The "What should replace religion?" question

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The positions of the BB codes would depend on the width of your display. Just sayin'.

 

[asydhouse]

Nothing. Then again the majority of non-religious people apparently need someone to tell them how to live their lives, how to act, what to value, what they are entitled from other people and so on. So just go ahead and replace religious thinking with other types of religious thinking that suits your mindset.

Huh? Where do you get this silly idea that "the majority" need someone telling them how to live?

Are you in a religion then? Because this is an outrageous straw man, which I find it hard to believe that any atheist would assume. I have to conclude you are either a religious person who doesn't understand what it means to be free, or you are a deeply cynical and embittered human being!

 

[asydhouse]

What is it about the words rephrase, intention and consequence that you don't understand?

Yes, of course! When I point out to you that access to proper health care is a prerequisite for abolishing the belief in witchcraft, it can only be interpreted as meaning that I recommend that "poor uneducated Africans be taken advantage of".

"Employment, and happy rewarding lives." Brillant! You do seem to have an inkling of a clue that addicts don't usually resort to heroin because they confuse it with vitamins! There's hope for you yet!

I'm sure that my students would inform you otherwise!

Always?! I just can't put up with fundamentalism! Does my arse look big in these pants, honey?

I'd be pained if you were my teacher, that's for sure! You have a very unpleasant method of "discussion". It comes across as arrogant and aggressive. Old fashioned "marxist" giving marx and marxism a bad name. Don't you get it? You do exactly as you accuse others, "rephrasing" and "reinterpreting" what others say in order to argue against what they didn't actually say! Unbelievable.

 

[asydhouse]

Science is all about acquiring knowledge and religion is all about Man's search for meaning in the universe, both of which seem to be very important to mankind.

"meaning". Grandiose aim, to find some cosmic "meaning". Replace religion with being human together in recognition of the precious moment of being alive we all share just now. Recognising ourselves in each other should be enough. I'd say "love" should replace religion, but not everybody has so much luck.

But whether you have a lover or not, you can still love life, and recognise the humanity of those around you, and we can share that being together. The human family is my family. That's what we need. Not religion. And I get all the meaning I need out of life in that recognition of our sharing the journey of our species through this world unfolding as we go.

And art is the way to engage with that, or activate it. Art in all its forms... including and maybe most of all, beautiful parties, where people share inspirational visions in music and decor and self-expression in clothes and dance and simply having fun together!

 

[asydhouse]

a life based on principles you feel are important to your conscience.

Perhaps principles like: Love, tolerance, kindness, honesty, responsibility, care, understanding, patience, etc......

bingo!

 

[JaysonR]

A common critique levelled against the "new atheists" is that they don't put forth a replacement for religion. For some reason this critique appears to be more common among atheist critics than religious critics.

Dawkins briefly deals with it in The God Delusion. How would you answer that question? If it is a bad question, then how would you explain it?

Religion doesn't need to be replaced; the way religion functions needs to evolve.

Religion, in our society, is still running on very old societal paradigms meanwhile the social paradigm standards have changed radically.
Religion needs to become open-source and modular, like every other part of our society now.

It's largest failing point is its inflexible mass (mass as in size).
This is one of the reasons there are more non-affiliated spiritualists than there used to be.
People are choosing (in growing numbers) to form their own personal systems, or conceptualize their belief system so abstractly that it lacks any recognition traditionally (and gets dismissed by Harris/Dawkins, et. al. as 'disingenuous', in preference for addressing fundamental adherence).

This question is the primary interest that I personally work on; how spirituality functions, and works, and how it can be better fitted into society functionally for the individual than is currently provisioned (which; the current system is terrible).

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with these words. Get a dictionary.

Yes, indeed, that is possible! Even the poorest of Africans are free to die a skeptical, witchcraft-free death! Hallelujah!

I'm sure that you would be willing to die a brave, skeptical death, bereft of health care. And in the case of the poverty-stricken Africans, I guess that you would consider it mission accomplished if only they'd die without their degrading "comfort blanket", right?

And what drives people to become heroin addicts today is the prevalent "illusion that its a good way to escape," right?

Well, ignoring the big arse may not make it go away, but it's my preferred treatment for a lot of maladies. The common cold, for instance, and certain members of this forum whom the ignore button makes med blissfully unaware of!

