Will we survive religion?

[R_McGeddon]

R McGeddon

*Yet again you are wrong, mankind existed in co-operative societal communities long, long before the church existed.
*
Not so. The church began with Adam and Eve.

Newsflash, Adam & Eve is a made up story, they never existed.

We cannot be sure that those who kill in the name of religion are religious. Dante put certain popes in hell because he did not think they were very religious. That doesn’t mean that all popes deserve to be in hell and that no pope has ever done good things as pope.

The same is true of radical Muslims … are they true Muslims or have they hi-jacked religion and done murder to advance themselves through it … just as Hitler pretended to be doing the Lord’s work and immediately began to persecute Christians when he came to power?

So you have to ask yourself this; would all these people have still been killed, if there was no religion?

Be very careful how you answer this question!

Still waiting to hear from you and Mirdath about all those do-gooding atheist titans other than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

After you give us the name of some theist do-gooder that was doing it of out of pure goodness, not just to secure their place in heaven.

 

[Mirdath]

Please keep in mind that the God you think does not exist truly does exist (even though you deny it). How can an atheist/agnostic be doing anything but fleeing from that very God?

Denial of an unprovable concept does not equate to flight from it. All it means is ‘I don’t think it’s that way’, and nobody on either side can logically prove it. But as one who postulates that it is so, it’s on you to prove it (as it is also on the strong atheists to prove it isn’t). Good luck.

I’m arguing for the atheists here, but I myself am agnostic – a position not all that different from ‘weak’ atheism. I don’t believe either way and assert nothing save the single exception that we can’t truly know the answer. And since that’s the case, all this is really just an intellectual exercise. The question’s pretty much irrelevant to me as it’s unanswerable.

First you say atheists will get their morality from society, then you say there is no society but the rich.

I did not. They direct it; they do not constitute it.

The churches are the bearers of collective morality, from which even the atheists derive their sense of right and wrong.

Morality? Perhaps. Ethicality? Not on your life. That’s an older thing than religion.

In a previous post you said this: Rules of behavior aren’t a religious invention: they’re societal. No, they are religious.

Really? News to me. The proto-humans had to agree not to kill each other before they could agree to worship the ball of fire in the sky. And to continue their civilization, they had to agree to trade fairly – not necessarily within the purview of religion, and rarely entirely within it.

All western societies have their moral systems rooted in the Ten Commandments … their legal systems as well.

Well yeah, Christianity is the primary religion of all Western societies. Why would it be otherwise?

But the Ten Commandments are older than Christianity, and the ideas behind them are older even than Judaism. ‘Don’t steal’, ‘don’t kill’, ‘don’t rape’, ‘respect your elders’ – all pretty fundamental tenets of any society that wants to get anywhere. They fit just as well in the Confucian code, bushido, or Babylonian law as they do in Judeo-Christian teaching. Judaism isn’t special for having written these down in a format of ten lines, and they were hardly the first.

But it is also a religious tenet.

Did I say otherwise?

This is true. But it is also consistent with another Catholic teaching … the natural law. The law was written on the hearts of **all **men everywhere at the creation of the race.

The idea of ‘natural law’ I’ve come across on these boards seems to have been thoroughly corrupted and extended by those pushing an agenda. If I drop an apple, it will hit the floor – that much I will acknowledge. If I kill someone, I have done harm to society – that too. If I have sex with someone with the same genitalia I possess – I have done no harm to society; yet here I’ve been told that runs contrary to natural law! It doesn’t; it runs contrary to what you believe has been handed down by God.

That many men and societies talked themselves out of the law is obvious when we look at the conduct of atheists like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (shall we call them the Unholy Trinity? They seem to be the only three you ever call upon – but you’re forgetting Pol Pot and Robespierre) were megalomaniac lunatics. To them it wasn’t a matter of talking out – it was a matter of ‘law? what law? I am the law!’. The fact that they were atheists (save for Hitler) is not relevant: they were insane.

Religions serve to remind men of their obligation to obey the laws of God which they may have erased from their hearts because they have learned to lie to themselves about what the law truly is.

If that is all the function religion has, it is obsolete by your own admission. The basic laws which govern society never had their origin in religion.

