I suspect the millions that have died at the hands of religious crusaders would disagree.
Although you think you’re disagreeing with me, you haven’t bothered to understand what I said. So you are actually agreeing with me.
I said that peaceful persuasion is a good thing. And you are citing violence to prove that I’m wrong? Try again.
My thesis was this: Regarding someone as potentially “convertible” to one’s own viewpoint and using peaceful persuasion to convince them to convert is better than regarding people who don’t share one’s worldview as fundamentally alien and using repression to contain, expel, or eradicate them.
See here:
I would much rather have someone try to CONVINCE me than to have them belong to a group or religion or ideology that doesn't accept outsiders and which regards outsiders as an unconvertible, irreconcilably different class, which might need to be banished, caged, or purged.
Only in very recent human history have religions moved to mostly non-violent conversion. Not that I'm defending Hinduism, which is equally as messed up as any other religion.
@whenpillarsfall, You refer to “religious crusaders”. Very well, if your point is that tremendous violence has been perpetrated in the name of religion, you are preaching to the choir. THAT WAS MY POINT:
https://www.namepros.com/threads/wh...-and-rob-monster.1128748/page-60#post-7242711
Christians are violent. Muslims are violent. Hindus are violent. Buddhists are violent. Atheists are violent. Human beings are violent. Groups of people who regard those with conflicting worldview as fundamentally alien or unconvertible by peaceful persuasion are likely to resort to repression or violence.
The Crusades were about conquest, not conversion. The Pope ordered the knights of Europe, who were busy murdering one another, to join forces and attack the “Saracens” in order to “reconquer” the Holy Land:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Clermont
“Saracens” included turks, arabs, palestinians – whether muslim or christian. Indeed, there were plenty of arab christians who fought against the invaders. That’s not surprising, since christianity originated in the middle east long before it spread through europe. To this day, there are plenty of christians in Palestine, Egypt, and neighboring countries.
Religion is a poison, to both the individual mind and humanity. It divides us, creates false differences and has and continues to allow men to carry out great evil under the pretence of a higher power.
Such a simplistic view of history. Before making sweeping generalizations, you ought to read a bit more.
Any ideology will do as a justification for genocide or to create "false differences". It need not be a religion. Invoking the communist state served Stalin quite well in that respect. Racial purity, as a concept, was enough for Hitler without invoking the Bible. If both religious ideologies and non-religious ideologies sometimes do and sometimes don't lead to "great evil", then how do you conclude that religion especially is to blame? Isn't it obvious that human nature itself includes a tendency to carry out great evil – with or without religion?
Yes, religion divides. But religion also unites. When christianity spread throughout Europe, or when Islam spread east to India and west to Spain, a wide variety of incompatible tribal worldviews were subsumed in a common worldview. Of course, human beings being intolerant and violent by nature, a common religion did not put an end to warfare. But a much wider group of people had a common set of beliefs, a common set of values, and a common set of reference points for determining truth and justice. Most importantly, they had a basis for believing that even foreigners were their fellows: fellow christians or fellow muslims.
In ancient times, a foreigner could never be anything but alien. They would worship strange gods, hold weird dissimilar beliefs, speak bizarre languages, and obviously have physical characteristics of another race. At best, one could ignore or trade with the “other”. But they could never be one of “us”. There would be no common underlying beliefs about the world and therefore no common humanity that makes all groups equal.
It took centuries to evolve the concept of a shared humanity that extends fellowship and equality to everyone on earth. And there is nothing natural or inevitable about it. By nature, human beings are tribal, petty, distrustful of their differences, prone to genocide and slavery. Human beings might be taught that everybody is fundamentally the same, but they are constantly backsliding into tribal warfare. You can see it in the USA as xenophobia, as islamophobia, as racism, as white supremacy, and even in the partisan split (partly along urban / rural lines) between the 2 political factions.
How did civilization arrive at the concept of shared humanity? By taking the tribal identity – or, rather, the part of tribal identity that is based on non-physical characteristics such as myths, rites, scriptures, customs, morals, and laws – and extending the tribal bubble to an ever larger set of people. So a tiny splinter group of Judaism (christianity) eventually spread in a way that has united, however imperfectly, a very large group of people. Likewise a small group of monotheists in Arabia spread to include between 1 and 2 billion people today.
To be sure, shared religion doesn’t stop violence or repression. How could it? Human beings are a fundamentally violent breed of ape, instinctively inclined to use force to settle disputes, take what they want, or eliminate rivals. Purging religion completely (if that were possible), wouldn’t eliminate repression or violence either. In a completely secular world, the same problems would exist.
But we have made progress. Science emerged as a result of large, unified economies that were based in empire. And empire never exists without some common ruling creed. But for the muslim empire, and the scientific discoveries it fostered in intellectual centers like Baghdad, there would have been no Renaissance in Europe. And but for christian monks in Europe, who moved from theology to philosophy to astronomy and physics and chemistry, there would have been no intellectual tradition to receive muslim science. Kids in junior high school would never be taught algebra (an Arabic word) but for the muslim empire, which required a common religion to create itself. And without algebra or alchemy (another Arabic word), there would be no science, no satellites, no secular worldview at all.
If you doubt that religion is the source of our common humanity today in the 21st century, look at the history of slavery. Who were the abolitionists? They were preachers. And why did they believe that African slaves – the most dissimilar group of people from white owners imaginable – were their fellow human beings? Because christianity gave them a basis for believing that absolutely everyone is convertible and could be saved. And that is a basis for regarding everyone else as a potential christian too. And once one regards someone else as a “fellow christian” or a “fellow muslim” or a “fellow [anything]”, one naturally begins to consider them in the spirit of fellowship and equality generally.
