Simply put; Is organized religion in the world today a greater force for good or evil? (there may be problems with good/evil perhaps someone can suggest better words)
Simply put? Evil.
(But it's really rather naive to reduce such an "immense and awesome presence in the world today" to anything resembling "simple")
It is my assertion that organized religion is doing more harm to man than good. I may concede that it has been beneficial in the past and may even have been pivotal in our assent from darkness but in the world today, it is a cancerous blight.
...
All this against what? A warm and fuzzy feeling for the intellectually lazy?
Essentially? Yes.
But, as Larni has described, this warm and fuzzy feeling is rather important... sometimes even a requirement for humans to work together in a functional society.
The fact that some (many?) humans have used this knowledge to abuse and control and destroy the lives of others does not negate it's importance to us.
So, the issue isn't identifying religion as a problem
and getting rid of it.
That won't solve anything.
The issue is working out the good parts of religion, taking them out, and dumping the rest of the useless baggage that can be used to abuse and even destroy the lives of our neighbours.
Can this be done and keep "the religious part" alive (if, for nothing else, for tradition's sake)? Yes, for some people. No for others.
Can this be done without "the religious part" at all? With
all the good-parts still identified and available for use? Yes, for some people. No for others.
One of the worst... worst in deception, worst in leading us to the wrong conclusion, worst in predicting the future, worst in popularity, worst in ease-of-making... worst mistakes in human thinking is to have the idea that somehow billions of different
subjective humans can all find the answers to
subjective questions using the same method.
The idea that "this method works fantastic for me... it must therefore be a perfect method and all people should use it!"... can in any way apply to
subjective humans attempting to deal with
subjective feelings of fear/depression/anger/life... is ludicrous.
It's a great idea when trying to objectively make sense of the reality of the world we live in... and science proves that.
But, people are different. Different from science, and different from each other.
People are subjective. We may both feel something we refer to as "fear". But how do we know that the "fear" you feel is equivalent to the "fear" I feel? Without having a definite answer to that question, how can we possibly consider that your solution to your feelings of fear would in any way be useful to my solution for my feelings of fear?
In this way, the only solution is to acknowledge that people are different, and we all have to find our own ways to deal with our own subjective feelings and reach our own subjective answers. We may be able to advise and help each other... and sometimes we may not be able to do this. Many people will likely have extremely similar paths towards their answers... and others will be completely different.
We can see where the "it worked for me, it worked for my bother, it worked for my whole god-damn town... what the hell do you mean it doesn't work for you!!!??" mentality comes from... but in looking at how subjective humans are, and how subjective these issues can be, is it really that strange to think that different people will require different paths to attain the same subjective goals?
So, again:
The issue is working out the good parts of religion, taking them out, and dumping the rest of the useless baggage that can be used to abuse and even destroy the lives of our neighbours.
For some of us this will include a lot of religion.
For some it will include a bit of religion.
For others it will include no religion at all.
...all three are valid avenues to reaching the subjective heights of human awareness, euphoria and clarity.
But let's be clear that "getting rid of religion" is not a solution to the problem. In fact, it's a very large part of the very large problem that created the mess in the first place.
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