I totally agree with this. That said, religion’s often been what dictates our culture, and not just a product of it. If we have something dictating our behaviour it should be fair and rational. In other words, not a religion.
Why do we live in a misogynist culture? Because our irrational religions have promoted misogyny for centuries.
I don’t want to be uncharitable here, but are you saying that it is possible there could have been another world where people didn’t create anything we’d call religion and that we have a good reason to believe that other world would not have misogyny to the same extent our world did? Or maybe there is a case to be made that where religion has been outlawed/suppressed we’ve seen a more rapid decline in misogyny (e.g. did misogyny fall off more steeply in communist China or the USSR than it did in nearby countries were religion carried on a unregulated trajectory?).
When I look back in time I see religions that justify the dominance of men over women and I see a culture that thinks that men ought to be dominant over women. When I talk to my contemporary religious friends I talk to people who don’t think men should be dominant over women and who don’t believe their religion tells them that that is the case. Some Christians think the main thrust of the bible is that we should help poor people and be suspicious of rich people. Some Christians think the main thrust of the bible is that gay people are going to hell and we should make sure they get there sooner.
I think I see a lot more people justifying whatever they believe using what they call their religion than I see people actually doing what their religion tells them to do. To me, that’s the same mechanism as assholes who say there shouldn’t be change tables in the washrooms because it could spread feces around - start with a personal preference, extrapolate with an argument to some authority. When religion is an authority, it fills that role. But social pecking order, cleanliness, science, or whatever are all capable of filling that role because it’s never really about the thing being appealed to in the first place, it’s about the feelings of the person doing the appealing.
Science as we know it today grew directly out of Catholic and Islamic theological “natural philosophy”. Roger Bacon, The father of modern science was a Franciscan friar. The abolition movement in the US (and similar pushes in Europe) we’re largely fermented in churches. And often on theological ground. Like wise the women’s suffrage movement was heavily driven and rooted in churches a d religious movements. The labor movement has significant roots in the Methodist Church.
As with all things there is good and bad. Because it’s all people. People have done terrible things through and because of religion. But they have done great things because of and through religion. Because people will do good and bad things because of all sorts of things. You can have a pissing match back and forth over well religion did x! Well secular society did y! Or you can acknowledge that history and society are complicated. And there is nothing special or different about religion in that regard.
This is a bit like saying “Christopher Columbus discovered America”. He did, from his own perspective, but there were people living here when he arrived, and they “discovered” it first. In 1800BC, the Babylonians had astronomers who used math to track heavenly bodies. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth around 250BC, sounds like science to me. A lot of scientific progress was halted by Christianity, I hope you aren’t debating that?
Could you not find any direct quotes of Dawkins attacking a left wing cause?
This chart shows a county’s religious importance vs its UN’s gender empowerment score. You can see that as religion becomes less important, women become more empowered. The UN GE score is a measure of actual effects and not just opinion. Do we really need a chart to show that religion is sexist and oppressive though?
Sort of. Science as a general practice has roots all the way back at the origins of human culture. But modern science. Theory/philosophy of science and especially the formal scientific method has much more recent and clear origins. It was codified and defined largely by European priests and natural philosophers working from an explicitly religious point of view. Working from materials developed by Islamic scholars doing the same. Using documents and knowledge collated and preserved in the Middle East. Sources from ancient Babylonians, muslim India, Asia etc. Roman rhetorical and legal academics had a significant influence, something that was also a huge influence on the Catholic theological academic standards these dude were working under.
Which is why I specified “as we know it today”.
Those ancient Babylonians were interested in astronomy in part because if religious motivations BTW.
As for Dawkins. I don’t have time to do your homework for you. And my linking to a single nasty tweet won’t do much for you. As I’ve said your much better off reading up on the whole “dear muslima” controversy and Dawkin’s behavior in the following debate about inclusion in the atheist/skeptic community, atheist+ and all that.
I don’t think it’s terribly controversial to say I believe that education actually causes both lower religiosity and more progressive attitudes towards marginalized groups. Basically I’m not surprised to see that relationship and I’m not sold on it being an important one. I think in our world you could probably use religiosity as a loose metric of bigotry for large geographic regions, but I don’t think that minimizing that metric would minimize the thing being measured.
I also don’t see how we could even go about attempting to minimize religiosity other than by promoting education. And much like our scientific models that don’t need god to work, I don’t need to appeal to the value or lack thereof of religion to say why I think it’s better for people to be better educated.
Early humans used the stars for navigation and crops, and religion became a part of that. That doesn’t undo any of the harm caused by religious beliefs.
I read about Dawkin’s attack that you posted. It looks like he made a snarky comment, then realized his mistake and apologized for it. I sympathize, because I often put my foot in my mouth, even when I’m well intentioned. I get what you’re saying, but I really don’t think he’s out to attack the left. He makes mistakes like we all do.
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