Religion or Science - How do they compare?

Your point, which has been also made by jar and GDR, is taken. I don’t argue against people being ultimately responsible for doing bad things; we are. But the something which in this case is Religion, is not innocent. It is is a human creation, injected with its fair amount of poison which has encouraged people to entertain their selfish motives and feel justified to act on them.

You need to quote my own words where I concede that my original statements don’t prove my case. I have made my point that while people are ultimately responsible for what they do, Religion has encouraged and excused horrible things done in the name of god. Christianity is no exception. Christianity was conceived as a Jewish copy of other religions that were popular at the time. Later, when it became state religion, it was an effective tool to subdue the people through fear.

By this, do you mean that everything that the New Testament says is morally acceptable?

That’s why I asked you to quote my own words, because if what I wrote looks like I’m conceding that, then I need to correct it.I am not conceding anything. If I understood you, is people that is responsible for doing the wrong things and Religion, or any other world view for that matter, are not to blame at all. If that is what you mean, my position is not diametrically opposed to yours. I partially agree. I agree only to the extent that people ultimately are responsible for what they do. But the part where I don’t agree with you is that I do see Religion as having an influence in how people think and what they do. When this influence is negative, is when I give Religion its share of the blame for it.For example someone killing an homosexual cannot get away by saying that he is doing God’s will. He is liable regardless of his religious views. But in this case, a religion has been influential in the way this person sees homosexuals as sinners against God.Consider an example less extreme: Marriage equality. I live in Australia. Here, same sex marriage only became legal at the end of last year (it is a shame Australia lagged so much in this). There was a plebiscite were we were asked to say yes or no to change Marriage Law to include same sex couples. Around 65% of the population voted yes. In the days leading up to the plebiscite the Christian lobby put forth their campaign to convince people to say no using bullshit arguments like this would affect families because children needed to have both male and female role models and whatnot. Incidentally, all my Christian friends would share the no campaign through social media.If it was not because of Religion, I couldn’t think of a reason why someone would want to oppose two consenting adults to marry and do whatever they like with their lives. I doubt you can come up with a non-religious inspired reason, but even if you do, whatever it could be, be assured it wouldn’t have exerted such a powerful influence for an otherwise progressive country to wait to legalise same sex marriage until 2017.It was not too long ago that I was still a Christian. I never saw anything wrong about homosexuality and it always made me very uncomfortable that the Bible could have such a negative view about it, being inspired supposedly by an all loving perfect being. Despite this, I used to be against same sex marriage because I thought it was God’s will and although I didn’t understand why, there had to be a good reason. If the plebiscite had been back then, I would’ve voted no against my will, being entirely and negatively influenced by Religion. This was not only my case; there are lots of people who follow negative religious dogmas even if they don’t like them, just because their religion says so. I also had quoted in another post Faith’s position regarding women’s role to illustrate the point. It doesn’t make me proud at all to recognise how bad Religion influenced me, but It is a good example to illustrate my position.By the time the plebiscite took place I was already an atheist. I felt an enormous relief that I didn’t have to ask an ancient book anymore how to think but I was able to decide by myself what is right and what is wrong. I was proud to vote yes and to see the marriage law change to become more inclusive.

Is not that Religion is the only thing that is either used as an excuse or as reason for people to cause harm to others. It may be our tendency to think dualistically and see others as part of the in-group or out-group (friend or foe). This is probably legacy of our tribal ancestry. But religion has that added negative value of revealing the unquestioned truth to believers and move people to do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. Religion can be either the reason or the excuse; in any case it can be very influential in moral values.See for example the conflict between Palestine and Israel. I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a religious conflict. I think it all comes down to the needs of both nations to have a land where to live. But what is the one thing that has for decades fuelled the mutual hatred? I find this rather dubious. Are you saying that the institution of slavery that we know took place in the Roman Empire, where and when those epistles were written, was simply the equivalent to modern employment? It seems like this Onesimus was a person dear to Paul, and who both he and Philemon, found useful in Paul words. Note here that Paul is not pleading for slaves to be treated as brothers but for one specific person who found favour in Paul’s sight. Furthermore, for Paul to be asking for Onesimus to receive a treatment better than a slave, as a brother implies that they saw slaves not simply as employees but as inferior people, with lesser rights. He’s pleading for his dear Onesimus because he knows being slave is not nice. The slavery condoned by the New Testament is the horrible institution we know of. Yes, it does:

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1 Timothy 2:11-12 (ESV):

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Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.

