(October 31, 2015 at 1:20 am)Combanitorics Wrote: If you asked me what I thought the biggest problem caused by religion was, I'd say, "The fact that it justifies the way things are." It's not simply the fact that people believe that a God exists that gets to me. I can kind of understand why it would be that at various times and places in history people have come up with the idea that there might be forces operating outside of what we normally observe as the world around us. Honestly, if I thought it was all just an attempt to explain life, I'd feel differently. What gets to me is the fact that people who believe that there is a God and that God created the world are saying, in effect, that this is the way things are supposed to be. It's not only OK for them that the world is like it is, but this is to them the ideal scenario. Obviously, the way things are is far from perfect, and I think the religious explanation of life as is is just immoral by any standard.
What I'm trying to say here is that although I often hear athiest saying that belief in a deity is just dumb, I think it goes even deeper than that. I think it's bad for us as people.
What do you think? I know that some people believe that religion has been evolutionarily adaptable in the past, but I tend to think the opposite myself.
The problem with this idea is that it isn't necessarily true.
Most religions that I can think of have a belief that the way things are on earth are definitely not the way they're supposed to be without religious rules.
From a perspective of someone who believes in god they believe god created the world, and gave humans foreskins and a desire to have sex, drink alcohol, masturbate, eat meat on a Friday, murder, steal and so on.
But they definitely don't believe this is just the way things are supposed to be, they chop foreskins off, ban pork and alcohol consumption, stone the adulterers, kill the homosexuals, forbid masturbation and so on.
Are you ready for the fire? We are firemen. WE ARE FIREMEN! The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat. We train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, we’re where we’re supposed to be. Flames don’t intimidate us. What do we do? We control the flame. We control them. We move the flames where we want to. And then we extinguish them.
Impersonation is treason.
