Religion: Ironically the root of all evil?

[Pollux V]

So many wars, countless deaths have occured because of religious difference. It fuels hate, when you look at the entire world and every war or petty squable going on the basis for it is religion. Pakistan and Inda-Islamics and Hindus, Israel and Palestine-Jews and Islamics, America and the rest of the world....

It seems that instead of doing good, like it was undoubtedly intended to do by whoever started the whole idea (I'd like to meet him. Start up the time machine professor!). The basis of all religions seems to be the ability to satisfy a question of origin, but apparently differences in this sheer guess mean deaths by the millions.

What would the world be like if religion never existed? Would there still be wars, or at least as many? Would technology be more advanced (borrowed from another thread)? Would discrimination as we see it be nonexistent?

The world would be a better place if we could just formulate our own individual opinions on what happened 'at the beginning' and what happens when we die, instead of having a random priest or cardinal or rabbi or monk or whatever breathing down our necks. Right now it's more of a choice but this has not been the case for most of the rest of human history.

 

[Tyler]

"What would the world be like if religion never existed? Would there still be wars, or at least as many? Would technology be more advanced (borrowed from another thread)? Would discrimination as we see it be nonexistent?"

War is part of human nature. Early human tribes fought over land and food. Certainly there would be one less reason to fight if religion wasn't here, but that would in no way END war.

 

[Pollux V]

You're right. It would really end a good deal of the wars and fights going on right now, though. It's too much to ask, for everyone to just give it all up, and it may never happen.

 

[Asguard]

actully i can't think of one war that was purly religiouse

all of them that come to mind are actully political

so the real question should be is POLOTICS the root of all evil

and the corect answer is YES

 

[Pollux V]

When you get rid of politics, you get rid of the way things work. Politic is just a fancy word for argue. One of my teachers told me that politics is 'the art of making everyone happy' or something like that. We can't get rid of politics, religion seems to be a much easier route. Politics is intwined inreligion and generally everything else (especially the numerous cliques of girls at my school--jesus christ there's like fifty wars going on right now), so it is impossible to get rid of politicing without taking a chunk out of everyone's brain.<@

 

[Asguard]

so you kill something that actully HELPS alot of people

GOOD ONE

plus it is actully easier to destroy politics than destroy belife in people

ask rusia

they couldn't even get rid of the catholic faith, all they did was send it into hiding

 

[Neutrino_Albatross]

Ive decide that although religion has screwed over alot of people and has been a bad thing civiliazation may not be able to survive without it (see "Was Religion Necessary?" thread)

 

[Tyler]

"actully i can't think of one war that was purly religiouse
all of them that come to mind are actully political
so the real question should be is POLOTICS the root of all evil
and the corect answer is YES"

Well Hitler killed Jews because they were Jews. How about that? If there was no religion he wouldn't have differentiated them. How about the Crusades? If there were no religions there would be one less major thing to fight over.

As for politics being the root of all evil? No, that's just a stupid comment. Evil has no root, what we consider 'evil' is first of all different to each person. And second of all, it's part of human nature.

By the way, religion has long, long been a major partner in politics. And at one point, religion controlled politics.

 

[Asguard]

the crusades we for political gain

there was a power strugle in the church at the time (if i rember righly) and that was the best way to make the problem go away
no different from all the other wars being fort across erope and britan at the time

i doubt WW2 was about religion because he also persicuted catholics which were his OWN faith, and gays and comunasts and disabled people and people with brown hair (like his OWN)

Hitler wasn't just evil, he was insane but even so there are MANY times where a leader needed an enermy and so invented one

example was the frist roman emporer

 

[Tyler]

"there was a power strugle in the church at the time (if i rember righly) and that was the best way to make the problem go away
no different from all the other wars being fort across erope and britan at the time"

The crusades were fought in the name of religion. No religion means no religious-political struggle would have happened.



"i doubt WW2 was about religion because he also persicuted catholics which were his OWN faith, and gays and comunasts and disabled people and people with brown hair (like his OWN)"

The War itself wasn't about religion. Hitler was an angry man who saw Aryans as a master race very logically in his mind. Killing Jews was an incredibly important factor to Hitler because he saw the Jew as a virus which needed to be destroyed. Again, if there was no religion to differentiate people he wouldn't have picked on a group like that. What Hitler did to gays and commies was far from what he did to Jews and the Jewish religion in general.


