation. But that's a thing that will happen with or without religion. It's pretty easy to get a group of people blindly and fanatically behind an idea without basing it on a faith in a deity. You would be amazed how many people don't want to have to apply critical thinking to any part of their lives.

But religion itself certainly doesn't "try to keep people confused." And it's more than a little irritating that there's a lump assumption that people always assume that religious folks never asked ourselves why we believe what we believe. Believe it or not, for a lot people, a good deal of critical thinking goes into faith, and the two are not actually as mutually exclusive as you might think.

Faith isn't sinister. Dogma can be. People in large groups usually are.

You know what? I blame Martin Luther. He's the one with the quote about reason being the enemy of faith, which is completely counter to Christianity before him.

Amen! Not to mention the fact that ALL (and I do mean ALL) the anti-Semitism present in professing christianism today came straight from the poison pen of Mad Monk Martin.

(Seriously, Protestants? THIS (this CATHOLIC I add---lot of Protestants ignore/forget/handwave that part) is your go-to guy? Might as well stick with the Antichrist you know.....)

One of my best friends is Lutheran and very proud of it, so I get to hear a lot about how awesome Luther was. And I'll admit, he did point out some serious Not Good Things that were going down in the Catholic church at the time. But yeah, not exactly a flawless beacon there, either.

IIRC, in that same time period, or a little bit afterwards, men studying to be priest were actually required to study sciences, especially earth sciences. There's a lovely church in England that's built around the whole concept that geology is a metaphor for humanity--that is (and it's been ages since Art History, so I'm paraphrasing what I remember) that as the human race itself ages, our minds and our ability to grasp the workings of the universe also advances, and this--to the minds of the priests at the time (or at the very least, to William Butterfield, the architect)--is part of God's plan, that mankind's knowledge of God becomes more complex and nuanced with every new discovery.

Er, the point being, more or less, that two thousand years ago, people really didn't have the science to grasp ideas like germs and evolution and so faith had to be expressed in terms that they understood, but that faith can evolve with human knowledge.

Anyway.

It's most definitely not a myth. Unless the first 19 years of my life I spent as a Catholic are a myth. But, you know, thanks for being a dismissive asshole and illustrating exactly why people who are bitter about their experiences with religion are completely justified in being so.

Just because your personal experience with religion was awful doesn't mean all religions are awful.

Any institution that expressly requires its participants to leave their brains at the door, I see as something inherently dangerous.

I agree with this. But because not all religions are the same, not all religions are dangerous.

Yes, all religions are awful, dangerous things by their very nature. Faith is fine, but when you start trying to govern faith with rules (which is what religion is), it cannot end well. Ever.

Rubbish. Ignorant, bigoted rubbish.

"You're wrong because I say so, and I'm right because my god says so"

Classic religious person logic. Fucking lol

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-09-29 03:13 (UTC) - Expand

All religions effectively by definition rely on making you heavily invest in a false premise.

Unless we're going to go down the route of anything vaguely like an organisation is a religion and redefine the term to the point of meaningless.

Even if the nature of the beliefs is benign or harmless encouraging the idea of completely rejecting truth even if it's in one small area of your life certainly doesn't seem ideal.

Exactly. All religion, by its very nature, requires its participants to leave a portion of their brains behind and trust that their invisible sky wizard knows what's best for them. That's the part that's dangerous.

THANK YOU

As someone who followed a major religion for many, many years, I can say it never discouraged questions,and never "expressly" (or implicitly) required anyone to leave any brains at the door. Discussion, debate, asking awkward questions was thr order of the day.

It's a popular secularist myth, no doubt, but speaking personally some of the most closeminded,, unquestioning, most stolidly certain of their own correctness people I have ever met were militant atheists. Not to mention mind bendingly smug.

Wow. I guess the first 19 years of my life was a secularist myth, then. Thanks, douchebag.

There's no need to start calling people names.

Nice tone argument, dipshit.

Just because your parents apparently sucked, doesn't make it the fault of a belief system that places a high value on reason and knowledge.

Religion doesn't place any value on reason or knowledge. If it did, we wouldn't still be having fights about whether to teach evolution in public school, or trying to fudge science to support the religious version of the world.

What you just described are views of extremist Christians. Not all religious groups are the same. In fact, the Quran supports knowledge and logic. http://misconceptions-about-islam.com/religion-science-reason-compatible.htm

You're right. Islam is worse in its extremism. This is the religion that makes women marry their rapists or be killed for their family's "honor."

da

(Anonymous) - 2012-09-28 21:24 (UTC) - Expand

Re: da

(Anonymous) - 2012-09-28 21:36 (UTC) - Expand

What the actual fuck? "Religion" doesn't place any value on reason and knowledge? I can think of several off the top of my head.

Catholicism explicitly names reason and education as important, which is why it sets up so many schools, why monks and nuns spent their whole lives copying ancient manuscripts throughout the middle ages, why so much of modern science is derived from work and theories springing from Catholic priests and monks, why the Catholic Church established universities throughout Europe, why it has so many philosophers among the named saints, and so on.

Most forms of Judaism, as far as I know, place a very high value on reason and knowledge.

Many forms of Islam, at least the most popular when Europe was going through the collapse that required all those monks and nuns to spend their lives preserving ancient knowledge, value reason and knowledge, hence all the work on maths and science that produced things like the Arabic number system and the algebraist methods of calculating that you probably learnt in school. It is unfortunate that other schools of Islam have become so prominent.

Anyone want to chime in with some more?

Oh, and if you're going to pull in evolution, do you know who Gregor Mendel is, the one that Mendelian Genetics is named for?

Age of the universe: who came up with the Big Bang Theory?

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2012-09-28 21:31 (UTC) - Expand

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