July 5, 2003

Four Hours Later

I finally finished writing forum posts and emails. And I only wrote like three, which should tell you something.

At any rate, most of my assorted wordage has been on the subject of religious theory, which is always quite amusing to me as the athiest I am. This may be of interest if you like such discussion. My bit begins in reply to _real's massive July 4th post.

I've got a certain tangent from that discussion, which is why Islamic fundamentalism is our enemy, among other things. I won't post it there, for it's fairly inflamatory, but I'll post it here. You the reader may be offended by it.


Religion, on anything more than a purely personal level, is our enemy. I say this as an athiest, of course, and with a nod to the discussion on the nature of monotheisms and organized religion in the Tonto thread. To continue with that, religion is our enemy because faith and reason, faith and science can after a certain point no longer co-exist. As it is reason and science that are the keys to any sort of progress socially, materially, or otherwise, blind religious faith must be cast aside and replaced with a capacity to be skeptical and question our surroundings until we are left with an answer that is satisfactory. A life-encompassing scientific method, if you will.

Now, followers of moral monotheism will and have said to me that the end result of athiesm is an abandonment of morality, and that athiests will lose all thought of "good behavior" using, say, Communist China or Russia as an example. To that, I say that morality can be replaced with ethics - and there is a subtle distinction, in that morality is what our religion tells us is right, while ethics is what we tell ourselves is right. Athiests can be ethical beings, and as I am one such person, I ought to know.

And I'll end with that. Have I managed to piss everyone off? ;)

Posted by Dwip at July 5, 2003 6:13 PM
Comments

Abuh...

Posted by: Whir at July 5, 2003 11:52 PM

So yeah, well, disagreement.

Nice call on the moral/ethics thing. Much pondering and stroking of the chin. Hrm.

Some shaking of the head at the whole "religion is thine enemy" thing. Probably cuz I'm religious, right? I would also contest your generalization that progress only comes from science and reason. But I do agree that blind religious fanaticism is an obstacle. See: Islam.

People gathered around a pipe organ on Sunday mornings singing hymns is not an "evil" thing. =P

Posted by: Tonto Marechal at July 13, 2003 9:19 PM

The first thought that pops into my head upon reading this is that, actually, Christianity makes the most sense of anything I've ever heard. Note: I did not say most rational, but makes most sense, on more levels than the logical one. It's as Pascal said: "The heart has its own reasons, about which reason knows nothing whatsoever." Y'know how it is, when you read a book, and it not only makes logical sense, but emotional sense? (For me, that would be Lord of the Flies. First book I ever read that did that and it blew me away.) See, Christianity is like that for me. Only multiplied.

Faith vs. science: If faith is belief in that which is not proven, and science is the study of that which is provable, then wouldn't faith *have* to continue existing until we knew everything that was provable? And even then, wouldn't faith still have to exist, seeing as how we can't know everything?

And to re-iterate: There's a difference between religious faith and blind religious faith - there are some religious scholars who are amazingly smart, frex. One of the things that I have found so great about Christianity is that you can question it and it still makes sense. The more I read the Bible, the more questions I come up with, and the more answers I eventually get. It's an amazing process.

So yeah, I'm interested in what you think about that. As I am interested in what you just said. :)

Posted by: Regina at July 18, 2003 6:25 PM