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That’s because the Bible is contradictory, so you can find biblical support for contradictory arguments. Being supposedly inspired by God, this should not be the case. Nevertheless the church is subordinate to Jesus just as Paul expected women to be subordinate to their husbands. This is perfectly understandable as Paul being part of his culture. But again, if this scriptures are to be taken as inspired by God, they shouldn’t look immoral by our modern standards. But they look as what they are: fabrication of the men of ancient times with no evident divine insight. When you say that God speaks into the hearts of many of the writers of the OT, you imply is not into all of them. So how do you decide which writers are listening to God’s voice in their hearts and which are not? I think the answer is you have to use your own criteria; which in your case, is informed by modern moral values. But this is you again evaluating the NT and using your modern values to decide that Jesus teachings align with what you consider to be good. Since the NT has also some morally disgusting verses it is you again who has to decide what comes from God and what is just the reflection of the culture of the writers, like you do with Paul talking about women. But this is something that you take on faith, from what you consider to be good. So it doesn’t work as a criteria for others because it’s dependent on everyone deciding if John’s testimony is true or not. There should be some criteria that could be equally used by believers and nonbelievers to tell what comes from God and what doesn’t. If your criteria is an statement taken on faith it doesn’t get you any closer to the truth; there is no reason to rely on those claims. So what do you make of those passages? Why did God allowed such horrible texts to be present in the book that was supposed to convey his truth to people? We are not perfect, but I can confidently say we are morally better than the people of previous ages. This is only because we have a vantage point: we can look from the present towards the past, evaluate history, decide which mistakes of the past we don’t want to commit again and try to be better than them. We do have evidence, we know that as social species we have had to develop the ability to cooperate in order to survive. This ability to cooperate has been naturally selected, which means the most cooperative humans have had better chances at surviving. The sense of empathy that we and other social animals developed, helped our tribal ancestors to survive as a group by caring for each other. In tribal environments, this also meant we developed the tendency to think dualistically in terms of in-group/out-group (as I mentioned at the beginning of this very long post), thus translating into a sense of hostility towards those who belong to the out-group. As the development of technology, knowledge and awareness that we are not so different from each other, has helped us to transcend our tribal borders, empathy has been progressively extended to people belonging to other cultures, countries, groups. This is how moral values have improved through History.The people who wrote the story of The Tower of Babel knew very well about the importance of human cooperation. They portrayed the gods becoming concerned as humans joined together in the enterprise of building a tower to reach the heavens. The gods realized, says the story, that when humans join forces there is nothing they cannot achieve. So they created the different languages to confound and divide people so that they could not cooperate. I understand it was Jews exiled in Babylon who wrote this story. Maybe they saw the Babylonians as a highly cooperative civilization (which in fact were building a tower, not meant to reach heavens, but quite high for the standards of the time) that had achieved their greatness by joining efforts to become the powerhouse they were back then. If you look at history and anthropology, morals change from time to time and from culture to culture. If we were to consider morals to be absolute and to adopt those of Yahweh we would degenerate into an absolutist morally sick regime. Morals change with time, but they also tend to improve because we are standing on the shoulders of past generations. We can see what they got wrong and improve. That would be highly likely the case in a scenario where our whole civilisation collapses and a new one has to start from scratch. That is precisely what the movie The planet of the apes, in its original version illustrates. But if future generations keep building upon our achievements the tendency should be for better moral values. For example, people in the future may get to the point where all their energy comes from renewable sources and their impact on Earth is neutral. They will certainly look down on us as immoral because of the way we treat the environment but they would also understand we were product of our time and ignorant on things they will have figured out by then. I’ve learnt a lot from watching his talks and debates. I think he was a great critical thinker and able to present very compelling arguments. Although by the time I heard from him I was already well in my way out of Christianity, his arguments helped me make more sense of the way I feel about Religion, and specially, Christianity. If you have read his book God is not great, he starts explaining how as he puts it Religion poisons everything. The arguments he offers for that have helped me inform my position that religion has exerted a negative influence on people, and its influence has been way more powerful than that of other ideologies.

ISIS policies belong to past times when it was morally acceptable to try to impose one’s beliefs and kill those who resist. Morals change with the times, but they also tend to improve because we can look back and see what kind of society we don’t want to be. That’s how we can tell ISIS morals are wrong; neither absolute morals nor gods are required for that.

If you knew I did not concede and all you wanted is for me to make a different argument, why not plainly ask for that in the first place?Why do you think my argument is bad? Why don’t you elaborate your own argument so that I can see where am I wrong? Have you ever noticed that I did not say the contrary? I said myself before that people do use religion as an excuse. But many Christians do believe it. Christianity has an extremely wide range of possible views due to the contradictory nature of the books and stories that inspired it. You seem to be towards a secular end of Christianity; so no, I don’t think you particularly see Christianity as requiring you to mistreat anyone. I don’t think any one of the myriad of made up religions of antiquity came up with the idea of slavery. Religion has been quite effective at justifying bad things already in existence, like slavery.See for example slavery in USA. Was it Religion the reason it existed? No. Was it the excuse to maintain it for so long? Absolutely. The reason for the white southerners to support slavery was economical. Slavery was key in the production of cotton, reducing the cost of labour and making it economically worthy for the land owners. When the North started pushing to abolish slavery, would it help the cause of the South if they recognised this economic interest? Fortunately for them, Religion was at the rescue of their interests and was the perfect excuse to justify slavery as something endorsed by God and morally acceptable to oppress those African descendants of Ham, who was cursed by his father Noah just because he saw his dick. For this huge offence by the African ancestor, those religious apologists justified themselves in oppressing the Afro-American population.

For me, it’s not Christians as people but any ideology that is used by some as an excuse to carry on their agendas, denying the rights of others if they feel they have to. It doesn’t matter if is a Muslim, Christian, Hindu or whatever; if they are displaying homophobia, I will oppose their ideas. I don’t care if until recently some stupid prejudice led most of the World to see that as ridiculous. Now we know better and it’s about time we started recognising the rights of a largely oppressed chunk of the population. Same sex marriage doesn’t take away the meaning that traditional couples may want to give to their marriages; each to their own. The hostility towards homosexuality developed in small tribal communities when reproduction and population was paramount. Do you think we still need to worry about replenishing the Earth? You may mean: it is biblical, so it’s made up. It’s not about feeling righteous. It’s about understanding that whatever two consenting adults decide to do with their sexuality is nobody else’s business. I personally haven’t accused you of anything, but if you don’t want people calling you names you could set the example.