I, for one, never claimed that it was, but promoting the knowledge of proper health care to those who can't afford it only helps them die enlightened, doesn't it?
(By the way, where did you get your SOHB?)

Actually yes, in your false dichotomy wonderland that you invented where those are the only two choices, I'd rather people died without resorting to witchcraft than died after wasting their last days perpetuating a belief system based on errant nonsense.

This is obviously what I want since it would be impossible to advocate for educating Africans while also advocating improvements to their healthcare.

Better we just keep em stupid ... education never helped anybody, right?

 

[JaysonR]

Equally; I don't think being open to spiritual engagements as being synonymous with ignorance.
I would think it reasonable to educate and assist without addressing their religious infrastructure and holdings either way except where medically errant and inversely causing harm. But those should be addressed benignly anyway through education.

I agree, that example was a pretty poor false dichotomy; clearly we can offer education rather than just asserting people drop their religions, and instead aim for the education to better their society through natural consequences of facilitating tool sets functionally gainful for societal growth and sustainment.

 

[dann]

I'd be pained if you were my teacher, that's for sure!

You picked it up and used it the way I expected you to! Thank you. So at least we seem to agree that it depends on the circumstances whether education is a pain/relevant/progress or not! But you probably won't be able to recognize that the relevance of teaching somebody the difference between proper doctors and witchdoctors depends on proper doctors being available and affordable. And to keep you from jumping to conclusions again: that is not an argument for blissful ignorance, it's an argument for the context in which a certain piece of knowledge is relevant - much the same way that a description of the superiority of lightning rods over praying to Thor wouldn't be much use to a stoneage tribe with no access to metals ... (And, yes, I do know that Thor and a stoneage tribe are an anachronism.)

You have a very unpleasant method of "discussion". It comes across as arrogant and aggressive. Old fashioned "marxist" giving marx and marxism a bad name. Don't you get it? You do exactly as you accuse others, "rephrasing" and "reinterpreting" what others say in order to argue against what they didn't actually say! Unbelievable.

Yes, you're right. Unlike you I actually use the word rephrase to describe my rephrasing (and none of you ever commented on the argument!) whereas you rephrase to the extent of making up a series of strawmen apparently without the awareness of doing so, which makes you freak out when I point it out. Unbelievable!

 

[dann]

Actually yes, in your false dichotomy wonderland that you invented where those are the only two choices, I'd rather people died without resorting to witchcraft than died after wasting their last days perpetuating a belief system based on errant nonsense.

This is obviously what I want since it would be impossible to advocate for educating Africans while also advocating improvements to their healthcare.

No, it is not "impossble to advocate for educating Africans while also advocating improvements to their healthcare". On the contrary: The usefulness of that education actually depends on those improvements!
And, yes, apparently you"'d rather people died without resorting to witchcraft than died after wasting their last days perpetuating a belief system based on errant nonsense", or, as you put it in a post above that one (#94), "Well that word prerequisite (dann: "access to proper health care is a prerequisite for abolishing the belief in witchcraft") is where you've gone wrong. It's entirely possible for people with no access to healthcare to not resort to witchcraft. I'm sure there are plenty examples in the US."
So please make up your mind: Do you want to insist on the combination of health care and education (about the difference between proper and woo medicine), or would you prefer to disagree with me when I point out the prerequisite for the relevance of that education?

Better we just keep em stupid ... education never helped anybody, right?

Yes, resorting to hyperbole and strawman is a panacea to all bad arguments, right?

 

[dann]

"meaning". Grandiose aim, to find some cosmic "meaning". Replace religion with being human together in recognition of the precious moment of being alive we all share just now. Recognising ourselves in each other should be enough. I'd say "love" should replace religion, but not everybody has so much luck.

But whether you have a lover or not, you can still love life, and recognise the humanity of those around you, and we can share that being together. The human family is my family. That's what we need. Not religion. And I get all the meaning I need out of life in that recognition of our sharing the journey of our species through this world unfolding as we go.

And art is the way to engage with that, or activate it. Art in all its forms... including and maybe most of all, beautiful parties, where people share inspirational visions in music and decor and self-expression in clothes and dance and simply having fun together!

