IMO it doesn’t take a whole lot of research to conclude that Maher, and Dawkins to perhaps a lesser extent, are douchebags.
Saying a bunch of stuff I nominally agree with doesn’t get you a free pass to be a close-minded arsehole.
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Yep, this is a description that basically characterises at least one side of every political argument ever. ‘Make a bunch of accusations about the side you don’t like, pointedly ignore similar actions originating with preferred side.’ I see this exhibited on every theme from communism, to Turks, to cyclists.
It’s hard to say were, but somewhere in there I think we diverge a bit.
The largest acts of immorality tend to be done with the most power regardless of philosophy but I would argue that that is exactly why the most powerful countries need to argue over ideas. I would argue we need to be a lot more careful then Maher and Dawkins have been recently, religion has to be part of that. And as much as I think the mess in the middle east is much about foreign powers fighting proxy wars and funding brutal regimes, I also think we can see that Islam has offered the opposite of a solution for the people of the region. Certainly sectarian hatred, oppression of women and religious minorities seems tend to be the guise under which foreign powers continuously reinsert themselves and aren’t making life anything short of ghastly in the meantime.
For American’s I think the problem is that we are trending blame Islam almost completely and ignoring the long history secular democracies and atheist communism have in the process of funding and perpetuating never ending war in the region.
I think foreign powers have had a lot on influence in who has come to rule in the region. And we didn’t select thse leaders (directly or indirectly) for kindness. I think religion is a distraction. Would people have done such terrible things if they didn’t have a religion helping them along? I don’t know that there is any reason to say they wouldn’t have. There would have been a political party, a philosophy, a cult of personality, or something else to achieve the same ends. Very intelligence and rational people often use their tools to rationalize their own bad believes and actions instead of to be critical of themselves.
If you ask me, every single religion is going to tell you something that is very factually wrong, but in terms of creating a moral compass, justifying oppression, and generating hatred, I don’t know that religion has anything that secularism doesn’t. If the soviets had largely conquered the region and it was ruled mostly by officially atheist communist states, I think the situation wouldn’t be very different (well, maybe women would be less oppressed, but I wouldn’t put much cash on it).
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Sure it does, it has supreme truth. In my mind the only things that really reduce the sort of immoral violence and oppression is distribution of power and arbitrated resolution of conflict through a mutually trusted institution. All governments seem to oppose the first but religion seems to declare it from infallibility and religion does supply some of the second but really only for the devout in most cases. Theocracy hasn’t been the biggest headline in terms of horribleness for the last millennium because after being a big part of so many monsters in previous millennium most countries moved religion away from power. Move it back and suddenly everyone elses human right records would look a lot better.
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Who cares? The pope is infallible and yet only 63% of catholics have a favourable opinion of him: American Catholics Approve of Pope’s Direction, Poll Finds - The New York Times. Under benedict 53% of American catholics thought the church was out of touch. It has “supreme truth” in theory, but people who are members of religions still make their own decisions, and they decide to violate the teachings of their religions. In practice, I think whether or not a person says they are a member of a faith tells you extremely little about their attitudes and behaviours.
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Especially if they’re “right” for the wrong reasons and shaky premises.
But if the Pope was also president then people probably wouldn’t be allowed to publicly criticize his foreign affairs policy without being told the are going against god and receiving whatever holy punishment was due.
This is the whole thing, when religion and govt are together power gets consolidated and they can do twice as much awfulness as they can separately. The reason there aren’t a lot of theocratic super powers is that most everybody got sick of that shit and put an end to it. What the middle east is experiencing is a whole lot of people seeing their lives being shit on in the modern power structure so endorsing different levels of going back to varying levels of theocratic governance, which seems sort of like swallowing the spider to catch the fly. But like a really really bad fly and the worst imaginable spider.
But when Stalin and Mao were in charge the exact same thing happened without religion. Why could what is happening now in the middle east not be justified by communism or some other unheardof philosophy? Brutal would-be-dictators have to seek out a structure that allows them to have the power they need. Organized religions are just examples of such structures. If you are a manipulative psychopath who wants to have people do what you say, religion is a pre-made framework to work from. I think that’s the limit of the connection between evil things and religion. There are people in the US right now who could probably be motivated to go to war based on climate change denial or anti-vax if the right leader was pushing it.
Nobody thinks they are the kind of person who lives their lives by looking for an authority figure, latching on, and doing what that authority figure says, but lots of people are that sort of person. Most of the time in history the authority figures to latch onto are religious ones. If they hadn’t been there, there would have been someone to fill the void.
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It could, I guess, or at least something else similarly terrible could be. The difference is that I don’t think there is any chance of a bronze age religion based theocracy being anything other than backwards and oppressive. It’s not a glitch, its a feature. While, socialism capitalism, and democracy all have some success rate at being only annoyingly rather than horrifically backwards and oppressive.
The limit in my mind is the extent to which the things that helped create stability several thousand years ago create hate, oppression, and xenophobia in the modern world. Nobody designs a religion to be evil, (other than Hubbard) they just put their best thinking down on paper to preserve the current status quo and keep the peace and then say magic said it and that it will be true forever. And then people never figure out its bullshit and kill each other.
Not even him, if you read Going Clear. He definitely served himself, but he also sort of conned himself. He was part of a big cultural movement in the fifties that was redefining the religious experience. He definitely had moments which are only explainable if he was a believer in his own ideas.
