Is religion a from of evil in disguise?

And how exactly is that result breaking any natural laws?

Yes, but compared to the fact that natural laws have been observed in abundance, it is not very credible. Besides, if things are acting differently somewhere else, then that is a special case of the natural laws for the circumstances of that place.

They experienced gravity. What they thought they experienced, or what they called it or how they explained it is not interesting for this argument.

 

Right, so define "enemy". If you recognize that killing a friend is "bad", then you still know that killing is wrong. You have to justify the killing in some way to appease your morals. So killing an "enemy" is OK because you have supressed your internal compass by labelling someone accordingly.

There would certainly be some mental factors to include in any "killing of enemies" too. There are psych evaluations for soldiers all the time because it is understood that killing, even when conditioned, can still cause issues. Perhaps you should consider why psych care is available if there is nothing internal to evaluate?

 

Religion was invented for reasons of taxation.

 

It broke the natural laws of the time, which said that electrical phenomena should conform to the Galilean transformations.

How do you "observe" a natural law? And "abundance" relative to what? Non-existent natural laws?

Sure, but just by adding in these special cases we would be changing the laws. Laws assume that there are no exceptions.

What you now refer to as "gravity".

It is the entire point of the argument.

 

You have a mistaken idea about scientific laws. Scientific laws are valid only for certain circumstances, the define what repeated observation has shown for those circumstances. The laws are NOT universal for any and all conditions.

Gravity has been shown to have different actions in and around black holes, neutron stars and even in stars.

Light is both a wave and a particle. And on and on and on and on.


Whatever your "detached from human understanding"means, it is nonsense, we are human, lol, anything we understand is human understanding. There are things we do not know, and things we do not understand, but they are NOT detached, they are just UNKNOWN.
And, if you are referring to gods and other myths, they are easily understandable by HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, they are the imagination of humans.

 

It only takes fear to be religious, not dumbness. Fear of death, fear of demons, fear of the devil, fear of hell, and on and on.

 

"Natural laws of the time"? Nature didn't act differently in the 19th century. It broke what we thought were natural laws at the time, but not the actual natural laws, the way nature actually behaves.

Wiki: "Natural law, or the law of nature (Latin: lex naturalis), is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal."

I agree that I don't know what these laws are. If gravity turns out not to be a fundamental law, then gravity was not what I was referring to in the first place.

By special cases, I don't mean things that act differently under certain conditions, I refer to things that act in a more easily explained way than it's most fundamental.

For instance, gravity behaves according to rules known as Newton's law of universal gravitation (there are higher orders still, but they are not relevant to my argument). On earth, we experience a special case called standard gravity.

What wee experience on earth is a special case of what goes on everywhere else. Similarly, there might be rules that are more general than the ones we know, ie, we live in a special case of those rules. They don't contradict the more fundamental rules, but they are easier and more likely to have been formulated by humans.

My argument does not rely on what we think are natural laws, it relies on what happens in nature.

From the start, I've referred to natural laws as an omniscient God would know them.

 

Ok, not detached, what I mean is that my argument doesn't rely on human understanding, it relies on what actually happens, regardless of what that is or if a certain race on a certain planet knows what it is.

I have not been discussing scientific laws at all. Wiki:
"A scientific law is a statement that explains what something does in science..."

I have been discussing natural laws. Wiki:
Natural law [...] is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal.

 

Religion can spawn from any emotion. Greef, happyness, or simply trying to understand the universe.

I was being sarcastic to that other guy. I think there are both smart and dumb religious people.

Some maybe, but some see death as a new begining and whatnot.

and rock music

He's a bad dude. I wouldn't buy a car from him...

It's got a bad rap, but not as scary as people think.

 

In the army, the enemy is anyone your leader tells you to shoot. And, yes, many religious people have a huge problem with killing, and many love the idea of killing, at least if others do it.
People go nuts without killing, lol, they go nuts because many humans are unstable. The military has psychiatrists for many things, gays, wimps, criminal behavior, religious paranoia, and many others I am sure, but those are the ones I personally observed.
I have no problem with killing when I think it is necessary. I make the call, I decide, not religion, not govt, not the army, not you-----I make the call based on my beliefs.

 

A omniscient god would not have natural laws, he'd just know everything that will happen in advance of when it does.

 

To put it simple,

for a Marxist - yes, it is a tool to control

for a Durkheimian - no, it is the natural representation of society

for most intelligent people it's both.

monotheistic beliefs are particularly harmful, as they give too much room for ruling classes to justify war, oppression, destruction. Christianity, for example, cost the world thousands of bright men and women, who could have come up with electricity and the steam engine hundreds of years ago. Islam tends to slow down some countries today, but it can generally remain more liberal and open.

