Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: GotSteel
What I would like to know is, what's your point? Why is it that when atheists point out problems with religion so many theists feel the need to chime in that those aren't the only problems that exist as though there's somebody out there who doesn't get that?
Here's my point.
Mr. White: Blacks are stupid and antiwhite.
Mr. Black: Whites are stupid and antiblack.
Bystander: Both skin colors are stupid and racist.
Observer: Race is a red herring; humans are stupid and bigoted.
Religion is the red herring, or to use Occam's, the needlessly posited entity, in almost every instance where atheists point at religion, and it pains me to see atheists not only sharing the same blind spots as theists, but assuming themselves not to because they think they lack the causative factor behind the blind spot, often making themselves doubly blind. I'm not saying this is true of all atheists, but I've seen it very often, both on this board and in the offline world, with alarming regularity.
If we were to scratch religion, we would spend a lot of time and effort on doing so, and the result would be something else would serve the same role in every negative trait there, and we would be no closer to figuring out how to successfully deal with the shortcomings of our species, and indeed would have eliminated yet another of those helpful contrasts by which we can infer the underlying mechanisms.
If we instead recognize humanity itself as the issue, and religion as entirely irrelevant to the question of improving humanity, then that same effort can be directed toward solving the right problem, without superfluous and confounding factors in the equation, and the benefit will persist regardless of what fills which role in human lives.
The presence of different religions helps us see reflected through the differences and commonalities those things that allows us to do the differential analysis that, in turn, permits us to infer more about our underlying nature, which gives more insight we can use to improve. When we see how different people from different backgrounds and points of view reason about a single topic, we can infer something of which things are related to background and which things are because of other factors, such as the essential humanity they share. This is important in describing essential humanity and in factorizing the contributions to thought patterns.
History will keep replaying its darker moments with or without religion, so long as we look for the simple reasons (e.g. "religion did it!"), rather than taking a long, hard look at ourselves as a species and start pinning down what our problems are and how to deal with them. Things like fundamentalism and extreme conservativism are not exclusive to religion, nor caused by it. Religion plus these things equals one problem. Atheism plus these things equals another flavor of the same problem. Most of these reagents are soluble in religion and atheism both, because they're soluble in humanity. If we don't keep the reagents and solvents straight, we'll still have an explosive mix on our hands. And we still won't know why, because we refuse to grasp the chemistry of it.
Of course, there's also a personal point to make:
I'm not particularly amused at being met with bigotry and prejudice for being religious, even though it's usually dispelled once people get to know me (bigotry and prejudice usually is, regardless of its nature), and particularly not when it's by people that believe bigotry and prejudice are somehow the province of religion, rather than people pinning that tail on the right donkey. If I'm a douche, it probably isn't due to being religious. And if a religious douche becomes an atheist, more often than not, s/he'll still be a douche. Same thing goes for ignorance, violence, closedmindedness, and any number of other descriptors one might be inclined to apply.
Do you really think I was a better person as an atheist, or had any fewer flaws?
Because that's apples to apples, right there.
I could analyze social problems in the USA in terms of race, based on a higher prevalence of crime with certain races, but that would be completely nonsensical, when we can analyze the factors and see that it's a matter of certain races being stuck with a higher incidence of the actual causatives due to historical reasons. Yes, correlative profiling has its place in some cases, but it's not a basis on which to solve profound problems or make strong assumptions. For that, we need causative information, not correlations.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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