Opinion A holy war? Examining the relationship between religion and violence

I need to know someone exists before offending them

You need to know? Exactly. So keep your mind open man.

It’s open man, except bruton doesn’t allow god to have a smartphone for face time is out of the question.

Moan Burton and her iphone phobia. Not that she even cares, pension and perks secured.

I seen a pic today of daily prayer with ISIL, they’re all praying in different directions, they’d want some proper lessons off proper Muslims to follow Islam properly…

Well the world is round so technically they could point the opposite direction

I literally red thumbed that so you would also have the same

Don’t think you can really say that Tequila simply because humans have worshipped one deity or another since the beginning of mankind.

Well,this was 50/50,but I see the “you believe in a sky fairy” group have had their way with the green team…

Have they not learned by now?

“My religion is true and all other religions are false. If you won’t accept my statement, I will use violence to prove that my god is on the side of my religion”

So said Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and all the former Iron Curtain leaders, when imposing their religion – atheism.

Atheism is a lack of a belief system so is not a religion…in the same way a lack of fruit is not a type of fruit.

Atheism is not a religion Fraj. It has none of the structures of religion and the misuse of power by the forces you mention was not in the name of atheism.
It would be more accurate of you to describe those ideologies as religion. They have far more in common.

“Atheism is a lack of a belief system so is not a religion…” ?????

Atheism entails a whole system of beliefs, including materialism and determinism, to mention just two, so it requires FAITH …………..or don’t you BELIEVE it?

Fraj, Atheism is the lack of a belief in a God as opposed to a belief that there is no God…quite different things.
To suggest someone is an atheist and therefore believes in X or Y shows your lack of understanding on this point.

Atheism is not a religion you plonker, we don’t believe in fairy tales….

Since when have atheists all become materialists Fraj??

@Fozz
Q – what’s red and invisible?
A – no tomatoes
:-)

God help me the fairytale statement is so very annoying

Its supposed to be.

So you believe it is lack of a belief system so atheism is the belief in the absense of belief in a belief system which actually makes atheism a belief system believe it it not!!!!!!!

Well seen as no gods been proven I guess the term god is imagenary to some extent

Proove there’s no God?

Google “Russell’s teapot” Sean

Atheist myself but if someone believes in a God it’s not like I have proof .

Sean, the onus is on the believers to prove God’s existence, not the contrary as to expect so would be ridiculous.

Its not the believer onus to prove anything,.

Pantheism FTW.

Its not like they have proof either Sean

Nobody wants to discuss Pantheism?….Awwwww

If the onus is on the believer to prove and they dont feel the need to, what does that say. Its good enough for me. I’ve met a few atheists who insist that i prove the existence of God and my answer is i wont. And i cant. I know he is there. And how can you prove the love of God. How can i scientifically prove the love of my husband and my kids and my parents. I cant.

Prove any negative.

Its up to the claiment to provide proof not us.

Be surr to keep that opinion when someone believes you commited a crime.

All religion is open to interpretation and therefore the practice of such beliefs can become problematic. I have no issue with anyone and their faith but sometimes those beliefs can lead to proselytizing, such as the recent pro-life movement, which takes away individual freedoms which such be afforded to all regardless of personal doctrine.

I am not targeting the pro-life movement specifically it is just topical.

Completely agree Charles – I’m not religious in any way, but I know that many people gain comfort and reassurance from their faith and I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from them. Each to their own – its their personal choice and even though I don’t share it I do respect it, and as long as their beliefs don’t affect anyone else then good luck to them.

I do however have a huge problem with people who try and impose their beliefs on others by telling them how they should and shouldn’t live their lives and denying personal choice and freedom. For the record this also includes ‘preaching atheists’ who can’t accept and respect the fact that others may hold different views.

I am in total agreement with your opinion on the atheist “movement”…is it cool to call it a movement?…..

I appreciate Dawkins and love Hitchens and understand how important they are in helping us to see how religion affects our perception of the world. I also understand that their philosophy has spawned an ideological mindset that for some that can be so aggressive it can discount some of the main arguments they highlighted.

