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BainbridgeShred
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Post by BainbridgeShred » 12 May 2008 10:50

Yea, Sniikeri is right. To think that any dictator in history actually started a war in order to save heathen souls is giving way to much credit to history's dictators. The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond shined a lot of light on this for me.

As far as Hitler, it's unclear these days whether or not he genuinely had a personal hatred for Jews, so trying guess if he had a genuine faith in Christ based on what is probably some speech he gave outside the Reichstag is shakey at best.
Atheism is not a philosophy that people live by
That's highly arguable, on a person to person basis especially.
These kinds of attacks on atheism are ignorant and illogical, and completely miss the point of the criticism towards religion; which is that religious views are a significant direct factor in the violence and war that people attribute to it, while the so called atheists beliefs of the people they are attacking weren't the reasons behind their actions (in fact in all three cases it was nationalism, which is something many people think is essentially another form of religion - it's the irrational worship of a country instead of the irrational worship of imaginary friends).
Isn't all criticism to what you believe ignorant and illogical though Jeremy?
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Post by Paul Agostinelli » 12 May 2008 13:54

BainbridgeShred wrote:Yea, Sniikeri is right. To think that any dictator in history actually started a war in order to save heathen souls is giving way to much credit to history's dictators. The book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond shined a lot of light on this for me.

As far as Hitler, it's unclear these days whether or not he genuinely had a personal hatred for Jews, so trying guess if he had a genuine faith in Christ based on what is probably some speech he gave outside the Reichstag is shakey at best.
Atheism is not a philosophy that people live by
That's highly arguable, on a person to person basis especially.

im shocked. well put.
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Post by Tsiangkun » 12 May 2008 14:37

atheism is a philosophy to live by, in much the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby people enjoy.

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Post by ted » 12 May 2008 15:24

I love not collecting stamps! Also, I don't believe in nymphs, faeries and ogres.
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Post by Jeremy » 12 May 2008 16:55

sniikeri wrote:
Jeremy wrote:These kinds of attacks on atheism are ignorant and illogical, and completely miss the point of the criticism towards religion; which is that religious views are a significant direct factor in the violence and war that people attribute to it
Wait, are you saying religion is actually a reason to violence rather than just an excuse? Because, honestly, I believe the people killing in the name of their god would just find another excuse if religions didn't exist.
What evidence do you have for that belief?

The reality is that a lack of religious belief is the fastest growing view on religion, and has been for centuries now. In that same time violent death has dropped enormously.

Think about this, in any conflict people are separated into different sides. What is that separates them? In almost all cases it is either race, religion or nationality. If people didn't distinguish each other based on those groups, what would separate them, giving them a reason to fight? It's not a question of what excuse would they find to fight, it's a question of how could you have 2 sides to fight at all?

If we look at Hitler, since he's a common theme. Hitler was really involved in two separate conflicts that weren't that strongly connected. He was involved in the holocaust (which I guess wasn't a conflict, or a very one sided conflict) where he separated people by race because he felt that a few races were to blame for his perceived oppression of his race. He was also involved in WW2 because he felt that his nation had been oppressed by other nations unfairly after WW1. In both these cases there is conflict because people are distinguished by race or nation.

An example relating to religion. Osama bin Ladin's grievance with America and the Western world isn't that we have different beliefs to him, his grievance is that he feels that Islam is oppressed by the world (especially America and especially Christianity). If the whole world was Islamic, or none of the world was Islamic, how could he feel like that, and what excuse could he come up with to fight?

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Post by dyalander » 12 May 2008 23:44

While there are clear examples of religion being used to perpetuate violence amongst groups of people divided over other issues there are also clear examples where religion is the fundamental difference that divides the conflicting parties.

That is, religion can operate as both a reason and an excuse to violence.

Given this fact, it is hard to argue that removing religion would not reduce conflict. While it wouldn't stop those conflicts where it is just an excuse, it would stop those conflicts where it is a cause.

