Can religion be a force of progress and development?

[DetlefK]

Up front: I'm an agnostic.

Now, organized religion has its upsides:

* Religion is a great tool for controlling the unwashed masses.
"Don't eat pigs in the Middle-East because parasites 'n stuff."
"Para-what?"
"Sigh. Don't eat pigs in the Middle-East because God said so."
Marx didn't describe it as "opium for the masses" for nothing. Religion can be a tool for good and a tool for evil, it all depends on the wielder, because the important decisions in life get outsourced to an unaccountable authority-figure.

* Religion is a great tool for conservation.
Church is effectively a hierarchy parallel to secular structures, thereby serving as a fallback. The seclusive nature of church also allowed them to serve as intellectual fallbacks in the middle-ages, as their isolation preserved knowledge that got lost in more "tumultous" circumstances. And a minor, but important, example: In the communist German Democratic Republic it was the church that kept the principle of democracy alive in the minds of the people. Church-councils made decisions based on discussions and votes instead of the leader singlehandedly deciding. In Communism, that was considered outrageously weird.


Now, my question is, can religion also go forward?
Which developments, progress and changes from the old to the new can be attributed to religion? (in society, morality, science, art...)

[cbayer]

1. You say "religion has its upsides", then list a bunch of negative nonsense.

What's you goal here?

Let me ask you. Do you think religion has been a force of progress and development? Do you think it played a role in AA civil rights? Stopping the VN war? OWS?

Have you seen "Half the Sky", which focuses on the heinous crimes being committed against girls and women and how various organizations are working to stop it, including religious organizations?

Are there any religious organizations that are supplying goods and services to the most marginalized and needy in the world where non-religious organizations are decidedly absent?

And please refrain from saying the following bullshit: All of that could have happened without religion, because they didn't.

Thanks.

[phil89]

3. He said nothing untrue

and the negatives listed were certainly not nonsense. Religion is horribly oppressive and pointing that out is the duty of moral people.

[cbayer]

5. Religion has also been tremendously liberating and pointing that out is the duty of moral people.

Even if there are those that will reject it because they just can't stomach anything good about religion.

I'm very willing to see both the good and the bad. You?

[skepticscott]

7. "Tremendously liberating"? Are you serious?

For the last 1000 years, there has been no greater oppressor and restrictor of the human mind, body and spirit than religion. To say that it has been "tremendously liberating" is beyond laughable. What has it "liberated" people FROM?

[cleanhippie]

8. It almost sounds like Stockhold syndrome.

[DetlefK]

4. All that could have happened without white people.

But it didn't happen without white people, therefore african-american civil-rights, the Vietnam-protests and Occupy Wall Street can be attributed to white people.

And I don't consider the examples I gave as inherently negative: Religion brings order to chaos, quick and efficient.
For example: If you want kids to stop eating candies all the time, do you tell them about enamel and glucose and bacterias and acid? No, you say: "Because I said so." Religion is exactly the same.



My question was in no way intended to be offensive. I'm trying to take a look at the merits of religion. I'm trying to find out how useful religion is as a source of inspiration. And I don't mean inspiration as "paint-something-from-the-Bible". I mean inspiration as "paint-something-that-nobody-has-imagined-before".

[cbayer]

6. White people? What are you talking about?

If religion to you has been only "Because I said so", then your experience has been extremely limited and not at all reflective of the experiences of many others. You draw a caricature of religion that may reflect your personal experience, but does not reflect much else.

So, I ask you again to answer your own questions. What do you see as the merits of religion? Do you think it can be a source of inspiration? I'm not seeing a lot of replicas of the Sistine Chapel or Bach's masses or Gaudi's cathedral, but maybe you have not seen them as something that nobody had imagined before.

[skepticscott]

9. Yes, it was certainly a source of inspiration

to the guys who flew those planes into the WTC. And to people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Michelle Bachman, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Tom Delay, Ted Cruz and countless other virulent hate-mongers that could be named.

[DetlefK]

10. I used your argument with different words.

Exchange "religious people" in your argument for "white people" and you get my argument. Neither makes sense.

On the topic of "Because I said so.":
What is the reasoning behind God's commands? Why shall we have no other gods, why shall we not make an image of him, why shall we not murder, why shall we not steal, why shall we not lie? Does the Bible provide an argument? No. These religious and moral decisions are forced onto the believer without an explanation as to why they are better than the alternatives. It all goes back to one line of reasoning: God is always right. No need to discuss it, because God said so and God is always right.
(You know who said that God isn't always right? Lucifer. And for that the the Bible treats him as the worst of the worst.)



Okay, you are right with the religiously inspired art. Point conceded, thank you for the example.

[cbayer]

11. Neither makes sense. Exactly. That is why I asked you not to use that argument.

I am not going to defend religious beliefs or how some people interpret their god. I am only going to say that your view is reflective of a sub-group and not of the whole.

For every person that believes, there are a unique set of beliefs and interpretations. Some are wildly different than others and bear little resemblance to the caricature that you put up here.

For my part, I was raised in a religious tradition that insisted that your moral decisions come from within. They were not forced onto me without explanation at all, in fact quite the opposite was true. Congregants were encouraged to question and discuss and there was no assumption that god was always right.

You are portraying a fundamentalist view. We should push back against that, but we should identity the non-believers that also want to push back because they are our allies.

[pinto]

13. Perhaps God was made by man, not visa versa, the Bible a human creation.

I see it as possibly an attempt to codify or outline a series of standards of ethical, moral and behavioral standards in context of the period when it was written. Human standards.

Is some of it dated? Most definitely. Oppressive. Surely. That list can go on with any number of examples.

Yet the New Testament, particularly, speaks to many examples of beneficial standards, imho.

[Cartoonist]

2. It could

But it prefers to be obstinate.

[gcomeau]

12. In isolation, yes. Big picture, no.

Yes, if you limit the examples to isolated questions (can we make people stop eating unhealthy foods?) then sure. But here's the problem that then creates. Let's take your example:

* Religion is a great tool for controlling the unwashed masses.
"Don't eat pigs in the Middle-East because parasites 'n stuff."
"Para-what?"
"Sigh. Don't eat pigs in the Middle-East because God said so."

What you're essentially illustrating here is getting somebody to do something *they do not understand the rational reasons for doing* by making them believe a magic powered supreme being who is smarter than them said so and that's a good enough justification for doing it whether they understand why they're doing it or not.


Which, yeah, will work pretty often. History tells us that pretty clearly.


The problem? You have now conditioned these people to accept "because God said so, and you don't have to understand the reason for it" as an acceptable justification for following a command.

And if you do that, you can use "because God said so" to justify ANYTHING YOU WANT.

"Go kill that village, every last man woman and child."
"Really, it doesn't seem like they did anything to warrant that kind of..."
"Sigh... God said so!"
Oh, ok, well he knows better, I don't need to understand why then I guess..."



Undermining people's reliance on reason and logic to justify their actions is NEVER a net positive. Sure, you can then put someone benevolent in charge of them to tell them to do positive things... but the benevolent guy can get replaced. Or corrupted. And then you're screwed.


Maybe it would have been more difficult to educate all those people about the health impacts of relying on certain food sources under certain conditions... but it would have been *better*.

[trotsky]

15. Very well put. n/t

[Angry Dragon]

14. Organized religion NO ................ faith YES