Calling All Atheists: If You Could Erradicate One Religion, Which Woudl It Be?

Ok guys, no more PC bull(*)(*)(*)(*) where you try and make it seem like all religions are equally stupid or offensive or barbaric; not gonna happen here. Here, I'm going to present you with a choice:

Say that you had the power to eradicate all knowledge of a single religion from our collective consciousness and all literature pertaining to it, such that the entire idea of this religion no longer exists. But again, you can only pick one.

I have posted above the 10 most-followed religions in the world for you to choose from; I considered 9 + "other" but I doubt anyone would deem something smaller than these a worthy use of such a hypothetical wish as we are entertaining here.

I choose Islam. If anyone cares to know why I shall happily explain.

 

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Judaism takes out Christianity and Islam too, since they are based on it, and if it never existed...Neither could they.

 

Christianity would easily fill the vacuum left by eliminating Islam. I vote Islam off the island.

 

As a lesser of two weevils, Id boot islam.

 

Why is no one actually voting in the poll?

 

It's a tricky one. I tend to think that culture determine how peaceful or violent a group is, not religion.

 

I sincerely believe that religions are a side-effect of the natural inborn tendency of humans to seek teleological explanations for everything. What Aristotle called "final cause" - the "ultimate purpose" behind everything. Humans naturally ASSUME a final cause, and if they can't imagine any reason for a purpose, they invent an overriding "purpose-giver" so that everything can have a purpose. Even when there is none.

Teleological thinking was almost surely an evolutionary advantage, since our predators clearly had a purpose - to eat us. And since we are a gregarious species who required one another to accomplish what nobody could do alone, we needed to communicate and coordinate. And THAT means we had to understand each others' purposes.

But how about the weather? Droughts and floods are bad things, so weather is important. And since purpose is ubiquitous, the weather is obviously doing what it does for some purpose. Whose purpose? Must be somebody's, right? So we invent gods. But of course the gods are exactly like other people, except they have super powers and are invisible. But we appeal to them the exact same way we appeal to people - we offer them bribes (sacrifices), we offer then subjegation, we offer them devotion. And IN EXCHANGE, we expect them to produce good weather. If they do not, we offer bigger bribes.

I had an epiphany of sorts riding my motorcycle through the rural south. Every dozen miles or so was another pissant little town, which invariably consisted of trailer parks, shanties, slums, rusting vehicles in the yards and chickens on the lawn - AND a huge, modern, expensive brick-and-steel-and glass Baptist church. Where I imagine everyone congregated to pray for an end to their grinding poverty!

 

all true, anthropologically speaking . yet so few theists consider this stuff. you'd think it would be part and parcel of their investigations, if coming to faith at an adult age and shopping around for options. I know that if I consider something new in my life (a particular style of antique furniture say, or a new make of car), I generally look at the history of the thing.

meantime, regarding your pissant southern towns and their big glossy churches ... perhaps if they invested the same time and money in their kids' education there would be an end to their grinding poverty - at least for their kids. maybe their kids don't matter enough

 

As an atheist I wouldn't eliminate any religion.

I save it for religions to be against religious freedom.

 

Why would we eradicate a religion? That makes as much sense as saying I hate agnostics because they don't believe in what I believe in. That's absurd.

 

well sense Jews, Christians, Muslims and Mormons all believe in the same God, we could just do away with the belief in that one God

 

What would the eradication entail? If the individuals holding the belief were eradicated, then I'd chose the smallest option. If the religion was eliminated but the mind otherwise stayed the same, I'd chose Islam, it suffers mostly from religious enticements among the larger religions. If the religion was eliminated and people's brains would become as they would have been if they had been modern atheists, I would chose Christianity, since it has the greatest reach and power. Do these people become warded from religions afterwards? Chances are most would just pick up some other religion and it would have solved nothing.

All of this is naturally theoretical. In practice, I would have to give in to what you call political correctness and chose none or the smallest one on the basis that I don't think individuals should be messing with people's minds.

