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M*W: There is nothing emotional about it. I make my own choices, and I'm not influenced by another's emotional underpinnings. Nothing in this life is granted to us without our own will making it so.
Is Hate Delusional Thinking?
- Thread starter PsychoticEpisode
- Start date
M*W: There is nothing emotional about it. I make my own choices, and I'm not influenced by another's emotional underpinnings. Nothing in this life is granted to us without our own will making it so.
While I like lightgitantic's answer I'll supplement one of my own.
The consumption is in his time, mental efforts and desire to display his belief. be it by fashion or verbally.
The evil perpetrated in the name of god is by an a few extraordinary people whose numbers are irrelevant for a case study of how atheism affects the average individual. I'm saying that atheism today manifests its self in obsession. The atheist is more outspoken because he's a minority, it consumes their time and resources to be an atheist. This is not universal, or even a good stereotype. But 'Q' and people like him go out of their way to post attacks against religion when the presence of a god is assumed as a starting point. When the starting of a point has god assumed and you believe it to be false aren't you obsessive if you're responding at all (If your response is in disagreement with the premise)? This is especially true when you're both in a minority. I never engage in religion conversation with Christians and interject "But Jesus isn't savior" for a few reasons; it doesn't help my case, it doesn't further their discussion, it's a reiteration of what they probably already knew of my opinion.
The worst wars of modern times and the worst atrocities have been committed by areligious states, which do not have religion as their motivation.
Can we see some evidence for this?
How does that "squelch" the argument unless you are claiming that atheism has no influence on a person at all? I could easily "squelch" your argument by saying that any "religious" person who makes war is clearly an atheist pretending to believe in God to attain his ambitions. We have confessions from atheists here who tell us outright that they hide their beliefs to attain their ends.
Even though there is a thing or two I could say in response to this, you are changing the subject.
Q made the point that religion makes good people do bad things.
I asked what makes an atheist do bad things.
IOW I am asking about the hatred that is expressed on an individual level (since if you want to extrapolate the phenomena to a communal level, you inevitably bring in the sociology of power, politics and media which don't really stand as being intrinsically a/theistic .... for instance one could just as easily paint a tirade of atheist powers having a field day in ignorance the moment they come to office)
hence one's own personal emotional issues come to the fore
we didn't will ourselves into life.
Neither do we will the basic requirements of life (like water, air and food) into existence .... although we do seem to have a knack for spoiling them
And death will inevitably pay us a visit, no matter how much we might will to the contrary.
We might bring our will to bear on a few things, but these are but minor details in the bigger picture in which we exist.
And what is the source of religion? People.
The source of communism, nazism, and other isms are also people. So what? There is no need to be disgusted with the people when it is the ideology that drives them.
Irrelevant, since there is no ideological justification for doing bad things, unlike religion.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Even if that were true, I noted that the only valid way to measure the evil done by evangelical monotheism is to average it over the two millennia since it first began its metastasis. I regard the annihilation of half of the world's civilizations as a greater evil than the results of WWI and WWII (which some historians regard as one war with an intermission). The Holocaust (which is included in WWII's death toll because the Nazis understood that it could only be undertaken under the fog of war) cannot be separated from Christendom's millennium of antisemitism, clearly a religion-based hatred. That leaves one point for Hitler: his attempted genocide of the Gypsies, which is not a religion-based hatred.
Besides, as Jung pointed out, evangelical monotheism exacerbates our species' tribal instinct by making its disciples believe they are superior to their neighbors AND that someone needs to help those poor neighbors improve themselves even against their own objections. He noted that Christianity specifically puts its communities into a frame of mind in which they can easily be swayed toward war, probably because of its emphasis on a fictitious afterlife that makes mortal life seem easier to sacrifice.
It is not a coincidence that the Christian nations have developed the "weapons of mass destruction" that define their era, starting with guns.
Genghis Khan's body count is certainly impressive: ten percent of the population that the transportation technology of the era brought into his sphere of influence. But the Mongols never attempted to commit genocide, and they certainly never attempted to destroy a civilization. Their m.o. was simply to take over the leadership of a prosperous civilization and enjoy the perquisites that came with leadership. In fact, from China to Turkey, to a greater or lesser degree they assimilated into the occupied peoples. In China they adopted the language and in the Middle East they adopted the religion.
This contrasts with Caliph Omar's armies, who brought an end to the traditions, practices, language and other culture of Egyptian civilization (except their sturdy stone monuments), marginalized the population, flooded the country with Arabs, and established an Arabic culture with the Arabic language and the Muslim religion. (In Afghanistan, with modern weapons at their disposal, Caliph Omar's spiritual descendants actually destroyed some gigantic treasured statues of Buddha that were carved into a mountainside.)
