Theist Questions about human psychology...
Offline i had some previous questions wonderfully answered in here and have some new ones on a different topic. a lot questions back to back that might can be summed up a bit better than i posted them.
****EDIT*** the first post here is a little unorganized, read down for a more direct questions.
mankind. -what if religion was non-existent.
do humans have the tendancey to create groups of certain beliefs? are we apt to critique everyone else that is not in that group? is that really because of religion, do we know for sure, what's to stop man from creating new beliefs around something else besides God?
would we have more diversity without religion? are we naturally inclined to defend our ideas with aggression? there would always be leaders that would rally the people into groups. how could we prove or disprove that religion gave us this disposition? or if it wasn't God that we where fighting for but the mighty tree that yields tasty fruit.
-what about animal groups. do they fight amongst themselves? i know they are territorial and may fight over females or leadership. yet animals do not have the same "human" intelligence as we do. they are more simple than we are in some aspects. we tend to complicate things... did we create the belief system?
would we truly have obtained peace with the removal of religion or maybe is it possible that religion untied enough people so that even though a lot were murdered... it would have been more if there was no common factor? is it possible that religion gave us our civilization?
we do tend to fight for things such as land, possessions, ideas... if religion was non-existent would we still have had terrible mass murders? we as a group (correct me if i'm wrong) seem to have a "group" paranoia.
what about small groups. people in general... do we look for things to argue about? someone hurts you and you ignore it, then one day they walked across your grass and that infuriates you. you confront them and they are shocked and rage as well...
i do want to say that i think religion is a dangerous thing... i still believe in God but there is a difference in belief and following a group of people. "God created us and then we created religion" mindset.
it's sad that all these things that happened in our history and still in present... religious teachings were so adamant in peace yet it still provoked violence. did man naturally look for the violence?
it's crazy almost... we believe in peace and love yet we hate!? is there other examples in us, non-religious, that we contradict ourselves like that? maybe political, we want fairness yet we discriminate.
EDIT: changed title to more accurately represent post.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
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Humans are a 'herd' animal, or so it's reported by anthropologists and sociologists. As to creating new beliefs, sure humans will do that - but they'll be fact-based or rational belief structures if no 'faith' based beliefs in imaginary skygods.
I would think far more diversity would exist from not being fundamentally challenged by absurd religious based moral beliefs challenging anything or anyone being different.
What 'peace' have we as a race obtained??? Violence in the world is as pandemic as it every was particularly in monotheistic socieities! Religion didn't give us 'civilization', agriculture or planting and harvesting crops did.
At RoadToPeace.org on ‘Monotheism and Violence’, you’ll find the above most relevant table 4 from a survey that ranks belief systems by violent events occurring per each million adherents of Monotheism, Eastern Religions and Atheism. The table is ‘normalized’ using a rank order for Atheism equaling one. There is a whopping 2738% greater occurence of violent events by adherents to monotheism than the 1.3 average of violent events per million by adherents to eastern religions and Atheism.
It is all too evident from religious wars throughout history, and most notably from various monotheistic wars now being fought in the middle-east, the future for all humanity depends on an immediate cure for the pandemic level of a faith-based psychosis still afflicting so much of the world’s populace in the 21st century. Monotheism is singularly the most destructive force in the history of civilization.
Again refer to on ‘Monotheism and Violence’ citing a survey that concludes a whopping 2738% greater occurence of violent events by adherents to monotheism than the 1.3 average of violent events per million by adherents to eastern religions and Atheism.
I'm sure they'll always be pithy things folks with get into fights over - but the fact remains the Christian, at least in America, is far more likely to commit violent crime than the atheist. The per capita percentage of Christians [77%] in the general population produces a 6% higher per capita percentage of Christians [83%] in prison. The opposite is true for atheists by a wide margin. There’s a significantly lower percentage of atheist offenders in US Federal prisons [0.21%] than the per capita percentage of atheists [anywhere from 4%-14% averaging 9%] found in the general population. This would seem to prove that a Christian is far more likely to commit and be convicted of a crime in America than an atheist.
