Good Religion vs Bad, or Secular Humanism vs Religiosity.

welsh

welsh

Junkmaster
I was listening to a talk show on the radio last night and the speaker had just written a book about the a historical period where religions seem to come together around the idea of attaining greater spiritual awareness through selflessness. One of the callers asked about the fact that so many wars had been built around religious convictions. The speaker suggested that-

(1) there is a difference between bad religion and good religion.

And

(2) that wars are often driven by other human desires, and even if religion is utilized either to motivate or legitimize a religion, wars were often a consequence of human nature.

That got me thinking about what is the difference between "good" and "bad" religion and how that division can be clarified.

But it also got me thinking about this undergrad that I work with at the University. The kid is a muslim and takes his religion very seriously. He tries to do "right" by his faith, much like I have seen Christians do. Yet the kid also seems to be driven towards a career in commerce, to make a lot of money and please his parents. When I mentioned that I had walked away from a lucrative career to pursue a more meaningful career in education, he didn't quite "get it."

What has troubled me about this that it might be symptomatic of a trend, especially among young people. Many look to religion as a source of moral rules and traditions that, if they follow, will make them moral individuals. This might be based on notions of faith or it might be something they inherit from their parents- but it seems that they look to religion to provide a moral code by which to live by and to identify themselves with a moral community.

Yet this religiosity does not necessarily mean they are more moral or humanitarian- it doesn't necessarily make them more virtuous. The drive to pursuing religious virtue may be distinct from other forms of human virtue. By subscribing to a faith one joins a community of like-minded believers but that would suggest imposing notions of "US" vs "Them" as well as conviction that your faith is correct and theirs is wrong = social division.

In a sense by pursuing religion they decide to follow a faith's precriptions rather than the rather difficult process of trying to figure out, on their own, what is virtuous. In a sense being religious offers more benefits and ease that trying to be a secular humanist. With religion you have a set of rules and a community of like-minded believers. A secular humanist is pretty much on their own- they don't even have a church.

So that's a question-

What is the difference between "bad" and "good" religion?
and,
Are you better off being religious or being a secular humanist?

Your thoughts?
(and please keep this serious).
 
Religion is good.

The premise of religion is that you have to follow certain rules and will be rewarded in afterlife.
It's capable of enforcing certain behaviour without being expected to bring any reward within the person's physical lifetime.

It also doesn't have to prove anything because it's a matter of faith.

Religion is good.

The problem is that freedom and welfare encourages doubting one's faith.

If your life is miserable and you know that it won't get better, religion is a sure ticket to get something better. It becomes vital because it offers a chance for a better life, after death.

If your mortal existence is already that much fun, ignoring religion becomes a chance you might consider worthwhile, if it means you don't have to follow rules which would impair your worldly benefits.

If you also know that the religion isn't the only one and that there are many others believing different things, you also know that with all those mutually exclusive "one and only true" religions the vast majority has to be false and chosing any one of them would still not guarantee you made the right choice, given that any one of them is actually correct (even if there is a god, it's possible that the one and only true religion has long been lost or never even found in the first place and ALL of the ones that exist are wrong).

But religion is good.

If the people are unfree and uninformed, they will cling to their religion because it guarantees them a better future (even if only after death). Further, if their state of uninformedness and unfreeness should change, they will likely be unwilling to change their mind about religion because giving their religion up would mean that not only they spent all their life up to that point chasing a dead end, but they would also have to give up guaranteed hapiness.

So why is religion good?

If the religion teaches the right values, it can do good. Of course religion can be exploited politically. The Roman church was rather good at fulfilling political goals through religious dogma, for example. That would be pretty bad.

But if you can establish a productive religion, one that is beneficial to everyone, it can be good.

So what's the problem?

As I said, religion relies on uninformedness, unfreeness and misery. People are a lot more likely to turn towards God if they feel miserable, than if they feel great.

So the only way to ensure the religion doesn't vanish and lose its importance and become a mere cultural sidenote as, somewhat, in most western countries today is to ensure that the situation doesn't get so much better that anyone abandons religion.

Also whoever is in charge of the religion must be trusted not to abuse that position -- and even if the religion doesn't promote any form of hierarchy by itself, it is likely to mutate that way, as did most teachings in the past (which is why they usually focus on one particular "messiah" or "messenger of God").

As it is impossible to create a position of power that will not be abused even if hundreds of generations pass, the only alternative would be to ensure the religion has a stable, flat hierarchy without any such position of power, but that is equally unlikely to work out.

