Religulous

I don't think it's reasonable to say those wars are really CAUSED by religion. Wars are almost always over money - whether in the form of raw materials, trade routes, or otherwise - or, on occasion, power. Religion is very often used as a tool to mobilize and motivate groups of people to fight wars, but if you analyze conflicts in any depth, you'd be hard-pressed to find many examples where religion was really the root cause.

Regarding your examples specifically, the Crusades were much more about controlling trade routes between Europe and India than they were about "recapturing the Holy Land from infidels." The problem, of course, is that the people don't want to go fight for the former, while they may for the latter. The conflict in Northern Ireland was always more about nationalism than it was about religion. I'm not sure what you're referring to with regard to the Hebrews and the Egyptians - I assume you meant Canaanites and not Egyptians, but it's not easy to come up with hard historical documentation of that conflict either way. Your strongest example is probably the current situation in the Middle East, but even that has much more to do with the geopolitics of oil production and the residual effects of European colonialism and, later, the Cold War than it does with religion.

Now you'd be reasonable to raise the point that it's bad enough that religion is USED to incite these conflicts, regardless of whether it's actually the REAL cause. To that, though, I would again cite the historical examples of atheistic regimes finding other means to similar (and, recently, much worse) ends.
 
well then, i shall revise.

although not the outright cause (exception being Northern Ireland cause that is a straight fight between the Catholics of Ireland and the Protestants of England fighting over it) religion may not be the cause, but it DEFINITELY makes a war go longer, be bloodier, and makes ultimately both sides lose pretty horribly.
 
Just because one side is Catholic and the other Protestant doesn't mean that's what they're fighting over. And what about World War I and II? They had virtually nothing to do with religion and killed far more people than any of the examples you list. And that's not even to mention those killed not in war but in peacetime by their own governments in the Soviet Union and China.
 
well yes... but look at this... the Crusades were bloody, destructive wars in the middle east that to an extent are still having repercussions to this day. im not saying im completely right, but its just something to think about. hence the reason i dont believe in religion. and my dad also doesnt believe in it because of what he saw in Vietnam (NOT trying to connect that to this discussion)
 
To put the Crusades in perspective, World War II had a death toll of probably 50-70 times that. It's hard to say exactly, but probably between 1 and 2 million people died in the Crusades. Now that's awful, no question, but to say the Crusades were "bloody and destructive," relatively speaking, is a stretch. And I'd say their repercussions today are more ideological than they are political (which doesn't necessarily make them any less real, but something to consider nonetheless).

So what I'm saying is this: if you're going to choose whether or not to believe in God based on whether more people have been killed by those who claim a particular religion or by those who claim none, recent history would dictate you choose the religious side. That said, I don't think that's a valid or rational reason at all. The respective death tolls of those who claim Christianity vs. Islam vs. Hinduism vs. atheism may be interesting but they give absolutely no evidence towards the validity of any one of them.
 
religion is big thing in my life. I grew far away from when I started high school, but after my recent trip to Jerusalem I finally started to kind of grasp the concept. I think its inevitable that so many people in this world believe in some sort of god, yet there's no scientific fact that proves his existence. People devoting there whole life to something that may not be real is an amazing thing, thats why i think that there has to be a god. Jerusalem really emphasized this for me, the history of the region shows that literally millions of people have died for this abstract being that no one really knows if he is real or not. The holiest cites in the world for all three main religions, Jewish, Christian and Islam are there, and are within a 5 minute walk from each other. I grew suspicious of this a came to think that what if we were all just confused, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. What if the god we believed in was the same one, we just had differnet concepts of him and thats what led to all the fighting. This is just something that brought me back to establish my catholic faith, and maybe will help things clear up for you. Now if athiest then I completely understand were your coming from, its hard to have faith, I lost it cause I couldn't find the facts to support it, but then found it agian. Its escpecially hard for people in todays society to have faith cause of what were taught. In a broad spectrum we're taught to only believe what is concrete and not abtract, the school systems emphasis on math and science proves this. this is just what i think so you dont have to believe me ha.
 
