I don't think I need to add any more to that.

^^^Do you have a link or was it just fancy dress?

I could only find the Sun link on a quick search, I remember it from a while back clicky



* whistles *

In the future, people may be killing each other in the name of X, therefore X is bad.

Throughout history, people have been killing each other in the name of X, therefore X is bad.

Which statement holds more weight?



You cite two religions which preach non-violence. But that is just one manifestation of control, how about psychological control and awarding yourself power. That said, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Tibetan_Rebellion

Ah but that would have happened without religion!

Perhaps, but here religion helps them gain control, and is the reason vicious fighting broke out - not an isolated example in history of when that's happened!

So the religions preach non-violence but some of their members choose to be violent. Is that the fault of the religion, the followers or those select few who take things to the extreme?

We have laws. The majority follow them. Some choose the break them. What's at fault? The laws, the majority who follow them or the select few who break them?

If all religion was bad, it would have been wiped out years ago through people killing each other (or there would be only one religion). You cannot hold the majority for the select few who choose to do wrong any more than I can hold you accountable for the actions of say Derrick Bird.

Religion has always been used as a way to harness and focus power and therefore violence, history shows it to be so.

But then someone who is true to their faith probably doesn't care what I or anyone else thinks.

I don't align myself with any faith, though I do agree with some of Buddhism (eg we cause our own suffering through greed etc). I do believe in a deity but not in any traditional sense. I'd like to think I follow Pascal's wager.

Religion can be looked at as a form of mind control eg if you do something bad, you will go to hell and this is what happens there. In some ways, you could argue that it is a good thing and brings order to chaos. The flipside is that it can be used to manipulate people and there will always be some who take advantage of this eg fundamentalists/extremists etc.

But the question I have is what would have happened if there was no religion? Science was created as a way to understand God. So would it still have been developed had religion not existed? Would we still be savages bashing each other over the heads with clubs?

IMO religion has helped us develop "morality" eg Ten Commandments. Without this, how far aould the human race have survived?

I've just thought of a good quote about this "Organising atheists is like trying to herd cats".

To a degree I agree.

The trouble is religions helped to encourage the birth of science but as soon as it started finding answers that the religions didn't like they were persecuted.

I believe science would have flourished no matter what, we are an inquisitive beast. You could argue that we may have advanced more in science if religion hadn't held it back.

The ten commandments start off with the protectionism stuff - no praying to other gods, etc.. The morality stuff is a bit further down the list.

As far as science goes, it more than likely kicked off when rocks started to be banged together. Whether there was the kind of developed religion that we have now at the time is debatable, but I'd class religion as an attempt to explain the workings of the world using the tools and observations at the time.

Neither holds any weight at all as they are equally structurally incompetent.
It's easy do demonstrate, just substitute either of the following for X: Justice, freedom.

On a more technical note, the premise does not entail to the conclusion, so the argument is logically invalid. If it were valid it would probably be unsound given that the conclusion makes a grand statement about all X whereas the premise is based on empirical observation of some X. So you need to add another premise such that all X must lead to killing in the name of X.

Remember, you have the rationally sound religious opinion and everyone else is irrational. So you must maintain a standard of logic that they cannot. Otherwise your claims are arrogant and unfounded. There's no amount of ugly self pity that will get you out of the hole you have dug for yourself, only a severe improvement in the quality of your argument can suffice.

Some early scientists identified their craft as a method for understanding God, but that is not quite accurate. The earliest recognisable science was conducted simply to answer questions outside of religion (Eurosthenes measuring the circumference of the Earth in the 2nd century BC) - the Greek religion not being very dogmatic about such matters.

The earliest christian scientists were mostly testing information they gleaned from Aristotle. Francis Bacon can be (controversially) credited with the birth of modern science, he was explicitly supplanting Aristotle's preferred method of inquiry (which was mostly about logical deduction) with another form identified by the same author (based on empirical research). It wasn't about new ideas as such, but a choice about which takes precedence in the event of conflict.

It is unwise to credit religion with too much of the good things or the evils that afflict the world. Religion is not responsible as such for a great deal of the tragedy for which it is sometimes blamed. But it hasn't contributed that much to human advances either. Furthermore, modern religion (in the west at least) has reformed itself and abandoned the earlier interpretations that allowed it to participate quite freely in evils such as torture, murder, wars and slavery. But that entails a certain distance from the original spirit of religion - its habit of invading secular spheres - such that it can't be strongly linked to any good or evil that predates these modern reforms.

Ah! Some excellent clarification. Definitely must've been something to do with watchmaking then ie by understanding how a watch works, you can understand the mind of God. Or something like that.

I really do wonder when humans first became fully sentient. I keep having images of a hominid looking up at his/her fellows who are throwing crap around and thinking "WTF!".

I believe anthropologists believe that is exactly the origin of comedy, the pratfall in particular. So he probably said LOL.

That's the thing, you could say that we may not be fully sentient because we have yet evolved to a stage where we can fully understand what it means to be sentient.