Regardless of whether or not your in a religion, you're still buying into 'faith' based belief structure unsubstantiated by fact. You assume the existence of something not rationally proven to exist.... Faith is an act of mental destruction...
The absence of religion is surely no panacea to the human 'un-kind' natural instincts of fight or flight still in us.. The inherent intolerance of all monotheistic religions however creates bigotry, hate and violence..
Again, refer to that survey and entire web site for that matter showing societies of predominantly philosophical Eastern Religions and atheism to be incredibly more 'peaceful' than monotheistic societies at RoadToPeace.org on ‘Monotheism and Violence’
If there was a God, Man wouldn't have had to invent him [reversing Voltaire's famous quote].
good response. some good information for me to ponder on, thank you for the reply and resources links.
i don't feel that i stated my questions as clearly as i wanted, but in new light of some of the information provided i think a lot of my questions may change.
i might have caused the impression that i am going someplace with this other than what i intended. shortly i will have some more questions so please check back.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
*...is religion the only thing we accept without proof?
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i think in your reply you thought i was trying to defend religion by saying it has not been responsible for violence. that is not the case.
looks like some copy and paste in there so i take it you've dealth with something similar. i highly respect your answer and i do put weight on statistics. i rather enjoyed sociology in college and we touched on statistics in that class. i can appreciate the value that this information brings.
i was looking for something more psychology/sociology supported. after meditating and researching heavily on the matter i will attempt to make my questions more direct;
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1. from what i understand (please correct if i am oversimplifying your response!)... humans are "herd" animals. we naturally create beliefs, and other than religion, our beliefs are based on fact... *would that mean that we would never disagree, considering that without religion we would all be rational-based?
2. from what i understand, you feel that we would be more diverse, and get along, because religion would be absent and we would not have the need to challenge others because they are different. *do humans have the tendency to fear things and people that are different resulting in separation, criticism and in some cases hate (all being with no religion existing)?
3. from what i am understanding from the website links and comments, the overall statement is that man is violent but more violent because of religion. religion has been very active in our history. people were expected to have some kind of religion. possible that these people were not in "tune" with God yet claimed they were with their own agenda. using religion as a scape goat and a tool to rally the masses behind them.
*would it be possible for a large scale populace to follow a leader that has a wicked agenda, and that leader use another means other than religion to rally the people into a group to commit crimes against others? all knowing that people would not follow something irrational and non-fact based.
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we have expanded greatly in knowledge. we have also have created large governments, laws and conquered land. i am just wondering if we are malicious in nature and only used religion as an excuse.
a lot of people claim they believe in God just because society told them to (like you guys said to me before). yet they never gave it a second thought. using religion wrongly to complete a different agenda. although religion may be a scape goat, how easy would it be to replace it with science or a branch within?
i do understand that some people that strongly believed in religion tried to force it on others. did religion make them that way or where they just that kind of person?
-please feel free to just philosophize with me if you like. if you are knowledgeable in this area or have resources available, maybe we can answer some of these questions.
EDIT: removed the word "that" from the 10 paragraph down.
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
no responses yet.
(
i've learned in some of my "just talking" posts that i may have offended or defended questions when i asked for your opinion, but then stating i did not wish to debate. i was asking questions with an answer in mind. i was blind to this and i did not mean to be so evasive or misleading.
all this being said, i was being honest when i said i am looking for more knowledge. so with above questions still in place i would like to be a little more forward in my statements giving us the room to debate using fact to fact.
i feel that some people are misjudging religion and blaming it for something that "could have" happened anyway. i even want to get bold and say that maybe our humanity would be worse without the existence of religion.
religion is a system built of honesty, love, and forgiveness (this is definitely up to debate and my personal opinion, we can lightly brush in the matter but for the most part we have to agree that good things where taught in religion even if it was just moral). it says that we should explore ourselves before judging others and it warns us of our destructive nature. without that present cruelness may have never been challenged.
i feel that people became bigots, oppressors of the weak and offenders, not because of religion but because we are prone to. if any system was in order the results would be very similar.
