…superstition takes his place. Including things like the climate-change religion.
I think it was Chesterton who said that when people cease believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe anything. This is why, despite my own lack of belief, I think that attacks on organized religion by the Left (as engaged in by people like Dawkins and Dennett) can be disastrous. Like death, God serves a useful societal purpose, if not for every individual, whether He exists or not.
Like death, God serves a useful societal purpose, if not for every individual, whether He exists or not.
I think that statement is on the same intellectual level as “Global warming alarmism serves a useful societal purpose, if not for every individual, whether global warming is happening or not” or “Marxism serves a useful societal purpose, if not for every individual, whether Marxism is sound or not” or “Scientology serves a useful societal purpose, if not for every individual, whether scientoloy is true or not”.
Those are sentiments expressed by those who don’t want cherished beliefs questioned.
Perhaps, except in my case it’s hardly a “cherished belief.” I’m an agnostic, and I hate death. I’m simply postulating it, based on history.
[Update a while later]
To clarify, Jim, I think you’re making a severe category error here. I don’t think that any of those supposedly analogous statements are like mine. Particularly since I’m not trying to legally enforce my postulate.
I’m with Jon. Christians are required to believe a certain minimum amount of nonsense as tenets of their faith. But this very often seems to be a simultaneous floor and ceiling on the amount of nonsense they will credit. If one is familiar with Christianity, even if one does not share the particular beliefs of its adherents, one can deal reasonably with Christians by simply stepping diplomatically around the limited borders of Christian nonsense.
Leftists, on the other hand, seem to have no obvious upper limits on the amount of nonsense they will passionately believe. Oddly, this includes blatantly religious nonsense too, so long as said nonsense is not derived in any way from Christianity. American leftists are hugely more likely than the general population to believe in, to cite a few examples that come readily to mind: astrology, reincarnation, feng shui, “channeling” of the spirits of the deceased, Tarot card reading and other forms of fortune telling, and “spirituality” in seemingly endless wacky particular flavors. One’s search for rational common ground with leftists is correspondingly far more daunting and markedly less likely to yield success than with Christians.
The biggest difference between the nonsensical beliefs of Christians and the nonsensical beliefs of leftists is the capacity of said beliefs to engender agitation for various regimes of state control. The fact that Christians believe in Old Testament miracles and the Virgin Birth is mildly interesting, but has no impact on public policy or the lives of atheists such as myself. To the leftist, though, there is essentially nothing which is not political and, therefore, legitimately subject to state edict. So it goes.
I’ve found two types of atheists. The first shrug their shoulders and say, I don’t get this belief in God. But they usually see the positive effects religion has on society and enjoy Christmas. Most recognize that Christianity is part of what has made the West a wonderful place to live.
The second group is less atheist and more anti-Christian. They have a visceral hatred of Christianity. It is these folks who generally want to believe in the State or Salvation by Society (in Drucker’s words.) They are also more likely to believe in astral forces and global warming.
I would go so far as to say that the fashionable “atheism” of the new cool kids is mere anti-Christianity. I was, for a while, involved with some online atheist communities years ago. Their reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack was eye-opening and disturbing. Within days I saw all the CAIR talking points that they still use. I saw people who had for years proclaimed their contempt for all religions defending Islam and posting terrorism apologetics, even as they continued to yell about how much they hated the “Xtian hicks.” I suppose I should not have been surprised, but in my defense I can only say that I was young, and I assumed that because I don’t grasp this psychological need for gods, that all religions are equally voodoo to me, everyone else had come to their positions through logic. I learned, instead, that a great many “atheists” are just throwing a tantrum at Daddy.
For some reason this thread reminded me of that old atheist saw: “The World without God is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Or a fish without a rocket ship.
Were it not for bicycles, would humans be flying?
You know me, Rand. I’m an atheist who believes that the individual human is sovereign, and am level-headed when it comes to science. Would I want to live in a well-seasoned Christian world? Hell, no. The author cites John Calvin, who “had dozens of people executed over theological disputes.” One of them was Michael Servetus, a polymath who was the first person to correctly identify the functioning of the human respiratory system. Calvin had him condemned to death by slow burning, on a pyre of his own books. Calvin contributed exactly dick to the world, but took the life of a genius (and delayed the contributions of his mind from being widely known). Calvin was a puny intellect who got his rocks off torturing people to death.
Christianity hasn’t evolved very much since then, despite its cheerleaders saying so. Baptists still believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that DNA is a myth, and that the dinosaurs didn’t really exist. What’s worse, they believe that anyone who believes otherwise is a threat to them. And if push came to shove, they would be just as lethal as ISIS or Calvin.
I’m sorry, but belief in a supreme being as a means of keeping the masses under control is just bullshit. It always has been, and it always will be. I don’t care who wants to submit to it, that’s fine. But if they want to treat me as a threat, I will respond disproportionately — as disproportionately as I possibly can.
“But if they want to treat me as a threat, I will respond disproportionately — as disproportionately as I possibly can.”