"Hitler wasn't just evil, he was insane but even so there are MANY times where a leader needed an enermy and so invented one"

Yes there are. But I would argue to my death that Hitler wasn't just a man who wanted power and so consciencly invented the Jews as an enemy.

 

[Raithere]

Personally, I find that, religious or irreligious, people are pretty much the same. People have very strong tribalistic and xenophobic proclivities. Leaders give their followers ideologies and identify enemies (whether other "tribes" or ideologies) in order to bring them into cohesion and assert their power. This is our nature; tribalism is part of our evolution. Religions, nations, states, geographical regions, non-religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and athletic teams: the people who dedicate themselves these ideas all show their tribalism to varying degrees. Tribal identity is exhibited in our clothing, personal grooming and decoration, cuisine, music, literature, art, language, and dialect. Violence is often a result, particularly when the differing tribes come too close together and their ideologies are in opposition.

Benevolent leaders will try to smooth out the differences, particularly in favor of a larger tribal philosophy. The US is a great example of this attempt and demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining this homogenization. Other leaders will focus their tribe upon and exaggerate the differences, increasing the segregation of tribal identity, particularly when they have an aggressive agenda in mind.

Knowledge, education, desegregation, intercultural exposure, can all assist in eliminating violence. Even more so we need to build a tribal identity without exclusion and separation. We need to perceive the divisiveness of the leaders who would segregate us in order to consolidate their own power; identify them and their actions for what they are and eliminate them from positions of power.

After the civil war, a woman was upset that Lincoln was not planning to desecrate and punish the south, but wanted to reconstruct instead. She asked him, "Don't you want to destroy the enemy?" Lincoln replied; "Madam, do I not destroy the enemy when I make them my friend?"

"The tribe is whatever we believe it is, we become one tribe because we say we’re one tribe.
You grow by making us part of you.
Then we are one tribe and our greatness is your greatness, and yours is ours.
We must see all other tribes the same way.
As one tribe, our tribe all together, so that we grow by making them grow."
“Speaker for the Dead” by Orson Scott Card (edited for clarity)

Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace. - Dalai Lama

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of reach of common understanding - symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. - "God Emperor of Dune" by Frank Herbert

~Raithere

 

[TruthSeeker]

Originally posted by Asguard:

actully i can't think of one war that was purly religiouse

all of them that come to mind are actully political

so the real question should be is POLOTICS the root of all evil

and the corect answer is YES

Good to see that someone knows this!
May I add...
...money and power...

 

[Cris]

Tyler,

We tend to think of Hitler as the originator of WWII, but the Nazi party was also considered a significant religious movement. I was following some web references a few weeks ago and the stories are confusing. But the hardliners in the party did indeed see themselves on a religious quest.

And I think you are right, I don't see how anyone could see the Crusades as anything other than motivated purely by religion. Anything else would have been a side-track.

Cris

 

[Raithere]

Originally posted by Cris
And I think you are right, I don't see how anyone could see the Crusades as anything other than motivated purely by religion. Anything else would have been a side-track.

Religion was definetly an issue but you can hardly state that anything else is a side track. As with almost all wars there are strong economic and political factors:

Political:

For decades the Turks, fierce nomadic warriors recently converted to Islam, had been conquering outer areas of the empire and subjecting these lands to their own rule.
…
Emperor Alexius Comnenus knew he did not have the means to stop these invaders on his own. Because Byzantium had been a center of Christian freedom and learning, he felt confident in asking the Pope for assistance. In 1095 AD he sent a letter to Pope Urban II, asking him to send armed forces to Eastern Rome to help drive out the Turks.
http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa101397.htm

Political/Religious:

The Papacy in Europe had acquired considerable power over the preceding decades. Isolated churches and priests that had been under the authority of various secular lords had been brought together under the influence of Pope Gregory VII. Now the Church was a controlling force in Europe in both religious and secular matters, and it was Pope Urban II who succeeded Gregory (after the brief pontificate of Victor III) and continued his work. Although it is impossible to say exactly what Urban had in mind when he received the emperor's letter, his subsequent actions were most revealing.
At the Council of Clermont in November of 1095, Urban made a speech that literally changed the course of history. In it, he stated that the Turks had not only invaded Christian lands but had visited unspeakable atrocities on Christians (of which, according to Robert the Monk's account, he spoke in great detail). This was absolutely false, but it was just the beginning.
http://historymedren.about.com/library/weekly/aa101397.htm

Economic:

