RE: Why is religion in the business of moral policing?
July 30, 2017 at 8:32 am
(This post was last modified: July 30, 2017 at 8:42 am by Brian37.)
(July 29, 2017 at 11:02 pm)It_Was_me Wrote: Seems a big aspect of religion, Islam and Christianity is moral policing. You know, don't masturbate, don't watch porn and so on. Why is it these things are considered so bad according to religion? Or at least the Abrahamic ones? I don't see as long as it's not hurting one, then why is it really such a big deal?
Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion"
But especially Victor Stenger's "The New Atheism"
Both explain scientifically why there is no god. The God Delusion addresses it from an evolutionary biological aspect. Our brains evolved to seek patterns, problem is with even other life, life doesn't always have time to slow down and assess a situation so our brains evolved to make fight or flight choices. It is a false perception. It is gap filling. To put it bluntly, it is born out of scientific ignorance.
Stenger's book in the beginning chapters explains why science proves it does have something to say about god claims. But in later chapters it compares the motifs and tropes in multiple religions to show they all contain motifs of empathy and sharing but can also be used to justify harm to other groups.
Religion is really nothing more than a comic book reflection of our evolutionary group survival. It does serve a real benefit in safety in numbers, the problem is that the religion itself does not have to be true to be successful, it just has to sell. It is why the ancient Egyptians were successful for 3,000 years but none of their polytheistic gods were real.
If humans were the only species with a sense of morality then the following should not happen. But this did happen.
Our species sense of morality is in our genes not in the labels we assign ourselves.
Humans form groups for safety for the same reason these elephants did this.