i can appreciate your love of religion, i respect it, and i wish i knew what it was like but i lost my faith probably when i was in preschool. i went to preschool at a Lutheran church, and i had i think a backpack, a hat, and set of shoes stolen there and i just didnt understand how someone could do that in "Gods house" if you will (no hate, please). and later as i got older i met people who would push it on me:

"you know since you dont believe you are going to hell"

"get out of my fucking fcae"

"oh, no... you must repent or you will never make it to heaven"

"stfu and get away from me"

after that, in addition to stories from my dad about people praying in Vietnam and having a shell land in their foxhole and only finding a finger and part of a dog tag of said person left, i kinda lost faith in their being a "God"... now an afterlife, i hope there is on, i hate the idea that this world is all we get.
 
I deff respect your point of view. Thats kinda how i lost my faith to, i kept praying but nothinh happened. I came to learn that god doesn't grant wishes, i really cant tell you how he works or what he does, I just have some sense he exisits.
 
well, it wasnt the praying thing that got me... it was the people pushing it in my face.. which is what really got me going. its one of those "jeez, just let me be, im glad you have religion, i dont.. and i dont understand why thats such a big deal for you"... idk, i may end up finding religion, but i kinda doubt it... im too much of a cynic or like House to find religion i think.
 
"Singing, healing, and chanting, isnt that the sort of thing he does every day?" -Cameron (on a faith healer)

"YES! isnt it amazing how religious behavior and craziness are so close together you cant tell them apart?!"-House

idk, i guess i may just come from a community that has SO many crazy religiou people i just got a bad opinion of it.
 
Sometimes, I wish everyone could have a face to face with a religious person who isn't full of shit, if only to balance everything out.
Ultimately, we take on faith that our perception, emotions and reasoning are things to be valued, trusted and cherished, yet if one were to have to explain the validation for this cogently, without using mysterious language or appeals to the unknown, even if one were to have a fairly good grasp on the subject, the difficulty in this would be readily apparent.
And yet, the validity of this "faith" wouldn't be called into question by most, it's something that is inherently reasonable, that we should trust how it is that we know that we can trust things, without evidence needed.
I feel that "faith" gets a bad rap simply because it has connotations of ignorance, or blind following by a feeble mind. And more often than not, you may find people who do not know the philosophical argument that supports their claim, or the one that refutes it. Perhaps someone is convinced of something that they cannot prove to you because of a lack of intellect, a lack of personal understanding, or an inability to explain adequately. But you never doubted quantum theory because an undergrad got a C on his midterm explaining it to you. You never doubted that you value your reasoning in your decision making, even if the entire process of reasoning may have been a mystery to you.
I feel that people get this false sense of superiority when they come into a religious realm from an atheist perspective. I think we all know that this is the exact same case for most religious people, but it is a two way road. If we know that religious people are lazy in their understanding of faith, how much more lazy is the atheist who claims to know that religion is bogus from the onset of the discussion?
I don't see a great bastion of intellectual triumph in the atheist population, because the lot of anyone, be it academia, current society, "religious" people included, already agree with them. Credit should be shown at least to the person who has thought through their situation, their beliefs, and come to a seemingly untenable position, or one that necessitates the same amount of blind trust in their convictions that we all allow ourselves for our trust in our emotions, our senses and our reason.
And ultimately, we all have a "religion", a sense of a belief system that enable us to live a life we consider worth living. Like Rowen said, people tend to want to believe in things, and I would push that they tend to want to believe in things that let them feel a sense of purpose beyond simply existing. Science is a great one, religion another, humanity still another. We all have faith in something. Faith si what keeps the human condition going. Faith in meaning. Faith in happiness. Faith in pleasure. Faith in relevance. I couldn't prove to you that these things have intrinsic worth, but I think we all have a sense that these things are more important than simply being here.
Anyways, /thoughts/.
 