But didn’t you say, Rules of behavior aren’t a religious invention: they’re societal.

Are you saying you committed appeal to majority as a fallacy? I doubt it.

You’re right to doubt. I made a statement, not an appeal.

The appeal to majority, by the way, is not always a fallacy. Sometimes the majority are right! That, on occasion, is even true for the Supreme Court … and when there is only a majority of one vote.

It is fallacious; but logic breaks down sometimes, and it’s all we have. It’s not absolutely wrong to use it, but such occasions are rare, and this is not one of them.

Equating any renaissance pope with atheists like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao only shows how little history you know. Go back to school, and try not to learn all your history from atheist teachers.

Fine, how about we talk South American history for a while? Or is that too Catholic for you?

 

[Valke2]

But the Ten Commandments are older than Christianity, and the ideas behind them are older even than Judaism. ‘Don’t steal’, ‘don’t kill’, ‘don’t rape’, ‘respect your elders’ – all pretty fundamental tenets of any society that wants to get anywhere. They fit just as well in the Confucian code, bushido, or Babylonian law as they do in Judeo-Christian teaching. Judaism isn’t special for having written these down in a format of ten lines, and they were hardly the first.

They were the first, I believe, to codify the commandments in a way that made them applicable to all people for all time, rather than at the whim of the current ruler. They were unique in that the held the laws universally applicable to their people and no king could set himself up as a god thereafter and change the laws.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

R McGeddon

After you give us the name of some theist do-gooder that was doing it of out of pure goodness, not just to secure their place in heaven.

Securing one’s place in heaven cannot be done except by the motives of pure goodness.

I see you are not up to the challenge.

Newsflash, Adam & Eve is a made up story, they never existed.

Prove it.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Mirdath

I don’t believe either way and assert nothing save the single exception that we can’t truly know the answer. And since that’s the case, all this is really just an intellectual exercise. The question’s pretty much irrelevant to me as it’s unanswerable.

This answer is not convincing in the least. If the question is truly irrelevant, you wouldn’t be spending so much time here at Catholic Answers.

Really? News to me. The proto-humans had to agree not to kill each other before they could agree to worship the ball of fire in the sky. And to continue their civilization, they had to agree to trade fairly – not necessarily within the purview of religion, and rarely entirely within it.

I suppose you were there? So you saw for yourself that morality was founded without first the notion of a Lawgiver? I don’t think so.

If I have sex with someone with the same genitalia I possess – I have done no harm to society; yet here I’ve been told that runs contrary to natural law! It doesn’t; it runs contrary to what you believe has been handed down by God.

You have done harm to yourselves because you have violated the natural law. The homosexuals who die of Aids have also done harm to themselves and to others. Are you so bereft of common sense?

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao (shall we call them the Unholy Trinity? They seem to be the only three you ever call upon – but you’re forgetting Pol Pot and Robespierre) were megalomaniac lunatics. To them it wasn’t a matter of talking out – it was a matter of ‘law? what law? I am the law!’. The fact that they were atheists (save for Hitler) is not relevant: they were insane.

This point about Hitler, Stalin, and Mao has to be made over and over because it is the point that atheists never mention when they attack the sins of Christians. In this they have a pathetic blind spot that never goes away. You have the same blind spot if you still think Hitler was not an atheist. Learn some history outside of your favorite agnostic and atheist web sites which are filled with lies. Study the photo of Hitler admiring the bust of Nietzsche at the dedication of the Nietzsche archives. I take it you know Nietzsche was an atheist. What would a Christian be doing attending the celebration event of the most notorious atheist of modern times? I’m ready to restart this Hitler debate if you are. Be careful how you answer. But your first answer has to be an explanation of what Hitler is doing attending the dedication of the NIetzsche Archives if you think he was a Christian.

“The religions are all alike, no matter what they call themselves. They have no future – certainly none for the Germans. Fascism, if it likes, may come to terms with the Church. So shall I. Why not? That will not prevent me from tearing up Christianity root and branch and annihilating it in Germany.” Adolf Hitler

The basic laws which govern society never had their origin in religion.

Prove it. I thought you were an agnostic.http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon10.gif

Fine, how about we talk South American history for a while? Or is that too Catholic for you?

