Ultimately, this whole Pope/Islam spat is proving what I've always thought

[WindRavenX]

Organized religion is just fucked up, plain and simple.
There can be good religious PEOPLE, but on a whole, organized religion is a force that kills entire groups of humanity and has the gall to justify it on the premise of some pie in the sky.
Fuck. That.
Everyone is wrong, and everyone loses when there's this bullshit religious violence.

I needed to get this off my chest. I cannot understand why people think there's a right side when it comes to the killing of innocents.

I don't care who God you're killing in the name of--you're wrong.

[Demit]

1. Agree. Organized religion the cause of many many ills in this world. nt

[WindRavenX]

3. I think it is indisputable, for a logical standpoint, that...

...organized religion has done more harm than good so far in the history of mankind.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Organised religion has been so bound up with state power

for most of history, that's it's impossible to say what would have happened if we had never had any organised religion. It's possible we'd never have developed any states, with almost no specialisation, scientific advances, organised laws, and so on. We might still be working on a vendetta system, with everyone still at the subsistence level of existence. So I'd disagree that it's 'indisputable'.

[WindRavenX]

7. That's actually a good point

I never thought of it from that POV.

But, would you say that today it seems to be holding back advancements in society? I say yes because I see the distrust of science by most Americans to be a problem-- they see it as a threat to their faith. This is a major issue for me.

[muriel_volestrangler]

13. Yes; I think democracy and mass communication make a state possible

without religion, so the bad aspects of religion now dominate the good ones.

I found Jared Diamond's ideas in "Guns, Germs and Steel" very persuasive - that in small groups where everyone more or less knows everyone else, you can have some kind of order with either group decisions, or people giving authority to someone they know is wise. But conflicts with neighbouring 'tribes' can still be pretty bloody and lawless, because there's no shared standards, and he says that murder rates in places like New Guinea where life was still in small groups were very high, because strangers were never trusted, or assumed to have 'rights'.

Assigning authority in larger groups, when they organise for the purposes of, say, irrigation for agriculture, becomes a problem - unless there is a 'divine right' which persuades people to listen to one man and say he's the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. Then you get a sort of Darwinian competition between nascent civilisations and their leaders (more or less monarchs) - those that treat their members fairly well get more willing support from their populace, and do better than tyrannical ones who abuse power. So religions with some respect for people tend to win out over those which are into human sacrifice, for instance. Religions that are warlike may give rise to successful empires, but will also be prone to fighting inside themselves.

But when you develop a democratic system in which an educated populace has decent enough communications to know what's going on in their state, you don't need the old "do this, because it's right according to our gods" approach anymore - everyone can decide 'right' in an ongoing debate, and a consensus will generally get a better result for everyone than an individual having the ultimate decision, and be more adaptable - which, for instance, allows the better development and use of science, as you say.

[Leopolds Ghost]

16. Jared Diamond doesn't mention religion being the product of evolution

as I recall, that's (can't think of his name but he's a dogmatic anti-theist scholar).

And mass communication sure as hell doesn't allow for a DEMOCRATIC state to exist without religion. It's pushing us inexorably towards a totalitarian state. For that matter, without religion we'd have nobody pushing for a non-statist society -- left libertarianism does not work if you don't have a common ethical framework (not a hypothetical, relativist framework; a common set of values). We'd be living in a world similar to that of _Dune_ or _Blade Runner_ or numerous other sci-fi dystopias, many of which their author was convinced were desirable, scientific utopias.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. I'm thinking more in terms of memes for the 'evolution' of religions

and I can't remember if Diamond thinks in those terms, or if I just developed that thought myself, after reading him. It was he who argued (the first time I saw the argument, anyway) that religion allows the growth beyond 'tribal' level. I was talking about religious memes evolving when those that help the survival of a society reproduce, while those that don't die out, along with their believers.

So, if you say "mass communication sure as hell doesn't allow for a DEMOCRATIC state to exist without religion", you are contending that religion is still vital for a democratic state? I think that mass communication is vital for citizens to be informed about the condition of their state. Word of mouth just doesn't cut it. There's no way a state of millions of people could be democratic without any newspapers, radio, TV or internet - and it probably wouldn't work for groupings of even thousands. And if you don't know what's going on, you can't make proper decisions. There are plenty of modern democratic states in which religion doesn't play a large part - I think they would fail if you banned all of the media from them.