I think his book was perfectly valid in most of its arguments... he wasn't addressing religion in the sense of theology and whether or not their could be some sort of higher power... He does address some claims about the existence of god, but thats not the main focus of his book really. he was speaking out against organized religion such as Christianity or Islam for the most part, and his points made are mostly quite valid.

and i find that the argument he makes about leprachauns is a very good one. just because people have believed in the existence of god/gods for so long doesnt mean that there is any more reason to discuss the existence of god, because the idea is simply not worth discussing.

he doesnt argue points about the actual existence of a higher power or any sort of personal god in the sense that he isnt really against secular religion as much as he is against the power that organized religion has today. he is mainly arguing against the brainwashing power of organized religion and how it can corrupt people and change laws and change the way we live... one of his biggest gripes with religion is how children of religious parents are basically forced to become religious before they have any real decision making abilities of their own..

and i think in a book written for the general public, you need to make it shocking and you need to make strong arguments. obviously he isnt going to have a completly balanced back-and-forth debate about religion., i dont think you should expect that from this sort of book; nor do i think that one is warranted anyways.

If you accept a slim chance that god could exist then you must be agnostic; seeing as atheism is the belief that deities do not exist... if you believe that they could exist in any way shape or form, however unlikely, then you are agnostic.

 
The global population at the time of World War II was about 10 times that of the time of the Crusades, not 50 - 70 times. A much larger percentage of the world's population was killed in the World Wars.
 
and the spanish flu killed up to 100 million people? whats your point?

religion wasnt the reason for the world wars... although you could say that without religion there would be no holocaust if you wanted to...
 
not to mention holocaust, which may have had other motivations, but involved the slaughtering of another religion, gays and gypsies - also religious motivation. christians were killed in china for years, the war on terrorism is essentially the war on muslims & their oil. the only reason people dont agree is because of their religion.hm, catholics vs protestants in ireland only ended or is panning out just last year.
people kill people because they don't follow the same beliefs. religion causes discrimination, it causes hate, if religion didn't exist i wouldn't have this schpiel.
do what you want, dont fucking hate people.
i think it would be ignorant to say more people die in non religious wars.
if an atheist is fighting a war against religion, it's therefore a religious war.you can't really point out any modern ones that weren't religiously inclined, maybe aside for whatever reason between the japanese and the chinese during the 40s, and other tiny wars.
 
Is this a serious response? Because you're saying that when atheists kill Christians (for example), religion is to blame...do you see the problem with that argument? That's like saying the solution to people hating Jews is to get rid of all of them.

You also called the Second Sino-Japanese War "tiny." Given that it killed some 22 million people and was by far the largest and most destructive war in Asia of the 20th century, I'd say you have no idea what you're talking about.
 
tiny in respect to how many people actually know about it. none the less your comparing 55+ million deaths to a bunch of 1000-1000 000. i mean if you want to sit around doing math have fun. but most ideological fights are become of a system of a beliefs and some charismatic wack job.
 
That was exactly my point.

So even if comparing death tolls WAS a rational way of deciding the validity of worldviews, it would condemn atheism, not religion. This is all besides the point, however, if we're debating which is factually true. But if we're going to go about this in a purely pragmatic fashion, the 20th century is proof beyond any reasonable doubt that religion is more benign than its alternatives.
 
RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE!!!

i've successfully converted my mother to atheism, simply by pointing out a few of the flaws in a few religions (in other words i didn't mean to convert her she just did it herself). although if i carry on like this i think i may convert her to Buddhism, which isn't such a bad thing really because Buddhists are the best religious people (all they want is peace).
 
First of all, most intelligent do "know about" the war between Japan and China. Secondly, what the hell does that have to do with anything? The conflict killed about 3 times as many civilians as the Holocaust, in a fashion just as horrific, but you're arguing that it was "tiny" because you think most people don't know about it?

I don't even know what that second sentence means.
 
I'm really running out of options as to how make this more clear: if we're going to compare them using the completely illogical methodology of "whichever system kills fewer people is right," then religion is right.
 
right, well, they aren't really Buddhist then, are they?

kind of like how Hitler wasn't really Christian.

and i'm not in the U.S. (score).
 