If you’re still not convinced by that, then look at how secular traditions such as democracy and free speech actually evolved. You can read the actual books by the authors who advocated for those revolutionary concepts, which are still somewhat new. The concepts grew incrementally, and each step was justified on religious grounds. Shocking? No. The authors were mostly religious individuals because they lived in an era when the dominant worldview was religious.
Freedom of speech is rooted in freedom of worship. It derives from protestantism, which in one sense is nothing but a religious schism, a species of infighting among christians, which led to plenty of repression and bloodshed over the years. But in another sense, protestantism was about self-determination, about the right of an individual to discover the truth and spread that discovery even if it threatened the official views mandated and taught by the state:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
That is the same impulse that led puritans (who were appallingly religious)to seek self-determination in the English colonies.
Freedom of speech was justified on the grounds that each person had a sacred responsibility to discover a divine Truth and to spread it. In a narrowly defined tribal society, the state would be the source of religion. The priest class would be the rulers. Or the king would be a god, like Caesar or Pharaoh or the shining gold-clad god kings of the Incas. But once religion has spread beyond the lines of tribes, nation states, or even empires, then religion becomes more important than national identity. For the first time, human beings could believe in a “higher truth”. And because they believed in an afterlife, they could risk their own life more willingly in order to speak out about that higher truth. In self-contained societies where the priests are always right, there is no higher truth to seek. In times of drought, the priests would require human sacrifice; and the docile citizens would oblige with their own children.
But in societies that believed the highest truth was found in a holy book, whether the Bible or the Qur’an or the Torah, it was possible to regard the priest class as wrong, simply by noting discrepancies. The truth became independent of the governing elite. And that is a massive shift in human culture. Because of scripture, the truth became separate from human authority and available for each person to study and interpret on their own. And that led to greater and greater independence of thought, as people studied not only the scripture but the world around them – initially as evidence of God’s handiwork. That independence of thought was enabled by scripture and also by religious schisms. Its original motivation was religious – seeking God’s truth without human authority. To the extent that such independence led to finding discrepancies between scripture and the actual word, it has led to a modern secular worldview. But whatever the worldview that has emerged, the origins and the process by which it emerged were very religious.
As an atheist, I obviously regard the worldview of each religion as wrong. But I’m not so ignorant that I don’t know where civilization came from. Throughout more than 1000 years, all philosophers and all scientists of any importance, were religious and believed their innovative ideas were based on and justified by religion. The society in which they lived often bankrolled their investigations thanks to religion, since many of these men pursued their research as clerics. It is no exaggeration to say that they would not have made these discoveries were it not for the religious society in which they lived. Small tribes don’t invest in mathematicians or chemists or astronomers unless they are part of the priesthood. Large empires are required for large discoveries, and those empires have depended on common creeds to spread and remain unified.
Darwin isn’t possible without Martin Luther. Isaac Newton isn’t possible without without scholastic philosophers like Thomas Aquinas (a saint) and Duns Scotus (a priest). They, in turn, wouldn’t be possible without Moses Maimonides, a jewish philosopher / theologian who wrote in Arabic and exercised positions of leadership throughout the muslim world, thanks to the tolerance of non-muslims that is permanently enshrined in the Qur’an itself. Astronomy would not have arisen at all without priests seeking to track the movements of the gods in order to predict the future.
Yes, the Catholic Church threatened Galileo with torture in 1633 if he didn’t recant his theory that the earth revolves around the sun. Does that mean that religion is opposed to science? No.
Keep in mind that the Islamic world prized scientists; and they did so on religious grounds, citing passages in the Qur’an. 500 years before the Renaissance in Europe, the Abassid dynasty in modern-day Iraq financed the most important scientists in the world, who made huge strides in medicine, anatomy, navigation, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Europe didn’t learn how to perform cataract surgery until World War I, but muslim doctors were doing so more than 1000 years earlier. And Ibn Kathir Al-Farghani estimated the diameter of the spherical planet earth around the year 850:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Muhammad_ibn_Kathir_al-Farghani
800 years later, in 1693, Americans were still putting witches on trial in Salem, Massachusetts. If Columbus had been better educated in Arab science from 640 years before his expedition, then he wouldn’t have foolishly believed he had reached India. And Americans wouldn’t watch Hollywood cowboys do battle with “indians”. Columbus underestimated the diameter of the planet because of a unit conversion error: “Columbus mistook al-Farghani's 7091-foot Arabic mile to be a 4856-foot Roman mile, causing him to underestimate the Earth's circumference, believing he could take a shortcut to Asia.”
Religion has fostered science as well as repressed it. Religion has enabled moral and philosophical advances as well as resisted them. Religion has promoted tolerance and pacifism, and religion has been used to justify repression and violence. Religion has enabled an ever-widening definition of our common humanity. Religion has even enabled discoveries that have led many of us to reject religion itself. Religion was a stepping stone to a secular society.
Most of our ethical beliefs have roots in religious precepts. That includes pacifism, tolerance, free speech, a higher truth independent of any ruling regime, and a common humanity.
Religion is a mixed bag. It can be regarded as a scaffolding that was once necessary to construct the modern world. Or as training wheels for morality that eventually come off. But it’s absurdly ignorant to call religion a “poison”. Without large unifying religions, we would still be petty tribes, at war with one another, worshipping household gods, clueless about the motion of the stars or the weather, practicing human sacrifice whenever there’s a drought or a flood, and believing in racial superiority and the extermination or subjugation of others who are not like us and cannot be converted.
There is plenty in religion to dislike. But there is equally as much to admire. And even if atheists give religion only grudging respect, it merits respect, not just a grudge. It is, after all, where we came from as a civilization.
