Religions are Falsely accused.

[Madmogwai]

I can't think of any examples of religious wars besides the Crusades (including the Crusades in Northern Europe and the Balkans where they committed genocide against the native people who refused to convert), the European Wars of Religion and our modern international Islamic jihadist conflict. War usually isn't about religion.

And you think still the Religion is at fault, it was man that made the decisions.
And I still believe the crusades were for material gains.

 

[Augustus]

I'm not a psychologist but I think you have a bad case of conservatism.

The orthodoxy of seeing History as a teleological process ending in salvation of one form or another (be that eschatological or melioristic) is at least 2000 years old via Christianity and its more recent secular progeny of Western Liberalism, Islam, etc.

I'm not sure it counts as being conservative to belong to a minority (at least in the West) that thinks that the pre-Christians had it more correct in the tragic view of human nature which was dominant before that (tragic as in humans there is no salvation or teleology to history, humans don't really learn and cannot transcend their nature so just exist in cycles of gains and losses).

It can't be conservative to reject perhaps the core principle that underpins the currently dominant worldview imo.

Nope. Waiting for Jesus is passive and discouraging. It's what you do when you think you are helpless. Keeping this narrative out of politics (and your daily life) is encouraging. It enables you to think about what you can do to make things better and gives you the hope needed to be active. Secular humanism and (your version of) Christianity are diametrically opposites in that regard.

As an atheist, I don't have a version of Christianity.

It does have one key advantage over Secular Humanism and other forms of utopianism tough, in that it accepts humans are fundamentally flawed and thus cannot save themselves and relies on Divine intervention for salvation.

Humans thinking that the less pleasant aspects of human nature can be 'fixed' if only we could all become more rational is a dangerous delusion.

That's why religion is so often painted as the devil in the secular salvation narrative. If we can only cast out the devil then we can reach the promised land.

Christians who think they can speed up the 2nd by eradicating sin were always among the worst kinds. Their heirs in the secular utopian traditions were/are often just as bad, if not worse.

hat was what I were saying. Unrealistic goals lead to disappointment, yes. But you don't want to have any goals out of fear of disappointment.

The idea that accepting the tragic view of human nature means you can't have goals is a common misconception of Humanists. It couldn;t be more wrong.

You can set goals just the same, it's just that the goals are based on accepting human limitations rather than thinking they can be fixed.

 

[Heyo]

You can set goals just the same, it's just that the goals are based on accepting human limitations rather than thinking they can be fixed.

Mitigated, not fixed, at least not now, maybe in the far future. I never said "fixed". Maybe that is what lead to our disagreement. (Aside from being of the same opinion only with different grades of optimism.)

 

[Augustus]

And I still believe the crusades were for material gains.

Do you know how expensive it was to go on crusade? It would be the modern equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions for those from higher classes.

Many people had to sell off the family home and jewels (often to the church), and so many people sold off property and valuables it depressed the market.

Most people had no chance of turning in a significant profit and never expected to return home, although a few of the key nobles like Bohemond, Baldwin, etc. might well have seen the Crusades as a source of opportunity for land.

If you were a knight and just wanted to enrich yourself with plunder, you could do that pretty easily in Europe with a lot less risk and hardship.

It's pretty clear that the religious impulse was a driver for many folk. Just like today people's value systems motivate folk from Europe and America travel to Ukraine to fight the Russians.

It's pretty clear religion can motivate people to violence, the more pertinent question is whether or not it makes people more violent on average than 'secular' belief systems.

My personal view on that question is there is no reason to believe humans would be significantly more peaceful without religious belief systems. Humans are just a pretty violent species.

(tbh I don't even think we can draw a meaningful distinction between religious and secular belief systems which renders the above point somewhat moot)

 

[Augustus]

Mitigated, not fixed, at least not now, maybe in the far future. I never said "fixed". Maybe that is what lead to our disagreement. (Aside from being of the same opinion only with different grades of optimism.)

I understand what you are saying, but I think the difference between meliorism (continual incremental progress) and the tragic view is more than a degree of optimism.

One, at least implicitly, assumes that humans control their destiny and the 'crashes' can be avoided if we are smart enough and seeks to optimise systems and make them efficient for the good times, while the other view knows crises are inevitable and designs systems to be resilient to these at the expense of optimising them.

