Firstly, I mainly agree with what you say about alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous, judging by what you've quoted. Someone emailed me some of their literature once to see what I thought of it, and I thought it was horrible, all about being powerless to change things oneself and having to surrender to a higher power. It seemed rather defeatist, like learned helplessness. It might be that some alcoholics do feel that way because they've tried to give up themselves and failed so many times that they feel sure they won't be able to succeed alone so the concept of a higher power gives them new hope that something can help them; but I would guess that learning new techniques to use in trying to give up could be far more effective, and could increase self-belief because a person will know they themselves have the tools they need to succeed if they experience success. That addiction link in my signature is totally opposite to the helplessness ethos of that AA literature I read. It's all about taking control of life yourself and learning new ways of helping yourself.
Still, that thing about confessing wrongdoing isn't all bad; after all, it mentions admitting wrongdoing to another person, and I think it's used to encourage members to apologise to others for the way they've hurt them, and try and make amends.
And that thing about humbly acknowledging shortcomings to God might not be all bad, because acknowledging shortcomings can sometimes be the first step to doing something to try to remedy them, although if they imagine they're helpless to change anything at all about their lives, rather than just their alcoholism, that won't work.
Perhaps Alcoholics' Anonymous would be more successful if it had a more positive, motivational ethos. I read in a book once about someone who toured lots of support groups in America, like AA ones, and she found that in most of them, people would just immerse themselves in self-pity, telling stories about their painful pasts. She said the only exception to this was a group of Cambodian women who'd newly arrived in America from the "killing fields", where they'd witnessed and been victims of horrifying scenes of murder and violence and had fled to America where they had to get used to a lot of new things. Unlike in the other "self-help" groups, they spent little time discussing their traumatic pasts, but they spent most of the time helping each other learn practical things that could help them in their everyday lives - more English phrases, the local bus system, and other such things. They joked and laughed a lot. Only once, when a news story of a similar massacre in another country came on the radio, did they become quiet and sad and talk a bit about their past experiences; but then they quickly moved back to searching for solutions rather than dwelling on problems.
It may be that more people who go to Alcoholics' Anonymous would succeed in giving up drinking if the groups focused on the future and ways of making life more fulfilling that made giving up drinking seem more enticing, rather than dwelling on misery and feeling helpless.
kuroyume0161 said:
As an atheist, humanist, skeptic, how could I be pro-religion in any form to any degree? I don't care about it's positive value potential.
And why not? Why assume religion is all negative? Why not at least go halfway and concede that there are positive aspects to religion but that they can in fact be reproduced in secular settings, because it isn't the religion itself that makes them positive things - they just often tend to go along with it, or sometimes they were developed for religious reasons but secular versions can be just as good? Take Buddhist-style meditation, for example. Secular versions of that have been developed that can help people with some mental health problems. See the BBC News article
Group therapy 'beats depression' for instance, that I discussed in the first post on this page:
The group therapy is based on some techniques found in Buddhism
An unrelated study was done on the brains of some Buddhist experts in a style of deeper meditation and some Fransiscan nunns deep in prayer. There's an interesting article about how their brainwave patterns changed and how such changes might well lead people to feel as if they're having spiritual experiences:
This is Your Brain on God It concludes:
Newberg set out to demonstrate that "mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real" (Newberg 7), and he has succeeded in doing so. Although his research cannot prove whether or not God exists, it does lay to rest the long-held misconception that spiritual experience is the result of either emotional distress, delusion, or a pathological state (Newberg 100).3 He asserts that spirituality is the product of "sound, healthy minds coherently reacting to perceptions that in neurobiological terms are absolutely real" (Newberg 100). His research has also been important in demonstrating that the neurobiology of spiritual experience is virtually identical, regardless of theological subjectivity. This uniformity leads us to believe that spiritual experience may have a biological function. Perhaps the lowered blood pressure and superior mental health associated with religious people indicate that the brain's mechanism to allow for religious experience was selected for to improve the survival of man.
If religion gives an evolutionary survival advantage, how can people like you possibly object to it?
kuroyume0161 said:
The premise of religion is organized fantasizing - plain and simple.
It might have been in the religion you grew up in, but as I've illustrated, even some non-religious scientists believe there's more to it. You believe it's based on lies and the beliefs of people who want to believe those lies. Its alleged untruth is very much disputable.
Here's an article that disputes it. And here's another. But to keep to the topic of religion's value:
kuroyume0161 said:
Here, negativity not only means the 'bad' effects of religion but the delusional, useless effects of religion (devotion, blind faith, ritual, prayer, etc.).