Though, without a exhaustive-ish factor analysis of causes of conflict throughout history it is difficult to talk degrees with any authority.
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Post by Jeremy » 12 May 2008 23:52

Exactly. We can certainly say that religion has a direct influence on many conflicts. We could not possibly claim that the people would find something else to fight about if they didn't have religion.

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Post by Jeremy » 13 May 2008 00:11

*Could not claim with any surety that might be the case, but what evidence do we have to think that it would be? There are very few examples of groups that are expressly atheists fighting groups that are also expressly atheist (although I absolutely concede that this is pretty weak evidence either way).

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Post by Bringerofpie » 13 May 2008 13:55

Jeremy wrote:
The reality is that a lack of religious belief is the fastest growing view on religion, and has been for centuries now. In that same time violent death has dropped enormously.
You make two statements here, both of which I disagree with

(see: Revival (c. 1650s-1700s) and both World Wars)
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Post by Bringerofpie » 13 May 2008 13:55

Jeremy wrote:
The reality is that a lack of religious belief is the fastest growing view on religion, and has been for centuries now. In that same time violent death has dropped enormously.
You make two statements here, both of which I disagree with. Care to back up your statements?

(see: Revival (c. 1650s-1700s) and both World Wars)
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Post by Jeremy » 13 May 2008 15:37

Sure.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker0 ... index.html
Steven Pinker wrote:Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.
I also posted this article a while ago (sorry, I no longer have the direct link, although I'm sure it's really easy to find the mentioned UN report).;

http://modified.in/footbag/viewtopic.ph ... 64&start=0
Pamela Bone wrote:HERE is the news. Since 1992 the number of armed conflicts in the world has decreased by 40per cent. The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval for hundreds of years without a war between the major powers.
The percentage of men who died violent deaths last century - a century that held two world wars - was approximately 1 per cent, while the percentage of men who died violent deaths in hunter-gatherer societies is estimated at about 30 per cent.

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Post by RawSko » 14 May 2008 06:03

Jeremy, you say that war is fought by people who deem themselves different from their opponents (roughly). If we eliminated religion, we would have less wars. Would you be in favor of eliminating racial and national diversity as well? We could scientifically abolish racial diversity with some kind of vaccination, perhaps? Would you like everyone to assimilate to one global culture? ...at least we'd have nothing to fight about.

are you a communist?
:P

But seriously. Without diversity, what's the point anyway? I would rather kill people in order to retain my right to be different. ...and I'm a peaceful guy. Fuck assimilating.
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Post by PoisonTaffy » 14 May 2008 06:59

Problem is, religion wars are fought AGAINST people's rights to be of a different religion :)
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Post by RawSko » 14 May 2008 09:03

InfecedTofu wrote:Problem is, religion wars are fought AGAINST people's rights to be of a different religion :)
and I'm willing to defend my right (and the rights of others) to be different. What I'm getting at, is that it's worth fighting (and killing) for.
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Post by Blue_turnip » 14 May 2008 15:54

RawSko wrote:Jeremy, you say that war is fought by people who deem themselves different from their opponents (roughly). If we eliminated religion, we would have less wars. Would you be in favor of eliminating racial and national diversity as well? We could scientifically abolish racial diversity with some kind of vaccination, perhaps? Would you like everyone to assimilate to one global culture? ...at least we'd have nothing to fight about.

are you a communist?
:P

But seriously. Without diversity, what's the point anyway? I would rather kill people in order to retain my right to be different. ...and I'm a peaceful guy. Fuck assimilating.
I don't really see what communism has to do with anything you were talking about, although I recognise it was a joke.

