[MonteQuest]

You could equally say religion makes evil people do good things.

Give me an example of an evil person doing good because of religion.

John Newton, who went from active slave trader to abolitionist because he found faith through the teaching of the Anglican Church.

Not talking about someone finding faith. Was John Newton still evil while doing good? No.

I'm talking about someone who is evil doing good things because of religion. Religion makes people who are good do evil things.

[SeaGypsy]

You could equally say religion makes evil people do good things.

Give me an example of an evil person doing good because of religion.

Paul, or Saul, there you go.

[SeaGypsy]

If acting like you give a sh@t is good, & not giving a shi@t & acting accordingly is evil, & if good & evil have equal weight of numbers, something stops most of the evil people from acting out. The something is a belief in a higher power, the State, your intended victim's older brother, or God.

[evilgenius]

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.--Steven Weinberg

Yeah, but what is good and what is evil? For some people that answer is relative. For other people it's codified.

I tend to equate evil to a sort of selfishness that cannot see others, can't experience empathy. It's something like that, but not actually or wholly that. The knowledge of good and evil, that metaphor as it pertains to the self and what it does to a person's consciousness perhaps. About how the very understanding that those exist can cause us to see the world in relation to us, revolving around us in a way that is not healthy.

I don't know that it is about works. Obviously anybody can do what the world would label a bad work. That's why the Catholics separate sin out into mortal and non-mortal types. Go too far with that, though, and you can run into trouble with basic concepts, like equality. It's very easy to assign people to a station in life with no rights simply because the sort of life they were born into seems to predestine them to commit all kinds of violent or otherwise mortally sinful acts. Then love gets cut off because of a sort of distaste and loss of trust that those people were born as innocent as anybody else. So it becomes chronic.

[MonteQuest]

Give me an example of an evil person doing good because of religion.

Paul, or Saul, there you go.

Saul had a temporary moment where he shed some tears, when David showed mercy in not killing him when he had the chance. But his pursuit to kill David continued soon after, from what I remember.

That wasn't religion, that was an act of mercy.

Don't remember Paul being evil but speaking of it.

[MonteQuest]

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.--Steven Weinberg

Yeah, but what is good and what is evil?

That question isn't relevant. It's what evil things good people have done in the name of religion.

[onlooker]

Yes religion is a man-made contraption that pits man against man and justifies it as God's will. Think the Crusades, think God's chosen people, think the Inquisition. All these examples of man displaying his worst attributes under the guise of sanctimony. Their could not be a worse idea than to ascribe to any group the mantle of exclusive devoutness and righteousness. That is what religions does. God is not something that can be appropriated or possessed by a person or group. I would say if they're is a proper way to see and communicate with God that is via humility whereby each member of humanity can have a personal spiritual relation that is totally a private exchange between a man/woman and God. That is just my opinion.

[SeaGypsy]

The very word 'God' belongs to religion, else nobody but Germans would have a clue what it is supposed to mean. Martin Luther used God, to replace- supplant 'Gods' plural in the many languages he translated the New Testament into. This is why 'Thor' occurs in Scandinavian translations, Thor being already a monotheistic patriarch, His Name was acceptable to Luther. Before Luther, Christians used the word 'Jahovah' a bastardised version of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, YHWH, like the hippies called Yahweh, but in Hebrew the old church pronunciation was closer, something like- Yod Hod Vah Hey, translating to something like 'The Lord of Hosts', or the Host of Hosts. Luther chose the word God from old German on the basis of the resemblance of the word in meaning to YHVH, the source of gut, or goodness.

[onlooker]

Pretty interesting Sea. I found this:
An Additional On-Line Reference:

Word origin: God - Our word god goes back via Germanic to Indo-European, in which a corresponding ancestor form meant “invoked one.” The word’s only surviving non-Germanic relative is Sanskrit hu, invoke the gods, a form which appears in the Rig Veda, most ancient of Hindu scriptures: puru-hutas, “much invoked,” epithet of the rain-and-thunder god Indra. (From READER’S DIGEST, Family Word Finder, page 351) (Originally published by The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., Pleasantville New York, Montreal; Copyright 1975)

Now if the sources noted above are accurate, then the word that we use for the Supreme Being, God, comes from a very pagan origin. Thus the word god is used generically by many different religions to refer to their deity or “invoked one.”

