RE: Religion is poison to democracy
April 22, 2023 at 7:51 am
(This post was last modified: April 22, 2023 at 8:23 am by Belacqua.)
It looks as though the consensus here is that "religiousness" makes a person unable to participate in democracy in an intelligent way.
Since roughly 80% of human beings in the world identify as religious, I guess we'd have to make laws that they couldn't vote or run for office. That would make democracy more rational. But since some percentage of non-religious people are also irrational (flat-earthers or whatever) then we'd probably end up denying participation to even more people.
So to have reasonable and sane democracy, we'll have to have the remaining 19% rule democratically over everyone. Since the word "aristocracy" means "rule by the best people," it would be a sort of democratic aristocracy -- with of course non-religious people defined as "the best."
History doesn't give us many examples of countries ruled by atheists. I suspect that any number of presidents or prime ministers have been, privately, non-believers, but for political reasons they don't announce that. The only example of a top-level politician I can think of who would see his atheism as a positive trait would be President Xi of China. China is officially the country with the most atheists. So there is a real-world, concrete example of how an atheist might run a country. Certainly other atheists might rule differently, but we have no historical examples. And if the atheists here are advocating rule by only a small minority of the population (until such time as more people become reasonable) then majority rule doesn't seem like something they would prefer.
Earlier atheist rulers of China agreed that rule by religious people was a bad idea. Tibet, before Chinese intervention, was a feudal theocracy in which a small minority of priests controlled enormous wealth, while the great majority of the population were serfs, with short life expectancy and very low literacy rates. Since the atheist intervention in Tibet, literacy and health have achieved modern levels. So given that example I guess atheist rule really would improve many people's lives.
Since roughly 80% of human beings in the world identify as religious, I guess we'd have to make laws that they couldn't vote or run for office. That would make democracy more rational. But since some percentage of non-religious people are also irrational (flat-earthers or whatever) then we'd probably end up denying participation to even more people.
So to have reasonable and sane democracy, we'll have to have the remaining 19% rule democratically over everyone. Since the word "aristocracy" means "rule by the best people," it would be a sort of democratic aristocracy -- with of course non-religious people defined as "the best."
History doesn't give us many examples of countries ruled by atheists. I suspect that any number of presidents or prime ministers have been, privately, non-believers, but for political reasons they don't announce that. The only example of a top-level politician I can think of who would see his atheism as a positive trait would be President Xi of China. China is officially the country with the most atheists. So there is a real-world, concrete example of how an atheist might run a country. Certainly other atheists might rule differently, but we have no historical examples. And if the atheists here are advocating rule by only a small minority of the population (until such time as more people become reasonable) then majority rule doesn't seem like something they would prefer.
Earlier atheist rulers of China agreed that rule by religious people was a bad idea. Tibet, before Chinese intervention, was a feudal theocracy in which a small minority of priests controlled enormous wealth, while the great majority of the population were serfs, with short life expectancy and very low literacy rates. Since the atheist intervention in Tibet, literacy and health have achieved modern levels. So given that example I guess atheist rule really would improve many people's lives.
