I am also in my right to say that I have experienced a lack of nuance and circumspection in others arguments and that posters flat out avoid direct questions where their fallacies/prejudices would be exposed by answering them.Look just a few posts up this thread, where is 4runner?
Hey, I’m still here. I just started listening to all the complaints about religion and politics on Piggington. If you have any specific questions you want answered, please list ’em. I’ll be happy to address them.
The only one I see is the contention that people won’t start pillaging even if religion were eliminated. I disagree. I think that society is much more fragile than people want to recognize and that religion is the basis for that stability. In fact, it has been for generations and no long-lasting human society has ever been established without religion. Cyphire says that this doesn’t prove that religion is necessary. Maybe not, but I think that he bears the burden of proving that something that is present in every society can be discarded.
Indeed, I think that Cyphire and Rustico are quite naive in a charming sort of way. They are unable to conceive of people acting inhumanely toward others–unable to recognize how fragile society is. I think that this naivete is a measure of the success of religion.
Because humane behavior spurred by religion is the norm, we live under the delusion that it is the standard. Aside from personal experience, the only way I can illustrate this is our reaction to events. For example, after 9/11, the press got all hot and bothered about how “well-planned/well-coordinated” the attacks were. This is plain old wrong. Building the World Trade Center– that required planning and coordination. Building a 747– once again, it requires planning and coordination.
Destroying them was the work of child.
If there is no God and no religion, people are just meat. Yes– there are laws that that stop people from doing horrible things. Not only are those laws difficult to enforce, they are also subject to revision. Look- Hitler was duly elected. It was “legal” to kill people in Nazi Germany. It was “legal” to kill people in the Soviet Union. Hell– it was “legal” to execute prisoners on death row in Illinois before DNA testing proved that around 15% of the inmates on death row innocent.
Yet, when confronted with murder, we are all left with a deep-set feeling that it is “wrong”– independent of legality. It is in this feeling that I find religion.