Some may laugh at the notion, the very idea that the word “God” has any origin or association with Hindu Sanskrit. To illustrate how this is possible, we again quote from ‘Family Word Finder’ on the historical development of our Modern English language:

Page 7, ‘Word Origins’ - “English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, which consists of about 100 related tongues, all descended from prehistoric language of a pastoral, bronze working, horse breeding people, the Aryans, who inhabited the steppes of Central Asia about 4500 B.C. Scholars refer to their language at this stage as proto-Indo-European, or simply Indo-European."
So definitely God has a pagan origin.

[Ibon]

My opinion is that it isn't going away anytime soon. Brought up atheist by my parents and to this day am very grateful never to have been indoctrinated by any religion. I have always saw folks carrying around religious beliefs as something parasitic that weakens reason. Kind of always felt sorry for folks that got hooked when children and could never shake it off.

The natural world is full of more than enough marvels and wonder to satiate the need for something spiritual. Atheist parents and naturalist training have been great antidotes to any religion every having a chance gaining any foothold in my world view.

I wish humans didn't carry around this monkey on their backs. But that doesn't change that the vast vast majority of humanity have been duped into religious belief systems.

[C8]

I don't see the presence or absence of religion making much of a difference in how people act. I have seen plenty of really mean, judgemental people who were religious and also who were atheist or agnostic. It seems as though a person's personality type is a bigger factor than their beliefs. Many have died for religion and many have died for atheistic communism or socialism. People who need a cause to believe it will find it whether it involves god or not.

Every so often a murder will happen in the name of a religion. Like clockwork, somebody will post in the comments that religion is primitive and that atheism isn't. Yet in the 1900's many more died in atheistic nations like Nazi Germany, Communist Russia and China than by religious wars.

In terms of quality of life, the best places to live have not been Muslim, Catholic, Buddhist, or Hindu or atheist- they have been nations dominated by protestant Christianity.

The problem is human nature- not a belief in God. Getting rid of god doesn't necessarily make things better- the people just worship dictators.

[Ibon]

That is all true C8. Religion is an artifact of our tormented monkey brains so we cannot blame specifically religion. It is nevertheless a rather primitive and crude construct to layer over the bare naked reality of existence which is what I was getting at. I lost my mom recently, a crazy irreverent soul. The hospice worker was telling me that in his experience, just the opposite of what many of us probably assume, the most difficult patients he deals with who are dying are those that are religious. He says that for every dying religious patient who calmly and humbly welcomes death and the expectation of an afterlife there are a hundred who complicate immensely their dying process over thoughts of sin and guilt and worry over their relationship with god. Maybe this hospice worker works with a unique sub culture of aging confused american suburbanites or perhaps he is actually confirming my point that religion is a harmful monkey and parasite on the backs of most people. Some even will blow themselves up physically and literally while others blow themselves into strange guilty corners with their minds because of religious doctrine.

It would be great for our species to be educated away from religion. There will still be a monkey on our backs which was kind of your point I guess and I do acknowledge that but why not address the monkey directly?

[SeaGypsy]

Looping back to the G word for a moment. God in the Indian use of the word is definitely a known Person, they use the word to describe their greatest Avatar, or enlightened beings. To a Hindu, Buddha is a God, Krsna, a God, Sai Baba, a God, Jesus, a God. The abstract use of the word in Lutheran Germanic based European - God as distinct from human, distinct from Christ, makes no sense in Sanskrit based Vedic culture, because it tries to blend impersonalist nihilism 'Godlessness' (a form of atheism) with religion- which always comes from inspired human beings. The reason Hindus love Jesus & Christianity is because they present in the Holy Trinity- divine personhood. The fact the Trinity continues to be debated among Christians appears daft to Hindus. Jesus is respected as a God or Avatar in India because he displayed each of the divine qualities in abundance- Creation (Vishnu), Destruction (Shiva) & Sustenance (Brahma).

[evilgenius]

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.--Steven Weinberg

Yeah, but what is good and what is evil?

