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Originally Posted by gareth  Thank you SouthTown. I am not talking about 'organised religion'.
It's quite interesting to see scientists getting emotive about how valueless religion is. The title of this thread is religion vs. religion, yet it has now degenerated into a science vs. religion thread (that old chestnut). |
Well, that just means you're either not paying attention to what I'm saying or you're purposely avoiding it.
I've said several times before that Ecumenicism breaks out quickly whenever this topic is made concrete, and if you're going to blame someone for why the thread has "degenerated into science vs. religion" you need to look in the mirror. Now is hardly the only guilty one here.
You never did respond to the issue that I brought up earlier and which you continue with this appeal to Zoroastrianism, or personal religions as Southtown to his credit exemplifies:
- Religions are social phenomena.
- It is undeniable that most have dogma that is derogatory to other faiths.
The real point of this thread continues to be: what needs to happen in order for
true Ecumenicism to occur, and not just the useful but meaningless feint to deflect attention to the evil of atheism?
Conflict with atheism is actually no different than the conflicts with other faiths: its all about "apostasy" and "unbelievers" which simply means disagreement with religious scripture/teachings/dogma.
You have yet to admit that you're moving the goalposts and avoiding this issue, and that would seem to be odd, because if you--like Southtown--have a personal faith, you are in the
minority position of being able to avoid the accusation of having a belief system that by virtue of its most central tenants (usually a "divinely inspired" text, as was discussed previously) requires hostility toward other faiths.
So, this is not about you. Why are you acting so defensively? Why do you reactively "defend religion" when your personal religion is not being attacked? That's the source of the Ecumenicism that is one of the key discussion points here.
Can you do me a favor and discuss what you think about these points instead of just following Now down the path of Religion vs. Atheism?
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Originally Posted by modest I think you make a good point. Historically, a lot of conflicts we would call "holly wars" (ie religion vs. religion) had little to do with differences in ideology or belief. Mostly they seem to be either cultural, political, or territorial. Basically: tribalism. I believe the common sentiment that religion causes a lot of wars is a simplification. |
You know, I'm a marketing person, and one of the things we say in marketing is that all good marketing does is give consumers reasons to justify the decisions they've already made.
In this respect, I actually quite agree with you.
OTOH, the thing is that religions and political structures up until very recent history were completely inextricably linked, and I am of the opinion that religions were actually the original organizing mechanism of the earliest human societies. Social groups lived and died by virtue that their "leaders" could "predict" the future, and by following their predictions of when to plant and dictating which behaviors should be condemned, and enforcing loyalty by threatening catastrophic outcomes for those that did not follow the words of the leaders/shamans.
So the issue here is not "is religion the sole cause of conflict purely based on doctrine," because that would be *silly*: its *obvious* that all conflicts have at their source issues associated with power, resources, control, etc. and that the leaders pick and choose what to do when no matter what doctrine says, but the fact is that they use doctrine to justify it, and in spite of the fact that there are detrimental effects that are a direct result of these strong and clear doctrines that are in the divine texts, the question becomes: why do people continue to support them?
Religions constantly transmogrify and reform, yet these dogmas about what bad people unbelievers are and even how they should be converted or shuned or even go to war with,
are almost never excised from the belief systems. Why?
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Originally Posted by Modest Blaming religion can then be a bit of a cop out. We can blame great evils on religion itself rather than facing the harder truth that human nature (something we all equally share) is the cause. |
To make clear, this is not intended to be a *blame game*. This particular quote makes sense within the context of believing that all individuals have personal belief systems, which is *clearly* the exception and not the rule. So the question is the same in this light as well: why do people continue to support these religious dogmas that at the very *least* justify conflict with other groups?
One of the things I see as a point of resistance is--as I mentioned previously--that choosing to excise one particular item that has been taken for granted to be "God's word" begins the process of being able to question all of it, and that creates tremendous cognitive dissonance, that is scary and is avoided, in many cases by changing the issue to being one of "belief vs. non-belief" which is far more comfortable.
Doing that translation is an easy trap for people on both sides of that divide as we've seen in the last page or so of posts.
What's being avoided is the issue of
Why, and *that's* by far the more interesting one, and one that none of you should be passing off and ignoring...
Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it - what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone,
Buffy
3D Championship Golf Champion!
Re: Religion vs. Religion 
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