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Originally Posted by raison_d'etre
Ok, how does this work for you: People do both good and bad things in the name of religion. In both cases the act could be done without religion being present.
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Not really in both cases. There are things of harm religion causes that I can not see happening without it. Take the
recent story of the parents who watched their child die of a perfectly treatable type of diabetes because their religion claimed it was against gods will.
Now I am not saying horrific child abuse can only occur in religion. Clearly both theists and atheists engage in THAT. No, what happened here is something even worse than that. Insidious in fact. These parents were not abusing their child in their eyes, but loving it perfectly. They honestly thought watching their child die was the RIGHT Thing to do.
What religion here did was take the purest love we as a species have... that of a parent for a child.... and warped it entirely. The old saying comes true of "Good people will do good things, bad people will do bad things, but to make good people do bad things... takes religion".
But it goes deeper than that. Religion is in and of itself dangerous. It is dangerous because it is corrosive to the single most important thing we have to aid our survival as a species.... discourse. It is a conversation stopper. Two groups of people who believe a set of propositions based on nothing have no common basis for dialogue. It would be like two children with a shared imaginary friend arguing over what color their friends hair is. They have no common basis for discourse, let alone resolution of the conflict, because their world view is divorced from reality entirely.
Contrast this to.... say.... science.... where a truth in the west is also a truth in the east and if any disagreement arises then the facts can be observed, the experiments done and a resolution reached.
There is an old saying "Where goods do not cross borders armies will". People like Micheal Shermer have changed that to fit the conversation on religion. "Where words and ideas do not cross borders, armies will" and religion has been one of the greatest barriers to the free exchange of ideas our species has known.
So I do not say it lightly when I say that religion causes no good that can not be caused in it's absence, but it causes much harm which could not, or it would be very difficult to, cause in its absence.
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Originally Posted by raison_d'etre
And there is no bad done because of religion that is not done without it.
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I think I have covered this above, but I will go further here by repeating the original point. The point is not really whether good/bad is done with/without religion. The point is whether you can adumbrate a causal link between the two. The fact is with religion you can, and I did with two examples above but I can do more.
Simply not believing in god however has no causal link that I have thus far in my life been shown. Much less so by this thread or you yourself.
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Originally Posted by raison_d'etre
Atheism is a religious viewpoint.
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Only in the same way that not playing football is a sport and not collecting stamps is a hobby.
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Originally Posted by raison_d'etre
I could shoot someone and claim that evil doesn't exist so what I did was only natural.
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You could, but that would by your actions and your claims. Nothing to do with religion or atheism. Atheists also reach the position rationally that killing is bad. They do not need a religion or a god to reach this position and the idea we are "merely animals" does not seem to compel them to reach the positions you fantasize about.
Further we must also notice that this is a utility argument. Even if the idea we were "just animals" was to be harmful, despite the fact there is no basis to think it is, this would not for one second mean god actually exists or religion is true.
Quote:
Originally Posted by raison_d'etre
Both can lead to harm.
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No. People of both can do harm. Adumbrating a causal link between both and harm however is only easy in the case of theism. That is the crux of my point. You choose to focus doggedly on the fact atheists cause harm too. I have never denied that. What I am denying is that there is a causal link from atheism to that harm. Whatever motivated their actions it was something other than thinking to themselves "There is no god".