(June 25, 2017 at 9:05 pm)Khemikal Wrote:(June 25, 2017 at 8:55 pm)Astonished Wrote: If everyone on earth is healthy but one, shouldn't there be some kind of obligation to treat that person's illness?IMO? Yeah, lol. If someone is sick we help them.
Quote:Especially if there's a risk of that person's condition worsening or that they might infect others and start an epidemic?Sure.
Quote:This is the faith virus, it can't be trusted to just be left alone and hoped to be passive and dormant, it has to be vaccinated against 100%. It can't even be compared to sickle cell anemia which at least has the benefit of preventing malaria.
Well, I'll use the analogy. It can certainly be argued that there are deadly strains of this virus. OTOH, there also seem to be benign ones. It makes little sense to treat someone who has the theological equivalent of a sinus infection as though they had the theological equivalent of ebola. Particularly if that person with the sinus infection wasn't trying to spread it. We might say, hey..man, you should go see someone about that. Here's some over the counter stuff that worked for me, or that works for others....but more than that?
More hypothetically, isn't it at least conceivable that there might be beneficial strains of a virus or a bacteria? What would be the impetus in treating those? Perhaps a little bit of a benign religion inoculates us against a big case of bad religion?
Maybe very early on (before it took the form of religion as we know it) in our evolution it was useful but it mutated into something not. And your trigger-happy guy being held back only by a fear of hell is irrelevant as an example. If religion hadn't had such a fucking stranglehold over the damn planet for so long we wouldn't have so much trouble with population, resource management, weapon control, relationship conflicts, mental and other health care, among other things, so what you're saying means nothing. Rather than saying 'the symptom being caused by x will one day lead to one person suffering from x to not behave badly, but the billions of others infected by x will go on to cause untold damage for centuries". I give no goddamn quarter, NONE, to any of this nonsense. Maybe the problem is not enough people feel that strongly.
Religions were invented to impress and dupe illiterate, superstitious stone-age peasants. So in this modern, enlightened age of information, what's your excuse? Or are you saying with all your advantages, you were still tricked as easily as those early humans?
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There is no better way to convey the least amount of information in the greatest amount of words than to try explaining your religious views.
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There is no better way to convey the least amount of information in the greatest amount of words than to try explaining your religious views.