 

I couldn't vote because there's no category that covers them all...like "Sets of Man Made Rules Based On Silly Myths"

 

I look at what religion is preventing America from moving forward and that is Christianity. The religion is outdated and renders morality arbitrary and demands we praise an invisible being who, by all accounts, is nothing but an absentee landlord.

 

is that a rheotrical question?

 

The epiphany I had was, THIS is where the meager resources of these poor people is being pissed away. If ONLY they'd had the wit to put the money into starting businesses, educating their children, expanding their horizons, they would not be living in shanties with rusting antiques on the lawn. Those fancy churches cost a LOT. And THAT is rural brains on religion, from town to town to town to town for a thousand miles.

 

I'd choose Islam because it's far and away the most violent. Well, the most violent right now anyway.

(I'm making the assumption that it is the religion that is being eliminated. and it would be as if it never was. The people would wind up some other religion or atheist. Everything else would be the same.)

 

Faulty thinking there in red....Most predators dislike human flesh but can kill humans depending on circumstances. But then, an herbivore like a horse can also kill a human under certain circumstances. More likely, coordination was for the purpose of PREDATING to get FOOD and let me tell you, a hungry human is a far more dangerous and formidable predator.

I imagine successful breeders would form family 'clans' and such groups would have been widely dispersed. I also imagine that the 'purpose' of each clan would have been decided by the most prominent (for whatever reason) individual. However, that individual would have had no clout without agreement among the rest of the clan.

Human beings seem to have an innate 'purpose' of gathering together, collaborating with one another, etc. within either small tribes/clans or larger assemblies of contiguous pieces of bordered land masses. (countries/nations). There is some reason for this which is a mystery just as it is a mystery why some animals lead solitary lives.

There is definitely something greater at work. Thousands of years of human history echoes of these beliefs as well in a myriad of different beliefs and deities.

Funny, today we have AGW people who believe we DO have control over the climate.

Better than the street gangs of the inner cities with all their guns, drugs and bling.

 

This is an interesting idea but does it not have one fatal flaw?, ie if you eradicate a religion you do not eradicate the God. If a God really existed eradicating his followers would not alter his existence. Unless you are suggesting that for a God to exist he must have followers?

 

Their god is nothing more than an idea in their minds. If we eliminate the religion we eliminate that idea.

 

There are indications that humans managed to exterminate their most dangerous predators. But still this is a good point.,

And, I suppose you're also saying, the ability to detect and anticipate purpose in prey animals is also very helpful.

If the sort of morality captured by the Golden Rule evolved into us over a period of a couple of million years, computer simulations suggest that this sort of morality would be most effective for groups of approximately 200 people.

This isn't quite what I was talking about. Having an administrative hierarchy is not the same thing as teleological thinking.

For most anthropologists, it's not that big a mystery. Humans work best in groups. But this is also distinct from teleological thinking.

But for the most part, these beliefs and deities derive from the human intuition that there is a purpose behind everything. Today some of us may see droughts and floods as normal implications of the stochastic variability of weather. But in most past cultures, such events were the gods being angry. Weather happened for a purpose.

Not that I have seen. We have people who notice that human activities are altering the climate, but this is "controlling" the climate in a completely uncontrolled way.

Which certainly isn't saying much. You're comparing two views on life both of which encourage poverty and ignorance.

 

The question seems to rather indicate that Atheists inherently don't find any value in religion and would want to irradiate it. As an atheist, I certainly don't feel that way at all. Religion has played an immensely important role in history and in state building and continues to do so to this day (particularly religions like Christianity, and Islam). It would be a bit unnerving to remove those religions that have brought on the ability for states to form and overcome ethnic and tribal differences through religious custom. We might very well not have the EU without Christianity, or modern Middle Eastern and North African states without Islam. As much clashing as religious difference can create (particularly in the form of sectarianism) I highly doubt the world would be more stable or better off if they were expunged from history.

Thus, my answer is: none.

 

Spoken like a true atheist. You win the Joseph Stalin award.....congrats.

 

I'm an atheist that despises Islam. At least with Christianity, the vast majority of them white out all the stuff that makes the Bible bad.