Keep It Real wrote:What's that saying? "If you could reason with religious people there'd be no religious people" - well you're not even allowed in society writ large to appose their beliefs in conversation so no surprise they can't be reasoned with.

quas wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:What's that saying? "If you could reason with religious people there'd be no religious people" - well you're not even allowed in society writ large to appose their beliefs in conversation so no surprise they can't be reasoned with.

The thing is, we as a society accommodate them. Freedom to believe, freedom to practice religion, freedom to discriminate between believers and non-believers.

“Although there is not the same racist graffiti as we saw in the first incident, we are treating this as a hate crime.

Scot Dutchy wrote:You two are only talking about your backward part of the woods.

Keep It Real wrote:I remember the bit of TEOF where Harris points out that for some unknown reason religion and religious belief is "beyond criticism" whereas everything else is open for critical appraisal. I encounter this "special status" of religion all the time on the net, and of course poking criticism at someones religious conviction sin the flesh would be unthinkably rude. Or was it a bit in TGD thinking on...

Scot Dutchy wrote:Religion plays no role here. Get it. Dont impose your frustrations onto people that never experienced it.

Keep It Real wrote:Perhaps if people felt a bit more free to criticise religion this scumbag/Breivik etc wouldn't have drawn arms.

quas wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:You two are only talking about your backward part of the woods.

The basic premise of religion, if accepted, inevitably leads to intolerance and probably violence. This is assuming that the acceptor has the courage and intellectual integrity to follow his logical convictions. You have a belief in a god, and this god has given you a specific set of rules and instructions to live your life and how to worship him. His rules are not compatible with the rules of competing gods from other religions. Failure to comply with these rules, have severe repercussion not just in this life, but, more importantly, in the afterlife.

quas wrote:
If you accept the existence of religion, you accept that there is going to be intolerance and violence towards the out-group of non-believers. If you accept that, you accept that there is going to be those who are probably going to violently oppose that.

Scot Dutchy wrote:They cant be intolerant as they have no standing. We dont have religion in our society or are we a violent society.

Sam 1:11 wrote:"Technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences—and hence our religious beliefs—antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia—because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal phase of our credulity. Words like "God" and "Allah" must go the way of "Apollo" and "Baal," or they will unmake our world."

Svartalf wrote:

Keep It Real wrote:Perhaps if people felt a bit more free to criticise religion this scumbag/Breivik etc wouldn't have drawn arms.

What's the OP scumbag and Breivik have to do with religion or the ability to criticize it in society? Breivik at least was a total political psychopath, I'm not sure for the more recent case.

Cito di Pense wrote:I guess we atheists can consider ourselves lucky that you are an atheist, too. Any ideology, taken to extremes, leads to violence,

You never know, though. Given human tendencies, atheists, too, may fall to fighting hand to hand for ideological purity, too.

Mark my words. Theism isn't the only evil. Ask some people, and they'll tell you capitalism is evil. If you know enough theology, you can try to prove that capitalism is foundationally theistic.

quas wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:You two are only talking about your backward part of the woods.

The basic premise of religion, if accepted, inevitably leads to intolerance and probably violence. This is assuming that the acceptor has the courage and intellectual integrity to follow his logical convictions. You have a belief in a god, and this god has given you a specific set of rules and instructions to live your life and how to worship him. His rules are not compatible with the rules of competing gods from other religions. Failure to comply with these rules, have severe repercussion not just in this life, but, more importantly, in the afterlife.

If, for example, you come to believe that your neighbour is a serial child killer, fearing for the safety of your own children, you'd notify the police to have him arrested. If the local authorities ignored your police reports, then you'd probably need to deal with this threat yourself. But your neighbour is not a serial child killer, he is of a different faith, which means there is a chance of him (or his family/kids) sermonizing to your kids leading them astray to worship his god. Could you allow him to live and thereby risking your kids' fate in the afterlife? That is a fate worse than being murdered. as the suffering of being killed is only temporary, while hellfire is eternal. It's a Sisyphean nightmare. Your kids would be murdered, then live again, only to be murdered again, so that they could continue reliving being tortured ad nauseaum.

There is no dissuading the believer, the existence of his god is not up for debate. We have to respect his right to believe, it's the polite thing to do.