RE: Atheismix
August 6, 2009 at 5:05 pm
(This post was last modified: August 6, 2009 at 5:08 pm by FaithAffirmed.)
(August 6, 2009 at 3:14 pm)Kyuuketsuki Wrote: What faith "empowers" people to do is, I admit, sometimes impressive (I'm often near blown away by some religiously inspired artwork and architecture) but also scary as hell ... to me it comes down to what Dawkins says, something like, "good people do good things, bad people do bad things, but it takes a religion to make good people do bad things"! Personally I think it should be widened to ideology and acknowledge that religion can make bad people do good things but it still scares the hell outta me ... no gods will ever scare me, their followers do!
Kyu
Always take the question and flip it before you ask it. As you quoted "...it takes a religion to make good people do bad things." There are countless examples of religion taking bad people and making them do good things. In fact one of the strongest buffers against addictions and many already requiring recovery is religion. Buffers like religion provide the much needed yet hardly understood resilience that people have when it comes to addiction and deviant behavior in the psychological field. So faith can be seen as an idea and as Lawrence Kaplow wrote "...information is incapable of harm in of itself, ideas are neither good nor bad but merely as useful as what we do with them. Only actions can cause harm."
(August 6, 2009 at 4:59 pm)EvidenceVsFaith Wrote: Welcome to the forums FaithAffirmed.
I gotta warn you though - "Faith" is my nemesis!
That's not a joke just because of my name by the way. I'm serious. Faith is just irrational, gratuitous nonsense that can also lead to a lot of harm, as far as I'm concerned.
EvF
Theres no denying Faith can cause harm. A belief in anything can cause harm. A belief in science is a major component during the gruesome Nazi experiments performed. I don't ask that you believe in the faith but that you RESPECT the faith. Faith is such a tool that none of us can even comprehend. But in our lack of comprehension we then condemn it, which is the same thing that causes Crazy Conservative Christians to picket against homosexuals. When we don't hold respect for beliefs that aren't our own, we become ignorant ourselves.