For example the global economy is optimised for efficiency, and thus very fragile to shocks as we have seen recently. There is the classic clip of German MPs mocking Trump for suggesting they were over reliant on Russian energy a few months before the invasion which illustrates this worldview very pertinently.

Or to bore folk with the 1000th posting of my favourite quote, Bertrand Russell is the meliorist, and Keynes the tragic.

Bertie [Bertrand Russell] sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that human affairs are carried on in a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was carry them on rationally."

John Maynard Keynes

 

[Heyo]

One, at least implicitly, assumes that humans control their destiny and the 'crashes' can be avoided if we are smart enough and seeks to optimise systems and make them efficient for the good times, while the other view knows crises are inevitable and designs systems to be resilient to these at the expense of optimising them.

One can even keep the optimism in knowledge of the inevitable periodic crashes. E.g. capitalism is a system that is bound to crash every now and then. 1. A system built on eternal exponential growth can't work in a finite world. 2. Human nature (the 1% who tend to flock to positions where they make economically relevant decisions, psychopaths) will recklessly create conditions of high risk, high reward.
But we have always recovered from the crashes and, when you disregard the spikes in the curve, we see a constant (not exponential) increase in the standard of living.
The same goes for another profession loved by psychopaths, politics, especially geopolitics. That was a reason why I chose the end of WWII when referring to moral evolution. Wars and revolutions are the spikes in the curve of moral development. They are (usually short) periods of crashes after which the development quickly returns to the status quo and keeps on slowly and constantly rising.

So far the crashes seem to be inevitable but that is a biased view. We don't see the cases were crashes have been avoided. But there are a number of cases where crashes have been predicted based on past performances which didn't manifest. Was that just prophesy of was that due to people seeing the crash coming and preventing it?

Am I a bad prophet when I say that the US and her system will crash hard within this or the next decade and they somehow get their act together before that happens (not that there is any sign of that)?

 

[ChristineM]

Man is responsible for everything man does, you are the apologist as you pass the blame onto books which are inanimate objects.

Man is responsible including manufacturing religions and learning from them and acting on them.

 

[PureX]

Do you know how expensive it was to go on crusade? It would be the modern equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions for those from higher classes.

Many people had to sell off the family home and jewels (often to the church), and so many people sold off property and valuables it depressed the market.

Most people had no chance of turning in a significant profit and never expected to return home, although a few of the key nobles like Bohemond, Baldwin, etc. might well have seen the Crusades as a source of opportunity for land.

If you were a knight and just wanted to enrich yourself with plunder, you could do that pretty easily in Europe with a lot less risk and hardship.

It's pretty clear that the religious impulse was a driver for many folk. Just like today people's value systems motivate folk from Europe and America travel to Ukraine to fight the Russians.

It's pretty clear religion can motivate people to violence, the more pertinent question is whether or not it makes people more violent on average than 'secular' belief systems.

My personal view on that question is there is no reason to believe humans would be significantly more peaceful without religious belief systems. Humans are just a pretty violent species.

(tbh I don't even think we can draw a meaningful distinction between religious and secular belief systems which renders the above point somewhat moot)

I think what you are overlooking is that their "religious view" was completely selfish, in that what they gave up on Earth they believed they would gain in an afterlife. So they weren't really doing it "for God" or for religion. They were in fact doing it for what they believed they could gain from it.

The same was true of the more recent Muslim terrorists that people love to point to as "killing for God and religion". When in fact they were doing it for their own imagined gain.

People are selfish, and religion can be used to exploit that, or it can be used to help them counteract it. Religion is just as set of tools. And blaming the tools for what people choose to do with them is both foolish and ineffective, because the tools don't choose their own implementation.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Lol, and still you cannot see the obvious bigger picture.

Naturally not, because the only "bigger picture" is a product of your mind -- and I can 't go there unless you write it out.

 

[Kfox]

Religions have often been wrongly accused of being the root cause of conflicts and wars throughout history. However, it is crucial to recognize that religions themselves do not initiate wars. Rather, it is the manipulation of religious beliefs by leaders and individuals that serves as a smokescreen to further their own ulterior motives, such as the acquisition of land and control over valuable resources.

I guess it's sorta like the ole saying "guns don't kill people, it's people with guns that kill people". Huh?

