Text 4237, 82 rader
Skriven 2006-07-18 11:43:00 av Robert E Starr JR (4710.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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kruegerb76@hotmail.com wrote:
> Bill wrote:
> 
>>I also have very personal reasons for my jaded views on religion. I may
>>bore you with those at some future point. But what it really comes down
>>to is that the "love one another" message put forth by Dr. Martin
>>Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus Christ, etc. usually gets
>>subverted by the petty, greedy, selfish human nature and corrupted into
>>something which would turn the stomachs of King, et al.
>>
>>Bill
> 
> 
> Exactly.

The weirdness of this is still kind of amazing; y'all have basically 
taken the worst of human nature and labeled it "religion" without really 
recognizing that because religion and politics were intertwined, as Barb 
said previously, for so many centuries, it might not be the thing which 
controls.

I can invent a flying-spaghetti-monster style ideology out of whole 
cloth, and even gather followers. It might live, or die out, or persist 
in small numbers for centuries without ever causing widespread 
suffering. It might also balloon into Empire, as happened to 
Christianity and did not happen to Judaism.

Something else besides the nominal ideology in any group controls 
whether or not it persecutes. Bill named it, of course: every human has 
in his nature pettiness, greed, selfishness, all connected in one way or 
another with the fight/flight/sex/food hungers stimulated by our 
hormonal systems and patterned in our DNA.

It's because of that that an entirely "godless" ideology like Communism 
or Socialism was just as capable of being an accelerant for tyranny's 
fire just as completely as any crusade or jihad.

No one can deny, of course, that religious ideology forms the 
theological "reasoning" behind the greatest tyrannies of our day. Islam 
has become sick, just as any religion can get sick, and become an 
accelerant on that fire. But going back 60 years is all we need to show 
that even without it, we can still get widespread suffering.

The quantity, if we wish to remain the humane romantics our culture is 
teaching us all to be, is irrelevant: if an ideology is causing 
widespread suffering, it needs to be examined, and "truthed" out of its 
sickness, if at all possible. No appeal to history is necessary.

Therefore, I wonder if the question, "Which has caused more suffering" 
isn't just completely irrelevant. The suffering either general ideology 
has caused is in the past. Jay pointed out that to Communists, "science" 
was treated as a "religion". But I think it bends the definition and 
sweeps up a lot of innocuous religions and peoples in its net.

Better than "religion" as a term would be "ideology", permitting us to 
include the "godless" tyrannies in the same bucket, and condemn them 
equally. Then, the question becomes, "Is strict adherence to any 
ideology useful, or is there something else which makes sense?"

 From that, we separate ideologies from motivations and try to decide 
which is more fundamental to a tyranny: Is it the mass of 
biology/hormones/whatever which make up a person and his body? Is it the 
inevitable unprovability of any reasonably complex ideology, including 
socialisms? A combination of the two? Something else in addition?

Like humans themselves, the issue is more complex than a slogan can 
show, which is why I'll always reject the idea that "religion causes 
suffering." Mine does not; I'm entirely comfortable within it and 
utterly no harm to anyone else, including my children, who are just as 
free to reject it as I was. Amy's does not, on the same grounds; her 
participance is out of free will. And so forth.

Rob
  
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