So why is religion NOT good?

While unfreeness, uninformedness and misery may be good ways to stabilise a religion, they are all considered pretty bad things by modern humanitarian standards.

Misery is almost universally recognised as a bad thing (unless you are Mother Theresa or anybody else who believes in spiritual enlightenment through suffering) and unfreeness and uninformedness are hardly considered great virtues either.

Informedness leads to free thinking and free thinking leads to doubt, which is always bad if something is based on the surrender of the self and the acceptance of universal facts (religion is faith, not knowledge).
Happiness and fulfillment lead to unwillingness to accept temporary loss (by accepting the code of conduct dictated by religion) for possible longterm benefits.
Freedom... well, I think I've already explained that above.

So the only way to ensure stability through religion is to lose all the benefits of seccular individualism (personal liberty, pursuit of wisdom and joy).

I'm an atheist. Why? If you still have to ask, you haven't listened.
 
Re: Good Religion vs Bad, or Secular Humanism vs Religiosity

welsh said:
That got me thinking about what is the difference between "good" and "bad" religion and how that division can be clarified.
Click to expand...

If we want to define Islam as a "bad religion" now, then we'll have to accept that in most of the Dark Ages Christianity was a "bad religion" and should've been wiped out.

Imagine what the world would look like now, had that happened.

Except for maybe Scientology and Satanism, the label "bad religion" is pretty retarded. So is "good religion". Either ones are tools, often tools for ignorance.
 
No Kharn, you misunderstand- I am not trying to label one religion as good or bad. Even Satanism and Scientology might have redeeming characteristics. But I am asking what makes a religion good or bad.

I would agree that religion can be used for other, less decent motives. As an ideology it allows for the collective action of people often for rather nasty ends- be that the butchering of Jerusalem during the Crusades or flying airplanes into buildings. But I would also argue that religion helps people and societies in other ways- the sense of charity that is true of both Christianity and Islam for instance, some of the notions of family, the expectation that people have "God-given" rights- these are good outcomes.

The question though is if religion is so malleable that it can be used for good or ill purposes, how does one keep the good and get rid of the bad? Does that make sense?
 
welsh said:
No Kharn, you misunderstand- I am not trying to label one religion as good or bad. Even Satanism and Scientology might have redeeming characteristics. But I am asking what makes a religion good or bad.

(...)

The question though is if religion is so malleable that it can be used for good or ill purposes, how does one keep the good and get rid of the bad? Does that make sense?
Click to expand...

I don't see the distinction between what you're doing and labelling a religion good or bad. If you're going to define certain things that make a religion good or bad than inevitably by your definitions some religions will be labelled good and some bad.
 
Kharn, I think the distinction here has to be what a religion can provide and what a person brings to a religion.

Both a Christian or a Muslim can see their religion as a means to develop a more spiritual life, a greater sense of selflessness and motivation for more charitable humanitarian work. Alternatively both a Christian and a Muslim could see their faith as justification for doing some pretty horrific acts.

While I agree with you that sometimes a religion can be textually orientated towards what we think of as virtuous behavior or towards more belligerant or maligant behaviors, in the end its people that choose what to make with or do with their faith.

That said, I am not sure that being a secular humanist is perhaps better than being religious- as it's the questions of what is virtue or malignant behavior that would seem to come first. How does one qualify a faith as good or bad really? By how the members of that faith behave? By the standard which you judge human behavior?

A person who is sociopath may see violence as a good thing... yes, but that's an exception to the rule, and while all generalizations have exceptions that doesn't mean we can't make some qualified generalizations.

So back to the question- what is about a religion that makes it good or bad, and is there really a difference.

From you answer it seems that you are either saying that some religions are inherently bad (the CCR stand on Islam- and no let's not go there) or that it's up to the individual (which offers 0 opportunity for generalization).

I think as human beings we can agree on what is good and what is bad, and if so then what is good and bad about religion, and can the virtuous be seperated from the malignant?
 
I don't think that you can without some form of censorship, which is just as dumb and reckless as the badness itself. The problem with religion is that its leaders are often very effective at convincing people of inherrent guilt or debt, and when people are afraid they are easy to manipulate.

I have trouble imagining a large-scale religion that could not be usurped by a nefarious leader. So often religion is about control and not actual belief. The obvious evil is the Catholic church, which based on many of its principles should not have the political presence that it does.