I, personally, love Durkheim's ideas. For him religion = society. As people fail to recognise the great social forces that act upon them, they come up with a representation of the social, which can be understood and easily reproduced from one generation to the next. Hence -> religion.


Religion is NOT evil. People are evil.

 

Are you saying that if there was an omniscient god, things of mass would not attract each other?

Or that he knew everything that happened but did not understand the mechanism behind it?

 

Sure, but I'm not referncing those issues. They will also have these psychiatrists to deal with the affects after killing and being in battle - I'm sure you don't dispute this; it's well known.

Yes, as long as the target is defined as an enemy (whether military or just in your own head "at home"). If it is not defined as an enemy, then you have issues. The army hasn't erased all moral fibre in terms of "killing". The army has given you definition to supress emotion - the emotion still comes up if you have to kill someone who is not defined in such a way.

If you had to kill your daughter, if she was designated as a target, something inside would give you major issues. That's not a learned reflex, that's a "gut" issue (for want of a better term). I'm unsure either of us could prove that conditioning and social factors could remove that feeling inside, simply because it's almost impossible to set up a test. Those who have killed their own siblings often take their own lives - this could be because their morals tell them it's wrong, or it could be that they are crazy. Certainly NO social factor can be blamed for the murder as these people are usually in the same social circles as you or I may be.

 

Hmmm, does omniscience mean you know the future? You may be aware of all possible outcomes since you have "all knowledge", but do you know which outcome will occur?

Sorry, off on a tangent.

 

No.

Its not that well disguised.

 

A omniscient god wouldn't even have generalized categories like "things of mass", he'd just have a list.

God doesn't need to know about LIATE because he integrates empirically.

 

I'm assuming it does.

 

wiki can and does say most anything.
The FACT is that all laws are man-made. You can all it a natural law, or a law of nature or scientific law, it all boils down to the same thing, it is subject to the accuracy of the humans that created it. LAWS are NOT immutable, especially natural or scientific laws. They change based on the knowledge base of humanity, as we learn more, we correct, modify and change previous laws, sometimes even tossing them out, as in the nonsense "Law of Creation"

 

So I'll ask you too, would things of mass not fall towards each other if humans did not exist? Is the human understanding and wording relevant for what goes on in nature?

 

I haven't been discussing what he "needs" to know, I've been discussing what he knows.

God doesn't need to know about LIATE, but I bet you'd complain if anyone said he didn't understand it.

 

Laws and theories are generalizations, nothing more than abstract ideas that we humans must use because we have imperfect knowledge of the world around us. Theories are chosen based on a certain inherent appeal, one might call it "mathematical beauty" or "integrity", but it most certainly is not on an empirical basis. The thing is, to a being with omniscience who does not have imperfect knowledge, they'd all be equally arbitrary.

 

Emotion has nothing to do with my being willing to kill. 40 years ago when I was in the service, I might have had certain emotions blocked by military training, I actually cannot recall.
As far as killing my daughter, son, wife or anyone else, under specific conditions, I would do so. I might be sad and extremely upset afterwords but that would not stop me from doing what I thought was the right thing.

If for instance, my daughter was threatening to blow up the courthouse and I could stop her with a bullet I would do so. That is an unlikely possibility but not impossible.
And no, I would not commit suicide after shooting my daughter in the above or other circumstances. In fact, the only reason I can imagine to commit suicide would, be, hmmm, if 40 wolves were eating me and I had a weapon with one bullet or something similar. Maybe if I was in some kind of extreme pain with no possibility of relief, hmm, and maybe not. Suicide is just not in my head for some reason.

 

Generalizations of what?

So what if they're arbitrary? It would still know them.

 

All I can say is that the only reason we can today go to the library and read Ovid, Virgil, Pliny the Elder, St. Gregory of Tours, St. Augustine and all of the great Roman writers and orators of antiquity and read about the Emperors of Rome and all the history of antiquity before the fall of Rome is because at a time when ignorance, illiteracy and constant warfare destroyed society, that "form of evil in disguise" had the only institutions of higher learning left in Europe and felt it was their religious duty to laboriously hand copy these texts for future generations to read.

If for no other reason than that, you should be grateful that religion existed in such a time, because when such times come(and they probably will again one day), it will be religion that drags us out of the swamp of dark age ignorance and into the light of knowledge again.

Without that base of knowledge there would've been no enlightenment.