Do you plan to begin by talking about the persecution of the Catholic Church by atheist left-wing governments of Mexico and Cuba during the last century … including the murder of priests, nuns, and bishops? Or is this well documented and recent history going to be another notorious blind spot for agnostics and atheists?

 

[Mirdath]

This answer is not convincing in the least. If the question is truly irrelevant, you wouldn’t be spending so much time here at Catholic Answers.

Faith is something I don’t understand, and I’m trying to learn about that. Where better to go?

I suppose you were there? So you saw for yourself that morality was founded without first the notion of a Lawgiver? I don’t think so.

Haha, careful where you go with that. Were you there when Adam and Eve were cast out from the garden? Were you there when Jesus died on the cross? Were you there when Paul fell into a ditch on the way to Damascus? You saw all these things for yourself? Sure

It is, however, fairly easy to extrapolate how humans in general would have behaved. Nor was I speaking of morals, but ethics, which require no supreme Lawgiver.

You have done harm to yourselves because you have violated the natural law. The homosexuals who die of Aids have also done harm to themselves and to others. Are you so bereft of common sense?

First off, I still don’t buy that ‘natural law’ has anything to say about where one sticks what body part.

Second, I guess anyone with a cold is now a menace to society? Merely because they have that disease – are we to charge them with evil for the actions of bacteria and virii?

Third, AIDS is not the ‘gay plague’ you make it out to be. It’s easier to transmit through anal sex, sure – guess what, plenty of perfectly straight couples do that. Plenty of straight people have, transmit, and die from AIDS. If HIV/AIDS is divine punishment for homosexuality, as many seem to consider it, God’s got really awful aim. Go back to lightning bolts.

This point about Hitler, Stalin, and Mao has to be made over and over because it is the point that atheists never mention when they attack the sins of Christians. In this they have a pathetic blind spot that never goes away.

Yet Stalin and Mao committed crimes because they were madmen; Tomas de Torquemada and Bloody Mary (to name a mere two) committed crimes because they were religious and committed them in the name of religion. Hello pot, this is kettle?

You have the same blind spot if you still think Hitler was not an atheist. Learn some history outside of your favorite agnostic and atheist web sites which are filled with lies.

While Hitler may have privately been an atheist (and none of us can really know for sure) he was quite vocal about his faith in public. He wrapped himself in religion as American politicians wrap themselves in the flag. He spoke of his mission to exterminate the Jews as a God-given cause, a crusade. This is real history, not made-up atheist propaganda as you seem to think, and I have backed it up with quotes from the man himself both here and in another thread you yourself started.

I can fully understand why you don’t want Hitler acknowledged for what he was. Nobody wants him in their club, and honestly, he’s in a lot of them – I’ll even admit we’re both frustrated artists. He would have been better off keeping at the watercolors. But your refusal to take the facts for what they are is nothing more than angry historical revisionism. Let us remember our mistakes exactly, otherwise we will repeat them.

Study the photo of Hitler admiring the bust of Nietzsche at the dedication of the Nietzsche archives. I take it you know Nietzsche was an atheist. What would a Christian be doing attending the celebration event of the most notorious atheist of modern times?

Laughing to himself at how he had made an anti-nationalist, pro-Semitic thinker into a rabidly nationalist and anti-Semitic figurehead for his movement? Because that’s what happened.

I’m ready to restart this Hitler debate if you are.

Honey, you already did. It might have been fun; however, you’ve proven yourself an ignorant historian manque and an ineffective rhetorician time and again. You’ve shown little care for accuracy or rectitude, so long as you can say you’re ‘Right’. You ignore anything that runs counter to your heavily revised perceptions of history, ethics, and philosophy and try to steamroll anyone who does not share your mistaken impressions, thinking that if only you can repeat yourself louder and longer you’ll be Right. You belittle and demean anyone who makes the effort to hold a civil, equal debate with you, then cry foul when they call you out for your worthless arguments. Although I believe in no God, I’ll take the time to thank any deity who might be around now that I never knew anyone like you before, else I may have ended up with a far more bitter attitude towards religion than I have.

