RE: What is the function of religion?
May 14, 2014 at 10:22 am
(This post was last modified: May 14, 2014 at 10:34 am by Hegel.)
(May 14, 2014 at 9:05 am)FifthElement Wrote: (2) Religion is destroying itself, no need for external help, it is self destructive concept to begin with
Destroying itself? Every society in human history has, until our secular age, been religious. You cannot be serious ...
Quote: (3) No, there is no need for secular religion of any kind, see North Korea if ever in doubt.
Well, that was not really what I had in mind .... I was posing the question that within purely secular framework something that religion guarantees easily is perhaps easily lost. Jonathan Haidt is making point like that.
And North Korean ideology is not, btw, fully secular: it has supernatural elements borrowed from Korean pagan religion.
Quote:Welcome to the forums
Fanks.
(May 14, 2014 at 9:15 am)Bad Wolf Wrote: Religion is not functional at all. Everything that religion does, can be achieved through purely secular means. But there is one exception. One thing religion can do that secular organizations cannot, and that is: making good people do bad things whilst thinking they are good.
That's Steve Weinberg. Appreciate him, but here he's not honest. One can make good people do bad things also with purely secular political ideologies.
In any case, the claim that religion has no function is highly implausible, even if all those functions could be (good and bad) accomplished without the supernatural stuff.
Almost every society is religious, and religion is not just about stuff you get in mind when eating too much magic mushrooms. That's not an accident if you think by the evolutionary lines of Darwin.
