(April 9, 2017 at 9:21 am)Jeanne Wrote: Hi Brian.
I am fully aware that your post was to all believers, which is why I wrote of "deity beliefs" but it is the Christians in this country who are always hoping that my "seeking" will let them gain another soul for Jesus.
And...good grief, it is not possible to love everyone, but we can love individual believers even though we hate their belief system.
Let us face this fact; many human beings need to have an authority figure for comfort and guidance. Most of them have been told as children that they cannot choose for themselves to be good and to be strong, but must rely upon the authority figure, which is God, who is always right or is interpreted to be always right. And...who wants to be on the side that is wrong?
It's all well and good until somebody gets an eye poked out... And...there we have the problem with deity belief and the religion that supports it.
-Jeanne
No we need social order, thus we create that through artificial labels such as religion, nations, political and economic ideologies. None of those artificial labels change that we are still the same species.
We need order, but we don't need to hide behind the ideas started in the days of kings, and both polytheists and monotheists even in Asia and India in antiquity mistook fortune as coming from a divine world.
I value human rights not authoritarianism. I value laws only through consent and review, not old concepts of family rule which is where all religions started out as as concepts.
I DO love my species ability to be compassionate, but I don't have to love the claim that it comes from a religion, because evolution proves that is not the case. And where the hell in my OP did I ever imply one could force religion out of existence? Just because humans base their social orders on placebos that can lead to safety in numbers does not make that group right about everything, nor does it change we are still the same species, nor does it change that life is far older than our species.
Show me a church or mosque or synagogue or Buddhist or Hindu temple built by cockroaches? Show me where the dinosaurs 65 million years ago built pyramids in Egypt or temples to Roman gods? Show me evidence of the communism or socialism of the water bear?
I am for human rights but that does not mean I need to stay quiet and never call out bad claims. I do love my species capability of compassion and empathy, but I am NOT required to love every single individual. I will always value non violence and I do not value revenge, only containment. But I do not owe claims with no evidence any special treatment outside the legal right to make the claim. I still have the right to question and even blaspheme and ridicule that claim.
One is the issue of legal rights and common law, and that I DO VALUE. But claims as claims don't deserve taboos never to be challenged.
Humans have ideas, they group and defend those ideas, no you cannot stop that part. But en mass those ideas DO compete for political attention nationally and globally, and those groups have weapons, and especially today nukes that could knock us back into the stone age or worse, make us go extinct. So if your attitude is "some people need it" so what, what one feels they need does not give that group the right to hold the entire planet hostage and put our species at threat, and the only way to prevent that is to question those claims. Not to get rid of any group, but merely to prevent a disaster that would hurt our entire planet.
I could care less about anybody's utopia, or how they think their clubs help them, if you cannot question it, or demand nobody question it, that is not valuing human rights nor does it promote "love" of human rights. It promotes authoritarianism. No, if you want to live under authority, try Saudi Arabia or North Korea.
The authority we have in the west is through the consent of the voter, not the consent of a majority religion. Not the consent of a majority party. But through protection of pluralism through EQUALITY and oversight because of the ability of society to question.
"Cant we all just get along" is your argument, I fail to see what makes you think I am trying to argue otherwise. Yes we can and should get along, but no, not at the cost of fearing each other because someone might get offended. I will not fear my neighbor until they give me something to fear as an individual, but that does not entitle them to be scrutiny free when they make a claim on any subject.
