The problem with this question is that much of religious doctrine is based on metaphors for something that cannot be reached by conceptual thought. Doctrines are the interface, not the reality. I realize that most religious laypeople don’t make that distinction, but I assure you that many do, and (I suspect) most clerics and theologians have some inkling of it.

So before you ask for evidence, you need to clarify exactly what you want evidence of.

For example, God is a metaphor. No one can give you evidence of a metaphor. What does the metaphor represent? Perhaps someone could give you evidence of whatever that is, but first you need to thoroughly understand it so you know what you are looking for. And that’s the work of a lifetime. Good luck.

But did militant atheists make the sword?

I personally think any ideology – religious or atheist is to blame for atrocities committed in its name.

An interesting question (which I’m still thinking through myself) is if people are going to argue that religion should be abolished in favour of science, should the role science has played in facilitating the wars and atrocities of ideologies be examined?

Science is generally portrayed as morally neutral, but I’m not sure if the “brights” are portraying the following of science as a moral good in and of itself. If so, examples such as the atom bomb and the maxim gun really need to be discussed.

Putting this stupidity aside, religion remains the most destructive force on the globe, historically and now. Every advance western society has made has been despite religion. The church has been the last institution to adapt to modern ideals, and has been the first into the breach to argue for their repeal and to sieze the opportunity their repeal has offered. You don’t see many “militant atheists”[sic(k)] rushing to Iraq to convert muslims by the sword, do you? Or fleecing their followers while fucking their children.

I try to take my secularism lightly
The biggest threat to democracy is extremism and like produces like far too often.

In the UK, if you’re a committed Christian, you are already likely to feel slightly beleagured, with a mass media that by and large treat Christians as weird people (either comic or menacing). (In particular, the Guardian newspaper, whose political views I share, normally has at least one article or more a week deploring religion).

In the UK, if you’re a committed Guardian reader, you are already likely to feel slightly beleagured, with a mass media that by and large treat Guardian readers as weird people (either comic or menacing). (In particular, the Sun the Telegraph and the Mail, whose political views I do not share, normally have at least one article or more a week deploring the Guardian).

Novakant: I’m not sure my opinion’s too useful to you, since I thought Consciousness Explained was excellent (and it mostly gels with the hard neuroscience done by the likes of Kristof Koch). I didn’t find Freedom Evolves particularly good, mostly because I didn’t find compatibilism a particularly difficult problem in the first place. I’m told that his earlier book, Elbow Room, which covers similar ground, is much better, but I haven’t read it.

The framers, Mooney & Nisbet, point to evidence that so much of the American public is wedded to their religious beliefs that they simply reject scientific evidence to the contrary, even though they hold science in high regard. From this they conclude that, when the issue is one of educational standards or public policy, it’s counterproductive to attack religion directly. Hard to argue with that.

Contrariwise, the same evidence demonstrates to Myers & Dawkins that religion is itself the problem, and I’m disinclined to disagree.

It’s primarily, but not entirely, an American argument. Here, we few proud self-identified primates are fighting for the science of biology, and we’d certainly find our continent more congenial were more of our countrymen godless. I apologise on behalf of my fellow apostates, atheists and agnostics if, in our thrashing back towards the more fearless Enlightenment precepts of our predecessors, we’ve knocked anyone’s noses out of joint.

Or is Xt “pretty recent”?

Define please “pretty recent.” Machiavelli, for example, developed laws of political behavior explicitly without reference to religion. Christian Thomasius, equally explicitly, derided the notion taht law either eminates from or gains justification from religion.

If you mean that in the dim distant past of Hamurabi, Moses, and the Incas (to pick three) religion undergirded their world view, fine; but this does not for some kind of an exhaustive list nor yet does it foreclose formulating law without regard to religious sensibilities. Furthermore, what happen in the past does not determine what happens now. Does it? Ought we, to copy Zinzendorf, throw lots to make decision because the throwing of lots (as means of gaining insight into God’s or the God’s will(s) has some historical warrant (The Iliad).

It is realy odd, how some people use history ahistorically. But again, I am, no doubt da, schol, and aca.

I believe that most recent examples of such culls, and of the bright lines behind them, involved no deity – the Cultural Revolution in China, Stalin’s purges, the Khmer Rouge.

I don’t think the line is between “Creator” and “No Creator”, since people on both sides of that line have performed those culls. As you said, I think it’s dogmatism, or in particular the dehumanization of people based on their beliefs. It’s those who believe that the people thinking different from them are less human, or less worthy of proper treatment. To use 82’s terminology, the line is between those who support the reconfiguration of the biological imperative, and those who wish to transcend it.

What is true is that the current principal religions are organized along the lines of an elite group who knows the “truth” and a bunch of followers who are instructed in it. The details differ, but this is the essential element. To further their case the elite point to a variety of devices which only they are privy to. This can be the reading or interpretation of certain documents, or even getting direct information from a higher power. Since their authority rests with these devices and since normal people don’t have access to them, the result is that the leaders must be obeyed and not questioned.

