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| Author | Topic: Moral high ground | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
For example, people often bring up charities as a good thing from religion, but there are a good number of non-religious charities out there and atheists are just as likely to engage in charitable works as religious people, so that would seem to be a moot point. But a religion can have a tenet like: Help the poor. Without tenets, how can you assign the merit to atheism for motivating people to give? When poeple bring up something bad, y'all go: No, atheism can't be held responsible because its just a lack of belief. But if we talking about good things y'all go: See, atheists do that too 
So any purported "goods" have to be ones that are exclusive to the religion. I'd say ones that are tenets of the religion should be counted on the religiously motivated side.
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New Cat's Eye Inactive Member |
I'm not assigning it to atheism, I'm just saying that religion doesn't have a monopoly on the merit. Here, we get into the same problem with assigning deaths. Is the charity performed because of religion, or is there another motivation. Yup, I think that's an important part of all this. Its easy to take a birds-eye view of a situation and say: "look at how much bad influence their religion had on those dummies, wow, religion is so bad". But its a lot more complicated than that.
What we need to try and do is figure out which acts are religious, and which are maybe more cultural or even ingrained in what it means to be human. Indeed, especially for counting up things on the religious side... for how often do people follow a religion more for the cultural reasons rather than from sincere belief? For example, the Jim Jones massacre... I'll assume you're familiar with it. Take a look at this image:
All these people drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in what is apparently a mass suicide. Its very easy to say that all these deaths were religiously motivated, blame the religion, and convince yourself that religion was a bad thing because of this. But what if you learned that many people didn't know the drink was laced? Or that most of the children were forced by their parents? Or that those who refused to drink were forced to at gun-point? What if you learned that many of the people there were crying for help and calling themselves prisoners? That any sign of dissent lead to public beatings?
For the assertion droids out there: I'm not going to provide evidence that all that is necessarily true. I'm asking them as questions. Consider it hypothetical if it will. 909 people died... how many of those people were motivated by religion to kill themselves? How many disbelieved the religion but were still there anyways? How many of those 909 deaths should be chalked up to religiously motivated? How many were culturally motivated? How many were straight victims? If Jim Jones knew it was all a sham, but was just tricking people to do what he wanted, is that even a religious attrocity at all? When religion is used as a tool, then I don't blame the religion. Upon re-read, I think I should make it apparent that I do think some of those deaths in the Jim Jones massacre were religiously motivated, that some of them really believed all of that and wanted to kill themselves and that religion, itself, can be blamed for that. But I guess I agree. If we're going to assign a particular act of violence to religion, we should find acts of "goodness" that have religious motivations as well. Thanks for acknowledging that.
But you just said that atheism has no tenets. So, if we're going to try to use these calculations to compare, we're going to have tenet after tenet propped up by religion and the atheists are going to have nothing. The original quoted called for a comparison of the deaths caused by atheist regimes, and that allows for some counting.
If atheists do an action about as often as religious people do, it should be considered a human attribute and not religious. Its gonna get fuzzy tho, because it seems that being religious is a human attribute in itself...
What most of these types of calculations come down to is, if we got rid of all religions, would the net effect make the world better or worse. Consider that in the early stages of civilization, religion played a big part in keeping people together. I don't think we'd have civilization as we know it without religion.
Many atheists would argue that many wars would be eliminated (not all, by a long shot) but most of the good things, like charity, community, sense-of-purpose, etc would still exist. So, if removing an institution would eliminate some unnecessary deaths, but have no effect on the good things being done, doesn't that mean the effect of that institution is a net negative? I suppose, but its all in hind sight from here. Orphanages and hospitals, etc., were set-up by religious people. Its just too hard to imagine how things would be different is there weren't any religious people to begin with.
Now, I'm actually curious, hypothetically, what would happen to the charities done under the auspices of religions, if the religion were abandoned. Would someone keep them going from a moral compulsion, or would they just stop operating, leaving only the non-religious charities in operation? If that were the case, the calculation becomes more complicated. Yeah, I have no idea.
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