"People say we need religion, when what they really mean is we need police"

First topic message reminder :

The above is a quote from HL Mencken, taken completely out of context purely as a starting point for this thread.

I've been watching the 'religion' themed threads for a while now, and my conclusion is that religion seems to bring out some very nasty traits in many people - the main activity on these threads has been squabbling, sniping, argument by assertion, and puerile point scoring.

This seems par for the course whenever religion is discussed, whether within small groups like this one, or on the wider world stage (I'm thinking Crusades, I'm thinking Jihad, I'm thinking abuse of women in some Muslim cultures, I'm thinking brutalisation of Muslim prisoners in Iraq and in Abu Graib)

Religion so often seems to be the excuse we use for hating, torturing and killing people who are 'different', and it seems that, even in a friendly discussion where little is at stake, religion continues its role as a fomenter of conflict.

Yet, when you look at religious texts, the rhetoric is about God's love, duties to one's neighbours, humane treatment of animals, children and all weaker individuals, sharing wealth and resources, giving to the poor and needy etc etc. I can't see anything wrong with any of that - in fact, I'm completely behind all of it.

Religion is at the core of all civilisation - it seems to have evolved within all cultures as a means of drawing the community together, collecting and preserving knowledge, teaching children, providing 'theatre' in the form of communal ritual observances, providing a sense of safety, through knowledge of the seasons, history of the community etc. In early times, heads of state would often have a priestly role, and might be sacrificed if the harvest was unsatisfactory to placate the gods.

It's clear, at least to me, that we would not be able to live within the social groups we do, and could not have made the material advances we have made, as a race, without the influence of religion in providing the ethical framework within which we can live close to each other without raw self interest undermining any attempt to create a community.
Without communities, we are only ourselves - within communities, we have access to the talents and gifts of others - the whole is definitely much greater than the sum of its parts. Mankind (and womankind) needs to live in communities - no man, as John Donne famously wrote, is an island.

So far then, religion is to be seen as a completely positive thing - religion=communities, communities=people getting access to knowledge and resources they would otherwise lack, and thereby achieving outcomes they could not even dream of alone. Looked at in this way, religion is a completely practical and very desirable thing.

Looking around the wibbly wobbly world for inspiration, I found this series of essays - i'm only posting the link to the first - you can easily find the others if you're interested.
http://theology.co.kr/whitehead/religion/1.html

This is interesting to me because it divides the concept of religion into 4 phases:
Ritual
Emotion
Belief
Rationalism
Seems to me, so far I have talked about the first two phases, and the conclusion here is that there is no problem at all with these two.
Ritual observance brings a community together, channels the emotional energy of community members, provides entertainment, access to knowledge, the foundation for a set of rules about behaviour - in short, a police presence.
I do it all the time with my dogs - 'look over here, here's a biscuit, behave in a certain way and you will have the biscuit'.
Dogs are happy, furniture remains unchewed, the household is a happy one.

When we move on to what the author of the piece would term the 'individual' aspects of religion, I think we start to get into problems, and this may be where the negative aspects of religion arise. Belief and rationalism (forming a personal code of practice based on belief, and attempting to convince others of the validity of this) are where the subjective, 'numinous' elements arise, and where the mischief can also begin.

Some religious figures have evolved what I might want to call benign beliefs - Elizabeth Fry for example, who believed that her God loved everyone, even convicted criminals, and who expressed that belief by working within the prisons of the time to provide the benefits of civilisation to those prisoners so far as she could.

Some religious figures have evolved much less benign beliefs - I might want to cite the priests of the Spanish Inqisition, whose revelation and belief was that God loved only Catholic Christians and that the use of torture and painful death would save the souls of those that fell below this high standard.(Sorry, this is VERY oversimplified, but I hope people get the gist)

In my own journey, I have found it preferable to avoid close connection to any religious movement, because I think once you get into those 'personal' aspects of religious belief and action, you do run the risk of getting involved in beliefs and attitudes that I would find morally repugnant (the belief, for example, that Baptists, Catholics, Muslims - fill in your own denomination - have the direct line to heaven the real gen, the absolute knowledge of right and wrong; and that everyone else is going straight to Hell)

I like having the concept of god - I don't care whether anyone can prove or disprove her/his/its existence. To me the truth is that we are all god's children - we all belong to the same family, we all have the right to live, to grow and to find our own truth.

