The God Delusion: Would society be better off without religion?

You don't expect dumb people to understand God either, merely to believe in him. In the same sense, dumb people could believe in empathy and society even if they can't understand the concepts.

Nevertheless, I think there are few people who could not be taught to understand empathy and society.
 
You can take it in or shake it off - time will show, who is right.

No it won't. In 50,000 years there are going to be people worshipping Steve, and claiming that he created the Universe with a bb gun. They are going to type in caps, and use a lot of emoticons.
 
LOGIC is one mighty IDOL that humanity started worshipping long ago - since "philosophers".
oh yes, those silly philosophers
 
Bill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides
Moses Maimonides, also known as Rambam, was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher; one of the greatest Torah scholars of the Middle Ages.
I was talking about Greek ones and their later followers. :lol:
Thanks for making clear the DIFFERENCE. :lol: :lol: :lol:

Read this.
Moral luck

The problem of moral luck is that some people are born into, live within, and experience circumstances that seem to change their moral culpability when all other factors remain the same.

For instance, a case of circumstantial moral luck: a poor person is born into a poor family, and has no other way to feed himself so he steals his food. Another person, born into a very wealthy family, does very little but has ample food and does not need to steal to get it. Should the poor person be more morally blameworthy than the rich person? After all, it is not his fault that he was born into such circumstances, but a matter of "luck".

A related case is resultant moral luck. For instance, two persons behave in a morally culpable way, such as driving carelessly, but end up producing unequal amounts of harm: one strikes a pedestrian and kills him, while the other does not. That one driver caused a death and the other did not is no part of the drivers' intentional actions; yet most observers would likely ascribe greater blame to the driver who killed. (Compare consequentialism.)

The fundamental question of moral luck is how our moral responsibility is changed by factors over which we have no control.
But Godly moral laws do NOT change "under circumstances".
 
Well atheism is certainly not an better, if you look at what i has done the past. We are talking about mass murder being committed by regimes that were atheistic in their leanings. The communist purges of China and Russia shows what terrible crimes can happen and lets not forget about the Nazi regime. More people have been killed via atheism than have ever been killed by religious intent. Even with all the terrorism that happening around in the name of religion, is not even close to previous terrors done by atheistic states.
 
Bill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides

I was talking about Greek ones and their later followers. :lol:
Thanks for making clear the DIFFERENCE. :lol: :lol: :lol

Yeah, and Maimonides as heir to the Arabic philosophy tradition, is therefore also heir to the Greek tradition of philosophy which they themselves inherited. More specifically, he promoted and developed the philosophical tradition of Aristotle. Good going, chief.
 
Well atheism is certainly not an better, if you look at what i has done the past. We are talking about mass murder being committed by regimes that were atheistic in their leanings. The communist purges of China and Russia shows what terrible crimes can happen and lets not forget about the Nazi regime. More people have been killed via atheism than have ever been killed by religious intent. Even with all the terrorism that happening around in the name of religion, is not even close to previous terrors done by atheistic states.

The fallacy here is that you interpret all nonreligious actions as atheistic. Neither commnunism nor nazism is based on religion. And neither is democracy, medicine, physics or my cat for that matter. My point is that they have nothing to do with neither religion nor atheism. They exist on the side of all this.
 
Bill
I'll say it differently.
Maimonides is a "religion" philosopher, he applied it INSIDE religion, not outside.
For him, Torah was God-given while logic was just a servant to it, for better understanding.
I'm talking about people who make logic the MASTER, not the servant.
Same would be applicable to MONEY, btw.
Its mission is to SERVE people, but many people make money their MASTER instead.
Only when one recognizes that there's only One Master, one can see how EVERYTHING in the world is but a servant to the higher Cause.

Lillefix
Not sure about nazism (though the theory of a "higher race" is an obvious baby of EVOLUTION nonsense) - but communism is a CLEAR anti-religion movement, as far as their actions go.
Communists were actively hunting down religious people of any faith.
 