Humanism brah! Clue is in the name :)

@john b. Actually the onus of proof lies with the person who makes the claim. The only claim made here was that there is no god, so the onus of proof lies with Sean for making that claim.

That’s ridiculous Paul…
The burden of proof is worth the claimant who says something exists…if you cannot prove something exists in the first place then it’s impossible to prove it doesn’t exist…

There is no evidence that god exists and plenty of evidence that god doesn’t exist. If you’re being rational and scientific then it’s pretty obvious it’s all made up nonsense. If you have faith then you dont care what science says.

@Charlie

And lots of homophobes in Russia have used this government stance to launch abominable attacks on gay people.

What’s your point?

Charlie your making it look like being gay in Russia is not an issue. Please do some research.

Its more than just banning homosexually-oriented material from schools Charles

All religions have immoral laws not just Islam. In fact the Quran is literally plagiarised from the Bible. I’m agnostic and I find religion to be primitive with no place in modern times but you can’t say one religion is more terrible than the other because empirically they all tie together neatly.

Disturbing rise of fundamentalist Christianity in Africa too, with calls for the death penalty for being gay. In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army has been trying for years to set up a theocracy guided by the ten commandments – they use enforced child soldiers and have been accused of abduction, rape, murder and enslavement of young girls.

However, I agree that it is not religion as such (was Northern Ireland’s conflict really about religion too?) but about power and control, and also patriarchy – control and abuse of women tends to be a consistent thread through all of these movements.

A mistake however to blame all Christians for the fanatical fundamentalist Christians in parts of Africa, or even parts of the US, as it is a mistake to blame all Muslims for the actions of fundamentalist Muslims in other parts of the world.

There’s a quote I really like that may help my point,”Capitalism is religion.Banks are churches.Bankers are priests.Wealth is heaven.Poverty is hell.Rich people are saints.Poor people are sinners.Commodities are blessings.Money is God” – Miguel D Lewis.What’s in that quote is what drives wars,as I’ve said religion becomes another difference between a group and their opposition.

My issue with what you said Kevin is that the Crusades were a result of consistant Muslim attacks and attempts at invading Christian Europe (I’m not an apologist or condoning them) What was happening?Land grabbing.Pakistan and India?Land mix up at the hands of the former British Empire Palestine and Israel?Land grab.Northern Ireland?Originated from land grab.The majority began with the goal of increasing wealth through land ownership and as religion was such a pivotal thing in ones life not so long ago,the difference in beliefs morphed in to the difference in culture and ethnicity.

Land grabs came from religious ideologies. Ireland example was protestants trying to land grab from catholics. Your crusade point makes no sense. If Muslims started it then it’d still a religious war

My original point is that religion attributes to these wars in very negative ways. It doesn’t outright cause then there’s dozens of factors in wars. But claiming religion doesn’t attribute to the ‘holy wars’ is pretty laughable at best

Are you sure about that?I’m sure personal gain was more in mind and it wasn’t,the British wanted greater control of Ireland prior to the Reformation when England was also Catholic.The Qur’an actually says a great deal about respecting Christians.

As I’ve said before again and again it attributes. If northern ireland was already protestant there would be no land grab. As land was mainly owned by religious orders back then anyway. In many governments at the time religious orders had more power, thus a certain level of control

Faith is just that….. One persons belief in something. The minute you start demanding other people believe what you believe you are entering a world of pain and suffering. As someone who has faith it disgusts me how the simple message of love and understanding can be warped by people with different agendas. What you believe and your life style choices are up to you. What I believe is up to me and I would like to believe in the love for all people no matter who they are and what they do. A lot of people have lost sight of the original message to the detriment of humanity as a whole.

So what’s your point?religion should be outlawed because it could possibly be a difference between two groups?How about we ban all languages besides one too that might cause some tension.I’m not saying that,jihad=holy war,it’s fact,I’m not denying it.I just think it shouldn’t be blown out of proportion,don’t make mountains out of molehills.

