Bible Club: Exodus

[ChrisV]

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As far as Mother Teresa, when they pull her Noble Peace Prize, I'll think of someone else for the analogy.

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The Nobel Peace Prize isn't exactly an indication of an untarnished soul. Previous recipients also include Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho and Yasser Arafat. An Australian journalist once quipped that the best way to win a Nobel Peace Prize was to kill a lot of people and then promise to stop.

[ChrisV]

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But in modern Western democracies, I really can't see the issue or quite frankly the magnitude of the threat you feel religion is posing. All powers to control the life or liberty of a person are vested solely with the government. Not that I don't think there are problems, I do. But I really can't see your point that religion is the sole cause of the problems any more than if a group of UFO-oligists were lobbying Congress or basing their votes for candidates that would support building a federally funded alien welcome center. The problem isn't the Trekker organization it's the Trekkies.

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I don't really understand that analogy at the end. If people are voting to abrogate liberties because they hold religious beliefs, then our options are either to overturn democracy, which would be unwise given all other systems of government are worse, or to fight the spread of those beliefs. To put it another way, imagine all the Wahhabi Sunnis in the world moved to Australia. They would be in the majority and I'd be living under sharia law. Should I be comforted by the fact that the power to control my liberty is vested in the government?

The magnitude of the threat of religion is because religious beliefs can be (and in the past have been) used to justify just about any insane policy. If "rapture ready" type Christians ever become a majority in the US, we're all in deep trouble. Furthermore one need not even live in the same country as religious fanatics in order for one's life and liberty to be in peril, as New Yorkers found out on the morning of September 11th 2001.

[John21]

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I agree with that, of course. But I think you misinterpret the atheist position. It's not that reason should prevail over emotion. It's that when your emotions tell you a vicious tyrant is worthy of worship, something is wrong with them. They've turned against you, and only your reason can set things right. Reason here is the good friend who holds the intervention for the desperate addict. It's not that you should listen to reason above emotion, but to entirely dismiss reason is to toss yourself into denial just as surely as any addict ever has.

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I agree. I will say that emotions need to be educated. Where I think we're disagreeing is when I say religion - not solely, but also - can serve this purpose.

[John21]

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If "rapture ready" type Christians ever become a majority in the US, we're all in deep trouble.

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I don't see this as even a remote possibility. What you seem to be suggesting is that the Christian Coalition could become so powerful they could orchestrate a Constitutional Convention. And like I said, there's no way I can even imagine such a thing happening. I'm thinking more along the practical lines of removing the religious influence from civic affairs in areas like stem-cell research, creation science being taught in school, etc…

But I guess if you and others want to take on and demolish religion, oh well, it's been attempted before. It seems like every so often a generation decides to kill God, but at the end of the day God isn't dead - Nietzsche is. In the story from the OP in Exodus, legend has it that the Pharaoh had an inscription removed from the temples: the inscription read, "Nuk-pu-Nuk," which when translated reads, "I am that I am". I don't know if the legend is true or not, but I do know it's very, very old. Like I said people have been trying to kill that particular God for a long, long time.

[madnak]

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If you're talking about the Taliban rule in Afghanistan and overall societal structure, I could see your point. But in modern Western democracies, I really can't see the issue or quite frankly the magnitude of the threat you feel religion is posing. All powers to control the life or liberty of a person are vested solely with the government. Not that I don't think there are problems, I do. But I really can't see your point that religion is the sole cause of the problems any more than if a group of UFO-oligists were lobbying Congress or basing their votes for candidates that would support building a federally funded alien welcome center. The problem isn't the Trekker organization it's the Trekkies.

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I suppose we just have to disagree here. I think the entrenched alienation of Western society is the biggest problem the world is facing right now, and I think religion is one of the main causes.

[madnak]

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I agree with that, of course. But I think you misinterpret the atheist position. It's not that reason should prevail over emotion. It's that when your emotions tell you a vicious tyrant is worthy of worship, something is wrong with them. They've turned against you, and only your reason can set things right. Reason here is the good friend who holds the intervention for the desperate addict. It's not that you should listen to reason above emotion, but to entirely dismiss reason is to toss yourself into denial just as surely as any addict ever has.

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I agree. I will say that emotions need to be educated. Where I think we're disagreeing is when I say religion - not solely, but also - can serve this purpose.

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Perhaps. I can see it with Buddhism, but Christianity? It's too sour to be sweet, I think.

[madnak]

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It seems like every so often a generation decides to kill God, but at the end of the day God isn't dead - Nietzsche is.

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Nietzsche wasn't trying to kill - he was mourning. It was the religious who killed God, in a backward frenzy of mob rule. And we all feel the loss.

[John21]

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[ QUOTE ]
It seems like every so often a generation decides to kill God, but at the end of the day God isn't dead - Nietzsche is.

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Nietzsche wasn't trying to kill - he was mourning. It was the religious who killed God, in a backward frenzy of mob rule. And we all feel the loss.

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I took a little poetic license, when I said God… I should have said religion.

[ChrisV]

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I don't see this as even a remote possibility. What you seem to be suggesting is that the Christian Coalition could become so powerful they could orchestrate a Constitutional Convention. And like I said, there's no way I can even imagine such a thing happening.

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A constitutional convention is not necessary - a foreign policy driven by fundamentalism would be bad enough.

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But I guess if you and others want to take on and demolish religion, oh well, it's been attempted before. It seems like every so often a generation decides to kill God, but at the end of the day God isn't dead

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It's not an easy task, but that's no reason to be a fatalist about it. This generation is the best-armed to fight against religion there has ever been, and next generation will be even better armed. I certainly don't expect the battle to be won within my lifetime.

[John21]

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It's not an easy task, but that's no reason to be a fatalist about it. This generation is the best-armed to fight against religion there has ever been, and next generation will be even better armed. I certainly don't expect the battle to be won within my lifetime.

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Well, I wish you a limited success. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

But I have a question for you or others who are familiar with the meme complex or religion/God is a meme virus line of thinking. Have you considered the possibility that it may run even deeper in the human psyche than someone like Dawkins suggests?

Consider a point back into our primitive ancestral history, when what we consider as consciousness first began to appear in humans. Now whether that consciousness began to appear in a very gradual process over millennia or it happened to occur in a person's lifetime, I don't think really applies. At some point in time some individual began to feel a sense of self as we do now. I'm not saying it was verbalized, just that at some particular moment the concept/thought/feeling that "I am" arose in someone's mind for the first time.

Now going back to the name of God given to Moses, "I am that I am," what if that's true? What if that "I am" is the same "I am" that first appeared into the mind of primitive man? And I use the term "appeared" here, because in the mind of that primitive man, I think that's exactly the impression he would have had, but in a slightly different way. What appeared wasn't something outside of him, it was his own being that he now stood apart from - and there was something within him that wasn't there before - the I am.

The idea I'm trying to get at is, if things happened in a way similar to what I just described, and what we now call God is really that first awareness of the "I am" within, it's deeply woven into our conscious being. In a sense, it's really who we are. And whether we now refer to that process as emergence or awakening really doesn't matter too much. What matters is that it's who we are. And I feel it's a part of us we should try to understand, rather than an external parasitic virus that needs to be killed.