Between the world's religions and belief systems, there are many more points of similarity than there are differences - we all have a moral compass, we all believe in something - what I would like to see is a proper discussion of our different beliefs, a friendly and sympathetic consideration of the points of view expressed, and a sincere attempt to reach a common understanding.
But, hey, that's just me - carry on squabbling if you like

No Rock - cats, and you, have only one life - wondering at the Universe may be a valid use of that life, but as Trevor says, maybe other mammals - and even other species -do the same in their own way.
Having brought Maslow into the equation, you can't really just let him stand there to be looked at. Maybe, you could provide an analysis of where, how and why 'religion' interacts with this measuring tool, and maybe why soes it have to be ';religion' rather than, say, a moral system, a set of rules of conduct, abstact curiosity.
It might also be interesting to refer back to the original proposition that there are four elements to 'religion' - ritual, emotion, belief and rationalism, and consider how this proposition might fit with Maslow.

Does "belief" incorporate HOPE in that sentence. boatlady?

Many of the World's principal religions remain popular for their promises of an after-life that is better than our vale of tears.

It's an easy promise to make, because there is no record of anyone ever having claimed under the Guarantee.

Many of the World's principal religions remain popular for their promises of an after-life that is better than our vale of tears.

No doubt that is a major component. In fact, I wouldn't have an issue with a belief in an afterlife if, once again, religion was given a firm boot in the ass on its way out the door.

Unfortunately, religion tries to lay claim to the afterlife by placing a cosmic gatekeeper at the entrance - known collectively as a "god." This gatekeeper is tasked with allowing ONLY those with a particular religion through the gates and into a paradise. This obviously serves as a way to convert more followers and make your religion dominant.

But there is also the idea of cosmic justice, the desire to see those who escaped earthly justice receive their punishment once they arrive at this gatekeeper. But is it cosmic justice? Or cosmic revenge?

And there's the idea of fairness - that somehow all of the hardships we faced in life will be set right by the gatekeeper. This is different than cosmic justice in the sense that it's more about balance. Often times it seems good people get nothing but raw deals all of their lives and die poor and lonely. We want to believe that a life like that will be "made up for" in the afterlife - at the behest of the gatekeeper, of course.

Finally, there is explanation. Yeah, we humans don't like randomness and chaos. We want to believe everything has a reason. Therefore, when the star quarterback, class president, and prom king with the 4.0 grade average is killed on his way to church by a drug-addled drunk driver, we want to know WHY! The question "why" is probably the first question most children ever ask. The idea of an afterlife often gives people a partial reason. God needed heroes in Heaven or God needed another angel or, in the case of the star quarterback, God needed a quarterback for his heavenly football team. It prompts the notion that a person's untimely death means that God himself somehow desired the deceased's presence at his side.

Oddly enough, no one really says that about people who die of natural causes, and even less about those whose deaths were a foregone conclusion. Strange, that.

There may very well be some kind of afterlife. Who really knows? But I don't believe for one nanosecond that there's a cosmic gatekeeper bouncing people out of Heaven for believing in the wrong religion - or no religion at all. Oftenwrong, you talk liberally about tribalism. Well, there it is.

“the beliefs he grew up with” had nothing to do with the prediction.

No, they had nothing to do with that specific prediction.

But take Sir Isaac Newton, for instance, a person we laud for his scientific discoveries. Yet he also believed in things like alchemy and astrology - things no scientist today would give any credibility. We, all of us, including Einstein, are both blessed and cursed by the culture we find ourselves immersed in. There is no escaping its influence no matter how smart you are.

Believers can be as much victims of fashion as dressmakers.

Losing thse plot here, slightly, and not sure I'm on the right thread for this insight - thought recently, we all learn something in our lives - personally my lesson after 62 years is that I have more to offer the world than my parents and teachers led me to believe. Would rather like another lifetime in which to apply this learning - this of course would lead to needing another lifetime to apply yet more learning - i can sort of see where the idea of tansmigration and/or life after death comes from.

Hi Boatlady

Are you up in the Norfolk Broads? Is that your own boat in the pic? We were up in Thorpe Market a couple of weeks ago for a break. Lovely part of the country.

Take care, snowy

This fine professor, possessed of incredible intelligence and childlike wonder, started off agnostic.

Even scientists can be overwhelmed by the knowledge they possess and fall into the the trap of the 'God of the gaps', Rock. Delusion is not exclusive to stupid people. We humans are adept at deluding ourselves at an alarming pace.

Ask any 60 year old man who wants to buy a Harley or thinks he has a chance with that cute 35 year old. Ask any 50 year old woman who still has that size 6 dress in her closet from when she was 18 and thinks that one day she'll still be able to get into it.

Yes, snowy, I do live near the Broads - the boat pictured is a good bit grander than mine, but you get the idea - really longing at present for some warmer weather so we can get back on the river. We usually stay to the south of the Broads - Beccles, Oulton Broad, Reedham etc - also very pretty.