Well, this euphemistic idealisation of the human experience is so new agey that it not only replaces religion, it actually is religion! Why resort to this? (And when you know why you resort to this, you also know why people need religion & superstition - and what we have to overcome in order to obviate that need.)

 

[SlackerBabbath]

Right you are and take it all the way back to who wrote the laws in the Old Testament and why those particular laws, some of which we are all happy to ignore nowadays whether we have a faith in God or not.

I have always been curious about who started the story that God said all those laws and men wrote them down as they listened. And when. Especially when. It is a blank spot in my history of the Bible.

Well traditionaly, the Torah, which comprises of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and which contains all of the the Old Testament laws, is considered to have been dictated to Moses by God, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, which describe the death and burial of Moses.
Scholars on the other hand generaly consider most of these books to have been written around the time of the Babylonian Captivity during the sixth century BC, long after the time that Moses was said to have been alive.

We can consider that Abrahamic religion developed from, or was greatly influenced by, earlier polytheistic religions of the Middle East, especialy the religions of Mesopotamia, Canaan and Egypt.
As we know, the Golden rule and it's associated versions seems to have originated in Egypt or possibly Mesopotamia, which are both considered to be among the first civilised cultures to exist and may well have influenced each other. The laws of the 10 Commandments though could be Egyptian in origin because they appear to be based upon the negative confessions found in the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead', which was a kind of instructional text that Egyptians learned for how to successfully make it to the afterlife after one has died. In chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, these early versions of the Commandments take the form of 'negative confessions' that the dead person has to recite to various different gods when he descends to the hall of the 'Two Truths'.
For example;
"Hail, Neha-hau who comes from Re-stau, I have not killed man or woman." (You shall not murder)
"Hail, serpent Amenti who comes from the house of slaughter, I have not defiled the wife of a man." (You shall not commit adultery.)
"Hail, Shade-Eater who comes from the caverns which produce the Nile, I have not committed theft." (You shall not steal.)
"Hail, Aati who comes from Heliopolis, I have not foolishly set my mouth in motion against another man." (You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.)

There were basicaly 42 Egyptian commandments, (split up into 3 classifications of sins. Transgressions against Mankind, sins against gods and personal transgressions) each of which the person wishing to enter the afterlife had to announce to 42 different gods or 'judges' that they were not guilty of. If they failed to tell the truth, which was decided by the god Anubis weighing the heart of the person against a feather, their soul was eaten by a creature called 'Ammut' who was part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus, basicaly a demon. Interestingly, Ammut was also sometimes said to stand by a 'lake of fire', an image that Christianity later adopted in it's depiction of Hell.

 

[Hazel]

Well traditionaly, the Torah, which comprises of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy and which contains all of the the Old Testament laws, is considered to have been dictated to Moses by God, with the exception of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy, which describe the death and burial of Moses.
Scholars on the other hand generaly consider most of these books to have been written around the time of the Babylonian Captivity during the sixth century BC, long after the time that Moses was said to have been alive.

We can consider that Abrahamic religion developed from, or was greatly influenced by, earlier polytheistic religions of the Middle East, especialy the religions of Mesopotamia, Canaan and Egypt.
As we know, the Golden rule and it's associated versions seems to have originated in Egypt or possibly Mesopotamia, which are both considered to be among the first civilised cultures to exist and may well have influenced each other. The laws of the 10 Commandments though could be Egyptian in origin because they appear to be based upon the negative confessions found in the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead', which was a kind of instructional text that Egyptians learned for how to successfully make it to the afterlife after one has died. In chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, these early versions of the Commandments take the form of 'negative confessions' that the dead person has to recite to various different gods when he descends to the hall of the 'Two Truths'.
For example;
"Hail, Neha-hau who comes from Re-stau, I have not killed man or woman." (You shall not murder)
"Hail, serpent Amenti who comes from the house of slaughter, I have not defiled the wife of a man." (You shall not commit adultery.)
"Hail, Shade-Eater who comes from the caverns which produce the Nile, I have not committed theft." (You shall not steal.)
"Hail, Aati who comes from Heliopolis, I have not foolishly set my mouth in motion against another man." (You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.)