How do you get rid of the bad in the Catholic church? In my opinion there's too much bad to eliminate. The entire structure of the religion is based on repression and misinformation. There is a PHYSICAL description of Heaven in the Bible; turns out it's not that big at all. In Revelation, 21:15, it says 22,000 furlongs, which is about 1500 square miles. Greater Mexico City is about 1,925 square miles. Obviously not every good Christian can fit in there.

How does one get rid of bad books and keep the good? John Milton wrote a pretty important little ditty about that in 1644, called "Areopagitica." To paraphrase, Milton argues that no one arbiter should determine the goodness or badness of a book. I would extend this to religion and ask, who is to judge the goodness or badness of religion? What you think is bad about relgion (lets take suicide bombing as an example) is exactly what many of its members see as divine. Holy Wars start when religious leaders fail to realize the inherrent goodness in each others religion, just as people fail to appreciate that homosexuality is a legitimate and natural set of sexual actions.

I don't really think that you can do anything to excise the bad parts of a religion. Censorship shows us that the censored object gains popularity, and the best way to popularize a "bad" book is by publicly banning or burning it. There will always be dissenting voices, unless you take a totalitarian route and send all of them to the gulags.
 
No citizen, I am not talking about censorship from the state. That's something very different.

What I refer to is the issue of personal choice. People practice religions and some of those practices and behaviors that are drawn from religion can be called "good" (charity, generosity, moral choice, consideration of others, notions of unconditional love). But people can also draw the rather hateful and dangerous behaviors and practices,- for example, the Klan thinks God hates blacks and Jews, Certain muslims think it's right to blow oneself up for God, some christians believe it fight to blow up abortion clinics, while others believe that it's ok for people to suffer because suffering gets people close to God.

There is a lot of potential abuse in religion but there is also some pretty good stuff. The problem is that it all comes in the same package. So how to do you take what's good and get rid of what's bad?

In that is what I mean by "good" religion and "bad" religion. It's not the damnation of a particular faith, but the problem of how to overcome the vices of man to get the best out of what religions have to offer.

This is getting perhaps to what Ashmo is on to above- about how religions are perverted by individuals- that religion works best for those who are miserable but that it runs against human nature's desire for freedom and unfettered opportunity to pursue one's self interest.

But I would think that its the self-interest that causes much of what is "bad" about religion.

By the way, nice post Ashmo.
 
So do you think then that eliminating the self-interest would be a step toward reinforcing/encouraging the good of religion?
 
welsh said:
What is the difference between "bad" and "good" religion?
Click to expand...
Actually there is a difference, but it's between the bad, the worse and the evil religions. The bad usually have a chapel, a church etc. it's founder usually are all dead already, and it lives cause of the donations that have been given to it. The worse are the ones that use dubious methods so that people give them money. The evil are the ones that get the people to sacrifice nearly everything for it(, and to play Oblivion. :twisted: )

citizenkhan said:
So do you think then that eliminating the self-interest would be a step toward ´better religion`?
Click to expand...
Well, look at it in this light, the religions are all about self-interests, so it would kill the base, it kills the space, and it kills the sage.
 
Well to be honest, one of the schools of thought on international relations, the realist school, bases its theories on the notion that, fundamentally human beings are self-interested power seeking actors. The human condition is inherently selfish in a sense because we are all trapped in our existential limitations.

The irony of religion is that it should allow the individual to escape those existential limitations by finding some link to a higher God. The possibility of the soul, the afterlife, rebirth, etc- are about escaping the existential limits of natural life.

In contrast the secular humanist is stuck. ALl they have is their natural lives and must concede to the existential limitations of their existance.

So yes. Mind you that the notion of love was used, originally not as a statement of feeling or emotion, but as a definition of a relationship defined by selflessness.

THe notion of love we get from Christianity is also one that involves unconditional love- God loved as so that he sacrificed his only son. God loved us so that we have free will to reject him.

So those notions of love, which I think are fundamental to Christian notions, is one of selflessness.
 
welsh said:
Well to be honest, one of the schools of thought on international relations, the realist school, bases its theories on the notion that, fundamentally human beings are self-interested power seeking actors. The human condition is inherently selfish in a sense because we are all trapped in our existential limitations.
Click to expand...
You should seek deeper and and see that this even goes for all the single cell organisms, not just for humans. They cant move, talk, communicate even with each others, eat, pla pla pla.

Well my according to an evolutionary theory, the only notion of love is it's measure, which is
The sum of all
the sacrificies,
you have to make,
just to reprocreate.
Click to expand...
 