Only annoyingly? I have no idea how you can say that. I hate to Godwin a good thread, but Hitler’s malevolence towards the Jews and the modern industrialization of genocide is not directly attributable to religion. The ethnic conflicts that buried countless Bosnians and Armenians weren’t about whether people prayed to this God or the other.And the horrific piles and piles of Cambodian bones do not bear testament to the brutality of supernaturalist religion.
The Iroquoi had a participatory democracy (still do) before European colonization. They were not much more “enlightened” by today’s standards than the Europeans who came later. I remind you that American democracy created a secular legal framework for the chattel ownership of human people. It was certainly rationalized in religious terms by individuals, but Jefferson owned slaves and famously ripped parts out of the Bible that he didn’t like.
I think there’s a lot of confirmation bias in your assessment of history here. You want religion to be the worst, so you see it that way in your survey of history, and it helps that “horrifically” is subjective. But the arc of human history is incredibly long and full of complexity and diversity.
ETA: I don’t know why included the Armenian genocide above, although secular Turkey is hardly blameless. I’m tired, and it’s late. Suffice it to say that I can certainly find other instances of horrific brutality that aren’t immediately connected to religion.
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I don’t think this is really true. Buddhism is about a thousand years older than Islam, and it certainly has some atrocities to it’s name, but right now the world’s most famous and influential Buddhist gets to go around credibly lecturing world leaders about how they ought to stop having wars and recognize that people all over the world are the same. He supports science and says openly that if science proved Buddhism wrong he’d have to go with science, though he doesn’t really think that’s a possibility.
Capitalism is just as foundationally wrongheaded as Islam or any other religion. Adam Smith made observations about human behaviour that we can now prove were wrong, but we still base economic decisions off of them. Piketty showed us what most of us already suspected - that the endgame of capitalism is feudalism. Still, there are lots of “capitalist” countries out there that are doing quite well at avoiding that outcome by imposing high taxes on the rich and on inheritance.
When you have a system that basically puts one person (or a few people) in charge, what the system is like is a function of the person in charge, not of the theoretical basis of the system. Implementation trumps theory.
Yeah, when people talk about democracy, they like to wave aside that the Nazis won the election before they did away with democracy as an inconvenience to them. Mein Kampf was published in 1925, it was there for everyone to read. When authorities decide to throw away hundreds/thousands/millions of lives in the service of their ego/wealth, they may say, “Because God” but I think there is a good reason to be skeptical of that, and I think we know enough about why people follow authoritarian rulers to know that it works whether they call “God” or not.
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What I meant that if you are choosing a system to govern your country that not all the countries governed by the modern ism’s have gone off the horrible oppression and mass murder route. Like sweeden and post WWII japan haven’t done much nasty shit.
While I would argue that most all theocracies have either declared women subservient or gays deserving of punishment or slaughtered some other sinner or wrong religion group.
Also, it’s kind of hard to separate Hitler’s crimes from his Catholic Occult shit, but that’s besides the point.
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I agree, I would say the biggest factors in how terrible a country will act are,
How much power does the country have?
How concentrated and how diverse is its leadership?
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Bonigboing came through with a final example for me:
Plenty of atheist misogynist “race realists” out there. I think the misogyny and the racism and other issues run deeper than religion.
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Well, sure, but religion provides a virtually unassailable fortress of dogma that can protect and reinforce almost any fucked-up notion that you can poke a stick at. Without religion in the picture, the only justifications people can reach for are either based on mistaken (or rather, post-hoc) reasoning, or plain, naked pig-headedness.
The former is possibly amenable to argument, and the latter is at least honestly idiotic, thus less resistant to being overwhelmed by majority opinion. Religion is an extra line of significant defence, not to mention major vector of propagation, for bad ideas.
What does it have to offer that philosophy can’t do better? If honest philosophy had received half the attention and development that various flavors of fairytale have, we’d quite obviously be living much better lives by now.
Has that been your experience? The kinds of beliefs that show up on alt_medicine.txt or here are amenable to argument because they aren’t religious? If someone says “Chapstick: a moment on my lips, forever in my reproductive system” then they are going to change their mind if you give them a biology lesson? Those who think vaccines are a conspiracy to give our kids autism while shoring up big pharma profits have been swayed by social pressure? There’s no need for extra lines of defense when someone has completely compartmentalized their thinking.
One of my professors at university honestly wrote that children should be regarded as mere possessions of their parents because they couldn’t agree to a social contract. Ayn Rand is philosophy rather than religion, nutcases who believe what she said are just as dangerous as any religion. Early christians were apparently committed to charity and lived in poverty themselves and then the church came along and turned that into a hierarchy dedicated to make a small number of people rich. People are very exploitable. The reason religion has been a vehicle for that exploitation is because religion is what was around.
30% of my nation wants to vote for an anti-democratic corrupt government because… they hate nebulous leftists? They’ve always voted that way and they aren’t going to stop now? I actually have no idea. They found an authority to trust and they’ll trust him 'til the end of the Earth. I think he might actually be some kind of religious wacko, but that’s not remotely the basis of his persona or success.
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So does the pseudoskepticism cargo cult of a “community” that leads to MRAs and Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” rant.
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