OW
- I think when religionists speak of 'belief' they seem to mean a form of 'knowledge' that is based on hope and a form of direct experience that cannot be explained or properly described (see the Christian mystics for attempts to describe the experience)
You can also have what seem like similar experiences by using various drugs - mescalin, for example, I believe, can give a sense of access to a transcendant reality; Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary, to name but two, have experimented with altered consciousness and the attempt to reproduce a mystical religious state of mind.
When modern Christians speak of 'knowing' god and 'believing' in the life everlasting, I'm not sure just what that's based on, which is one reason that I do bang on a bit about epistemology.
In the wake of a couple of glasses of wine, i believe I made some remarks earlier about transmigration, and how this might be an attractive notion - i guess Heaven is also an attractive notion - sort of a reward for delaying one's gratification in this life.

Why? The Bible contains the ethical and moral principles for which they thirst.

I'm willing to bet that they thirst for a moral government, not religion. I'd also point out that the Bible does NOT say anything about democracy, freedom of speech, and definitely NOT about freedom of religion. After all, why would the Bible tell you to go right on ahead and worship Sheva if you want to? Of course it doesn't. In addition, the Bible is filled with 3,000 years of craptastic baggage that the Chinese (nor anyone else, for that matter) need.

Perhaps handing them copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would serve the cause in a much better fashion (instead of bypassing "freedom of religion" by indoctrinating them straight away with Christianity). That way you have the morality without the religion, the superstition, the Old Testament atrocities, and the vague and often misguided interpretations. The UDHR actually addresses things the Bible does not. Perhaps that document, rather than a religious text, would best serve the Chinese in their quest for freedom. They are still free to pick Christianity if they so choose, but at least it would be a choice rather than a compulsion. I find something vaguely immoral about using desperation as a mechanism to expand one's religious membership - and that's what is taking place. It would be like Aquafina setting up a water stand in the middle of the desert and handing out drugged bottles of water to thirsty travelers - drugged bottles of water that compel brand loyalty to Aquafina. It just isn't right.

Chinese non-believers eagerly seek Bibles despite the constant danger of being imprisoned for possessing any “religious” texts. Why? The Bible contains the ethical and moral principles for which they thirst.

The bible also contains some pretty immoral and unethical practices perpetrated by God himself. Is God above his own law?

This fine professor, possessed of incredible intelligence and childlike wonder, started off agnostic.

Yeah ... what Snowy said.

Would rather like another lifetime in which to apply this learning - this of course would lead to needing another lifetime to apply yet more learning - i can sort of see where the idea of tansmigration and/or life after death comes from.

This has to be one of the greatest human lemantations - it seems just as we start getting it right, we die.

i guess Heaven is also an attractive notion - sort of a reward for delaying one's gratification in this life.

I often think that people really don't grasp just how long eternity actually is. To believe that we all go to this singular place and, well, just hang out forever is rather mind-blowing. I've always believed that, if there is indeed an afterlife, it is one custom made for each individual. Perhaps that is where the notion that we become gods ourselves upon death comes from. We create the afterlife that we want rather than going to some "one-size-fits-all" paradise. The only way an afterlife could be pleasing to all of us is if it is OUR afterlife. Otherwise, we would all need a lobotomy at the front entrance so that we're all the same. Even then, that would make our life lessons here on earth utterly pointless - and THAT robs our lives of any meaning or purpose beyond the here and now.

Going to a paradise after death is an exceedingly attractive idea. It is no wonder then why so many embrace a religion and a god. After all, if one is indoctrinated to believe that worship and praise of a god is mandatory to enter that paradise, more than a few will end up on their knees. How sad that is since it essentially gives some people the right to declare others unworthy of existing in a perpetual paradise and, worse still, that others deserve to be tortured for all eternity no matter how good and kind they had been in this life.

Pat Robertson, a well-known and popular religious leader here in the US got in front of a national audience and proclaimed that, why yes, demons can attach themselves to physical objects so it can't hurt to purge any items bought at Good Will or the Salvation Army of any potential demons lurking within the sleeves. How ridiculous! THIS is the kind of nonsense that religion adds to morality; it is insanity that we simply can do without. I don't believe that an afterlife is the sole purview of religion. If one exists at all, it is the natural state of our evolution. ALL of us go there and no one is tortured.

I find that religion has misused in a most heinous way the desperation many of us feel when we think about death. We long so much for a paradise that we're willing to believe that demons might be hiding in the pockets of that coat you just bought. It just has to end.

The thread should be do we need God, the answer of course is yes.

Over and over again man has proved that he is incapable of governing his life in anything like an acceptable manner and he has been given the choice of doing so through God and his teachings.

Considering "god" has never actually shown the slightest bit of interest in man, were getting along okay without his input.

The bible does contains someone's teaching on the mount but it also contains all the other horrors, genocide, murder, rape, slavery, misogyny, bigotry and unwarranted death that have been mentioned before.