There were basicaly 42 Egyptian commandments, (split up into 3 classifications of sins. Transgressions against Mankind, sins against gods and personal transgressions) each of which the person wishing to enter the afterlife had to announce to 42 different gods or 'judges' that they were not guilty of. If they failed to tell the truth, which was decided by the god Anubis weighing the heart of the person against a feather, their soul was eaten by a creature called 'Ammut' who was part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus, basicaly a demon. Interestingly, Ammut was also sometimes said to stand by a 'lake of fire', an image that Christianity later adopted in it's depiction of Hell.

I did not know that about the Book of the Dead. Thank you.

So we go further and further back only to find that man had a tendency to make laws to control his fellow man. And, since someone might question his right to be king of the hill, he put forth his god - everyone has a god, whether we know it or not - as the highest authority and the one who gave him this right. Since no one could prove him wrong and he had might - might is the final dictator - to back up right, his laws became mandatory.

How far astray have I gone there?

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

No, it is not "impossble to advocate for educating Africans while also advocating improvements to their healthcare". On the contrary: The usefulness of that education actually depends on those improvements!
And, yes, apparently you"'d rather people died without resorting to witchcraft than died after wasting their last days perpetuating a belief system based on errant nonsense", or, as you put it in a post above that one (#94), "Well that word prerequisite (dann: "access to proper health care is a prerequisite for abolishing the belief in witchcraft") is where you've gone wrong. It's entirely possible for people with no access to healthcare to not resort to witchcraft. I'm sure there are plenty examples in the US."
So please make up your mind: Do you want to insist on the combination of health care and education (about the difference between proper and woo medicine), or would you prefer to disagree with me when I point out the prerequisite for the relevance of that education?[/quote[

I think I've been quite clear. There is no need to link the two things. Education on reality is a useful thing in and of itself. Its usefulness is not predicated on the availability of anything other than an ability to understand reality.

The alternative is to promote stupidity and ignorance.

Good healthcare is also useful in and of itself. The alternative is that people die. Trying to suggest that witchcraft is some kind of useful stopgap as you seem to be doing is simply insulting.

When these things are prevalent in cultures they also retard the development of things like good healthcare.

Yes, resorting to hyperbole and strawman is a panacea to all bad arguments, right?

You are advocating for ignorance, and accuse me of wanting Africans to die and accuse me of this crap?

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

If we look at largely secular societies today I think we can see what has replaced religion, that being rationality.

 

[Hazel]

The positions of the BB codes would depend on the width of your display. Just sayin'.

All right. I'll break down and ask. What and where are the BB codes? I still do not know how to highlight a line in yellow, or any other color, in this setup.

P. S. Oops! Slowly I've gone down the long thread and found Asydhouse's instructions. Thank you. Now I'll get it done.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

All right. I'll break down and ask. What and where are the BB codes? I still do not know how to highlight a line in yellow, or any other color, in this setup.

The codes are what tells the browser how to display your post. When you quote a post you see the BB tags for quoting, 'QUOTE' and '/QUOTE', with the slash telling the browser to put the text in a quote box. The "hilite" icon above the text box (with yellow background) produces something like this:

I selected this text and hit the Hilite icon.
If you quote this post you'll see the BB code for that. A link to the forum BB list was posted earlier in this thread.

 

[Hazel]

"meaning". Grandiose aim, to find some cosmic "meaning". Replace religion with being human together in recognition of the precious moment of being alive we all share just now. Recognising ourselves in each other should be enough. I'd say "love" should replace religion, but not everybody has so much luck.

Depends on what you mean by "love" but I won't quibble there. What instantly went through my poor mind is 'how ironic; love was suppoosed to be part of the Christian religion'. Now we have to suggest that love replace religion. Knowing our history, that may be the way to go.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The cleverest thing religion has done is to make people believe there is an actual void that it fills. Job security for the parasitic priesthood.

 

[Hazel]

The codes are what tells the browser how to display your post. When you quote a post you see the BB tags for quoting, 'QUOTE' and '/QUOTE', with the slash telling the browser to put the text in a quote box. The "hilite" icon above the text box (with yellow background) produces something like this:

I selected this text and hit the Hilite icon.
If you quote this post you'll see the BB code for that. A link to the forum BB list was posted earlier in this thread.

Found it! Now I know why I couldn't find it before. I have to be making a post. Thank you again. Mine isn't yellow but that's all right. Still works.