"Dawkins and Pinker are jerks."

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Ah, the 'if you're against religion you're just as bad as those fundamentalists'. Really, I expected better from you, Godot. That is so fucking stupid. (All) Religion is based upon irrationally believing things with faith instead of reason; it can be and very often is used to rationalize and justify all sorts of horrible things, and what good it can provide is not unique.

F19:04, 12 February 2012

so because some people have used religion as a means of control all religion is bad?

il'Dictator Mikal19:18, 12 February 2012

Read what I said again.

F19:21, 12 February 2012

There is actually nothing irrational about belief in most religions. Let's look at the rain dance. You are starving, there is no rain. You don't know where rain comes from, cause you are primitive. One day you are out dancing, cause you are trying hard to do something other than think of your starving kids. Rain starts. Your mind, being a human mind that is biologically driven to make connections between events (cause and effect) assumes quite naturally and logically that what you did made the rain. Cause you did it, and rain started.

We do that with everything in life - from sports superstitions to science. we say "x was the status, I did Y, X changed to a new status". That is the ground work for most religious actions.

But beyond that, there is a host of religions and religious beliefs not nestled in the blatantly irrational like "god sent jesus to cure all ills". We have no idea what might have started the big bang. any theory we have is just a guess, and really we can never know. Saying "goddidit", when you define god as "something bigger than what we know" is as rational as saying to membranes touched and the contact point was the big bang.

Surveys suggest the slight majority of people who are religious, do not think of a personal god like Fundamentalists do. They think, at best, of something merely "bigger than what I can know". Their monotheist god has grown up, to be "beyond" a guy worrying about who sleeps with whom. But those people aren't out talking to you, trying to change your views, trying to make you worship their way - so most of us don't even realize that's what they think. What we here is loud fundimentlists changing laws, screaming at "others', and even bombing people to get their way. But that is not what most religion in the world suggests.

your own view of religion as bad, is itself irrational. especially when you are doing it from a position where you (likely) don't know what most religions actually teach.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina19:38, 12 February 2012

and not all fundamentalists want to make you act like them either: Case in point is me.

il'Dictator Mikal19:46, 12 February 2012
 

And yet religion persists as we have answers on orders of magnitude better than anything primitive assumptions about cause and effect could have provided.

F19:57, 12 February 2012

Religion persists because it gives human important things they do not get anywhere else. not "cannot" get - just "do not get". A sense of purpose; a meaning to life; a reason why "life sucks" or why there is "suffering". "I just want to know that all of these deaths meant something".

Religion persists because of the sense of community, shared moral and social values, shared sense of exploring the universe.

Science, especially the really deep science can be "like" a religion in those ways. It can awe, inspire, give you a sense of meaning and reason, etc. People who spend their lives staring at the "Wonders of the Universe" often talk with teh language of mystics. But - most people cannot or will not have that relationship to things like how vastly huge the universe is, and how incredibly tiny an electron and it's sub parts are.

Religion persists because it is a wonderful way to control people. But that's why Rational Wiki, Facebook, chocolate, hot baths, and other human diversions persist. We are, by and large, sheep most of our lives. We only really get a voice some percentage of our day, or year. If we as humans were not controllable, not only would we not be big things, like the 99%, we woudln't go to work, or listen to our stupid boss who really does know less than we do. WE would not take our parent's griping about our dates, or our children's whining about the new ipad.

Perhaps it's "one more stupid humanity thing", but as a 20 something yourself (well, actually, i think you said you're still in highschoo - which blows me away), much of your disgust still comes from that space of "teen rebellion" for want of a better word. But for every one stupid thing you change, another will grow. It's so much better, in my life, anyhow, to understand why humans want and need religion, than to disparage it, or attack it, or wish it gone.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina14:36, 13 February 2012