That’s the core – obedience. It is why the founders didn’t put religion in the constitution. The constitution depends upon the people ruling themselves. There is no higher authority. There are no privileged people, neither religious nor royalty. Democracy is the antithesis of organized religion. The founders were sensitive to the recent history of the US and Great Britain to realize that many people were strongly invested in their religious beliefs, so they made allowances by promising that religion wouldn’t be controlled by government.

The idea was to protect religion from government, not the reverse. Once one religion becomes associated preferentially with government it leads to civil strife. You can look at the English Civil War, the behavior of the Massachusetts Colony or to more contemporary cases in the Middle East.

It is also a fact that as societies become more advanced, and as democracy becomes more entrenched, the degree of religiosity declines. There are parts of western Europe where the religious are less than 10% of the population. The societies do fine. They don’t have rampant lawlessness, nor do they have to invoke dogma to come up with a set of ethical principles on which to base laws.

The US appears to be an anomaly, in that a large group of people profess a belief in a supernatural being, but they don’t act like they mean it when one examines everyday life. The incidents of misbehavior is not lower in those who profess strong religious beliefs. In fact things like divorce are actually higher.

I don’t think there really are any significant number of people who believe absolutely as many did before the Reformation. This would require a single dominant religion with no alternatives. In this country we have over 1500 denominations. People shop for one that fits their values, and sometimes move to another one if they have disagreements. Even people who stick with a specific religion decide what parts they will follow. The issue of Catholics and birth control is a perfect example. The percent of Catholic women who use birth control doesn’t differ much from the general population.

So, what is the religious faith that people profess to have? Is it something that is in the core of themselves or is just a convenient peg on which to hang whatever collection of beliefs the individual has?

In spite of all the fear mongering, I think the importance of Islamic fundamentalism is overstated. Once again there is lots of visible adherence to the ceremonies, but this doesn’t seem to affect how the majority of the population deals with their personal lives. It does make a good bogeyman for use by the conservatives to short circuit any in depth discussion of the issues.

The bright line isn’t exclusively internal, it’s external as well happening as a function of time’s ineluctable passage. We end up impaled on the fork in the road if we don’t choose. What I’m trying to make clearer is how little of the actual theology is bearing on this question. It’s Darwinian all the way, dressed up in yards of abstract costuming, but in the end there will be truncated branches of human possibility left behind, and that’s what gives it so much weight. The anti-Darwinian stance of the fundamentalists is a ruse, same as the pro-Darwinian stance of the positivists is a ruse. The fundos are totally working a survival edge, they appeal directly to the meat selfishness of their congregations, while the positivists are subverting every single Darwinian process they can get their hands and equipment on. Toward what end? Survival. Yet when we look at how we got here, we see the balance between individual immediate survival and the long slow curve of evolving stuff we really are.
People want information, in order to make informed decisions. But we’re talking about an infinite universe here, it’s impossible that we can get enough relevant info into our heads given the limits of time and capacity. Educated guesses, hunches and intuition, and the possibility of inspiration, information coming in from outside the system, we muddle along.
But it’s still Darwinian, it’s still all and only about who survives and breeds and who doesn’t. This may explain some of the resistance of simple-minded people to a series of changes in social complexity that promise fair to leave them behind.
That and the fact we’re getting closer every day to the great Satanic dream of physical immortality.edenbaum #100-“The history of secular law begins in religious law.”
bad Jim #102-“Laws and religion appear simultaneously in the historical record”It seems pretty clear at least to me that at one time we must have had an integrated field kit of both religion and law, that what we now see as these two completely separate things was once whole, unified.
You can pick up echoes of this in some indigenous spiritual practices still today. It’s there in most of the mystical literature as well.edenbaum #100, redux- “And in religion the legal and the social functions, the storytelling function, are more important than mysticism, which is always on the periphery.”From here these things seem discrete but in the full tide of absorption, in say a child whose mind is wide open and receiving stories that have been carried, unmediated by third-party intervention, from the same cultural springs as food and shelter and language, mysticism is not an “other”, it’s air, stars, the way things smell, the sound of something moving in the brush where you can’t see clearly what it is.
In that regard we haven’t gained a clearer understanding of where we are, in a wholistic sense we’ve lost the integration with where and what we are at the same time we’re transforming where and what we are irrevocably, not adding to it but reducing, diluting, flattening, and the affect and effects of most popular religions show this exactly in parallel with the attitudes of positivist science and its champions. Anthropocentricity being what they have most in common, not the flags and team colors, but how they perform.
Man against the world, dominant, in control.
Where we were once lost and alone in the hateful wilderness, now the wilderness is beaten to its knees and begging us for mercy.