(February 21, 2016 at 1:32 pm)MrNoMorePropaganda Wrote:
I think I understand what you're saying: People are often better than the deities they worship. That's why people are tolerant. I understand people will be more violent if they looked at their religious texts without ignoring the inconvenient parts. But as there's no objective interpretation, aren't all ways of reading the text equally valid?
BINGO, religion, and even the more earthy polytheism and "atheist philosophies" they like to call them as a dodge, all religions are are artificial gap answers, and while they produce social order, they are all still gap answers. Our real source of compassion and our desire to harm others when we perceive a threat, stems from our evolutionary social order and fight or flight.
Civility in the west isn't a result of religion, civility in the west is because our natural empathy has allowed us to ignore the more barbaric parts of our evolution in terms of the gap answers humans wrote into holy books to make excuses to do those things. In layperson's terms, we've learned to cherry pick and ignore the more violent tribal parts of holy books.
