RE: What is the function of religion?
May 15, 2014 at 4:01 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2014 at 4:12 pm by Hegel.)
(May 15, 2014 at 3:51 pm)Cato Wrote: Hegel,
I don't need the idea of a god, a creed, or assholes in funny hats asking me for money to remind me of my mortality or fragile existence in the face of nature. I also don't need to personify nature and worship it to make me feel better about reality. Religion is for feeble minded gullible cowards that don't have the guts to be responsible for their own humanity. Fuck 'em.
As far as the communal benefit; I prefer the environment in an episode of Cheers to the bullshit that goes on in churches.
Well, neither do I think I need it. But I am an elitist. You see, even an average man ain't that smart, far from it, and one half is below that. An average man is too stupid to understand complex philosophy and science.
Furthermore, intelligent people are the most likely to get into the hubris of control. Masses are always believers, for they can understand at least that they are in need of faith... Intelligentsia can understand their science ... and with the science, they think, they can control everything. But look what that has produced from soviet union to 2008 financial catastrophe and so on. But obviously they are not in need of "religion" ... they need critical thinking and philosophy. Schopenhauer said that religion is philosophy for the masses.
(May 15, 2014 at 3:56 pm)Faith No More Wrote: Your claim was that all societies have been religious, so you have no way of observing that.
Not directly, but that's simply a logical consequence of the hypothesis. Your argument is of the same type that creationist do against evolution: you can't show some intermediary stage for them, and thus, they claim, eveolution is crap ... But if evolution is true, then obviously nature has not kept some fossils for us simply to convince the creationist.
Of course, if it is the case that religion has made society really fit, then there should be no non-religious societies.
But if it is as damaging as the New Atheists claim, I wonder why cultural selection has not done away with it?
What I posed is an alternative hypothesis for the New Atheist story, which makes much less sense and is even less testable.
And: I am not trying to convince you to think that religion should or should not exist. It will exist whatever you or me think of it, and trying to bash it, btw, is not the best startegy to get rid of its harmful forms, at least in my opinion.