Cornelius,I wholeheartedly agree

No all those ideas are stupid. Just make your own informed decision to not hate and be kind and respect other people.

That is brilliant Keenan, money is the only true religion. Every single war that was called in the name of a religious belief were really down to money.

Modern Ireland is veering from Catholicism towards a different means of conducting life Pauline,a treachourous one,materialism;I do like that quote alot!

The one thing that I have noticed Keenan about Ireland and religion is wealth or rather our steps from poor to rich, when Ireland was a poor country religion and the power of the church was force to be reckoned with but in the 90′s when money started to flow we turned away from the church. We educated ourselves we no longer cowered before the church and its archaic teachings.

I hope you aren’t equating education levels to faith,I don’t like that view.People leave the Church due to materialism becoming dominant over spirituality.No doubt that wealthier countries bring less Church dominance but this is due to the democratic process,not the level of educated people rising.In the entirity of it all,the new Irish generation have followed a European wide trend of materialism and I feel Ireland will meerly become a replica of a failing ultra-secular England,that isn’t as rosy as atheists would suggest.

“People leave the Church due to materialism becoming dominant over spirituality.” I’d say the Church’s wide spread abuse of women and children and the abuse of power by the hierarchy helped as more so.

Sorry Keenan but that is my belief, I grew up in a very strict catholic home, I didn’t grow up poor or uneducated but in the information age that began in the 90′s I questioned my parents and grandparents beliefs especially the power that our PP held in our lives. I have faith but not in the teachings of my parents church.

Well,when I used term church and spirituality,I implied them abandoning their faith regardless of what religion they belong to…

Japan is a modern, wealthy state, most people are still Shinto-Buddhists, most Jews live in wealthy states, again, most are still practicing, the line about most western Christians losing their faith because they’re greedy comes off as sour grapes from people unwilling to notices just how much their religious leaders damaged others faith though hypocrisy and leading people to realize they where being used by ‘holy’ men after power.

I don’t blame you,what I have experienced of the church is probably in stark contrast to what you have experienced.It’s a very touchy issue in Ireland nowadays and the conversation is virtually non-existent in my generation.I looked into religion off my own accord after visiting Dubai and witnessing Islam and have been very interested in theology since.I’ve adopted an unpopular view by modern Irish standards!

David, less than 15% of the Japanese people formally identify with any religion according to census data. Most Japanese people are non-religious. They are often automatically registered as Shinto adherents by their local temple because of long standing family traditions, but the overwhelming majority claim no affiliation. However, the Japanese people do practice certain Shinto traditions. But the Japanese people by and large do not acknowledge them as religious. In much the same way that putting up a Christmas tree is not a religious act.
Just under half of all Jews live in America. Two thirds of them don’t belong to a synagogue. A quarter don’t believe in God and a third of them celebrate Christmas. These figures are significantly higher amongst younger Jews.
Basically, religious beliefs and faith are being lost across the developed world. The difference is that some religions are still important culturally to people. Many Jews claim that Judaism is more of an ethnicity than a prescriptive faith.

In some ways, saying religion is the cause of anything is not quite right – to me religions are created in human minds – they have no objective existence outside of human minds – and tend to be different depending on the cultural place from which they spring. So really they are just another manifestation of the ‘them and us’ mentality, and that is what we have to let go of if we want to end the vicious cycle of war on this planet.

@ The LoneHurler. What a brilliant woman thank you for sharing

Absolutely correct Dave – unthinking knee-jerk reactions! When it comes to it there is fundamentalist Christianity on the rise in Africa, with the Lord’s Resistance Army trying to set up a state based on the ten commandments and also accused of rape, murder, abductions of girls. Yet nobody blames Irish Christians for that!

We need to see these things for what they are – the product of a ‘them and us’ mentality, the need to maintain existing power bases and patriarchy. We are all one on this planet and let’s not forget it.

Keenan, it is not atheistic communism, it is just communism. It is an illustration of the power of religion that you feel the need to describe based on a religious paradigm. The evils of Stalin were not committed in the name of or motivated by the belief or lack of belief in God.

Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao didn’t do the things they did in the name of atheism. They did it in the name of communism which typically has a quasi-state religion. It’s not the same as secular atheism. Not even close.
Hitler wasn’t an atheist, he was a Catholic. And much of the atrocities he committed on the Jewish people were informed by centuries of church sanctioned anti-semitism. That’s a complete straw argument. The reason why most wars now are in the middle east over religion is that the collapse of thousands of years of successive empires and strong leaders has lead to massive power vaccums. Islam has always been ruled by Caliphs, Emperors, Sultans etc. It has no history of democracy and yet sixty years ago democracy and self determination was heaped on the middle east which no consideration for religious divide or contentious border issues. The British Empire just drew some lines which we now call borders, packed up shop and left. It was ridiculous. It’s the same reason why Africa has seen repeated wars since the empires pulled out. The failure is firmly on the empires who completely messed up the transfer of power. Sadly, the only times of peace in these troubled ex-colonies is when a dictator was in charge. It’s a messy subject. And religion pays a role, but bad historical blood is a much bigger factor.

All wars have a religious element to them. Dictatorships including Stalins relied on credulous citizens. Christopher Hitchens phrased it best when he religion in wars is a force multiplier. Hitler was a catholic & was supported by rome as was mussolini & franco. 50% of the waffen ss were confessing roman catholics. So they confessed to rome about the final solution well before the end of ww2. Now catholics need to have a good long think about that & I haven’t even got to the muslims yet. Did religion start these wars? No but it did prolong them & it licensed lunatics to carry out atrocities with gods blessing.

Hitler wasn’t a Catholic, his mother was. He despised the Catholic Church and removed the Bible from every school, closed Catholic schools, closed the Catholic press etc. He believed in God alright but not Catholicism.

Hitler wasn’t really a Catholic I agree. He certainly didn’t practice it. But he did manipulate it. He used it as a method of control. And he was very very deep with the occult and Germano/Christian mysticism. And the doctrine of anti-semitism was on the books for thousands of years. He was well informed by a Catholic background. It would be a disgrace to say that being a Catholic made him what he was. He was destined to be a genocidal maniac, but he was definitely coloured in with RCC blue if you like in certain ways.

Hitler was a catholic & his first political agreement was with the rcc in Germany. Gott mit uns is on the belt buckle of all ss soldiers. Please look it up

Sorry, but Hitler was not Catholic. In fact, Hitler despised Christianity in its entirety and described it “as a symptom of decay”. He merely tolerated in the early days of his rise to power but when he became sole ruler after the death of Hindenburg his true feelings emerged. He began to imprison leaders on false charges, he closed Catholic schools, replaced the Bible with copies of Mein Kampf, closed the Catholic press etc. Hitler merely played lip service to Christianity in the beginning to garner much needed support in an overwhelmingly Christian country but he was not one himself.

Andrea Hitlers birthday was celebrated every year by the rcc during the war until his death. The alliances Hitler had around europe were conveniently with catholic groups including yugoslavia/Croatia spain italy just to name a few. I have no doubt that Hitler may have other ideas once he was in total control. The fact is the rcc were fully engaged with the nazis even after the war when they helped many nazis escape to south America. These all point to someone that used the rcc to his own ends but also point to the fact the rcc was only to happy to engage with facism. I also put it to you as before that hitler was in fact a catholic & he used that to his advance. Many of these nazis were in fact catholics & goebbels himself was the only nazis excommunicated by the rcc for the horrendous crime of marrying a non catholic. Its all written down in history.

Mj, it is widely accepted now that Hitler despised Christianity and everything it stood for. I am not now, nor have I ever denied the relationship that existed between the Church and Hitler in the earlier days of his power but it all changed as we all know now. Google Mit Brennender Sorge, Alan O Connor mentioned it here before and it gives a clearer picture of the actual relationship between the two.

