Women's Rights and Religion

[FiniteImmortal]

Or, it's an instinctual reaction engrained into your mind from billions of years of evolution.

If you were a polar bear, and that baby was a mates rival, instinct would tell you to tear it apart limb from limb to increase the resources necessary for your own off spring to survive.

This was a trait of humanity until not too long ago. In fact, it is a trait that some still adhere to now around the world.

When I hold by newborn, should I remind myself that it is really just a bag of guts, and a needy inconvenience that needs its disgusting diaper changed way too often? We must be very careful here. When we drop the sanctity of life and trade it in for material evolution and nothing else, we walk down a very treacherous slope that other societies have gone down.

Why?

Define what exactly is meant by 'sanctity of life'? What life, in particular? Human life? If so, that's only a very localised and modern perspective on humanity per se. For millions of years otherism has been the dominant force behind choosing who lives and who dies. I disagree that it is 'self-evident' - It hasn't been self-evident for the vast majority of people. And it wasn't engendered by any particular religion either. I would say it was more likely stemming from things such as Westphalia & the renaissance where sovereignty over the self became more of a status quo, on both a personal and national/international level.

I don't know what 'material evolution' is. Please define it.

I also disagree with your user title; I've never had any religious views since I was born. I have 'views on religion', which is a decidedly different thing altogether, wouldn't you say?
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As it is 4:00 am here and there is no limit to the amount of interaction you guys are thoughtfully willing to indulge me on, I gotta make this shorter than i'd like. For now, just about the everyone has a religious viewpoint thing:

Everyone has a religious view. If i may take a stab at this... You hold a belief that things were a certain way 100,000 years ago in early human existence. You take that on faith. It is not irrational, it is based on reasoning backwards and critical thinking, and piecing together bits of evidence. That is to be commended, as compared to some who's views are inherited from their parents automatically. But nonetheless, we all hold a construct we've pieced together, a model in our minds about the way the world is. A lot of that model we cannot directly interact with, such as yours. We cannot watch footage of ape-man creatures, so we think backwards. about what things must have been like. It is at the mercy of speculation and approximation. We all by default, with our models attempt to answer the 4 components of our human narrative : Origin, Meaning, Morality, and Destiny.
You most likely hold a belief that life evolved from a primordial pool of elements hundreds of millions of years ago. You believe that this in-organic pool of compounds was struck by lightning or some form of energy and morphed into increasingly complex compounds over ages of time to eventually, against all odds, become organic. You believe at some point a cell, with unimaginable complex protein chains formed and the rest was history.
You most likely believe meaning is only what society can provide, as there is no other meaning or ultimate narrative about us and our place in the universe other than we were here for a short time before the Red-giant sun cooked earth.
You believe morality is a convention of society and thus able to be reshaped to a more useful style to and to fit a re-engineered civilization free of archaic rules.
You likely believe your destiny is to lay down in your grave one day, never to have a conscious thought again, and never knowing you were ever here, as well as everyone else that has ever existed. It ultimately doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, not that there is a grand scheme of things.

Am I close? Is this not the beliefs of the Atheistic doctrines of faith? Isn't it a perquisite to believe these as to be considered one of the educated and enlightened fairy-tale-free believers of atheism? Do not the Dawkins and Hitches, and Harris' of the world spread the good news that there really is nothing, and humanity will be snuffed out by cataclysm or self-destruction sooner rather than later, with no hope of ever existing again?

We all have religious views, in some of our's God is God, in some of our's, we are god.

Thanks for the reply and I'll try to interact with the other points soon.