(November 18, 2015 at 9:26 pm)mbk734 Wrote: Imagine there's no religion and everyone is somehow convinced there is no religion starting tomorrow. How would the world be different?
1. The Pope would become irrelevant
2. People can sleep in on Sundays, stop wasting their time praying, bible would become #1 fantasy fiction bestseller etc.
3. What else do you think? Would it make the world a better place? What would bring people together that used to belong to a church, temple, mosque, etc. ?
The most important thing is for people to be critical thinkers, skeptics and understand what actually constitutes good evidence.
There are plenty of atheists that believe in all sorts of woo.
But the world would be a better place, if everyone made decisions based on having an internal model of the world, that more closely mapped to the real world.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
