Here is a little comic relief (for you maybe, for me it is heart-breaking and devastating):
Even so many of the "secular" holidays have religious undertones...
I can think of some secular holidays without any religious undertones, like Nation Day (almost every nation has its July 4th, or Labor Day (May 1st), or Pi-Day (March 14th), or Human Rights Day (Dec 10th), or Talk-like-a-pirate-day (Sep. 19th), or Blasphemy Day (Sep. 30)), or Global Handwashing Day (Oct 15). Also, the formerly religious holidays like Valentine's or St. Patrick's day, how much do they actually have to do with the underlying mythology?
Of course humans need to celebrate but I think religion is also in this regard just an excuse. Many of the religious holidays were derived from older traditions that mostly have to do with the solar cycle or certain natural phenomenons, harvest times, winter solistice etc. Even if people ascribed to them some mythical meaning, basically they are celebrations of our place in the universe and nature.
Not to mention if we want people to stop all beliefs in anything that has not been proven, then we also need to stop people from believing in ghosts, the supernatural, astrology, aliens and UFO's for starters. None of those things have been proven. So, no more daily horoscopes... No more "ghost whisperer".... etc..
I don't want to stop people from believing, just from having their beliefs influence the way other people are allowed to live their lives (and by other people I also mean collateral victims like gays, children and women). I don't see any tax exemptions for astrologers and UFO believers, so there is a little difference there.
However, the main reason I don't mind religion is that I think people have trouble distinguishing between good and bad. I think they need someone to tell them what is right and wrong and religion has served that purpose throughout history.
Ironically, that is one of the main reasons, I object to religion. Because there is no real distinction between good and bad in religion at all. Of course religious power-mongers rely heavily upon pointing out this apparent dichotomy and framing the world according to their own views and in such a way that it reinforces their own power over the simple folks. Basically, what is good and bad may change from generation to generation at the whims of a few powerful individuals.
Even though it is true that religion has served the purpose of showing people what they ought to think of as good or bad, it did so by a blatantly flawed mechanism. Only after more enlightened people came up with a code of laws, and the religious dogmas phased out, there was some sort of progression towards justice (that is the kernel of distinguishing between good and bad, IMO).
Your idea of children being free of brainwashing til the age of 10 is interesting but can you imagine having a conversation with your 9 year old son who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer; "Well, son, you're gonna die and after that... well, that's it kid.. lights out. Sorry, son, since there's no proof that anything else happens after you die, I gotta tell you that I'm pretty sure it's all over for you here in a few months. That's just the way the world works"
One possibility being more comforting than the other is of course no argument for or against that idea, not even for or against lying to children. Personally, I don't see why there is an absolute need for lies to get by an overwhelmingly tragic situation (just imagine I live with that certainty every day of my life, even if my death might be decades in the future, yet I don't feel the urge to buy into something that has no evidence and logic). I can think of some strategies to be comforting that do not involve lying, like conveying to that boy a sense of importance and love from his parents, friends etc.
That is a major misconception about non-religious people: just because we are so in-your-face on internet sites when we don't necessarily push our disbelief to every dying child out there. When confronted with such situations I tend to ask more than tell and subtly encourage the beliefs that they hold anyway. Fortunately I have not yet had to deal with one of my own children dying but I imagine them being brought up as atheists does not mean they are going to be whiny pessimists.
Mostly, this happens when the scriptures are taken literally instead of interpreted.
Another big problem I have with religion. Even if all people today suddenly "saw the light" and became moderate believers who don't take the scriptures literally (as many already do), what does people down the road in some hundred years prevent from "reconnecting with the roots", becoming fundamentalists again? For nearly a thousand years only a small percentage of the population even knew how to read the bible, so literally most of the people did not know anything that they were not told. Only after the so called enlightenment period when the bible got translated, printed en mass and people learned to read, the fundamentalism bs started! Prior to that, the cleric silently agreed to some parts of the bible being not quite accurate, and their power being more important than the actual words of the book. Of course that story is vastly different for Islam where the spread of the religion was accompanied with the spread of the "holy" language, combined with the tendency to commemorate the scriptures (as depicted in that "fun" little clip above). As I said before, Islam is in many ways more progressive and effective than Christianity, for the good and for the bad.
Clearly, though, in both cases (and many others), the clinging to those old, wishy-washy texts that get weirder and more unintelligible by the decade, has done more harm than good. A reasonable process would have discarded any bad stuff, rewritten the ambiguous passages in a sensible manner and added new sections as time and society progresses, coincidentally like we do with laws and regulations.
I find them to be good people on the whole and I don't feel the need to force them to recant their beliefs and become athiests or agnostics.
I don't want to reeducate anyone. But, I guess, that is one instance where my opion differs greatly from the average American: I believe in standardized and centralized education (for the major subjects, of course there is room for individualism in arts and crafts). So, IMHO, home schooling and the often accompanying religious brain-washing should be outlawed, and to go even further, the influence of local BOEs should be greatly diminished. By eliminating religious indoctrination of children while providing them with the facts and information about the real world and the means to use reason and logic about what they may encounter in the future (before they encounter them), I think the appeal of religion and other supernatural claims would be greatly decreasing and slowly vanishing into the fringes (there may be people, though, who are inherently religious - mildly schizophrenic IMO - and who will invent it anew, but they will be like today's conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists - as THOSE already ARE people who have not been (sufficiently) primed by religion, so they substituted something other for it).
how to solve some of the problems that religion inherently creates without first accepting why they hold their beliefs and then trying to understand them.
I know why they hold their beliefs: because they were told so by people they trust who also did not know better. But, let me be clear, I try to distinguish between the people who hold the beliefs (whom I try to give the respect as a fellow human being until proven otherwise) and the beliefs themselves whom I mostly regard as harmful and try to attack and rebut as directly, decisively and sharply as possible.
That's where I was coming from. I didn't mean to attack you so much but it was my reaction to what I perceived as an attack on some of the Muslim members of TYT.
I think, Muslims who have found their way to TYT and don't want to kill Cenk, who often states that he is essentially an apostate (who can be killed by any Muslim), are not people I would feel the need to attack, but often I encounter really deep-seated notions about Islam that seem irrational to me (not to mention that it seems weird to me to defend Muhammad on the pedophilia issue and take offense in the ideat that he might have slept with 400 women...).
I feel like they're getting it from all sides right now and that we should at least keep things respectful.
From my POV, I feel like reason, secularism and atheists got it and get it from all sides and are often seen as not having any right to be respected at all. Payback is a bitch ;). Also, I really think that tolerance of fundamentalism and its onsets (like not allowing criticism of historical figures) is the wrong way to go in every instance.
by
eborujion on
02/13/2010 03:13:44 PM EST
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