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

I guess it's sorta like the ole saying "guns don't kill people, it's people with guns that kill people". Huh?

Excellent! Religion doesn't kill people, it's people with religion that kill people!

A gun does nothing at all without a finger to pull the trigger. Without a human to embrace (and use) it, no religion has any meaninful existence at all.

 

[We Never Know]

I guess it's sorta like the ole saying "guns don't kill people, it's people with guns that kill people". Huh?

Its what a gun in the wrong hands can be/is used for that makes them a problem IMO

 

[Quintessence]

Unfortunately it is a huge factor in their behaviour, but I still say they are at fault.

Why do you think you choose to tell the story that way? For example, why do you construct this tale as about blame and needing to assign blame? What is the purpose behind faulting individual humans as opposed to taking account of the myriad of factors that cause any given outcome? How does this change your approach to resolving perceived problems? Are you satisfied with those outcomes?

You can only behave how you choose, ultimately whatever you do regardless of influences is still your choosing.

How do you know, and why do you choose to tell the story that way? Should we suppose your choice of story here is the only correct interpretation? Isn't that a bit ironic given we are permitted, via your own story here, to tell ourselves otherwise?

In any case, I find it downright dangerous to disregard external influences on human behavior for a lot of reasons. Not just because it is at odds with what I was taught in higher education - that the vast majority of human behavior is explained by externalities, not factors like personality or choice - but because this line of thinking offers an easy excuse to abusers. Abusers routinely gaslight their victims and twist things around so that the victim's reactions are somehow their own fault rather than those of the abuser who harmed them. And I'm seeing chilling echoes of that sort of thing in some of your other posts in this thread.

 

[danieldemol]

@Madmogwai
In my view all religion is man-made. In the context of this view it doesn't make sense to ask whether fault lay with the religion or the people because any fault with a man-made religion *is* the fault of the man/woman etc who made it.

You also seem to believe that humans have absolute control over their choices as opposed to those choices being a product of nature and nurture. Does this accurately reflect your belief?

 

[We Never Know]

@Madmogwai
In my view all religion is man-made. In the context of this view it doesn't make sense to ask whether fault lay with the religion or the people because any fault with a man-made religion *is* the fault of the man/woman etc who made it.

You also seem to believe that humans have absolute control over their choices as opposed to those choices being a product of nature and nurture. Does this accurately reflect your belief?

Of course religion is man-made. Where else would religion have came from? Surely a god(if one existed) didn't create religion.

 

[Saint Frankenstein]

And you think still the Religion is at fault, it was man that made the decisions.
And I still believe the crusades were for material gains.

Well, they based those actions in religion, so you go take it up with them that religion had nothing to do with it.

 

[ppp]

And you think still the Religion is at fault, it was man that made the decisions.
And I still believe the crusades were for material gains.

Christianity is de facto for material gains. The forms of Christianity that are not are few and far between.

 

[Madmogwai]

Its what a gun in the wrong hands can be/is used for that makes them a problem IMO

But Guns can be useful to, and necessary.

 

[SalixIncendium]

It occurs to me that the primary defense of religion by the OP here is that it's man, not religion, that causes conflict.

Can someone tell me who it was that created religions?

 

[Quintessence]

Can someone tell me who it was that created religions?

Religion emerges out of the relationship humans have with their environment or their circumstances (aka, the world). It's a co-created construct that results from life experience and addresses who one is (identity and purpose) and whose one is (belonging and relationship). Put another way, religions develop to navigate existential questions and their practical implementation as lifeways and worldviews because humans think too much for their own good instead of simply existing and being as most other animals seem to.

Because I observe religion is an emergent property of the human condition, I don't consider it possible for any thinking human to not have a religion (whether identified as such or not; as @Augustus says, there's not really any meaningful way to distinguish between "secular" and "religious" systems). It is inherent and inseparable, so in many ways it is weird to go "humans are at fault, but this inherent quality of being human isn't at fault" ends up not making a lot of sense to me.

I doubt the OP sees it this way. Like many, they probably view religion as something one can carve out of oneself and stick in a box because that is how mainstream culture encourages us to understand religion. Or something that not every thinking human just has. Fair enough, if so. If they want to confine religion to irrelevancy in all things that's their call for themselves.