And do we need to recount the evil done by Pope Urban's armies in the Americas? The 2,000-year old Aztec/Maya/Olmec Bronze Age civilization was demolished, leaving, again, only the huge stone edifices whose destruction was beyond the power of pre-industrial weapons. Their libraries, the repository of their history and culture, were burned so completely that today we have trouble deciphering Maya script. The same fate befell the slightly younger Bronze Age civilization of the Incas. They had not invented writing but the Christians melted down their "blasphemous" artworks--the legacy of their culture--and shipped them back to Europe as raw bullion. Throughout the Western Hemisphere, including north of the Rio Grande where the first baby steps toward civilization were in progress, the natives were marginalized, their culture pushed aside, and boatloads of Christian occupiers claimed the so-called "wilderness" as their own to exploit and convert into an outpost of Europe. Everywhere they went, the first buildings were churches and the "heathen" locals who had managed to survive where assimilated.
But until very recently those "ends" were so often purely religious in motivation, generally rooted in the evangelical imperative that shapes Christianity and Islam. If atheists in disguise were in command of the armies who fought the wars that defined the Reformation, what would they have to gain from either the defense of Catholicism or the victory of Protestantism? If Pope Urban were a closet atheist, why would he burn books and melt down works of art, instead of packing them up and shipping them to European libraries and museums, which enhances the wealth of the victors and is the norm when Christian armies conquer other Christian nations?
Or just to survive! The Inquisition is not forgotten, and if the Muslims achieve their goal of world domination it will start anew.
But to take your point seriously, if I were a megalomaniac who found myself appointed Dictator of America, I would set about reforming America. I'd try to improve the attraction of rational thought and reduce the influence of supernaturalism and other irrationality. I'd see to it that reason played a larger role in our culture, from our counterproductive glut of attorneys to our idiotic terrorism-fixated risk management. I'd abolish the tax exemption for churches, significantly reducing their number. I'd facilitate the spread of Buddhism with its lack of a deity and its respect for science, of Hinduism with its non-evangelical polytheism that resonates more harmoniously with the human spirit, and of other Eastern philosophies that downplay supernaturalism and do not as strongly reinforce our tribal instinct. I'd also facilitate the existing growth of secularism, agnosticism, atheism and non-denominational personal religious philosophies.
What I would not do is make war on Thailand or Malaysia in order to make them Christian countries.
As a third-generation atheist who may have a mutation that lost my gene for the supernaturalism instinct, or who at least has never discovered a vestige of the Stone Age tribalism instinct inside myself, I would use my power to push my people toward peace and to integrate them into the Global Village.
Of course as a small-d democrat, it would be difficult for me to effectively wield my despotic powers.
Sorry, I was answering another question. Someone asked why atheists put so much of our cognitive energy into the phenomenon of religion, something we don't even believe in. The answer is that religion dominates the world, religion is evil, and religion continually threatens to bring down civilization and take us back to the Stone Age, where it was more appropriate. Anyone who cares about the future of our species, and is not blinded by his instinct to believe in the supernatural, can't help but be terrified of what evangelical monotheism has done to mankind.
I explained that hatred is usually a manifestation of our species' pack-social instinct. Sure it can be a rational reaction to a personal threat, but it's often an instinctive (although unconsciously rational, which Sam dismisses as unimportant, rather odd for a biologist) reaction to someone who we perceive as a threat to the survival, or at least the prosperity, of our family, our tribe, our nation, or our entire civilization.
I hate the guy who shot my cat because he harmed the emotional health of my family, but I also hate him because people who walk around shooting guns for any reason except self defense reduce the viability of civilization.
I don't know what country you live in but in the United States with its self-serving too-big-for-its-britches government, the higher a level you attain in our government, the more exclusively it selects for only two traits:
- You love power
- You will do anything you have to in order to get it or increase it
So all the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb were Christians?
Could you name the significant developers of weapons of mass destruction and their religious affiliations?
Huh? Caliph Omar came after the Persians, Romans and Byzantines. Do you honestly think the Egyptian civilisation survived these three?
Besides Omar didn't "flood Egypt with Arabs", he's the guy who could not be identified as the leader because he was dressed just like the soldiers. The Egyptian population is probably over 90% native Egypt, Arabised, but not Arabic.Omar is also guy who cleaned the garbage around the wailing wall with his own hands and invited the Jews back to Jerusalem. He is famous for his just treatment of non-Muslims and known for his humble nature. He built the Masjid al Aqsa as a place of worship for all the Abrahamic religions not just Muslims and sincerely believed in treating prisoners well. He is known for releasing all the POW Christians after the war with Byzantine and letting them go in return for a pledge of peace.
To compare him with the horde of Mongol warriors who ripped through China, Europe, Persia, Arabia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and India is frankly baffling.
This is the guy who said:
If a dog dies hungry on the banks of the River Euphrates, Umar will be responsible for dereliction of duty.
Where have you read his history?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umar#Legacy
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Exactly. Humanity is a great thing, it just needs to get together. We don't hate one another as humans, we merely despise the ideologies that attempt to divide and conquer us.
Sorry, but I don't find either ideological justifications for doing bad things. :shrug:
What does that have to do with your claim?
What does that have to do with your claim?
That's circular reasoning. You didn't answer the questions.
You couldn't provide any, what planet are you on?