Well if the Buddhists who use violence aren't really Buddhist and the Christians who use violence aren't really Christian, what makes one superior to the other?

 
haha, i said Hitler, not Christians who don't use violence. There is plenty of violence in the Bible (yes, i've read it). In fact, a lot of it is either encouraged or undertaken by God Himself. Although nowhere does it say that anybody should "Kill all the Jews, etc."

As far as superiority goes, I don't think Buddhists are "superior", per se, i just agree with them more than I do with the Ancient Egyptians. Buddhism is one of the largest religions on the planet, yet they don't show up at my house promoting their religion, forcing their beliefs into political systems, etc. I like them because they are not only willing to listen to others, but they can deal with not being listened to. Buddhists are never going to tell me what I should and should not do, because their beliefs do not require me to. They generally let people believe whatever they want to believe. I like people who don't get all up in my face because I said I like someone else.

 
i dont know how this argument got to this point. it is by far the stupidest way to argue about religion...

but seeing as i've already made my viewpoint clear on everything else, i will just say that you are wrong... because nobody has ever killed someone in the name of atheism (or at least not a lot of people), whereas religion is the sole cause of millions and millions of deaths.

terrorist attacks, crusades etc. etc. all were fought in the name of religion... no wars were fought because of atheism.

but the bottom line is that religion in today society is outdated and is simply a hinderance 90% of the time. i dont have respect for religious people because i think that if they arent just a brainwashed idiot, then they are simply lying to themselves because they are scared of the idea of living without a god...

why do people want an afterlife? what makes this life so great is how its so short. we have a limited amount of time to do everything and take in all the incredible experiences. the idea of living for eternity doesnt make me happy, it scares me, and to be honest it would just be like torture. you'd wake up every day and have no motivation to do anything ever. people turn to religion because they are scared and confused and want answers... but the answers they are getting are lies.
 
I'm done arguing about which system of thought has killed more people, because it's irrelevant and winning that argument doesn't prove or disprove the systems being compared.

Regarding your last paragraph, it sounds like your reason for not believing in an afterlife is just as irrational as you think a Christian's belief in the afterlife is. You say religious people are "scared of the idea of living without a god." Then you say the idea of living for eternity scares you. You can't criticize somebody for basing their beliefs around their personal fears and then submit your own personal fears as a rationale for your beliefs. Neither is valid evidence one way or another.

And the argument you and Dawkins give for not addressing serious arguments for the existence of God is ridiculous and circular - "There is no reasonable argument for the existence of God, therefore no argument for the existence of God is reasonable." That's a worthless argument from your conclusion. Besides, if there's really no point in addressing serious philosophical questions about the existence of God, what is the point of writing a book about God's nonexistence? If that were the case, the book would have no more value than an expose on "the leprechaun delusion."
 
i don't want to ask Christians anything because they'd just start complaining about how I don't agree with them.
 
I have yet to hear a reasonable argument for the existence of God... at least not the God(s) portrayed in any major religions. when i hear one i would be glad to listen to it and then discuss it.

Granted i worded my last paragraph wrongly... but i dont turn to atheism/agnosticism because im afraid of living forever...
 
They also might complain about the Buddhist extremists bombing their churches and pushing to make their religion law. But if you prefer to ignorantly believe that Buddhism is better because it's peaceful based on your experience living in a country with almost no Buddhists, good for you. Just don't try to make that out to be rational.
 
No, I'm saying that every viewpoint of any kind as its violent followers. Violence is a common characteristic of religions, yes, but it's also a common characteristic of all of humanity. And it's our humanity that's to blame, not religion. The only practical end to all human conflict will be the end of all human life.
 
I came into this thread and said that I would be content with my mother becoming a Buddhist. Somebody who wasn't a Buddhist decided to talk about how bad Buddhists in Sri Lanka are. Great, as if I cared. My mom isn't in Sri Lanka, she's not going to become a Buddhist extremist. I don't give a fuck about Buddhist extremists, especially ones on the other side of the planet, and I'm sure my mom doesn't either. I also never said that Buddhism was "better," you're obviously not paying attention to what I have to say. I said that i agree with Buddhists more than I do with Ancient Egyptians. I know that Buddhists have faults. I don't think they are better than anyone else. I just like them more than I like other religious people.

