Why I believe it is in my own best interest to put down all religions,

[heidler1]

Humans by nature like to gang up on other people and religion is the most expedient way of getting large groups all on board with a common goal. Each brand of religious thought needs, for the good of mankind, to be splintered into smaller more manageable sects as quickly as possible so as to weaken the common dogma. Martin Luther was a hero.

We were told that Communism would over run the earth, but its day is passed. Bush is going going gone Hitler came and went, but religion continues to rear its ugly head.

Sure the problem is man himself, but we're stuck with that. Some humans see the problem and beat on each horse until the new horse dies before that horse/religion can destroys us. Volunteer Atheists are needed.

[laconicsax]

1. An influential writer once put it

  To describe religion as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both. I am often asked why I am so hostile to "organized religion". My first response it that I am not exactly friendly towards disorganized religion either. As a lover of truth, I am suspicious of strongly held beliefs that are unsupported by evidence: fairies, unicorns, werewolves, any of the inifinite set of conceivable and unfalsifiable beliefs epitomized by Bertrand Russell's hypothetical china tea pot orbiting the Sun.

  The reason religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell's tea pot, religion is powerful, influencial, tax exempt and systematically passed down to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorizing loony books about teapots. Government-subsidized schools don't exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don't stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don't warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don't kneecap those who put the tea in first.

Richard Dawkins in The Devil's Chaplain

[onager]

5. Gotta use this fave quote again...

One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected...

(This) convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency.

That they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly.--H.L. Mencken

[anonymous171]

2. I am creeped out by your rhetoric and also fascinated by it. nt

[DeSwiss]

3. Rearing its ugly head, indeed....

- K&R

[lutherj]

4. The best antidote to religion is ridicule. That's why knocking religion

is considered taboo by many people. Believers want to hide behind the taboo. The mutual pretense among a group of believers is the guarantee of their social bond, and when someone ridicules it they feel outraged that the pretense has been violated. On the other hand, it makes no difference to me if someone makes fun of atheism. It's like making fun of oxygen, or the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, or the theory of relativity. It's just childish defensiveness.

As far as I'm concerned all gods are personal gods, all gods are totemic tribal gods, and as such, all gods are the projection of the conformist identity of the group, and of the overarching authority of the group's interests.

No gods, no masters.

[bananas]

6. That's why I put down fundamentalist atheists

As Einstein said, "The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer."
:rofl:

[cosmik debris]

8. Was that Ralph Einstein or Larry Einstein?

Why do people make up Einstein quotes?

And why do people think that quoting a physicist will make a valid theological or sociological argument?

Is it because they are too lazy to find theologians or sociologists to quote?

How about this quote from the Woo Woo Credo. http://www.insolitology.com/tests/credo.htm

36. Quote Einstein, and do so often. Quote things he said if possible, but Einstein has been dead for ages now and so it's permissible to bring him up to date. Change the odd word here and there to make it clear that Einstein would have supported your argument if only he knew what you know. Act as if any arbitrary Einstein quote supports your position.

Do you ever get tired of that?

[cyborg_jim]

9. Simple: tacitly we all respect scientists more than theologians because science can DEMONSTRATE

Demonstration will always be more powerful than proclamation.

So if you want to make your proclamation stronger associate it with demonstration.

This works.

I say fuck Einstein. Nothing he said means anything because he said it. It only means something if - and only if - what he said could be demonstrated. And since a lot of it could it means something. Doesn't mean everything he ever uttered is meaningful or true.

Cults of personality suck.

[ladjf]

10. Science is based upon objective observation. Religion is based

upon subjective constructs.

[LARED]

7. manageable sects??

To be managed by whom?

[heidler1]

12. Other humans who dislike all of the trouble caused by religion.

[LARED]

19. Managed like say criminals are managed or

the mentally ill. Or did you have something else in mind?

[heidler1]

20. It appears to me that religious beliefs make people so vulnerable to self doubt that a clinker like

"The God Delusion" gets them defensive, However if the group is large enough they consider themselves as much more infallible.

[LARED]

21. I have to admit I have no clue what you're talking about

It seems to me an issue you have is that religious people tend to stay on message, and managing them in smaller groups is somehow expedite in your efforts to weaken their dogma.

What I find offensive is your goal of somehow managing people that hold religious beliefs. How you propose to accomplished this and to what end is something I'd like to hear more about. Religious institutions used to manage atheists on a regular basis not to long ago. I think many were managed via tortured and death. I hope your methods are more humane.

[Evoman]

11. Note to Hedler: In a religious conflict, we would be the first to be "put down".

Just sayin....:scared:

[heidler1]

13. Are you ready to be a modern day martyr for a just cause?

The timing has never been better. IMO

The religiou are the least sure of themselves, that I remember.

[Evoman]

14. I'm too selfish to ever be a martyr. I've always geared my entire existence towards survival.

[heidler1]

15. But, you do take part by using your wit to make logical and humorous comments.

[Evoman]

16. Yeah, I do it in real life too. But whereas personal confrontations or small groups don't scare me,

large, organized groups of christians scare the fuck out of me.

[maxsolomon]

17. good luck with that, especially once you pass 80.

i understand the survival rate is 0%.

[Igel]

18. Eh.

The problem is tribalism, not religion per se. I'm also not sure that religion is the most expedient way of forming large groups; religions tend to fracture quite a bit on their own, rendering them less potent. Still, when necessary, they make for a nice foil when other factors can't be named in the interests of group solidarity.

Remove religion, you still have ethnicity and nationality, ideology and class, not to mention lifestyle. These are all fairly fluid, more fluid than often appears to be the case. China's class-based pogroms weren't religious; Stalin's class- and ideology-based massacres took on religious trappings--as did Saddam's--only in distress. Hitler's religion wasn't for the masses.

The Hutu and Tutsi 'conflict' wasn't religious, the Croat-Bosnian-Serb atrocities were likewise ethnic. Arguably the Darfur 'genocide' is one of lifestyle, pastoral vs. agrarian, more than it is ethnic or religious, although the arguments can certainly go the other ways--often a conflict has more than one faultline between warring groups. And while there are arguments to be made about Darfur, there are other cases, mostly historical, where lifestyle is crucial--a fair portion of the Indian Wars in the US boils down to agrarian invaders vs. pastoral tribes.

But they also have their advantages, which is why supra-clan groups exist in the first place--they're nice honor-saving ways of being in the same honor group, with the existence of pre-approved conflict resolution strategies that are often lacking with outside-group people.

But, of course, each person is simultaneously in multiple groups--and often a large group is composed of subgroups. The trick is to recognize all the group boundaries and how they're ranked--keeping in mind that the ranking is flexible over time and by circumstances.