Mass communication isn't pushing us towards a totalitarian state - before it existed, all states were totalitarian (even Greek democracy excluded women and slaves, and it didn't last long).

"without religion we'd have nobody pushing for a non-statist society"? I'm not sure what you mean. The only significant advocates for a non-statist society have been communists (as in final stage communists), as far as I know, and they were non-religious. Are you saying there are religions that want a society with no states? I think people can develop a common set of values without it being imposed in a Straussian manner by some arbitrary religious power.

[Demit]

12. "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails

of the last priest."

Seemed a good time to insert that quote. :)

[Liberal Veteran]

2. What pisses me off the most is the hypocrisy...

....of those (and I am not referring to all Christians) who when faced with the history of violence and intolerance and atrocities committed in the name of Christianity will piously say "They weren't real Christians", but then turn around and paint every single Muslim as a being part of a savage, violent faith even thought the vast majority of 1.2 billion Muslims are just peaceful people trying to make a life for themselves.

[Freedom_from_Chains]

4. Yeah, but it still meant those were real deaths.

[StClone]

11. I think too that this is hyped

To add fuel to the fire of X-tian angst who will in turn look for Father W to save them.

[6000eliot]

5. 9/11 killed whatever lingering religious feeling I had.

I will stick with atheism, thank you. I don't trust any organized religion.

[daa]

8. Its not any different

than when the pope helped Hitler against the Jews.

[MADem]

9. It's where the boys are, though, you see (as well as the girls)

The voting boys, the fighting boys, the boys who will crack heads on behalf of the "right" leader. It's funded by rich people who like power and can rely on people who are fervently invested in their "team" to go out and vanquish the other team. Because belonging to a team is important for some. It gives their lives meaning.

All of those pricy buildings that are houses of worship and affiliated structures, expensive schools, investment holdings, and so on...all tax free. Why? Because way too many people are afraid of the invisible man in the sky.

And leading the charge are assholes in costumes who wag their fingers and tell people what to do, while claiming to have a direct, secret line to the man in the sky...

And idiots on the teams, in the pews, or lined up kneeling on the floor and putting their foreheads to the ground in supplication simply BELIEVE, because their invisible man in the sky likes their team the BEST.

And hell, if you took the invisible man out of the equation, they'd really have to ponder the meaning of life, wouldn't they?

[StClone]

10. Humanists and some Eastern Religions

And may be better than all that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism

[woodsgirl]

14. Been reading a little history today. At the time of the French

Revolution the little people were being squeezed to death
because the nobility didn't have enough cash ...the church
took in more money than the nobility. Bet it was catholic.The
catholic church is institutionalized fascism and pedophelia.
Why anybody would give them money to ruin lives is beyond me.

[newyawker99]

18. Hi woodsgirl!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[lovuian]

15. Turkish intellectuals want to know more on pope's view of Islam

http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr/article.php?enewsid=54829

Following a wave of protests against Pope Benedict XVI's remarks on Islam, Muslim intellectuals in Turkey are asking what he really thinks about their faith and what long-term consequences his views will have.

Muslim thinkers in Turkey, where the German-born pontiff is due on a sensitive visit in late November, suspect Benedict suffers from “Orientalist” delusions about Islam and wants to move the Roman Catholic Church away from dialogue with it.

His argument that Christianity is rational could be an indirect way of saying Islam is unreasonable and has no place in Christian-rooted Europe, they claim.

At the same time, they set clear limits on the dialogue they want, boxing it into a series of polite exchanges where the tough issues Benedict wants to discuss risk remaining taboo.

“He should explain a lot of things,” said Bekir Karlıağa, philosophy professor at Istanbul's Marmara University. “His apology was not enough for the feelings of the Muslim world.”

The pope has invited ambassadors of Muslim countries at the Vatican, and Muslim religious leaders, to a meeting on Monday at his summer palace, a senior Vatican official said on Friday.

The meeting is part of diplomatic efforts to explain that his speech in Germany has been misunderstood, the Vatican said.
more...

[The2ndWheel]

19. Not just religion though

The same can be said for organization in general.