[Taraz]

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Why can one not argue that religion is useless? Let's imagine an ideology which states that all money should be burned and that we have to pay "in nature" only. Most people would say that the idea is stupid and that the ideology supporting that is useless in a sense that it doesn't do any good to society or to our world. It might have good side effects but wouldn't it be better to just try to take the good side effects to practice and discard the useless ideology?

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You're free to try to prove that religion is useless. But we are so far away from knowing that that I think it's kind of ridiculous to state it as fact. I wouldn't object if you wanted to claim that certain specific beliefs are useless. But humanity has always had religion throughout it's history and it's pretty silly for you to step right up and dismiss the whole enterprise as useless. Obviously we've had a need for it for ages.

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Well, probably some would "fall" into superstitions like the serious hardcore astrologists today but it would be quite minor, I'm sure. There are people living today who don't need religion and they live in a world full of religion. What if the world wasn't full of religion? Children simply wouldn't have the need to build their world views around a Creator if they are taught the things I mentioned.

This is of course a huge task. What I'm stating here is that the world should become more sophisticated and intelligent. It's not a coincidence that most top scientists don't believe in a Creator. Do you have to be very intelligent in order to be non-religious? I think in some way you have to be more enlightened simply because non-religiousness requires analytical, critical thinking and not all people today are capable of that. That should be our goal, though. Just as we try to make the whole world able to read we should try to make the whole world able to be non-religious. Some sorts of superstitions will always be around, I'm sure, but anything we can do to help the situation is good.

People can enjoy the mystery without religion. Again, Einsteinian sense of God etc. The community aspect is strong, sure. People have a need to belong. Hopefully the world doesn't become so individualistic that the only place to do that is a place to worship a Creator.

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It's weird because I pretty much agree with you on every point here. My only adjustment would be to change the phrase "non-religious" to "non-dogmatic". I guess this gets back to the definition of "religion".

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The analogy of religion as a language is not good though. Language is just a mean to communicate. It is by its nature trying to be neutral. Religion isn't neutral, it has substance which it is trying to spread. I agree that religion has probably been born from a need to discuss this aspect of our emotions but I don't think it is as harmless as you make it sound to be. I think it would be better if we talked about that stuff "in another language", in a language of analytical thinking for example.

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I think you misunderstood me slightly or maybe I was unclear. People use their religion to describe experiences for which they have no words. I don't know if you've ever had any spiritual experiences before, but people don't know how to describe them other than "God spoke to me" or something similar. We also use religion as metaphor and to describe our relationship with the unknown. I realize that this is a hard thing to grasp, but people use religion to describe what they don't know or don't have words for. Obviously I think it's necessary to educate people about the world so they don't keep interfering with what we currently know about the world.

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Generally I'm not saying that feelings or sense of a mystery is useless or stupid or whatever. Far from it. I'm saying that we should be able to discuss about that stuff without superstitions/dogmas. We should not be uber-rational robots uncapable of emotion or appreciation of love and beauty. We should strive to discuss and view those things in another way than a religious dogmatic way.

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We're in complete agreement.

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Well, why don't you tell me why we would need religion? Religion isn't the only way to talk about the mystical experiences we have like I stated in the last paragraph. If we continue to compare religion to an ideology, what inherently good stuff can an ideology contain that isn't otherwise reachable? Ideologies are human made. They are packages that we have created. They contain stuff that we put there.

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Again it depends on your definition of religion. I would counter, how are you sure they we don't need it on a societal scale? Again, I'm not talking about specific dogmatic beliefs, just the language, principles, and community of religion. We might be able to replace it with some other system, but it would still be what I call a religion.


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Can we be good and moral and nice and compassionate and tolerant without religion? Yes. If someone claims otherwise he's saying that all atheists are bad or some other nonsense and he must not be taken seriously. Religion isn't a source of our morals. Religion didn't build our moral codes, I'd say it's the other way around and that our moral codes help built religion.

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Yeah, but often the best morality of a time is codified by a religion. By spreading this religion you are spreading this version of morality. Again, it's not particularly relevant now, but this is how things have gone historically.

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Like I previously said, if religion would vanish now at this very second many people would go into personal chaos and as a result the world would go into chaos. But as you agreed with me before, children should be taught differently. They should not be encouraged to build their world views and personal images around a Creator. If we take away this belief in a Creator, why it would have negative consequences?

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That wouldn't eliminate religion necessarily.

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You're right, it's much easier to try to modify religion to be better than to get rid of it. The difficulty of the task is still not an argument against the idea that religious ideology is useless. Useless in a sense that even though some people find it useful it isn't necessary. So maybe the better word would be unnecessary.

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I guess I think we should try to modify because elimination on any relevant time-scale is impossible IMO.

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In any case, what I'm championing here and what most "crusading atheists" that I've heard of are promoting is that we should be able to criticize religion and that we should get rid of religion's special status which does not belong to it. A dogmatic religious belief system is bad because people can live without it. If it didn't have any negative side effects I'm sure nobody would mind religion but it has side effects and it's a huge force in our world. Therefore the goal should be to get rid of this unnecessary ideology.

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I am all for criticizing the dogmatic and harmful elements of religion. But that is hardly eliminating religion as a whole. People are always going to be organizing their beliefs and coming up with names for these belief systems. I guess I don't understand what the difference between a personal philosophy and a religion is.