Well atheism is certainly not an better, if you look at what i has done the past. We are talking about mass murder being committed by regimes that were atheistic in their leanings. The communist purges of China and Russia shows what terrible crimes can happen and lets not forget about the Nazi regime. More people have been killed via atheism than have ever been killed by religious intent. Even with all the terrorism that happening around in the name of religion, is not even close to previous terrors done by atheistic states.

You know Naziism wasn't actually atheistic, Hitler believed in god, it's just that he thought Christianity was too Jewish.
Your Soviet and Chinese examples are also flawed, most of the people killed by both of these regimes were killed in order to uphold dictatorial regimes who called themselves "communist", just because they called themselves atheist was often quite incidental to the murders.
On the other hand you've got a lot of people killed during the Thirty Years War because of a dispute between two branches of Christianity, or the Inquisitions which took place throughout Catholic Europe during most of the middle ages.
 
But Godly moral laws do NOT change "under circumstances".

Of course they do. Have you ever seen a Christian eat shrimp? In fact, there is a Christian eating shrimp right beside me as we speak, and it is fully sanctioned by the Lord.
 
So, what was your physics degree?
 
Of course they do. Have you ever seen a Christian eat shrimp? In fact, there is a Christian eating shrimp right beside me as we speak, and it is fully sanctioned by the Lord.

A further example: Catholic food rituals,
1) Only fish on Fridays, now in abeyance.
2) 1 meal and 2 collations (bread and water) during Lent, now in abeyance.

Back in my mother's day (not too long ago) it was mortal sin to ignore either of these requirements. Also the whole idea of Papal Infallibility (another Godly Moral Law according to Catholic theology) was only properly implemented in the 1850's.

Religions change over time to suit the changing circumstances and, where powerful institutions are involved, to keep the powerful in power.

I'm not against religion per se, just institutions like the Catholic Hierarchy, whose sole purpose is the retention of power through religion.
 
The most organized religion in the world is the religion of "man can do everything" - with science as its prophet.
Period.
The biggest and worst idolatry is to worship YOURSELF.

So I guess
Albert Einstein
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Wolfgang Pauli
Sigmund Freud
Hans Krebs

aren't real Jews?

And I guess you can add Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel to that list.
 
Well atheism is certainly not an better, if you look at what i has done the past. We are talking about mass murder being committed by regimes that were atheistic in their leanings. The communist purges of China and Russia shows what terrible crimes can happen and lets not forget about the Nazi regime. More people have been killed via atheism than have ever been killed by religious intent. Even with all the terrorism that happening around in the name of religion, is not even close to previous terrors done by atheistic states.

No, you're correct. "Atheism" is an incomplete moral system, too. It's not hard to be incomplete when it's based on one thing, though. I still agree, religion needs a replacement for its 'good parts' if its leaving is to be beneficial.

That said, I know very few atheists that venerate mass murderers and who venerate those who committed human sacrifices in the name of their religious faith.

I'll denounce Stalin as evil. Will you denounce Samuel?
 
You all forget that most if not all of so-called atheists were born in families with religious background - and that have the religion-based moral engraved in their (un)consciousness.
Why did you miss my example about "Mowgly" - without ANY background, a man to himself.
That would be a good example of a true atheist, without any contact with religion whatsoever.
Now, why would you assume him to "act morally"???
I wouldn't.
(I don't mean he'd be CRUEL, I mean he would just LACK the reverence for ANOTHER's life and value(able)s.)

And my study was basically related with LASERS, so what???
I'm not too good at it anyways - I'm not working in that field and not even planning to.
(I'm much more of a mathematician by view than physicist.)
 
nonconformist
1. Being Jewish is NOT limited to being Judaistic - a born Jew is a Jew for life regardless of one's actions.
2. "Religion" is a word with a wide range of "definitions".
We're talking about different ones.
You refer to "being named as a specific-religionist" while I refer to "believing in a specific religious system".
Not the same.
 
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