He did not despise Christianity. He despised the control it have over the minds of people and sought to replace it with nationalism. He manipulated it like I said. He said no problem with the church when practiced by ordinary people and indeed sought multiple times to connect the church with German mysticism. He often used Barbarossa as a holy warrior who took up the mantle of the Church during holy war against infidels. Which is why he called it Operation Barborossa. He obsessed over collecting Christian relics including the Holy Lance. I have no doubt that he did persecute Catholics, but only those that spoke out against him. The truth is, the relationship Hitler had with his faith is impossible to know. But the relationship he had with the Church as an organ of the state to further his agenda is unquestionable.
Either way, the original poster claiming that Hitler was an atheist and started a war is childish. Correlation does not prove causation, in this case it’s not even true that he was an atheist. There are different causes for war and for doing terrible things. And I would challenge anybody to come up with a single instance in history where you could say “Person X did this, because they didn’t believe in God”.

@ Andrea Rock Massey
Thanks Andrea, that is good information.
@ Sean J. Troy
The communist claim that “religion is the opium of the people” is constantly echoed here on the journal, by the self acclaimed atheists. If I had a Euro for every time it’s claimed I’m brainwashed, I’d be doing well. The arrogance of many of the atheists here is staggering. But I’m also glad to say many atheist are more than capable of stimulating rational discussion. Both Stalin and Mao targeted Christianity as a source of freedom, and an enemy of their godless regimes. Stalin executed 85,000 orthodox priests in 1937 alone. There were 6,000 priests murdered during the Spanish civil war.
The reality is that Christianity has been the bedrock of freedom for many centuries, even though there are some notable exceptions.
Here is an interesting link to what is happening in Hong Kong, and the role of Christians right now.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/10/17/Christians-Central-to-Hong-Kong-Pro-Democracy-Protests

You’re right. Stalin and Mao did target Christians. Although to be fair, they targeted everything that ideologically opposed them. It has little to do with atheism. Communist regimes in general tend to try and implement a state religion. Seeing the state itself as divine. You need not look any further than North Korea. Stalin did not believe in a God, he wanted his people to believe that the only loyalty they owed was to the state. That’s why they killed off Christians and other religions, they didn’t want to people to think there was an authority higher than the state itself. This is very well documented. It has nothing to do with brain washing. It’s about ego, power and authority and who the people look up to. I don’t think religious people are brain washed, not now anyway. But it’s hard to deny that people have done some pretty horrific things because their religious leaders told them to. So no, religion is not the true evil. Extreme ideology is. Religion just happens to be that extreme Ideology more than not.
I think claiming that Christianity has been the bedrock of freedom is a dangerous position to take. It gripped Europe in an authoritarian vice for thousands of years until the secular enlightenment. The Church condoned slavery, absolute monarchism, serfdom, tithes, death for reading scriptures in vernacular languages etc. It has never been a bastion of freedom. Freedom was wrested from it by people like John Locke and Francis Bacon.

I’m happy to concede that Christianity was a big motivator for the people who pushed for democracy. I’d be interested to see actual statistics, there are none in the article. It just claims that most of them were Christian without justifying why it thinks that.
But if you want to use that as an example of Christians standing up for freedom, you also have to accept Christians killing girls because they believe they are witches in Africa. The violent suppression of gay rights in Russia and Africa. Uganda recently passed legislation that gives gay people the life sentence at the behest of local church leaders. The recent surge in homophobia has been lead by a nascent resurgence in Orthodox values and nationalism. The AIDS crisis in Africa is almost exclusively as bad as it is because the Church frowns upon the use of condoms. Then you have to look at all of the Christian ideology militia groups like the LRA. There are a lot of atrocities committed in the world today because they claim the bible tells them to do so.

@ Sean J. Troy
Sean, life is far too short to try and address the collection of mistruths you lay out above. Sufficeth to say, when one sucks from the pap of Locke, Bacon and Hitchens, ones views will be colourful if not accurate.
Here we were addressing just one of the mistruths popular among the trendy atheists.

