A Healthier Tomorrow
Offline Apologies in advance for tl;dr. Sometimes I just need to write.
Given the tendency among humans for tribal conflict, any religion that glorifies or even romanticizes death must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Rational people must find abhorrent the death cult, which promises eternal bliss for the chosen and unending torment for everyone else. The institutionalized religion, the bastard child of secular authority and faithful conviction, goes hand in hand with a rosy view of death.
History has demonstrated the repulsive fruits of theocracy. The desert dogmas, in their own allegedly holy books, condone cruelty in all its hideous forms. Christianity and Islam, in particular, give open invitation to witch-burnings, stonings, jihads, crusades, inquisitions, repression, and internecine war. One need not peer into the past to witness religious law at work. Much of the world is still governed by dictatorial theocracies. In many countries, the descendents and cousins of the Christian dark ages linger on. In some of those countries, men and (occasional) women of God work to drag the rest of us back to medieval superstition.
I have wondered if opposing those forces is really the good fight. Our understanding of the universe does not seem to be tempered with wisdom. Even as we took the first steps towards the stars, we rushed headlong towards global annihilation. Is our understanding worth the shadow of nuclear war? The internet is, in my opinion, the greatest work humanity as a species has ever undertaken. Never before has communication been easier, has mutual understanding been more possible. Is that worth drowning continents and choking the sky to power the greatest repository of information and porn in human history?
Of course, we could greatly reduce these threats if we could, collective, shake the monkey from our back. Richard Dawkins has compared religion to a virus, if only obliquely. Religion is a meme, memes are viral information. It strikes me that the comparison is apt. As a species, we are unhealthy. Pollution, war, hatred, and violence are merely the symptoms. A fever can kill, but the infection is the real source.
I've come to understand that our species will not magically become happy, peaceful, and in harmony with the biosphere if religion dies. Curing cancer doesn't mean we'd get to stop fighting other diseases, but we are healthier as a species for the cure. We are more fit. It is long since time to send religion the way of Smallpox. We will be better for it.
Religion is a virus.
Fight the infection.
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Kavis , nice read, thanks. Everyone world wide needs a computer. I've said "drop love bombs", meaning essentially that. Instead, we've recently spent over 500 trillion killing and injuring. Go world communication.
CANNED HEAT - "Let's Work Together" (1970)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c1Z9cIY_QU
Atheism Books.
Of course it is o_O what a silly question
So far, true
Totally agree
O_O you damn straight it is!
for the most part
Other then that, for the sake of arguement, i agreed ^_^
What Would Kharn Do?
Unfortunately, we cause the most of religious fanaticism by the way how we live.
One problem has been that the average person knows little of the enormous vested interests which control the affairs of men, and which, for the most part, work against the needs and rights of countless millions. At the moment, 80 per cent of the world’s wealth is owned by a small number of families and institutions. Much of that wealth is ‘static’, invested in estates, ships, gold, jewels and works of art, benefiting thereby but few. Such imbalance confounds the efforts of governments everywhere to establish societies based on relative social justice.
This unequality is horrendous and causes extreme conditions.
Extreme conditions causes fanaticism, and if local people are religious, then it's religious fanaticism.
So old and so entrenched is this imbalance that only a Herculean effort or world economic disaster will shake its hold. Faced with this situation, governments are at a loss to manage their nation’s affairs and, simultaneously, compete with others for markets. The result, inevitably, is recurring chaos, instability, and a chronic lack of money for essential services and foreign aid. The world’s poor continue to suffer, therefore, and pray silently for change. Some, less silent, join the growing number of the world’s terrorist groups.
In many of local historical cities, there are so-called plague pillars. It's a decorated pillar with statues of Christianic saints, who have gilded aureolas and auras. When a plague came and wiped out whole villages and cities, religion took this opportunity and people paid a lot of money to build these pillars, and also cathedrals, and so on. Evil obviously causes more evil. And this evil causes more evil - religional leaders ordered to kill cats, because they're devil's animals (and they also kill plague rats) and to burn herbalists, aka witches. (so only so-called doctors faced the plague) You got the point?
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I think I'm going to regret this. Actually, no. No regrets.
