The Power of Religion

[cleanhippie]

Yesterday I penned a very difficult post that allowed me to maintain my commitment to writing about my battle with a psychological disease. It did not take long for a true, true believer to say something we all could have predicted.

--snip--

If what he believes is true, then he is offering me a cure. His intentions are as good as yours or mine. Of course, what he believes is not true, and so he’s not helping. Instead, he’s capitalizing on another person’s suffering to spread a position that cannot be spread through evidence or sound argument and so must be thrust on the emotionally weak or the mentally underdeveloped (read: children). He is a predator.

This is the problem with religion. It allows people to stick their evangelistic thumb into a wound and think they’re helping.

It allows people to oppose equal rights for others…and think they’re helping.

It allows people to fly airplanes into skyscrapers…and think they’re helping.

This is not to say that good intentions are irrelevant. After all, we must want to be reasonable before we can be reasonable. But good intentions by themselves, absent the influence of reason, are not enough to make somebody a good person. In fact, good intentions unchained from rationality are frequently perilous to ourselves and to the world we all share. It is the doorway to well-meaning madness.

And that is the problem with religion, not that it corrupts people’s intentions, but that it corrupts their reason and thus often makes predators (or even monsters) of otherwise good people, like the callous commenter who saw opportunity in the wake of my agony.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/wwjtd/2011/10/15/the-power-of-religion/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

[PATRICK]

1. I don't believe that is what they think

Emotions and deep instincts come before thought and definitely before the final judgment and self-justification package we should all be leery of. The presumption that our beliefs are solidly grounded on objective facts or ultimate authority are all, almost without exception, grounded in a structural delusion of the mind.

I suspect that behind the backwash of supposed sympathy(after the self-justification process) is a predisposed malevolence, need for power and fear. This makes the final result of pleasurable self-justification pretty nearly textbook sadism in the application of power over others. Most self determined fundamentalists are content to be minor demons of a DeSade God, hiding behind an even greater "Authority" to avoid the inescapable sentiments of decency, open mindedness and empathic compassion that begin to be automatically denied and retranslated into polar opposites rewarded by evil results.

In plain Gospel sense, the greatest sin is in calling evil good and good evil, because that completely corrupts the human mind, action and belief. The same is the absolute definition of the hater of the truth God, namely the person whose loyalty is to Mammon, no compromise, no exception. We have a lot of dogmatic God-haters on that count alone. Most lefties have an almost impoverishing effect on their economic ambitions by their humanistic priorities. They know their hearts, their values and think true accordingly if not infallibly.

It is benevolent and partly correct to remember the hearts of harmful humans contain the same good emotions, instincts and traits. It is less mystifying to remember after that how twisted and warped hearts of harmful humans, how fundamentally dishonest beyond the pale of their own senses and of reality.

More people know things in their heart and actually admit to them openly(but quietly) than one would credit considering actual behavior and words. They must transform this inner, pre-verbal connection to reality into a lie. Self-interest and fear can corrupt anyone's initial emotional perceptions. Those who deny themselves so fundamentally have the most to hide.

[Deep13]

2. Agreed.

Beliefs based on unreality will necessarily cause harm because actual reality is not going to bend to accommodate them.

[NMMNG]

3. I've encountered that attitude from believers before

That sort of snide, condescending, blame-the-victim, "you wouldn't have that problem if you just turned to God" attitude. It's demeaning and frustrating. I have no problem with well-meaning people who offer a prayer or mention religion on occasion. I have a big problem with snotty people who, while I'm suffering from an agonizing migraine, sneer when I take my medication and say "I don't have migraines because I pray".

[Kurmudgeon]

4. Read for yourself, decide for yourself. Just because one believes doesn't mean they truly understand

[darkstar3]

5. No one who's ever trotted out that argument has been able to answer the following question:

What proof do you have that your understanding is the "true" one?

Will you break the trend?

[cleanhippie]

6. Do you apply that to YOUR belief as well?

[Deep13]

7. You'd think God would be a bit less ambiguous.

Universal love and kill anyone who disagrees are pretty wildly variant instructions, yet true believers get both out of Christianity, for example.

[NMMNG]

8. .....

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
― Susan B. Anthony

[cleanhippie]

9. I see that this was just an uniteligent drive-by post.

How expected.

[deacon_sephiroth]

10. To quote Steven Weinberg

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

[David Sky]

11. Very excellent points in this thread. My personal experience with this is...

An older relative who is in a nursing home. She is a confirmed atheist who has not set foot in a church for 40 years other than to go to someone's wedding sometime.

A minister of a quite ordinary and common Protestant faith visits the nursing home twice a week and has descended upon my elderly relative in an attempt to "save her soul" before she dies. My relative isn't stupid, she knows she's got few weeks or months left. She just wants to be left alone, with her family and friends paying visits, not some stranger out of the religious fog stopping by her bed twice weekly. We have politely asked that preacher not to visit our relative. But, of course, that preacher continues to ignore our request.

This is just one more tiny example of religious folk sticking their fingers in places they should not, and refusing to accept the rights and requests of others.

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[darkstar3]

14. Now show us some "guilty" atheists from history who WEREN'T Communists.

1-3 weren't caused by what you think they were.

[David Sky]

15. So Atheism is equated in your mind with Communism? It is a "cause" of

Communist political thinking? Atheists are all in favor of a totalitarian government? If one looks around, you will see most Atheists are in favor of LESS government imposition of religious beliefs, in favor of LESS government restrictions over individual freedoms.

Oh how easy it is to forget that Hitler was born into a Catholic family, and that literally MILLIONS of German young men of Protestant faith went off to CRUSH their neighboring nations, under the banner "Got mit uns" (God with us)!

But somehow in the mind of those fearful of Atheism, Communism or some other horrible ruthless despotism is just one short step away from repudiation of any organized religion. It's really strange how the most recent ruthless forms of over-controlling government and ruthless despotism of the 19th and 20th centuries gets immediately linked to Atheism, but the histories of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and dozens of wars and decades of fighting, say between TWO CHRISTIAN FACTIONS, (Catholics and Protestants) all over Europe and Great Britain, and elsewhere in the world, all of THAT ugliness is conveniently overlooked by those who detest Atheism.

[NMMNG]

16. Same schtick from you guys

Commies! Stalin! Pol Pot! Lenin!


Do they teach you that in church for whenever you encounter an atheist?

[trotsky]

13. Best quote I've ever heard on the topic:

"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." -- Steven Weinberg