The bible is your 'bible', Rock. You take from it what you will and discard the rest. I don't know how you reconcile that within yourself. If the bible is the inspired word of God then you must take it in toto, otherwise you are at risk of implying that the bible is not the inspired word of God. This is where the mental gymnastics takes place. According to the bible, God killed millions for the sin of not being Israelites, the Chosen People. Doesn't any of this inconsistency bother you? Zoom to the time of Jesus and suddenly from the jealous, petty, genocidal maniac we get a 'loving' God? Eh?

The thread should be do we need God, the answer of course is yes.

You might need God. Atheists can live moral, productive, honest and decent lives without judging others or being intolerant of their neighbours based on the fact that they look, love or live differently. The only thing I have intolerance for is criminality.

Refresh my memory about “God of the gaps.”

Science answers questions but quite often uncovers more questions. When the question doesn't have an answer, scientists don't just throw their hands up and say, 'Well...there we are then. It MUST be God!....whew all that time spent on science when we should have been in church worshipping YOUKNOWWHO!....what were we thinking?'

When we don't know the answer or another question arises, we continue our search for the evidence. We don't fill the space with 'God'.

Considering "god" has never actually shown the slightest bit of interest in man, were getting along okay without his input.

Exactly. We are better than we have ever been in history. It's only the Apocolyptists that see doom at every corner.

Yes, there are criminals, frauds, dictators, killers, rapists, child molesters but this is becoming less and less. In time, perhaps we humans might become the saviours of our planet and the species that co-habit it with us. That is where my hope lies. It doesn't lie with an unseeable, unknowable God of questionable reputation and inconsistent intervention.

The thread should be do we need God, the answer of course is yes.

No.

That is what you think we need.

I think we need to have respect and care for every soul upon the Earth, for all the creatures, and for the precious resources of the Earth.

I think we each need to learn and to grow, and to change the world one act of kindness at a time.

I think we need to understand that the Earth is in fact a very small place and that each of our actions has an impact far beyond what we intend.

I think the notion of 'god' can either help or hinder these goals, and therefore I would strongly argue we DON'T need god.

So you believe the bible in it's entirety roc?

Then pick any page in the OT, Rock. Tell me why God and Satan played with Job. What was the necessity of visiting so much suffering on one man? Just to prove a point?

Why did the man give his concubine to the men of the town to be raped and murdered? Then when they were done he cut up her body into 12 pieces? I get the metaphor of the 12 tribes of Israel but the bottom line is he gave her up to save his honour and God's.

I'll start with those because the only bible we have is a leather bound carved monstrosity that is sitting on the top shelf that I can't reach or even pick up and the hubby is having a sleep-in.

The above accounts in the OT are actions perpetrated by the will of God. This is not a God I want to know.

To which “horrors, genocide, murder, rape, slavery, misogyny, bigotry and unwarranted death” do you specifically refer? A blanket response to a sweepingly broad assertion is of no value, in my opinion. Books, chapters, and verses, inserted after authorship into the original Hebrew and Greek texts for ease of reference, would ease my examination of that which you assert.

The majority of Christians do not read hebrew or greek, Rock. Are you saying that the translations are incorrect, because I am assuming you think the hebrew and greek versions are therefore incorruptible. You must know that the even the greek and hebrew transcriptions are copies of other manuscripts. And where humans are involved in transcription, trust me, mistakes happen. I work in a hospital and the number of times a day that I have to confirm what is written on a request card or a sample tube because people make transcription mistakes would astonish you.

Just because the bible(s) are written in an ancient language doesn't improve their veracity one iota.

And as I said previously, Tacitus and Josephus were speaking decades after the fact. They were reporting on hearsay evidence that may or may not be true.

Rock
Your answer is interesting, but i sm now confused.
You appear to be arguing strongly for 'religion' as a necessary part of life, yet you conclude with the comment

[Perhaps those four elements you’ve described are clues to me as to why I am not religious

Removed because it is offensive to my friend.

I choose to believe the stories.

I think that's wonderful. I would love to hear your great-grandmothers stories and hope one day one of you will write them down so that the following generations will know what their life was like. It is so important, Rock.

As you know, stories get embellished over time, Rock. Everyone does it. To make a story more interesting, more exciting, more adventurous. It's not lying, it's telling the story. This is what I think happened with the story of Jesus and other stories in the bible. They were minor stories but to make them look 'big' they added a little seasoning and spices here and there to make the story more 'delicious' if you know what I mean. It's human nature.

I hope you are ok with me choosing not to believe the bible stories because of human nature, our propensity to make mistakes and because there is no evidence of their truth.

Rock
Didn't realise you were Baha'i - a belief system i somehow missed on my journey, but i will amend the lack in the interest of better communication.