Europe was already in a period of expansion, and its capacity for war and conquest had grown during the years of fending off raiders from all direction. Most importantly from the standpoint of the crusades, the Italian city states had developed navies of merchant/fighting vessels that had seized control of the Mediterranean. They had reconquered Sicily and southern Italy from the Muslims, and there was a general sense that, like the Vikings and Magyars, the force of the Muslims was spent and that the way eastward lay open.
http://www.ku.edu/kansas/medieval/108/lectures/first_crusade.html

Economic:

The middle classes were now ware of the profits of the eastern trade, and were searching for some way to bypass the middlemen of the eastern empire and to trade directly with the Muslims. They knew that they could become rich by cutting out the Byzantines and taking for themselves the profits that the Byzantine merchants had been making on trade with them.
http://www.ku.edu/kansas/medieval/108/lectures/first_crusade.html[/

~Raithere

 

[Cris]

Raithere,

Some good quotes but these are the side-tracks still. The overriding jusfication was to destroy all Muslims or convert them to Christianity.

All lands and politics in those times were dominated by Church and religious controlled politicians. It is impossible to seperate the politics from the religion.

Like nearly all wars it is one ideology trying to force itself on and replace an opposing idealogy.

In the case of the crusades religion was the primary overiding issue.

Cris

 

[Pollux V]

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That seems to be 'the name of the game,' that people with power who have it for a long time purposely or inadvertantly make mistakes that damage the populace they control.

The bottom line is that you can't get rid of politics, it's simply part of the human brain to argue and make deals that mutually benefit multiple parties involved. Religion cannot be destroyed immediately but it can be phased out over an eon or so. The process likely started back when the US was formed and religious persecution began to decline in the world.

 

[Dragon Stone]

!

This may be way off subject from what you people are talking about, but, oh well.

Religion, you must understand, is what creates us, molds us. That's ironic because we created it. We created religion to have something to grasp onto and explain what cannot be explained by any normal mortal standards. We created it and it became our rulebooks. It became our morals and determined what we should value or despise. Every human has a religion, even atheists, who in the long run believe in themselves. And is that not a religion?

War, to answer your question, is over power. The want for power comes from our morals, our morals from religion, and religion from ourselves. Even without religion war would still exist because it is soley about the gaining of ultimate power. And power is enough to exist on its own, with no need for just humans. For even animals, who have no religion, fight for power. Its animal nature, and humans are more or less animals. War has almost nothing to do with religion. War is just something we do.

Advanced technology? Huh! I just had to laugh at this question! Yes, yes, our brains and our thumbs our largely in part due to our success, but we need ideals to store there. And where do ideals come from? You guessed it, religion! Without religion we would not be nearly so far into technology or an organized government system. Without our ideals to make us better we'd be lost. We'd be thoughtless and emotionless. And emotion and thoughts is what makes us want an easier life, in which we create machines to help us. I do not believe there is an "advanced" species of life out there such as aliens. I believe they exist, but I don't believe them to be smart. How can a speicies thrive at the top if they've no religion or culture to keep them going on? How?

Just to sum it up, yes, life would be more peaceful, but not better. We'd be like the animals: we'd hunt, feed, and mate. That would be our purpose. But with religion we've found a deeper purpose, a need for discovery. Humans need to know what's out there, no matter what the price. Without religion, without a want to know, we'd be emotionless and moral-less, without anything to drive us to be our best. And without that, without what creates who we are, then we are nothing. Religion may be the cause of evil, but it is also our cause for goodness. For truly the one cannot exist without the other. So accept both. Accept religion and get over it.

Dragon

PS As for poltics, why get rid of them? They just make our lives so damn peechy keen. That is said with all the sarcasim I can muster.

 

[tomzyk]

Just briefly getting back to the Hitler topic:

About a year ago I went to see the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Just from looking at all of the different ways people (not just the Jews, but everyone) had been categorized was pretty amazing. (Body size, shape, facial structure, length of fingers and toes, proportionality of various body parts to each other, etc...) From what I got from my experience at the museum was that Hitler didn't so much care about the religious beliefs of the Jews, but more about their physical characteristics. (They were generally shorter, weaker, etc... than people of, say, Norse/Germanic ancestry.)

This gets back to something I read a few years ago. (Sorry, I don't have an exact reference for anyone.) I heard that Hitler had suggested to his officers two books to read for "intellectual and spiritual benefit and growth". The first was the Bible and the second was Neitzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".