I personally don’t care about Hitchens or Locke. I only admire Bacon for creating the Scientific Method. What did I say that was a mistruth? Please, refute what you think is a lie. I don’t particularly care about religion. Let people believe what they want. But it does irritate me when people try to rewrite history and portray Christianity as a beacon of light and hope and then tarnish secular thinkers with people like Stalin and Mao who were not secularists.
I would call myself a secularist ahead of an atheist. I believe that everybody has the right to believe whatever they want. But no religion should get special treatment. That’s all.

@ Sean J. Troy
Sean, this discussion was particularly about whether faith systems were the main movers of war and misery in the world. Bacon of course was not an atheist, even though atheists have attempted to recruit him. As for the scientific method, I’m all in support of it. It has been a useful tool to humanity, even if it has its limitations.

I never claimed Bacon was an atheist. I personally don’t think it matters because most of his views were his own anyway. If he was a theist, he certainly didn’t have religious views and values. He made his own.
I never claimed that religion is the sole cause of war and misery. I think two things are: extreme Ideology and natural resources. Religion is not the only source for extreme ideology, but you’d have to be an idiot to believe that religious extremism isn’t responsible for any wars both past and present.
No thought method is perfect because human beings aren’t perfect. But I don’t think it’s actually possible to improve upon it given the limitations of the human mind. It’s superior even to logic. It’s hard to imagine it can be improved.

@ Sean J. Troy
I can agree with a lot of that. The reality is much of humanity have one faith system or another, and with so many conflicts around the world, war would be difficult without persons s of faith involved. With one third of the entire population Christian, we are bound to be caught up in the melee.

There are a few problems with that:

1) Faith is dying out. There are less people of faith now than there were fifty years ago, and there will be less again fifty years from now.

2) It’s fairly difficult to calculate how many Christians there are in the world. Especially with the RCC. Statistically, I am one of those 2.2 billion people who are supposedly Christian even though I’ve never been one in my life. I was baptised as a matter of culture. My parents are both atheists and baptised me because they didn’t see the harm in it and their parents wanted them to. Not to mention that it’s next to impossible to get into a school otherwise. But of course, the Church considers me amongst it’s flock because of it.

3) Like I said already, there’s a difference between having beliefs and acting on those beliefs. Many of these wars are happening precisely because of religion. Boko Haram exists because of religion. It’s not just that they’re being caught up in it, they’re causing it. Not all wars are religious like I said. But there are wars are directly caused by religious clashes that otherwise may not have ever happened.

But thankfully, the western world is shaking off religion more and more and I do believe the world will be a better place when the majority of people don’t actually care about faith and couldn’t be bothered getting upset over what you do in the bedroom or whether your God is wrong or not. Again, there are many other causes for this. I’d also like to see an end to racism which is another extreme ideology. But religion is on my wish list of things that should fade away. Not forcefully, and people should be allowed to believe what they want. But people are losing their faith with or without help, it’s only a matter of time.

@ Sean J. Troy
Sean, you are just incorrect, there are 2.5b Christians in the world, and Christians are the fastest growing faith in the world. Try not to have such a narrow view of the world, the west is declining as the aftereffects of wealth an decedence takes hold, but Christianity is going from strength to strength. So we are still on a growth curve, and its predicted to continue. Your prediction has been made every year since year zero.
Many of the war groups you mention are not faith based, but use faith as a recruting mechanism of convenience.
In my view, rather than shaking off religion, the west is bound to return to religion with fervour, when they discover the aftereffects of their apostasy. No marriage, lifelong, childcentric, conjugal. Children commoditized. Euthanasia normalised, with and without consent. Everyone for themselves. The demographic winter, and the redesign of Europe as new races and creeds fill the under populated countries. Quite a bleak forecast for the secular experiment. But of course the secularist view of separating church and state is reasonable, but secularism has come to mean the rejection of all morals or ideas which the church proposes. The popular response to church in the west is rejection and taunting, just for the hell of it, rather than considering the long term social effects.