from what i understand of mankind we can not have a perfect society. if it is perfect we become blind to wrong-doing and open the way for it to happen... yet when we are oppressed we become rebels with a cause, powerful and ideal. it is almost like a never ending movement to an unbiased fellowship.
take the wackos at westboro baptist church. would fred phelps still be a hatemonger if religion did not exist? would he still be able to rally people behind him to spread hate and to get "attention"? (ROFL.. maybe his mother didn't hug him enough... or maybe his father just hugged him too much.)
the absence of religion isn't going to provoke a peaceful society, and i think it would be unfair to assume that religion is responsible for great tragedies when we should blame ourselves.
i would still like the above questions to be answered if possible. the first post is very unorganized, i would like us to start at....
...is religion the only thing we accept without proof?
EDIT: removed the phrases "take happen" and "we he".
May God bless us and give us the words to express our ideas in a creative and civil manner, while providing us an ear that we may truly hear each other, and a voice to clearly project our thoughts.
ok, I'm going to try to answer this as well as I can. To answer your last question first. Yes, theres a post about it in the killing with kindness forum. Examples include magic, destiny, luck, karma etc.
Coming from a psychological standpoint, I think you might be right to an extent. There would still be violence without religion. And I think there will continue to be violence until there are no more groups. Because of the in-group, out-group bias (think thats the name) people are more likely to look at their own group (whatever it may be) more favorably and look at the other group (out-group) infavorably. This can lead later to hate, discrimination, violence etc. I think no matter what, there will always be something to fight over, at least until we are all brainwashed to have the exact same thoughts.
As far as things being worse without religion. I disagree, but that's because I have seen the violence that occurs from religion. That in itself may be biased, but its my opinion. The only way to find out for sure is to A) find a society that has no religion (probably hard because most societies will create one), or B) wait until we prove with scientific fact that religion is impossible, and see what happens to the world.
I agree that most religions preach love peace and happyness. They also preach that nonbelievers are to be shunned (talking from islam and christianity). Their gods also commit violence (as seen in the bible). It's almost a two faced ideal. And while teaching love peace and happyness is great. Religion is not the only way to do it.
And I disagree with the view that humans are inherently cruel. I think it's society that makes people cruel and violent. I also disagree that humans are inherently good (precisely why babies will pee on you and puke on your shirt
) I believe they are inherently neutral, if not self serving. Your basic instincts are to survive. Beyond that your morals and ethics you pick up from the world around you. If an evil person is evil and using religion, if you were to take religion away and keep everything equal, he would still be evil. On the opposite note, if you take the love peace and happyness preaching religious leader, take away religion, he would still be a good person. Religion is just one way of creating these people.
I hope this helps. I would go into more detail but i have to leave for class in 10 mins and need to get ready.
Hmm, I missed this thread when it originally went by somehow.
Personally I'm not interested in fixing blame on religion for anything in particular that happened in the past. I'm interested in fixing the problem that exists now. Religion most likely served a purpose in human society in the past and it's open to discussion how important that function was. Now, I believe, religion has become maladaptive in current society.
Of course there would still be violence in the world today without religion. There would not, however, be religious violence. Because of the way people resist questioning and analysis of relgious dogma in the name of "respect for religion," it gives certain kinds of behavior a license to proceed without any critical analysis. And that can lead to abuses. Without religion, those abuses might still happen, but they wouldn't be able to hide behind the shield of religious freedom.
I'm with Dawkins in asking, why does religion deserve more respect than other kinds of ideas? Why should everyone automatically have to bend over backward to accommodate these silly superstitions?
And as for having a way of encouraging people to be kind to each other, why not go directly to the idea of telling people "be kind to each other?" Why does the idea of ethical, humanistic behavior have to be routed and filtered through an ancient system of fairy tales that just confuses the system and adds in lots of unwanted things like not worshiping idols or wearing polycotton blends?
"After Jesus was born, the Old Testament basically became a way for Bible publishers to keep their word count up." -Stephen Colbert