Some of that is probably a waste of time and an unhealthy trip into the bizarre; but it doesn't have to be taken to extremes. And good things can come out of a frame of mind dedicated to devotion and prayer, regardless of whether there's a supernatural being listening or not, such as self-reflection that focuses on determining how to better oneself morally, a more peaceful state of mind, and unity borne out of a group of people all wanting the same thing. Of course I'm well aware that religion has led to fierce divisions and emnity over the years, but religion is not a monolith, and some forms of it are much more healthy than others.
Incidentally, "blind faith" is a misnoma, at least when applied to faith in general. Faith is based on the reports of people considered trustworthy. I can only believe Queen Elizabeth I existed through faith - it's a similar thing. Yes, there's more documentation about her existence, and the things she did were, on the face of it, easier to believe. But then, a lot more people could read and write by that time, and a lot of things have happened since then that wouldn't have been believed for a second by most people of the day, such as the development of planes and trains, the discovery of radio waves that enable someone to hear something going on in London when they're hundreds of miles away, or telephones that can enable people to talk when they're thousands of miles away, and the discovery that things as microscopically tiny as germs can even kill. If someone had theorised in the sixteenth century that such things would be discovered, many people would have just laughed them to scorn or said such things were absolutely impossible. It would have taken a lot of faith to believe that one day, such things might just happen. It's for a similar reason that atheists aren't convincing when they say what the Bible says Jesus did just couldn't have happened - no one knows all there is to know yet.
But back to the faith necessary to believe Elizabeth I existed - yes, there's a lot written down about her - or so we're led to believe.
But really, how do we know the documentors were all telling the truth, and that the romantic era of the Great Queen wasn't in fact a fabrication to cover up the fact that in reality, there might have been on the throne a model, - yes, a doll made of wood, symbolising a person who was being manipulated by the faction in power - an easy manipulation to achieve, since the person didn't even exist?
The truth is, we can't be absolutely sure. We even have to take it on faith that documentation about Elizabeth's reign actually exists, and that it isn't the media of the modern era perpetrating a hoax on us.
So yeah, basically, faith is belief based on accounts of people you believe you can trust.
kuroyume0161 said:
There are a few verses in the NT advising Christians to do other things:
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.
Luke 14:26
And do you know any Christians who take that literally and do do their best to hate their family? Or do most Christians you know recognise it for the hyperbole it is? If so, is that verse really damaging to anyone? It was apparently common for people to use hyperbole to emphasise points they wanted people to remember in the culture of the day. See
On the use of hyperbole and "extreme language" in the Bible. Jesus would simply have been emphasising that following him would mean committing oneself to putting doing that before loyalty to others, so if the two conflicted, it would come first.
kuroyume0161 said:
34Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the
law.
35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
I Corinthians 14: 34-37
Well, maybe that passage has been more influential in certain sects. But Paul can't have meant absolute silence, since only a few chapters earlier, he was giving instructions about women "praying" and "prophesying" in church. It isn't necessary that Christianity is denigrated because of such verses, just that more understanding about them should be gained.
For instance, there's an account on a
web page about what it might possibly have been like in Paul's culture. Many of the things he said in his letters were written to stop specific behaviours that were going on in the churches he was writing to, so they're a little bit like one half of a phone conversation - we don't always know what the issues were that the church was raising and asking Paul to address in his letters to them. We'd understand better if we did. But here's something that might be similar to something that could have been going on:
1 Cor 14:34-35 sounds like an absolute ban on women even speaking in a church assembly. But how does this square with 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, where Paul assumes women will pray and prophesy in church?
Let us bear in mind that Paul has spent most of chapter 14 correcting disorderly conduct in the church service, especially with regard to tongues. Could there have been another cause of disorder in the church service? Kari Torejsen furnishes an excellent example:
Code:
My mother used to compare the situation in Corinth to the one she and my father faced in northern China. Back in the 1920s when they were the first to bring God's message to that forgotten area, they found women with bound feet who seldom left their homes and who, unlike men, had never in their whole lives attended a public meeting or a class. They had never been told as little girls, 'Now you must sit still and listen to the teacher.' Their only concept of an assembly was a family feast where everyone talked at once.
When these women came to my parents' church and gathered on the women's side of the sanctuary, they thought this was a chance to catch up on the news with their neighbors and to ask questions about the story of Jesus they were hearing. Needless to say, along with babies crying and toddlers running about, the women's section got rather noisy! Add to that the temptation for the women to shout their questions to their husbands across the aisle, and you can imagine the chaos. As my mother patiently tried to tell the women that they should listen first and chitchat or ask questions later, she would mutter under her breath, 'Just like Corinth; it just couldn't be more like Corinth.'
[Kari Torejsen Malcolm, Women at the Crossroads (USA:IVP, 1982), 73-74]