Okay. First of all, there are 2.2 billion Christians in the world not 2.5. Secondly, I have already addressed how weak that figure is because it doesn’t take into account people who have left their religions. Thirdly, Christianity is not the fastest growing religion in the world, Islam is. Thirdly, irreligion is growing faster than any other belief about religion in the western world. Fourthly, while Christianity IS indeed still growing in absolute terms. These converts are mainly limited to the third world which has a very high fertility rate.
ISIS is not faith based? The Taliban isn’t? Anders Brevik wasn’t motivated by religious nationalism? Boko Haram no? All of these groups coincidentally carried out their atrocities for non religious reasons but just recruited using religion? That’s like saying the IRA isn’t a nationalist paramilitary organisation. Don’t be ridiculous.
The West is not returning to religion. As I said, irreligion is growing rapidly at the expense of theism across the Western world. These are verifiable facts, I don’t care what you think. Numbers matter more than wishful thinking.
You are now equating religion with morality which is absolute crap. Being religious does not make you a more moral person except by the moral criteria of that religion itself. There are no statistical variations amongst atheists and religious people when it comes to marriage and children. Euthansia is not an absolute moral issue, don’t claim that it is. Many people, religious or not believe in it.
Secularism doesn’t reject morality, it just proposes it’s own. One which most of us follow. Don’t forget, “Love one another as I have loved you” isn’t originally a Christian idea. It’s a secular idea that spawns from Confucianism. I’m sure there are long term social effects of losing religion, both good and bad. But that’s not a good reason to blindly stick to Bronze age mysticism. The fact is, since the secular enlightenment we have abolished slavery, given universal voting rights, guaranteed freedom of religion and we are well on the way to granting full rights regardless of sexual orientation.
If you want to go back to the days when religion dominated, then you’ll have sectarian divide, tithes, mother and child homes, sexual abuse scandals, exclusionary policies towards non Christians etc etc.
The facts bear out. We ARE becoming less religious. And we are better for it. Unless of course, you’re happy to go back to slavery and all of the other things I said above?

# Alan Flynn

The “fairy stories” are the myth that complex living cells came into existence by pure chance and that somehow they evolved – by purposeless, unguided processes – into complex human beings possessing intelligence, consciousness and self-awareness (which are non-material realities.)

Evolution guided by God, I can believe, but spare me the fable of the purposeless, unguided version.

Fraj, there is masses of evidence for the fact that is evolution…..if you refuse to study even a portion of that then that is indeed your loss to ignorance.

You demonstrate a total lack of understanding when you describe the process of evolution as ‘purposeless’.

And intelligence, consciousness and self-awareness are by-products of the extremely complex chemistry going on in our brains…it is all explainable if not understood…but science is constantly trying to shed light on new areas and as it does so, the fables and myths get banished to history.

Hi Alan!

Fozz,your first sentence
“.. there is masses of evidence for the fact that is evolution…..if you refuse to study even a portion of that then that is indeed your loss to ignorance.”
betrays the fact that you didn’t read my post at all; I didn’t deny evolution.

You say “You demonstrate a total lack of understanding when you describe the process of evolution as ‘purposeless’ ”
Atheistic evolution necessarily is. It cannot have foresight or planning or a goal in mind. Even Dawkins calls it “the blind watchmaker”.

I find people who believe in a celestial North Korea are often not very bright! They say we have free will because the boss said so! I don’t mind someone who is religious just keep it to yourselves and don’t keep trying to save me and tell me this nonsense and don’t try and teach this nonsense to my children! My word I don’t want large elderly virgins telling my children they will burn in a fiery pit for all eternity if they take the lords name in vain, cop on!

Admittedly good points in your 2nd post, fraj.
But I feel that, while science cannot yet explain the origins of life, we should not fill in the blanks with an answer that discourages wonder – a creator.

I don’t know Jason – I think religion made my mother’s life an utter misery – very little money, nine children – it wore her down completely… it certainly did not make her happy as a belief system… quite the opposite it seems to me… I do think countries with low religious beliefs do tend to score higher on the happiness index too…