A strawman that was addressed in the OP, yet I knew someone would do something like this anyway.

Hey...this time it wasn't me.

I'm proud of you

Give me time.... I'll make you be ashamed of me again.



BTW... you are turning out to be a central character in RGT:The Movie.

Maybe I'll let you kill Pletho.

The problem is you're still not showing that religion is a motivating factor to the point where it presents as the best target for action preventing these negative effects.

If religion only serves as a catalyst for motivation to violence in cases where other factors are already in play*, then for your position to hold, you need a couple of things to be true. Firstly you need the other factors to be more difficult or impossible to alter, for whatever reason. You also need religion to be the only such catalyst, or if you accept that it's one of a number, you need it to be the most effective. Finally, you need a way of establishing all this.

I really feel that if your concern is preventing these negative effects there are other targets, both more invidious and more tractable, that you could focus on.

*I think this is the case, and we can discuss that if you disagree.

If that's really true, I suggest you think about the fact that most theists on these forums consider you to be the atheist version of Pletho. It might be prudent to start taking a tone that actually has a chance of convincing people rather than alienating them.

Please stop being an idiot. The only possible way to know for sure is if you created another universe to the exact specifications of our current universe and just removed religion. Then we could study the differences between the two. Man, I try to stay patient with you guys, but I must say the ignorance in this forum is just appalling.

I actually think Stu has the right end result, but the wrong reasoning getting him there. The reason it's difficult to say if religion has a net + or - effect is because there are too many variables and unknowns, as well as innate problems of comparison - say, six hundred million lives somewhat enriched vs. ~3000 ended, and say 40k horribly affected by the 3k dying.

The last point sort of means that even his notion of 'running it twice' would still be extremely problematic, even if it were possible.

Obv agree.

Edit: Generally speaking of course. I do think though that there are pretty clear cut cases of religion having a negative impact on the overall result. But of course people just being *******s is a huge determining factor as well.

Obviously you would need to run a series of monte carlo-esqe simulations. Even then happenstance could skew your particular results so you would never have 100% confidence. These are technicalities I left out for simplicity.

Yeah, variance is a bitch.

Definitely not the best target imo. As far as what is the best target? This book or this video and this video go a long way in explaining the biggest threat to the human species.

I agree that religion is mainly a catalyst when it comes to terrorism. Although when it comes to fascist social policies like criminalizing abortion, stopping gays from getting married, teaching fairy tales in school, etc, it appears religion is the main factor. Assuming we're focusing on stopping terror, and assuming religion is one catalyst out of many, I'm not sure why Rize needs "going after religion" to be the most effective. Even if it's not the most effective, I think Rize is still justified in taking peaceful measures to try to curb religion's negative effects. He's still helping the cause, at least in theory.

I agree with this 100%, but I also think if one wants to try to do things to stop the negative effects of religion they're doing a good thing. But yeah, If Rize is trying to establish that fighting religion is the best strategy he's pretty much screwed imo.

On a related note, I have no idea how to establish that religion is a net-negative overall. I suspect it is though.

The problem is here that you are inserting your own opinion on these matters then calling what others are doing as "wrong". Let's look at your examples.

abortion. you are complaining about people wanting to stop people from killing babies. I don't see how this is a bad thing as you seem to be implying. Religion giving an giving an unalterable worth to human life is hardly an issue.

as far as these "fairy tales". That is just your opinion and something that has not shown to be false, so you can hardly blame religion for your disagreement.

now with the gay marriage, I think you will have to agree that the government does a fine job of restricting what we do without religion. Religion is completely unnecessary to pass arbitrary laws based on current societal whims.

Just using anecdotal evidence from my own life:

When I was a kid my parents basically gave me a hard time about everything. I wasn't allowed to do much and even though I went to a public school, my access to the friends I had was extremely limited to say the least until I was 16 or 17 years old because my friends weren't Christians. Everything seemed to be a hassle and the focus was completely on what I should not be doing 24/7.

My parents were both completely unreasonable people and still are in a lot of things. (Though it has toned down drmatically) They would still be unreasonable people even if they weren't Christians, but the fact that they were made them pretty intolerable. And not only that but they now had a supreme being and an entire community of people to tell them that what they were doing was 100% right.

I don't see that as a problem.

No, not true. I am complaining about the criminalization of abortion in particular. There's other ways to curb abortion rates that don't involve an ineffective law that just causes more deaths and suffering, and puts more humans in cages.

That's another thread really. My morality is based on suffering, not the sanctity of life for a certain primate.

I don't think we should be teaching students something as if it were true, when that something is not backed by good evidence. Whether it be astrology or any of the thousands of various creation stories/gods/religions/cults. I can certainly blame religion for this. It doesn't matter if it hasn't been shown to be false. Only extremely ignorant people think "You can't prove me wrong" is a worthy argument.

Completely irrelevant to the discussion.

I would agree that religion is a far greater motivator regarding social policies like abortion and gay marriage, and obviously with regard to ID and related educational issues, it is the issue. I've never understood the beef with gay marriage - I at least understand why people oppose abortion, even if I disagree, and - theoretically at least - the ID'ers think they're on to something, but all you really seem to hear from opponents of gay marriage is that 'the family needs to be protected'. I've no idea what that means, or in what sense straight marriage is 'threatened' by gay marriage. Just weird.

On a more serious note, I think you severely underestimate the positive influence of religion. As a significant example, many sociologists would list religion as one of the fundamental things that keeps a community from dissipating (at least throughout most of history, I'd argue that is perhaps less true today, at least in the developed world).

This makes it entirely impossible to estimate what the world would look like if there had never been religion, since what would happen in a primitive society without it is (as far as I know) impossible to measure. It would be like trying to guess what life on Earth would look like without the presence of, say, nitrogren in our atmosphere.

Note that this in no way implies religion is true.

You could also make the argument that religion was perhaps once necessary but no longer is, but functionally that does nothing, since it's pretty much ingrained in society now anyway.

TBH I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that society in this country has chosen against Christianity in a lot of major social issues and Christians see this issue amongst a couple others as their Alamo in regards to their moral power in politics.

The title of the thread is "religion is a negative freeroll for life on Earth" not "religion is the worst, and the only negative freeroll for life on Earth"

I'm sure there are, but they aren't as petty, needless, and so completely wrong as religion is. Also, what do you think those things are?

I gotta agree with RIZE here.... you guys have derailed!


"Spoons could kill if you hurled them at 200mph...let's get rid of spoons too I guess!"

pfffft

And, as a significant example, religion is one of the fundamental things that keeps global communities from joining together. See the middle east for more info.

Key word being ONE.

Don't put all that on religion.

i think you are way oversimplifying.
are you grouping all religions together?
i.e some of the eastern philosophies and religions are def nonaggresive.
do people commit terrorist acts because a book told them or did they create a book to justify doing it?

It's definitely not one single thing. It's a mix of a lot of things, some of which are caused by or rooted in religion.