The Supreme Court on Thursday, in a 4-4 ruling, said Oklahoma cannot create the nation's first religious charter school funded directly with taxpayer dollars.
You seem to think that religion is the cause or the “excuse”. But it isnt. The cause and the justification is that we are animals like any other, flawed and guided by instincts. It is our nature to want more than we have, even when we have enough because the future is always uncertain.
Just like humans don’t need religion to have morality we do not need religion to justify genocide, war and violence. It would have happened through any other justification.
If we take your view to the extreme I could also use it as a justification for genocide, just to illustrate my point. So no, religion is not the problem itself.
I hate to get all schoolyard here, but yes it is. I’ll happily grant that the root cause behind nearly every suffering is that humans can be convinced to be awful tribalistic little shits to each other at the drop of a hat, but there’s no honest way to get away from the reality that religion has been and continues to be the #1 hat to drop when you’re looking to appeal to humanity’s basic capacity for cruelty. Look, I can easily demonstrate the point - find me an ethnic cleansing where religion wasn’t a primary motivation/justification. I’ll wait.
And please feel free to take my view to the extreme! But it falls just a little bit flat when you do, since I don’t have to take religion to an extreme to find examples of it being used to justify all kinds of horrible things. Do I think that an abstract concept (like a system of belief) is in itself good or evil? No. Nuns don’t kill people, people kill people. But I do think it’s a tool which has, time and time again, demonstrated that it brings nothing to society which cannot be gained elsewhere, yet introduces an incredibly easily exploited and basely irrational system wherever it gets it’s toe in the door. It’s an outdated concept that needs to be left in the dust of history, there only to serve as a cautionary tale for those that come after (though I admit that as a species, we’re godawful about actually paying attention to those…)
side note
(Okay so fair’s fair: arguably mitma wasn’t religiously motivated. It gets a bit fuzzy as the Inca often used religion as a tool to provoke or promote resettlement, and that’s on top of the whole blending of religion and bureaucratic system. It’s a fascinating topic, really, and I’d be willing to debate its applicability if you’d like!)
You confuse justification for cause. Again my argument that even in a world in which somehow organized religion never developed, the same violence would have happened under a different pretense or even no pretense at all.
“I want what you have and I can take it, so I will” is enough justification in a perfectly rational non religious world for any kind of war and violence.
In a world where religion never developed, nothing would have changed? Then it rather clearly carries that it’s sole use has been to introduce some exploitable divisions in our non-hypothetical universe. I’m sorry, I think you’re actually making my case for me at this point.
(I’m not confusing boo, and don’t presume to tell me what I mean.)
You seem to think that religion is the cause or the “excuse”. But it isnt. The cause and the justification is that we are animals like any other, flawed and guided by instincts. It is our nature to want more than we have, even when we have enough because the future is always uncertain.
Just like humans don’t need religion to have morality we do not need religion to justify genocide, war and violence. It would have happened through any other justification.
If we take your view to the extreme I could also use it as a justification for genocide, just to illustrate my point. So no, religion is not the problem itself.
I hate to get all schoolyard here, but yes it is. I’ll happily grant that the root cause behind nearly every suffering is that humans can be convinced to be awful tribalistic little shits to each other at the drop of a hat, but there’s no honest way to get away from the reality that religion has been and continues to be the #1 hat to drop when you’re looking to appeal to humanity’s basic capacity for cruelty. Look, I can easily demonstrate the point - find me an ethnic cleansing where religion wasn’t a primary motivation/justification. I’ll wait.
And please feel free to take my view to the extreme! But it falls just a little bit flat when you do, since I don’t have to take religion to an extreme to find examples of it being used to justify all kinds of horrible things. Do I think that an abstract concept (like a system of belief) is in itself good or evil? No. Nuns don’t kill people, people kill people. But I do think it’s a tool which has, time and time again, demonstrated that it brings nothing to society which cannot be gained elsewhere, yet introduces an incredibly easily exploited and basely irrational system wherever it gets it’s toe in the door. It’s an outdated concept that needs to be left in the dust of history, there only to serve as a cautionary tale for those that come after (though I admit that as a species, we’re godawful about actually paying attention to those…)
side note
(Okay so fair’s fair: arguably mitma wasn’t religiously motivated. It gets a bit fuzzy as the Inca often used religion as a tool to provoke or promote resettlement, and that’s on top of the whole blending of religion and bureaucratic system. It’s a fascinating topic, really, and I’d be willing to debate its applicability if you’d like!)
You confuse justification for cause. Again my argument that even in a world in which somehow organized religion never developed, the same violence would have happened under a different pretense or even no pretense at all.
“I want what you have and I can take it, so I will” is enough justification in a perfectly rational non religious world for any kind of war and violence.
In a world where religion never developed, nothing would have changed? Then it rather clearly carries that it’s sole use has been to introduce some exploitable divisions in our non-hypothetical universe. I’m sorry, I think you’re actually making my case for me at this point.
(I’m not confusing boo, and don’t presume to tell me what I mean.)