(December 9, 2012 at 12:00 am)naimless Wrote: Perhaps Vinny's terminology is unwise but his points are still valid. No doubt most of organised religion is to do with the manipulation of the masses. Often people are fighting against a nation because they think that nation will impose on their freedom to practice their ideals, regardless if that is true or not.
Yet I find it funny how some focus on how religion was a setback in evolution, when the ability to dream of a deity is seen as a development in itself, and is even an important stage in then rejecting that deity. One would also be inclined to question why one feels the pinnacle of development goes something like: no god, some god(s), then no god again. It should at least provoke the question of what is next.
Indeed, if one is considering hundreds or thousands of years in the context of 13.7 billion, religion is a fairly insignificant stage, at least it is as insignificant as the stage of atheism - or is that stage of development definitive for ever and ever like Einstein's static universe? Perhaps Einstein wasn't very clever either... [sarcasm]
Furthermore, do Stalin and Mao's massacres not count, or were they not real atheists? Also I'm fairly sure a lack of natural resources and over-population is as much to do with "little black African kids dying" as anyone's spiritual beliefs or what anyone does or doesn't post on a forum. Quite frankly, the empires, slavery, and banking systems, have done as much to fuck them over as the religious systems.
Man, I'm thoroughly against organised religion, but I couldn't let the last post of the thread be without context.
I refute this line of argument. Just because the goal posts have been placed in atheist v theist it does not mean that is where they should be.
I do not believe, not just in a god, but any philosophy that requires belief. Let us not forget Bolshevism was against natural selection, as they envisaged a evolution to a goal, The highest form of humanity the communist. Let us not forget how the Empires are interwoven with religion and the church supported these Empires, and slavery, and that old song with the lyric 'the rich man in his mansion, and the poor man at his gate'. So what does the field of guilt look live if we make the division of the two sides along the lines of philosophies that require the individual to adhere to a church or party line, and free thinkers?