 

[Mr.Ex_Nihilo]

Honey, you already did. It might have been fun; however, you’ve proven yourself an ignorant historian manque and an ineffective rhetorician time and again. You’ve shown little care for accuracy or rectitude, so long as you can say you’re ‘Right’. You ignore anything that runs counter to your heavily revised perceptions of history, ethics, and philosophy and try to steamroll anyone who does not share your mistaken impressions, thinking that if only you can repeat yourself louder and longer you’ll be Right. You belittle and demean anyone who makes the effort to hold a civil, equal debate with you, then cry foul when they call you out for your worthless arguments. Although I believe in no God, I’ll take the time to thank any deity who might be around now that I never knew anyone like you before, else I may have ended up with a far more bitter attitude towards religion than I have.

That’s crossed the line Mirdath. http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/buttons_cad/report.gif

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Mirdath

Although I believe in no God, I’ll take the time to thank any deity who might be around now that I never knew anyone like you before, else I may have ended up with a far more bitter attitude towards religion than I have.

Yes, I suppose the truth hurts. And when you are told time and again by various sources that Hitler hated Jews and Christians and persecuted them with all his might, you will of course go back to Mein Kampf and take that liar’s claim to be a godly man doing God’s work as gospel truth.

What Martin Niemöller said, a Lutheran pastor in Germany who spent several years in one of Hitler’s concentration camps, appears in the Congressional Record, 14, October 1968, page 31636, as:

When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church — and there was nobody left to be concerned.

But Mirdath knows better because Mirdath read the lies in Mein Kampf and believed them.

Hitler was a Christian? Baloney … and everyone knows it except the people who don’t want to know it.

 

[fix]

Denial of an unprovable concept does not equate to flight from it. All it means is ‘I don’t think it’s that way’, and nobody on either side can logically prove it. But as one who postulates that it is so, it’s on you to prove it (as it is also on the strong atheists to prove it isn’t). Good luck.

I’m arguing for the atheists here, but I myself am agnostic – a position not all that different from ‘weak’ atheism. I don’t believe either way and assert nothing save the single exception that we can’t truly know the answer. And since that’s the case, all this is really just an intellectual exercise. The question’s pretty much irrelevant to me as it’s unanswerable.

… the truth made known to us by Revelation is neither the product nor the consummation of an argument devised by human reason. It appears instead as something gratuitous, which itself stirs thought and seeks acceptance as an expression of love. This revealed truth is set within our history as an anticipation of that ultimate and definitive vision of God which is reserved for those who believe in him and seek him with a sincere heart. The ultimate purpose of personal existence, then, is the theme of philosophy and theology alike. For all their difference of method and content, both disciplines point to that “path of life” (*Ps *16:11) which, as faith tells us, leads in the end to the full and lasting joy of the contemplation of the Triune God…

…In abandoning these rules, the human being runs the risk of failure and ends up in the condition of “the fool”. For the Bible, in this foolishness there lies a threat to life. The fool thinks that he knows many things, but really he is incapable of fixing his gaze on the things that truly matter. Therefore he can neither order his mind (*Prov *1:7) nor assume a correct attitude to himself or to the world around him. And so when he claims that “God does not exist” (cf. *Ps *14:1), he shows with absolute clarity just how deficient his knowledge is and just how far he is from the full truth of things, their origin and their destiny…
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/j.../hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html
***FIDES ET RATIO ***

 

[R_McGeddon]

R McGeddon

After you give us the name of some theist do-gooder that was doing it of out of pure goodness, not just to secure their place in heaven.

Securing one’s place in heaven cannot be done except by the motives of pure goodness.

I see you are not up to the challenge.

It is a worthless challenge.

Newsflash, Adam & Eve is a made up story, they never existed.

Prove it.

The story of Adam & Eve does not fit in with what is known in history to have happened. Dinosaurs and cavemen, for instance, have thousands of items of solid, tangible evidence that they actually existed. This evidence can be viewed in many, many museums around the world.

Now that you have made a positive claim of their existence, you back it up with proof.

 

[R_McGeddon]

That’s crossed the line Mirdath. http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/buttons_cad/report.gif

It was crossed a long time ago.

 

[Valke2]

At the risk of putting this thread back on track, are religious beliefs today more harmful than helpful?