Man’s inhumanity to Man is a human trait and is not idiosyncratic to any religion or ideology. Religion is often blamed for people’s actions, and sometimes deservedly, but religious people don’t act any different than other humans. Religion is just another ideology and every human engages in magical thinking. Replace religion with something else or nothing at all and people would still act like humans.
Absolutely correct.
It isn’t the religious tenants that drove religious people to kill…it was human nature, belief in infallibility, belief in the “one and only one true way”, innate need to control other people, love of power, love of money.. etc etc
The “rationale” for the heinous acts are plug n’ play…islamo-fascism, Calvinist excesses, communism, progressivism….mere excuses…rationale for the all too human trait of wanting to tell others what to do and how to do it. The more extreme people go to ….well….the extremes.
And as Lord Acton pointed out, once started down the path you could end up in psychological places you didn’t foresee.
And a lot of people could rot in jail and/or end up dead. Lots of lives destroyed.
The strangest thing to me regarding the present day progressive madmen is the fact that in the 60’s they utterly rejected the government. but once they obtained a taste of the power….it corrupted.
MfK, what you’re describing sounds like christians in name only, adhering to the rules but missing the message of the Gospel. Both Jesus and the apostle Paul were critical of legalism common in the society they lived in.
I think you’re arguing more about human intolerance rather than religious intolerance. Religion is run by humans, who are fallible and fall to corruption when they have power. Rather than saying this is a fallacy of religion, I’ve discovered that the heinous occurrences of Christianity tell us more about ideological dominance in a culture. Calvin was in charge and he was a dick. There were disgusting popes as well.
But we find the same intolerance in other facets of human culture. Just look at the global warming fanatics. If they were in charge, they really would kill those of us who “denied” their truth.
Don’t forget that it was Christianity that eliminated slavery for the first time (maybe Buddhists were first.) The idea of equality under one God became equality under the the law. Human rights are a result of Christianity. One only needs to look at China, the Middle East, etc to see how much worse it can be. Look how ISIS has slave markets. They arrived the second the influence of the West evaporated.
Let us also look at Mother Theresa and charity in general. Would any anti-Christians do this? Probably, but if you look at the charity contributions of the US vs the rest of the world, we rank at the top and this is probably due to religion.
The history of the Scholastics also show that, contrary to the lies of Carl Sagan and Neil de Grasse Tyson, the Catholic Church often promoted science. The reintroduction of logic through Aquinas was critical for the birth of science as we know it today.
Since we’re on the subject of Catholics (you might throw in Lombard and Albertus Magnus for laying a lot of Aquinas’s groundwork, by the way), by common tradition, the first few dozen popes died as martyrs (the exact number or reliability of all accounts is beside the point; it’s generally accepted that a fair number were killed by the Roman state in some fashion). There were many other bishops who were killed as well, especially in the Diocletian persecution. Certainly this is an extraordinarily and personally costly way to achieve a means of keeping the masses under control – certainly if you don’t really believe in what what you’re preaching. I think we have to credit that many really did and do believe.
And this is not just Catholics, of course. As a Catholic, I am no fan of Cranmer, but he went to the pyre for what he asserted, and had multiple chances to recant. I’m inclined to think he was sincere in his belief, to the extent that any human being can be.
Of course, recognizing that someone is sincere in his or her beliefs does not mean you must share them. But refusal to credit an interlocutor with any sincerity from the outset not only marks a certain sociopathy, but can also be irrational.
Baptists still believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that DNA is a myth, and that the dinosaurs didn’t really exist
Some Baptists, you mean?
The SBC denies evolution, but I can’t find any reason to believe that young-earth Creationism is a uniform belief (indeed, I found plenty of evidence that lots of Baptists reconcile it quite easily with Biblical Inerrancy, in exactly the same way Catholics accept it), denial of the existence of DNA, or of dinosaurs.
Conflating the craziest fringe with the mainstream (within the Baptists, that is) is … exactly the sort of error that I try to avoid in my atheism.
I’m an atheist that will defend to the death any ones right to believe whatever they want as long as they don’t try to change what I believe. I find the Christian beliefs a lot less harmful than a lot of the left wing progressive religion. I believe that prominent christian beliefs and attitudes were a large part of the success of the U.S. I think taking the most fringe beliefs of any one group and then painting the whole group with those beliefs is unfair. In some ways the most amazing thing about the Christian belief system is the accuracy of the genesis description of the creation of earth. It may not be the correct time scale, but the steps and order of events fits very closely with out belief and order of cosmology as described by modern science.
— Paul Breed
October 27, 2015 at 2:03 PM
I’m an atheist that will defend to the death any ones right to believe whatever they want as long as they don’t try to change what I believe. —
I think people are going to want to change what you believe- that’s life.
But they shouldn’t able to tax, torture, threat with death, or imprison you in other to change what you believe.
Or it’s mostly about using power of a state, or other mobs, in rather insane need to change your belief- or if nothing else, keep you from expressing your belief/opinion as a potential “threat” with their stupid plans or ideals.