That question isn't relevant. It's what evil things good people have done in the name of religion.

MonteQuest, I'll give you that the greatest restraint against the advancement of any religion is actually the people who believe in it. What you are saying, though, that it takes religion to make a good person do evil things, flies in the face of the other things that can grip people's hearts just as unquestioningly and just as corporately. There are many things that do the same, such as nationalism, economics, politics, tribalism, to name a few. Perhaps what you really mean is that religion is amongst the oldest? Long before there was any kind of patriarchal dominance there were people carrying around harvest season idols, willing to sacrifice the things they held dearest to themselves so that they could ensure harvest season success.

What people miss in the grand excoriation of religion is the turn that religion has made under written language. There is, of course, the impact of the law given at Sinai, whatever you think about where it may have really come from. Judeo-Christian heritage is certainly not the only place where this turn has taken place either. What was the law after all but a means to try and sort out a way to go forward as a tribe or society given the struggle against the chaos inherent to such an endeavor? Wasn't it just the realization that to do so as a going concern required an ethical understanding? In fact, the way it happened in many traditions is not too dissimilar from the way that democracy has discovered over time that the suffrage must spread in order for the ideals to prevail.

I think what you are pointing the finger at is not necessarily religion, but a host of stubborn and easily accessed memes. Under a religious populace that doesn't understand the importance of ethics they can express themselves in the burning of witches or the hatred of a people for no reason other than a name. Under nationalism they fan the flames of war, whipping the people into a quick fury as they rally around revenge or the chance to become great. Under economics they throw people into pseudo-intellectual positions which actually set them as opponents to their own interests, blinding them to their own class and convincing them that they too can be CEO, or achieve to a similar standard well outside of that which is much more likely.

[MonteQuest]

I think what you are pointing the finger at is not necessarily religion, but a host of stubborn and easily accessed memes.

No, it's religion.

[Timo]

Satanism is a religion. Doing good by Satan is doing evil by any other religious standard. Quite frankly, i think challenging Arkansas to place a statue of Satan on the Capitol grounds was a brilliant move. Was is good? That depends on your contextual understanding of what is good and what is evil. If your aim is to promote Satanism, from their POV, it was good. If your aim is to highlight the unconstitutional hypocrisy of allowing the State sanction of one religion over any other, again, brilliant. Promoting Satanism, in general, however, most people would find evil. As for myself, i'm happy just standing on the sidelines, looking at religious zealots of all faiths get up on their soap boxes to make fools of themselves. I find religion highly entertaining. It's also a very profitable business.

[Timo]

BTW, the fundamental nature of good and evil are moral standards, not religious standards. Religion simply high-jacked those moral standards to promote themselves over all of the other religions out there. When push comes to shove, however, religion does not define good or evil.

[evilgenius]

BTW, the fundamental nature of good and evil are moral standards, not religious standards. Religion simply high-jacked those moral standards to promote themselves over all of the other religions out there. When push comes to shove, however, religion does not define good or evil.

Absolutely right! As I've said I think religion's biggest problem is its believers. So far no major religion is based upon the notion that God as a being would be bound by the same ethics as we arrive at when we ponder such things. There are hints of this in Christianity, when it emphasizes love as the basis for the law and the prophets. I think Jewish teaching is very similar, so Christianity gets no lock on that. The thing is, in practice they don't do as they say. Instead they all tend to push their God as a supreme being who is somehow above the law, or above ethics. They preach a kind of teaching that encourages a piling up of numbers over adherents. And when they do focus an adherence it is with a notion of exclusivity that reasonable ethics is not compatible with. Islam isn't immune to this either. You see it in their denial that they have any gays, and in their envy of the things that the Western World has without any acknowledgement of the systems that are necessary to gain such things.

[SeaGypsy]

As a spiritual drifter & internationalist I find the Abrahamic religions funny in one aspect particularly- they all have anti idolatry as a fundamental principle, yet they all practice it. Jews with their scrolls, Christians with their white Jesus & crosses & communion, Muslims with Mohammed & Mecca. The notion of God without a reflection expressed through personality & practice is just vagary.

[careinke]

My view on religions is; everyone should be allowed to practice any religion they want, as long as I am not forced to participate in them.