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

R McGeddon

The story of Adam & Eve does not fit in with what is known in history to have happened.

So because you were there, you **know **what happened?

Give it a rest. Your theories are no more provable than what is in the Bible. Even so, you have faith … in what you want to believe, as opposed to what you don’t want to believe.

Atheism depends not on the hope that there is a God, but on the hope that there is no God. The wish is father to the fact. The intellectual dilemma of atheism is that it declares religion to be a fantasy while it cannot prove that atheism is a fact.

And that’s a** fact**.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Valke 2

At the risk of putting this thread back on track, are religious beliefs today more harmful than helpful?

Since Roe v Wade, if the million or so babies who are murdered in the womb each year could answer you, I think they would be cheering on the Catholic Church.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

Are religious beliefs more harmful than helpful today?

They have been today and always have been. Here is the French philosopher Voltaire’s take on the danger of atheism in the ancient world.

“That was how things went with the Roman Senate which was almost entirely composed of atheists in theory and in practice, that is to say, who believed in neither a Providence nor a future life; this senate was an assembly of philosophers, of sensualists and ambitious men, all very dangerous men, who ruined the republic.” (from Voltaire’s essay On Atheism).

There is no reason why we should not think his view is still relevant today. I believe there are many such dangerous men and women in government today. For the most part, they have learned to hide behind smoke and mirrors. It’s when they have to vote in state legislatures and Congress and on the Supreme Court that we find out who they are. The more difficult ones to expose are the ones who are lifelong employees of the federal and state bureaucracies (especially the public colleges and schools).

 

[whatever]

At the risk of putting this thread back on track, are religious beliefs today more harmful than helpful?

Religious beliefs are the same they’ve always been - impotent to change human nature, a placebo for people who are inclined to do good in the first place, and a powerful weapon to inflict harm on others.

 

[Mirdath]

At the risk of putting this thread back on track, are religious beliefs today more harmful than helpful?

Beliefs? Not particularly. What people do with them and in their name is another story, and while we’ve perhaps learned to handle ourselves better from those disasters, we’re continually causing more.

I don’t dispute that religions and religious both have done a lot of good in the world, but it’s at best a pretty close balance with the harm they’ve caused. In my view, the easiest way to reduce that harm would be to stop preaching divine exclusivity – to realize that all religions are attempts to become close to the divine and that preaching or acting against other faiths is arrogant and hurtful. But alas, while some people realize this, others – even and especially here – raise cries of ‘moral relativism!’ the moment one hints at such an idea.

 

[R_McGeddon]

R McGeddon

The story of Adam & Eve does not fit in with what is known in history to have happened.

So because you were there, you **know **what happened?

Oh, I get it, all the evidence that exists isn’t enough, I have to have been there at the time of the events

Guess what?!?! that cuts both ways!!!

Give it a rest. Your theories are no more provable than what is in the Bible.

Really, where can I view the artifacts that exist to back up the bible???

Even so, you have faith … in what you want to believe, as opposed to what you don’t want to believe.

You seem to have no sense of irony at all.

Atheism depends not on the hope that there is a God, but on the hope that there is no God.

Atheism is dependant on nothing at all. Where do you get your information?

You are quick to challenge other peoples’ education, now I’m challenging yours.

The intellectual dilemma of atheism is that it declares religion to be a fantasy while it cannot prove that atheism is a fact.

The intellectual dilemma of religion is that it declares itself to be fact whilst being unable to prove it.

And that’s a** fact**.

You wouldn’t recognise a fact if it came up to you and personally introduced itself.

That is the fact.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

R McGeddon

The intellectual dilemma of religion is that it declares itself to be fact whilst being unable to prove it.

No cigar for you. Religion does not pretend to be a fact. It is a faith. Just as atheism is not a fact … but an an provable faith. If you disagree, prove atheism to be a fact.

*Really, where can I view the artifacts that exist to back up the bible???
*
They are in your head and in your heart. Go look for them … I dare you.

 

[Gilbert_Keith]

R. McGeddon

Oh, I get it, all the evidence that exists isn’t enough,…

I’m curious. What evidence exists that the human race did not begin with a male and a female? Exactly what artifacts have you found that prove Adam & Eve never lived?