I have a vast amount of strong arguments to strengthen my case of religion being a lie. If you want, I'll be happy to bring it up but it's not really the object of discussion yet in this thread.

People kill other people in the name of religion but nobody kills someone else in the name of atheism.

Well, you obviously do not use reason, logic and science to determine your world-view else you wouldn't be religious. There is no way to make sense of the Christian belief system simply because it does not make any sense. Therefore those that believe in it are automatically not driven by logic, reason and science in the field of their philosophy of life.

Comfort and happiness are positive. You think those are offset by the lies that come with them, but that doesn't mean the comfort and happiness don't exist. I can easily accept that you view the situation as a net negative, but to not see the positive side of that at all??

All your points are based on the assertion that religion is false. If this assertion weren't true, then nothing else you've said will be true.

I guess you could have this thread discuss the topic given the assumption that religion is false, but that would be a very uninteresting discussion. Who exactly is your intended audience here?

Obviously no one kills in the name of atheism -- atheism doesn't have any values to kill for. Still, people kill people in the name of many things (country, person, money, freedom). Do you think that the people who kill in the name of religion would not have killed anyone had religion not existed?

If I get books from the library, it would be a poor assumption that getting rid of libraries would keep me from having books.

Again, you are assuming your conclusion -- how could you ever hope to be convincing like this?

And again, you know nothing about me. I'm not a Christian. I'm 5 months away from being a doctor. I've studied biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, etc at a college level. To say that my philosophy of life is not based in science, reason, and logic is laughable. Sure, there are aspects of it that you will find irrational, but who doesn't have any irrational beliefs?

The sort of comfort that religion supplies is in no way positive, again, because it is based on lies.
If the vacation advisor tells me it's perfectly safe to go to Somalia, I'll be in a way comforted. When I then go on vacation to Somalia I might be shot and wish the vacation advisor hadn't made me false hopes.
It's the same with religion.

So basically you're suggesting that some people are born to kill and it wouldn't have mattered if the reason why they killed had been removed or not because they would've killed either way.
Nice!

The fact that you're defending religion confirms that your world view isn't based on reason, logic and science.

WHICH IS A POSITIVE YOU FEEL IS OUTWEIGHED BY NEGATIVES. The positive doesn't not exist, though. Also, here's another case where your point is only valid if your assertion that 'religion is false' is true.

And you offer nothing to contradict this. I'm seriously beginning to doubt that you get what's supposed to happen in a debate.

Still, that wasn't quite my point. When people are put into a bad political and economic position, they're willing to do lots of things they wouldn't do if they were born elsewhere. The situation in the Middle East, for instance, is hard to blame on religion --the root cause is much deeper than that.

So what I'm saying isn't that the people were born to kill, but the situation bred people to kill, even if religion weren't there for them to claim as the driving force. People kill all the time in an "us vs them" mentality. Religion serves as an easy identifier for the us and them, but many other things (such as nationality) would just as easily substitute, and have in the past.

For the unfortunately likely not-so-final time, if you are trying to convince religious people that religion is wrong, simply asserting so is horribly ineffective. Surely you can do better.

Also, you meant to say that part of my world view isn't based on logic and science. That shouldn't take away from the rest of it. Just as you likely have irrational beliefs about the world and that doesn't mean I can just blanket your entire world view as illogical.

Also, you probably didn't catch this, and might have assumed that I'm an atheist or something when I said I wasn't a Christian:

No it's not at all like that. No sports fan ever flew a plane into a rival team's headquarters because he was extra pissed off that his team lost last week. Nobody ever went on serial killing "crusades" through a division rival's stadium on game day. Give me a ****ing break.

Sometimes those soccer hooligans kill each other. Not sure how many died in the stadiums on game day.

You beat me to it. I was going to post this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_hooliganism

but I really wanted some overall numbers.

Yeah i dont know the numbers but they get a little crazy for their teams.

Football hooligans = Religious zealots?

One of these things is more violent than the other

Who said anything about equal. I just said sometimes sports fans kill the opposing fans.

Even if the set of things that motivate killing is quite large, each member is still responsible for the times that it does. So you can't pawn it off on the people involved. Religion deserves blame for the violence that it motivates.

Everybody has some irrational beliefs; therefore we shouldn't be bothered too much when people have some irrational beliefs?? (I'm not sure if that what you meant or why you even added that bit.) Why not strive to have the fewest irrational beliefs possible?

Yes, people have killed and used religion as their reason. But if you abolish religion, you won't be solving the problem.


Here was my point: If set of people X have some irrational beliefs, but OP still thinks their worldviews are based in science/logic/reason, then me having some irrational beliefs is not in itself sufficient to say that my worldview is not based in science/logic/reason.

As for your question, I'm not sure that the fewest irrational beliefs is optimal. Sure, much rationality is good as it helps us interact with our environment better, but some irrationality can be helpful in some situations. I don't see why it's necessarily harmful, or at the least why it's so harmful as to warrant people like the OP telling us we can't have those beliefs.

They wouldn't have a reason to kill anymore and therefore the problem is solved, right?

If you want to live a lie, feel free to do so but I for my part am interested only in living the truth.

The question is whether or not religion caused it. IMO, saying religion caused deaths is like saying guns caused a death. In on sense it is correct, but in reality the death would occur even is another tool had to be used.

I would be interested if they could ever do a study (if this is even possible) to see how many people were good passive calm people, then "found" religion and turned to violent aggressive people.

We know that this happens in the opposite all the time, but do you ever hear of the above?

This whole discussion is just a non sequitur. Science is pretty fricking great. Pretty much everyone can agree with this. The fact that science is so useful doesn't imply that other human activities that don't measure up are somehow bad. For instance, "Science flies you to the moon, baseball just has fly balls," or "Science flies you to the moon, ice cream just causes obesity." The goodness of science doesn't imply that either baseball or ice cream are therefore bad. Neither does it imply that religion is bad.

However, a religion that encourage people to kill thousands of others probably is bad. So we should condemn forms of Islam (or Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, etc) that encourage terrorism or other forms of violence. However, notice that this doesn't mean that we should condemn all forms of Islam, etc., because some forms of Islam do not encourage terrorism or violence.

This is why it is ridiculous to say that "religion flies you into buildings." Religion didn't do that. A group of men motivated (in part) by a specific religious ideology did that, but you could just as easily and inaccurately say that "politics flies you into buildings." Would this mean that politics is bad? Obviously not. Trying to develop ideas based on such inaccurate generalizations is a simplistic way to understand the actual threats to human life on this planet.

Now I'm free to believe what I want? Just yesterday you wanted me to only believe things you approved of!

No. I already dealt with this. Please come up with something original.

Shouldn't you be?? Shouldn't you be trying to save as many ppl as possible?? Keeping this truth to yourself is very selfish imo and it is not what God would want.

I guess the real question is would society be a better place if there were no religion? Also, you could argue that religion possibly saves lives. For instance, a would be murderer is indoctrinated with religion and therefore does not murder for the fear of God. Of course there are ppl that have murdered in the name of God, but these ppl are the minority. To say that there sole reason for committing such atrocities is religion is prolly irrational. I would think their environment has a much bigger influence on them than their religion does.

Can you explain or provide some examples?