From: ingles@engin.umich.edu (Ray Ingles)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: Removing "god" from morality. (was: Moral liberty)
Date: 26 Jan 1993 22:28:31 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan Engineering, Ann Arbor
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: wormwood.engin.umich.edu

In article <108114@bu.edu> wooyoung@bu.edu (WooYoung Chung) writes:
>Ray Ingles (ingles@engin.umich.edu) wrote:
>: In article <107305@bu.edu> wooyoung@bu.edu (WooYoung Chung) writes:
>: [large-scale deletion]
>: >My question is that why is religion, do you think, is so harmful. 
>: >Because of wars that people used religion to justify? 
 
 [Wars; useless, harmful rules; forced conversions; creationism; mindless
  followers; etc.]
 (Special Note: I don't say *all* theists do the above stuff, but being
a theist sure seems to help.)

>Ray, you are right.  There is no doubt that religion imposed on us, 
>the problems that you mentioned.  However, I think the religion is 
>more than just emotional crutches.  Human beings are limited in power, 
>mortal, and subject to many painful experience during life.  It is 
>almost a part of our humanity to look for a being more powerful 
>than us, someone of great power and authority to look over our lives, 
>and someone to bring some justice to our existence. 

 Who was it who defined God as, "The invention of a bunch of primates who
couldn't imagine all this stuff lying around without an alpha-male in
charge of it"?
 This may be a natural proclivity, but it doesn't mean there's something
out there to justify it. Also, as far as I can see, theism has not done
a really great job of making good people. People still lie, cheat, steal,
kill, etc.
 Of course, the canonical answer to this is, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis,
"Let's say we have a theist A and an atheist B. B may well be a nicer
person than A. The question is what would A be like if they were an athiest,
and what B would be like if they were a theist."
 The problem is, from my limited sample, atheists on average are nicer
than theists. What we need is a religion that can show statistically that,
say, there were fewer murderers than among otherwise similar atheists.
Or something like that. To my knowledge, no one's ever demonstrated this.

>As I said before, the religion have caused many problems, but it 
>wasn't much more than some of ideologies that we have created.  Do
>you really think mankind will be better off without religion? 
>Let's say we bring up the new generation of kids, without exposing 
>them to any types of religion, would they be better off?  (This 
>is NOT a rhetorical question.)

 Well, yes, I think so. I myself was raised without any religion to
speak of; I was never even lied to about Santa Claus. I don't claim to
be a paragon of virtue, but I do think I'm a nicer person than the
average theist. (Note the word 'average' in the last sentence. It's
important.)
 Imagine people deciding to base their morality on observable reality,
instead of thousand-or-more-year-old books. Imagine if there weren't so
many tax-exempt thingies lying (no pun intended) around, causing others
to pay more.
Imagine if people burst out laughing when someone said, "They are putting
the wrong kind of statues up in that building! Let's kill them!" Imagine
if people thought that they weren't worthless, degraded creatures whose
every thought was reprehensble and who could never do anything good on
their own. (Cripes, I'd better calm down; I'm starting to sound like
John Lennon.)
 I think that if you raised kids by saying things like, "Don't do that!
What if everyone did that?" instead of "Don't do that! Why? Because God
said so!" we'd all be better off, yeah.

 Sincerely,
 
 Ray Ingles               ingles@engin.umich.edu

 "Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?" -- Woody Allen