DarknLight wrote:
i wonder why there was an interest to keep this debate (thread) going again, though i am interested on how we suddenly push aside our autisitc and asperger relations, and open up and talk about our beliefs, but i'm not to crazy about how we believe we can choose on what's right and what is wrong, i mean, who do we think is our moral giver? law officals? the government? are they concedered good people, or someone who just wants to make a living?
why was the 20th century the bloodiest in human histoy?
"do what thou wilt" has truly destroyed us all
we don't need closed minded atheists or violent religons, we need open minders, we need back the Gospal
To me, religion has never seemed to contain much moral truth or guidance. "The golden rule" is one gem, but this one is actually common in all religions, and in social structures generally, and has been for a very long time. There are terrible things written in some of the books. And the followers pick and choose what to apply, and what not to. Some truly terrible things have arisen out of broad religious cultures (to later be rationalized by the followers saying "well, they were doing it wrong back then" ). Or people change the subject and say "well, the atheist Stalin killed millions" in his terror-famine - as though that one facet operated independent of the social/political context of the time and place. These points of view are of course both very incomplete, being chiefly self-justifying in nature.
Anyways, I actually have an innate fear of many religions, I see them as entities breathed to life in old books from primitive times when we did not know very much. The wheelbarrow was emerging technology, for instance, when the Bible was written. I avoid religions because they seem, at least to me, to contain dangerous formulas of thinking based on logical consequences (and historical evidences) of their doctrines. I avoid them in the same way one avoids a crouching tiger - more for the potentiality of danger.
I don't think religion has any basic claim to morality - in fact, this whole concept that "we get our morals from some kind of higher authority" is itself oversimplified. We're not just doing whatever we want, to think we would do terrible things without some outside authority telling us not to, seems very strange to me. Such a suggestion seems to assume that humans are mindless children, almost. I don't think humans are uncivilized naive barbarians without religion. I do see however, that religion can often hold this very assumption itself. Each of us has a strong innate ability to govern ourselves in relation to other people - we don't just go around killing one another. So does a pirhana, for example - they are eating machines, yes, but they do not chaotically 'do what they want' and eat each other - there is an innate order. We have that, as well, as do most species of animal. We humans also pick up more subtle things from the culture around us, too, so our morality can get quite informed and complex depending on our influences.
It's a very interesting topic to me.