But of course, people are quick to point out why I shouldn't like other people. Religious people, that is.
 
I'm not telling you who to "like" and dislike, and if you're trying to appear as the atheist voice of tolerance, you're failing spectacularly. You said you agreed more with Buddhists than with other religions, based on false perceptions of all of them. You think Buddhists don't try to make their religion into political policy, among other things. If that's your basis of which religion to follow, it will depend entirely on where you live. In Canada or the United States, you'd be a Buddhist, in Thailand or Morocco, you'd be a Christian. All I'm saying is that's not a remotely rational way of analyzing religion.

If you really think I'm trying to warn you about the possibility of your mom becoming a Buddhist terrorist, you're not paying attention to what I'm saying. I'm saying that if you think you agree most with Buddhists because they're passive and peaceful, you need to rethink your position because that is not by any means universally true.
 
having sex over the internet?

damnit, i wish i could be part of the ancient Vikings way of religion... killing was a good thing and if you didnt do it you got sent to hell.
 
i know i'm repeating myself here, but it seems to have become necessary.

Buddhism is not in the least bit a violent religion. There is nothing in Buddhism that condones violence of any sort. Violent "Buddhists" are not Buddhist. They are just assholes using religion as an excuse to be violent. The highest authorities of Buddhism do not condone violence.

I don't know exactly how we got onto the topic of Christianity, but I know it was not me that brought it up. The Church has condoned and committed violent and murderous acts in the name of Christianity. Last I checked the Church was a pretty big part of Christianity. So unless I'm mistaken, Christianity excuses violence to a point. Maybe that's just my opinion, maybe it is horribly skewed, i don't care.

I've read the Bible and I know what does and does not cross the line (unless you're God and the line doesn't apply to you). The Church crossed the line. Hitler crossed the line. "Buddhist" extremists crossed the line. Which of those three has been excused by Christians? Which of those three has been excused by Buddhists? I agree with the Buddhists.

I hope you've taken the time to actually read this post instead of picking out a few of the words and leaving the key ones behind.

 
ok, im atheist, but my mom being Japanese is Buddhist and Shinto. the very very VERY first teaching in Buddhism is essentially to treat your neighbor politely because everyone is ultimately connected. do not poison the air because the air of your enemy is your air as well.

i love how it seems as soon as a Buddhist becomes an extremist everyone jumps on them. but Islam (at least in the Middle East) its like this "oh, they started it".... Christians and Catholics especially (the hardliners ive met) basically denounce that the Crusades and the violence they have caused have ever happened.....

islam-religion-of-peace.jpg


^^^^while not COMMON it is certainly more common that extreme buddhists doing the same sort of thing.
 
Bill Mahre isn't the best voice for the socialist perspective, but i'd rather watch him and his show "RealTime" then any other right wing political commentary.

Bill will at least let people discuss issues, most right wing nut jobs wont even discuss things.
 
I watched it. I think it was ok. Maher ruined it with the last 5 minutes though. I wanted to see hard core blasphemy and instead I saw a guilt trip towards the religious.
 
It's really hard to get a neutral take on religion in any form of media. It seems like some Athiests group anyone of the Chirstian faith as a stupid creationist, while the Pope accepts evolution. Then some relgious people seem to "respect" your opinion, yet they act as though they are right and hold an elitist attitude.In my opinion, there is no problem with religion itself. But, people's interpretation of religion that causes a lot of problem. Bottom line, people are flawed. There is so much about the universe we do not know and I don't think at this point anyone can prove there is or isn't a God. But, if people were to follow the simple guideline of the major religions, to treat people as you would like to be treated the world wouldn't be that bad.
 
No Catholicism is a branch of Christianity and I was just making the point that a major leader of a major branch of Christianity thinks one way.
 
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