Religion should be a personal experience, if you are busy pushing your beliefs on others then you suck and you make your religion suck. Including atheism.

Religion isn't bad, people make it that way. If you keep it to yourself or at least don't try to suck others in by badgering them, fine. Conflict arises because of these fools want to convert the world. Go home. If everyone stopped pushing their religion like it was Jet, the world would be fuckin fine.

So, keep your beliefs to your group, stop trying to convert others, and enjoy.
 
Ashmo said:
So why is religion good?

If the religion teaches the right values, it can do good.
Click to expand...

We're wandering in circles around the four general terms:

1. Right
2. Wrong
3. Good
4. Bad

Everybody defines these four conceptions differently. Sure, in most cases they match, but not wholly. Until we all come to the one and only understanding what exactly means right and what definitely is wrong, how can we judge religions?

What can be picked out from Christianity? The Ten Commandments, I think.

Living in a post-atheistic society which is Russia, I'm very suspicious of any religion, in fact. Especially when I see former champions of Communism go to church. There is something very wrong about it.
 
There is something very wrong about it.
Click to expand...

I believe in this and it's been tested be research, he who fucks nuns will later join the Church
Click to expand...

Just listen to the Clash.

And I don't mean that as an insult to the Clergy, who frankly went through unimaginable tragedies during the Soviet Era, just that former hardcore Atheists, even VIOLENT Atheists, pretty often turn around at some point.

And besides, Russians never made good Atheists, just mediocre pissed off Skeptics.
 
Most people seemed to miss this but Reverend Sloan Coffin died this week. I would have missed it too but he was mentioned on NPR and they replayed an interview with him.

I couldn't help but think that we could use more priests like him.

I also thought if one of our evengelical leaders were to die, it would make bigger news.

For those interested-
http://www.pbs.org/now/society/coffin.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2133330,00.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5339609

During the interview on NPR, Sloan said a couple of interesting thing-

(1) THat the purpose of faith is not to make certain the uncertainties of the world. Rather the purpose of faith is to allow us to live more fully given those uncertainties, to find some sense of peace in the turmoil. To make that less turmultuous, that's our problem.

(2) That the principle of Christianity is love, and that the principle of love as taught by Christ is more important than Christian dogma or rules. Rather it is often those who are more interested in the issue of power, or more concerned with fear, that abide by the rules and institutions of christianity, but in doing so miss the core issue- that we should love each other.

I thought that was pretty good religion.

Your thoughts?
 
I confess I don't know much about the man but any man of cloth who preaches the spirit of Christianity rather than the dogma is okay in my book. But that's only a start, getting rid of the foolish superstition surrounding universal values inherent in most (if not all) religions is the goal. I've always felt that the need for supernatural pressure in order to do good (i.e. fear of hell) is what shows us to be more primitive than we admit.
 
You know, I have to agree with this.

I have always thought that praying to God or believing in God because you are afraid of damnation is bullshit. That's the
"If I promise faith to a supernatural idea, I cover my bets that if I my soul does survive this world it wont' get toasted in the next."

Nonsense, it's little better than trying to buy your way out of damnation.

A person to pray and love God because they love God, or at least because they have some kind of appreciation of what the love of God means.

What is love under coercion?
 
welsh said:
the purpose of faith is not to make certain the uncertainties of the world.
Click to expand...

That's too bad! If the-main-book-in the-world does not give answers to clear and distinct questions, then who needs it? Maybe we should examine it more carefully. Maybe somewhere between the lines there is a FAQ.

welsh said:
Rather the purpose of faith is to allow us to live more fully given those uncertainties, to find some sense of peace in the turmoil. To make that less turmultuous, that's our problem.
Click to expand...

Most of us would try our best to live in peace if we knew for sure that God exists, watches us and puts down records of every step his children make. People need evidence. People generally need more info.

welsh said:
...more interested in the issue of power, or more concerned with fear, that abide by the rules and institutions of christianity, but in doing so miss the core issue- that we should love each other.
Click to expand...

A salty tear ran down Rusty's bristly cheek.

No, really, that'd be fine. But it's a beautiful utopia. At least today. I've met folks whom I wanted to finish off a good deal more than to love them. And I guess it was a reciprocal feeling.

I have to admit, I'm not capable of loving everyone. The former Pope John Paul II once said something like, "The sense of Christmas is not in giving presents to each other. It's in love for your neighbour. Invite a homeless person to your Christmas dinner." Would you ever do it? I would not.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top