A few months ago, to satisfy my curiosity, I picked up a copy of some of Nietzsche's works and it did show one of the fundamental beliefs of the Nazi's: "the master race" (or as Neitzsche put it in TSZ: "the super man" or "the over man"). The "over man" is basically what we should strive to become, improving ourselves physically and mentally so that we would eventually become "gods" ourselves. (Much like how we are so much more "god-like" to apes, the over man would be to normal homo sapiens.)

It seems almost as though someone told Hitler about Neitzsche's "over man" and he just went in his own direction with the idea removing (killing) people he thought were preventing the human race from evolving further rather than simply trying to improve himself and others (which is what TSZ is about).

It's also curious that Hitler would recommend the Bible to read along with a book by Neitzsche. (A book about one of the most popular religions in the world with a book by one of the most popular atheists in the world.)

 

[Xev]

Psst, Tomzyk, Freddy wasn't really an athiest. He more felt that God was irrelevent, or "dead".

Also, Freddy didn't seem to think that the ubermensch was somthing that we could reach any time soon. He imagined a bridge stretching from the animals to the ubermensch - man tries to cross this bridge, but has not reached the ubermensch. That is why Zarathrusra, the hero, is not the ubermensch himself - he is a hereld of the ubermensch.

"I love all who are like heavy drops falling one by one out of the
dark cloud that lowereth over man: they herald the coming of the
lightning, and succumb as heralds. Lo, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the Superman."

The superman is not exactly the summit of human achievement, he is almost beyond human. More human than human*, he is not merely stronger mentally and physically, he is better distinguished by his lack of conventional morals. The will to power is his only law.

I do not find Hitler's suggestion of Bible and Zarathrusra to be odd. Hitler was a slimy, ugly, stupid little untermensch who bargained with the masses - the masses, and was a dirty little anti-Semite. Freddy had a falling out with his sister when she married an anti-Semite. Needless to say, Freddy would have despised the ball-less little Austrian.

Erm, on subject:

Dragon-Stone:

Without religion, without a want to know, we'd be emotionless and moral-less, without anything to drive us to be our best. And without that, without what creates who we are, then we are nothing. Religion may be the cause of evil, but it is also our cause for goodness. For truly the one cannot exist without the other. So accept both. Accept religion and get over it.

Is it? What good has religion done? And are you seriously contending that all athiests are emotionless and moral-less?

You do realize how damned foolish you sound, making such a claim? You do realize how easy to disprove that claim is?

Without anything to drive us to our best? I see. So Abraham Lincoln was not driven to his best? Giordano Bruno was not driven to do his best, although he died rather than accept Christianity? You do realize that Mady Murray O'Hair's husband fought in the second world war? You do realize what an exemplary life Voltaire led?

I do not need to defend my honour, yet I would ask you to be a little more careful with your claims. Extrordinary claims require extrordinary evidence, no?

*Bladerunner is actually an interesting movie to compare to "Zarathrusra".

 

[(Q)]

Every human has a religion, even atheists, who in the long run believe in themselves. And is that not a religion?

Believing in oneself is rational because we exist and we control our destinies. Believing in gods is irrational because they do not exist. Big difference.

Even without religion war would still exist because it is soley about the gaining of ultimate power.

Rational people do not clamor for power. Rational people do not instigate wars.

War has almost nothing to do with religion. War is just something we do.

You must have flunked history in school. Many wars have been completely centered around religion. Name me one war that started as a result of rationality.

Just to sum it up, yes, life would be more peaceful, but not better. We'd be like the animals: we'd hunt, feed, and mate. That would be our purpose.

No. Our purpose is to seek knowledge, not hide our heads in the sand.

But with religion we've found a deeper purpose, a need for discovery.

Discovering what ? Fairy tales ? Lies ?

Humans need to know what's out there, no matter what the price. Without religion, without a want to know, we'd be emotionless and moral-less, without anything to drive us to be our best.

Rubbish. We do our best when we ignore religion and embrace knowledge and understanding. Religion is not required to have emotions and morals. Those are inherent to rationality.

And without that, without what creates who we are, then we are nothing.

More rubbish. Religion holds you back from being everything you can. With religion, you are nothing.

Religion may be the cause of evil, but it is also our cause for goodness. For truly the one cannot exist without the other. So accept both. Accept religion and get over it.

Many exist quite normally and happily without religion. Accepting religion is accepting ignorance.