You ask what's the point without diversity? Well, what is the point with diversity? There have been many cultures that have and still are pretty much isolated from each other. But they're just chillin'. This whole 'diversity' thing is so overrated. Its just so lame.
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Post by Krafty » 14 May 2008 15:55

RawSko wrote:Jeremy, you say that war is fought by people who deem themselves different from their opponents (roughly). If we eliminated religion, we would have less wars. Would you be in favor of eliminating racial and national diversity as well? We could scientifically abolish racial diversity with some kind of vaccination, perhaps? Would you like everyone to assimilate to one global culture? ...at least we'd have nothing to fight about.

are you a communist?
:P

But seriously. Without diversity, what's the point anyway? I would rather kill people in order to retain my right to be different. ...and I'm a peaceful guy. Fuck assimilating.
That's not how a vaccine works. It works by eliciting an immune response before you encounter a pathogen so that when you do encounter the specific pathogen, your immune response is quick enough that the pathogen doesn't pose much of a threat.

Also, why can't there be diversity within a single culture? Just because someone is part of a culture doesn't mean that everyone in the culture is the same and have nothing to set them apart from others. I don't understand how everyone being part of a single culture takes away any significant diversity.
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Post by Jeremy » 14 May 2008 17:11

RawSko wrote:Jeremy, you say that war is fought by people who deem themselves different from their opponents (roughly). If we eliminated religion, we would have less wars. Would you be in favor of eliminating racial and national diversity as well? We could scientifically abolish racial diversity with some kind of vaccination, perhaps? Would you like everyone to assimilate to one global culture? ...at least we'd have nothing to fight about.

are you a communist?
:P

But seriously. Without diversity, what's the point anyway? I would rather kill people in order to retain my right to be different. ...and I'm a peaceful guy. Fuck assimilating.
I'm not really sure what you're talking about, or how you've drawn those conclusions. The solution to racism seems to be integration and inclusion, rather than getting rid of all races. Like religion, it's the attitude of "us and them" that is the problem, not people's actual races. This is why places that are racially homogeneous (as in most of the people are of the same race) are much more racist than places with much more racial diversity. The Czech Republic, for example, has much stronger and more prevalent racial attitudes than much of Europe, and it's also 95% white people. Rural towns usually have stronger racist attitudes than cities, again because they're not exposed to people of different races so much. Some cities are more racist than others, and they're also usually racially separated - usually on economic reasons as well as racial reasons - ie. all the black people are poor and live in one suburb, and all the white people are rich and live in another. Cities with diversity of races and mixing of races have far less racial attitudes than polarised cities.

Nations are obviously a way in which people are divided, and obviously leads to conflict. Much of the progress in avoiding conflict in the second half of the 20th century can be attributed to the growth in international relations and immigration, and the weakening of national borders. It's now inconceivable for two nations in Europe to start a war against each other, yet in the last 100 years we've seen the two biggest wars that have ever occurred in Europe (although that's in real terms, not relative terms). This clearly shows that we don't need an end to nations, we just need an end to nationalism, and in most countries, especially amongst the educated people, who are the ones to have influence over the country, the attitude of "My country is the best and other countries are inferior" has pretty much disappeared.

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Post by BainbridgeShred » 14 May 2008 19:20

Just watching the La/Utah game right now, and its Radmonivic and Brewer going back and forth, which is kind of funny. Radmonivic just hit another three as I was loading the page to post this that I couldn’t even tell went in because of how cleanly it went through the net.

LA’s major weakness is on defense though and I remember thinking that when they allowed Denver, albeit a good offensive team, to drop so many points on them. Tonight it’s becoming especially apparent against Utah. I’m not saying they wont win (It’s 26-20 LA right now) but they should be worried regardless of who they’re going to face in the next round. 27-23 now

Lebron is a joke =/
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Post by RawSko » 15 May 2008 06:08

All I was getting at is that people have the right to belive in religion. Saying that religion is bad because it causes war is the same thing as saying Hindus are wrong because they belive in MANY gods. It's offensive to harsh on anyone's beliefs. Getting rid of all religions because they cause war would take away freedom and diversity (like in a communist regime, turnip). I'd rather have war than that...
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Post by mc » 15 May 2008 06:22

I haven't read any of this discussion.

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