best arguments against religion (no theists)

So look out any Grade 1 teacher!

So you can bridge the gap between federal offenses and what the FBI is supposed to represent, yes?

Sure ... but currently you also have quite a bit of mental baggage from other association that you can't tie to me.

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Hardly the defining moments of conflict in terms of loss of life and destruction - in fact there is a good argument for secularism raising the ante in war with the refinement of national identity, standing armies, persecuting the poor, etc

As for religious sentiment fanning war, that is simply a tool and not the cause. IOW any nation engaged in sending out a popular message to its inhabitants about mass engaged combat will most certainly call upon whatever strong social tropes it has at its disposal. If a population isn't strongly religious, it will use national identity, race or political ideology.

I mean its not like winding back on religion rendered communist russia more peaceful, is it?

 

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@lightgigantic --

Prove it. As of right now this is purely speculative on your part, and quite a stretch at that, postulating two different causes for the exact same phenomenon....

 

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I have a lot of "baggage" from the association with you.

 

Then you must have a lot more from others ...

 

Don't even try to underestimate yourself.

 

I don't see how postulating that the acquisition/protection of resources is perhaps the exclusive cause for armed conflict between nations is two causes and I also don't see teh difficulty in proving it.

If however one wants to play religion in such a role, I guess the first question that comes to mind is why we don't primarily see commentaries and analysis of conflict zones presented in terms of religious ideology and whatnot ....

 

Its more estimating your encounters with others that makes me say that - slamming doors, being yelled at etc etc

 

Your actions are generally more subtle than those of others, but no less hurtful.

 

Then heaven forbid if you ever stomped out and slammed a door in my face .....

 

The Bolshevik revolution was not founded on a religious dispute, but on the the atrocities of the ruling family. The resulting ban on religion was touted to be an expansion of Marx's statement that religion is the opiate of the people. So they went overboard with that.

But wasn't Marx ahead of his time in that statement? It's prophetic.

certainly you can name a few wars that were entirely religious: serbians vs. Bosnians? Irish Catholic vs Protestant? The Holocaust? How about Seiks vs Hindus, Moslems vs Hindus/Buddhists, etc.

and I said slavery because apparently these holy Christians determined that Africans had no soul, therefore were not human, therefore chattel

But my main point had to do with the propagandizing effect religion contributes, by depriving needy minds of access to truth. For example we still have school boards interfering with the teaching of evolution.

 

I was talking more about post WW2 russia, but even the era you present clearly shows how war has a requirement to call upon whatever social tropes are dominant in the said community.

IOW isolating the religious trope as the sole or major contributor is fallacious

I doubt it

that was about independence - aka resource based

ditto above

Catalyzed by a perception of jewish business enclaves and their detrimental effect on German industry - resource again

Not sure what you are talking about

You will have to be specific

But regardless, the biggest most defining aspects or war and destruction are clearly issues of politics and the pursuit of resources (often catalyzed by national identity)

Do a bit of research and you will find that the grounds for anti-slavery was also made on the same grounds

Do you also have a problem with the propagandizing effect of atheism?

So religious schools that don't problematize evolution are all clear from establishing adverse propaganda IYHO?

 

"--god cannot be totally omniscient without our futures being predetermined."
That's a good one!

 

God doesn't need to be omniscient if he's always right.

 

well maybe we define propaganda differently

and maybe even religion

I'm thinking of paintings of soldiers bearing crosses on their uniforms, committing massacres, things like that... I suppose on another level you could try to mince the meaning of that, and conclude that it had no real religious basis, so I guess that's kind of academic. We certainly have records of heads of religious bodies sending troops to battle - that might get a little closer to what I'm saying...

Regardless, my point had to do with the creation of God by weavers of ancient myth, and the destructive consequences on human intellect by the indoctrination with propagated myth, to the point that no one can remember the reference frame in which the first myth took root, so a "blind faith" evolves out of that, and collides with reality in the modern world, where we have the tools to survey the past with a decent margin of error, to make batter informed conclusions about how this all started, and so on.

As far as atheism exercising propaganda, I'm not sure what you mean. For atheism to become an -ism would imply a belief, so it's a particular word that gets bandied about more as an epithet than as a philosophical position, which I suppose most Atheists would prefer to have as their labels.

I was not advocating propaganda, I was opposing it in all its forms. We might need to find a common definition. I think of it as spreading lies. So,, for example, when a child goes to Sunday school, and the teacher insists to the puzzled kid that every type of creature was loaded up on a huge ship, etc., then this lie is spread, so it meets my definition of propaganda.

Not sure if you oppose the teaching of evolution, but I would certainly hope you want all students to have available to them the fact that there were many geologic eras, and several mass extinctions, but never was there a flood that decimated all living things in a period of forty days.

But you lead to a good point, education is the enemy of propaganda.

Can religion exist under the crush of education? What would religion be like without propaganda?

 

my point is that we now have secular heads of state sending troops to war and that in terms of destruction and conflict, it has gotten worse

well first you have to establish that god is "created" as such - from another angle atheism is created by weavers of urban myth
:shrug:

blind faith, destructive consequences on human intellect by indoctrination with propagated myth can follow anything - even technology. In fact given the global state of a world tethering on the point of climatic/social/economic/agricultural collapse due to industry, I think it is a better form of the argument you present.

I mean you are talking about popularizing the deconstruction of religion on dubious ideological grounds (ie it causes war, stunts civilization etc)

If you want to talk about deconstructing an ideology you already have one. It's too late to back down now ...

You are advocating what you believe to be a truth (religion is myth, it is the major cause of war etc etc).
This is certainly advocating propaganda

Now compare to a puzzled kid who is told that they are essentially a bunch of chemicals
:shrug:

You can't have ideology without propaganda - IOW ideas about how the world is have consequences

 

But that's not what he postulated, and it is quite clear in his wording.

 

Is religiousness in the mode of passion or ignorance still religiousness?

 

I've always thought you have God at your beck and call ...

 

I went to a secular school, I myself was not religious at all - but I nevertheless felt deprived of access to truth.

There were so many taboos, so many questions that we were not supposed to ask, so many questions that if we did ask, we were called stupid and bad for doing so.

I do not think it is at all an exaggeration to compare the secular school system to slaughterhouses.