Philosophy Now Forum

iambiguous wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 8:39 pm

Talking now in non-sexual terms, the Golden Rule of ‘treating others as we would have them treat us’ is no piece of cake, either. Neither is ‘loving your neighbor as yourself’. Yet both of these apparently impossibly demanding norms, commanded by Jesus, are commonly agreed upon by Christians.

Gay or not, any religious morality calls us to deny some aspects of our sexuality in order to keep social order and to please God.

In learning to obey their parents children learn obedience in general. The deference learned in the family setting will manifest itself whenever the child faces a 'superior' in later life. Sexual repression----by the already sexually repressed parents---is an integral part of the conditioning process.

According to Reich, the suppression of natural sexuality in the child...makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, 'good', and 'adjusted' in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief the goal of sexual repression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all the misery and degradation...the result is fear of freedom, and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction, not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order'.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have written pages about the medical effects of sexual repression. Reich however constantly reiterated its social function, exercised through the family. The purpose of sexual repression was to anchor submission to authority and the fear of freedom into people's 'character armour'. The net result was the reproduction, generation after generation, of the basic [psychological] conditions essential for manipulation and enslavement of the masses.

C.S. Lewis captured the issue well in Mere Christianity: “There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong.”

Lewis did not have homosexuality specifically in mind. Rather, according to Christianity, we all have sexual desires it would be wrong to act upon, in one way or another. Self-control is paramount for moral rectitude.

Richard Dawkins makes so many claims in The God Delusion that I have decided to select just two for consideration. First, I will consider his claim that religion is harmful. Dawkins is at pains to make the point that it is religion as such and not religious extremism which is responsible for acts of atrocity.

Second, I will discuss his view that religious belief is a matter of blind (i.e. uncritical) faith – a view known as fideism. Dawkins thinks that reasonable people should eschew such kinds of faith. I largely disagree with the first of these two claims, but have more sympathy with the second.

attofishpi wrote: ↑Sun Dec 03, 2023 9:15 pm

It is inevitable, if humanity isn’t destroyed in the meantime, that we will at some point in the future be required to interface our consciousness to within a simulation. Inevitably, a ‘God’ will exist. My argument is that God or ‘God’ already exists.


Downloadable here (I recommend the PDF version since it has the best formatting)
https://www.androcies.com/DivineEtymology.php

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Dontaskme wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 10:39 pm
We’ve all got opinions about GOD


God is just a human coping mechanism, to soothe away their existential anxiety about death. Why, because to know you live is to know you’ll die. And no one knows about death,only life. So that’s why we petition in vain our illusory created God for an eternal life.

Walker wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 10:44 pm

Dontaskme wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 10:39 pm
We’ve all got opinions about GOD


God is just a human coping mechanism, to soothe away their existential anxiety about death. Why, because to know you live is to know you’ll die. And no one knows about death,only life. So that’s why we petition in vain our illusory created God for an eternal life.

That's just your own shallow opinion, based on your personal opinion.

Walker wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 10:55 pm Yes, your shallow opinions are not a basis for determining the veracity of what other folks know, or the basis of their knowledge.

They're just your shallow opinions based on your own opinions.

Thus, to assume that shallow opinions are the basis of knowledge for other folks, just because they are your basis, is pure ignorant projection.

Is Religion Harmful?

Dawkins considers religion to be like a virus that infects our minds, infects society, and especially children, whose brains he suggests are through evolution wired up to believe what adults tell them.

To Dawkins there are two types of harm caused by religion:

1) People thereby come to believe what is not true, and

2) Moral harm in terms of prejudice and violence e.g. homophobia, misogyny and murder.

For Dawkins, both these forms of harm stem from people believing simply because of blind faith.

Several points should be made here:

While there is some dispute about the origins of the word ‘religion’, it seems to derive from a Latin word meaning ‘to bind’. In the way we currently understand the word in the West, it emerged as an object for study in the nineteenth century. There is no precise equivalent of the word ‘religion’ in many languages. For example, in Sanskrit, the nearest we get is a word like ‘dhamma’, which can equally be translated as ‘law’. Therefore many ‘religious’ cultures – so-called by Western scholars – do not apply this self-ascription.

To speak of ‘religion’ and without dialogue apply this category to other cultures, is then a Western conceptual imposition. To go on from there, and say that this imposed category is something that means, for example, that Vietnamese Caodaism is harmful, when Richard Dawkins has possibly never heard of Caodaism, is high-handed and presumptuous in the extreme.

Let us suppose the impossible for a moment, just to give Dawkins the benefit of several doubts. Let us suppose that we could reach cross-cultural agreement about what was a religion and what was not.

We would then need to do an enormous amount of empirical research to get the data to make a moral judgment about the general effects of religion. How much data would we need? Where would we stop in order to not be presumptuous or unscientific in our claims?

We might want to look specifically at indigenous religions, institutional religion, civil religion, liberation theologies, or new religious movements; and in doing so we might reach different conclusions about these different phenomena.

It would also be hard to agree about what the effects of religion are – when religious activities are the cause and when the effect of social phenomena. In any historical or sociological analysis of the moral output of a religion, we would probably find it hard to circumscribe religion and to distinguish it from other cultural factors.

For example, how far Christian anti-semitism caused Nazi anti-semitism is something we could spend a long time investigating, precisely because of the openness to interpretation of wide landscapes of historical data.

A further omission in Dawkins’ claim that religion is harmful is glaringly obvious from a philosophical standpoint: the claim seems to have little if any base in ethical theory. Further, Dawkins makes clear his dislike of moral absolutism. Does this mean that his claim that religion is harmful is a relative truth? If we have no basis for our ethical thinking, how can we argue that killing for your country is good, but for your religion is bad, or visa versa?

The issue of the selection of evidence is also a key weakness in Dawkins’ case. He gives umpteen anecdotes rather than hard data.

But why not also look at evidence that might suggest that religion can be beneficial? We might look at the role of religion in the American civil rights movement for example. Or we could consider the work of Christian Aid, Tear Fund and CAFOD, or that Christians motivated significantly by their faith helped finally make slavery illegal in Britain and elsewhere.

There’s no question that Christians, even Quakers owned slaves; but my point is that the picture is not simple. We simply cannot bite off a chunk of reality like religion, and say ‘bad’. If we do, we do more than intellectual harm, we do social harm too.