Comments on: Religion Experts Respond to Aggression and Terrorism

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 05:58:47 +0000

Religion is the root… the same way WMDs were the root. Both concern things that never existed.

By: Theo Bromine

Theo Bromine — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:48:45 +0000

apologies for the misunderstanding – I’ve seen both theists and atheists misstate Hitler’s theology or lack thereof

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:16:33 +0000

I think you give faith too much credit. People kill, faith just makes them feel better about it.

By: Peter E.

Peter E. — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:05:13 +0000

Right again, Kevin!

By: Peter E.

Peter E. — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:00:45 +0000

I thought it was very clever of Kevin to include the Hitler reference.

The wink was an attempt to convey the sarcasm clearly.

By: Billybob

Billybob — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:41:05 +0000

“he fully acknowledges that there is plenty of evil without religion”

Yes I understand that but that is not what I was saying.

Sayings like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” are trite pieces of crap. We live in a complex society with no
absolute judge of right and wrong. These saying
are simplistic and useless. They simplify (poorly) our behaviour so that with our limited intelligence we can try to understand (very poorly) a complex issue.

Weinberg’s statement revised.

“With or without patriotism, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes patriotism”

Now substitute “tribalism”, capitalism or communism or …. any excuse will do to kill your neighbours and take their stuff.

I think I will write a post on this so I have time to organize my thoughts.

By: Theo Bromine

Theo Bromine — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:01:47 +0000

No insult was intended – one can engage in trolling without actually being a troll, but even with the winking smiley, it’s rather provocative to talk about “Hitler’s atheism”, especially since it’s so widely believed as a fact by religious folks.

By: Theo Bromine

Theo Bromine — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 18:58:07 +0000

Granted the lines drawn around good and evil are invariably fuzzy. And I don’t consider Weinberg’s statement to be trite feelgoodery – he fully acknowledges that there is plenty of evil without religion. But religion does have some rather spectacular examples of apparently otherwise normal people doing things that most would consider to be completely odious under normal circumstances. It’s hard to imagine getting anyone riled up (to the point of issuing death threats) about a cartoon drawing labeled “Mohammed” without religious motivations.

By: Gord Barker

Gord Barker — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 18:42:52 +0000

I would think that by now we recognize that organized religion is a control mechanism to maintain power, influence and control (however you name it) over its followers.
I agree with Theo that, ignoring the straw man argument about the nature of good and evil, it is true that for someone to commit acts that they would not otherwise do requires an outside controlling force. If you are in the US Army, its the pentagon, if you are in a religion, its your cult leader.
Sam Harris has likened it to a software programming running in your brain. And different religious software is more or less capable of moving to the dark side depending on the religion (or cult).
The Catholic religions went through this phase of attacking heritics but it took from 385 to 1826 to get over. Now they just take us to court.

By: Billybob

Billybob — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 17:22:14 +0000

I can’t help but think broad statements like that are trite. First what is evil and what is good? It depends where you are standing?

Human society is complex and cannot be rendered to a simplistic statement.

The reason we have a penchant for killing, rape and stealing is probably evolutionary. Forget the simple and trite feel good statements, they are useless.

Ghengis Khan and Pope Innocent III were the same, for Innocent the religion was just a path to power, both were psychopaths. If religion was not there some other method would be used, its human nature.