Say what? Where do you get that 80% figure? In 2000, the global household wealth was estimated at $125 trillion, US dollars, according to the (*gasp*) World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (*whew*). According to that same report, about half of that wealth rests in the hands of about 2% of the population. Since you live in a country with phone lines, Luminon, that means you. Not the Rothschilds, Rockafellers, or whomever. Me, you, Brian Sapient, Richard Dawkins. Us. If you have electricity, you are basically part of the problem.
*spelling/grammar corrected. Not really part of the discussion, just wanted to note that conditions cause, they don't causes.
Quote:
I'm not sure what this has to do with the rest of your post. Are you suggesting that a communist revolution, overthrowing the bourgeois, will make religious fanaticism go away? I'm afraid I don't get the point. You've failed to connect economic dominance with religious faith.
I don't find it at all unusual that true believers would turn to their faith under conditions as bad as the black plague presented. Placating the gods with offerings and sacrifices predates pretty much all of modern economic theory, stretching back to animism at the dawn of human civilization. The problem isn't that people paid to have these pillars erected, or killed the cats and rats (actually not a bad idea, given the vector of bubonic plague and the medical technology available). The problem was that people didn't understand how to keep themselves and their surroundings healthy. It was scientific repression, not economic repression that allowed the plague to take the course it did.
Also, I'm not sure I like being lectured on a forum.
Religion is a virus.
Fight the infection.
I couldn't agree more with the OP. You do realize, though, you or I aren't the first, or even the thousandth to have these ideas. I think people in general have issues with much of technological society, from the destruction of nature to the idea we could just be killed and be powerless to prevent it.(Primitive man at least enjoyed the ability to fight off hunger or predators, but a nuke could kill us instantly with no hope of defending ourselves.)
You should read the unabomber's manifesto. Now there was a guy pissed at society...of course he wasn't the first to come up with these ideas either, but I think it's outlined fairly well in his paper(it does oversimplify a few things, though). And of course his main flaw in planning was he did mail bombs and kill people, not usually a good way to get people on your side.
"We are the star things harvesting the star energy"
-Carl Sagan
Great points! I agree that religion poisons more than it helps. Even the "good parts" of religion continue spreading the poison, irrationality and violence of such mind-numbing cults.
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
These $125 trillion we supposedly have are a product of a bank system. Most of all the world's money are just numbers in a computer. We don't own them, we're just related to them, and all that system depends on a hope, that never enough of people will go to their banks and decide to take their money in cash. These fictive money doesn't really belong to us. (remember the famous Jesus' quote "look, who's portrait is on the coin"
It is already presumed what will we do with these money. They had been given to us as input, and there is a lot of possible outputs prepared for us, like necessities for life and totally useless, wasteful things, propagated in commercials.
Let's suppose, that there is any purpose on which the top rich 2% doesn't want the population to spend their money on. (for example large-scale change of the world order) This can hardly happen on a large scale, because these money are divided on really tiny parts among people in various social groups, and most of them goes on maintaining a decent life. The rest, which could go on the mentioned purpose, is usually spent on the omnipresent and powerful commerce, consumer society and waste mentality. I mean this seriously, it's quite a difference in what valuable world resources a certain western nation spends per capita, and what the most of other nations.
Next, the fictive economics, as shown in stock markets and electronic bank system is really different than the economics of a real world. In real world, you won't summon a value by speculative capitalism. A stock market is basically an electronic gambling machine, and it's users are addicted to the movements of free market. Sometimes someone gets rich there, but far more people always loses.
As for where I've got it from, it's from a magazine Share International, where are various articles about the world events, written by people like diplomats, politics, economists, BBC, and so on. This magazine is quite special, when it features such a prominents and exists for about...34 years, if I remember. It has a very broad spectrum of topics, after all, it's about a transformation of every aspect of our lives.
The fanaticism is caused by malnutrition, lack of education, healthcare and housing, while people who suffer by all this can ocassionally see people in media who have several times more of everything than they need. This must piss off everyone. And the solution of fanaticism is not in a media embargo on poor countries, but in providing them an adequate food, healthcare, education and housing. There are money for all that when the contemporary economic system and the waste mentality will change. The main change of life style in USA for example, it's most painful part, would be in withdrawal of this mentality.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.