How many here want freedom FROM religion?

Originally posted by sonhouse
I'm not talking just about me but about the control religionists try to put on the population, like claiming homosexuality is an abomination when it is no such thing.

Like forcing young pregnant girls, victims of rape, to exhort them to carry to term.

Like forcing creationism to be taught in a science class as if creationism was some kind of science w ...[text shortened]... can mean death in some Islam countries and it used to be that way in so-called Christian ones.

If you regard all these things as bad things, as not good things, you must have some standard of moral law against which you measure these things.

From what do you derive your moral standard against which you decide these things are not good things to occur ? Is it just your taste ? Is it just your arbitrary preference of one thing and not another ?

Is there a good proton in your brain as opposed to a bad proton there ?
What is the difference between your preference that these things not be done and your preference for a particular soft drink you are fond of ?

Originally posted by sonhouse
Let's form the FFRAI league!

nah, that would be an ideology.

Originally posted by jaywill
From what do you derive your moral standard against which you decide these things are not good things to occur ?

he draws them from the same place everybody else derives them from; his own experiences, memories and thoughts.

Originally posted by jaywill
If you regard all these things as bad things, as not good things, you must have some standard of moral law against which you measure these things.

From what do you derive your moral standard against which you decide these things are not good things to occur ? Is it just your taste ? Is it just your arbitrary preference of one thing and not another ?

...[text shortened]... that these things not be done and your preference for a particular soft drink you are fond of ?

What I have is common courtesy, if I see a woman getting raped, I am at the perp with a baseball bat or anything else I can scrounge up, I don't need a moralistic roadmap man made for the express purpose of controlling men and suppressing women.

I also don't do a heaven calculation when I see something that needs doing for someone, like 'If I do this thing, god will think I am good and will let me into heaven'.

I don't EVER think something like that when I help someone. I see only the immediate need, don't have to look any further than that.

Right wing religious nutjobs have no place in my life, no place in telling me how I should behave in my bedroom, whom I sleep with or whatever.

I intensely dislike proseltyzing and I intensely dislike people who distrust or hate people not of their own religion. If I want to believe a Hippo is my god, so be it.

If I want to believe there is no god, also so be it, and woe be to the person who decides I am to be killed for that belief or non-belief.

I am not a war like person, neither am I particularly peaceful.

It is obvious to me when the bible puts down women, saying a man is worth 50 shekels and a woman 35, that is all the proof I need to see the entire edifice of christianity as man made and by extension, every other religion on Earth.

It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to see that but people are so profoundly brainwashed by all the BS promises, they will let anything happen in religion, burning 'witches', hanging gays, shunning or killing apostates, religious wars.

All that totally un-necessary and clearly man made. There is no god that would make women be on a lower plane than men. It doesn't need to go any deeper than that.

That alone proves these kind of religions are made up by men for the express purpose of controlling other men, building a political organization and suppressing women.

You may talk about free will all you want but a real god would never set up several religions at each others throat, diametrically opposed to one another on the same planet.

The fact there are religions where they fight to the death over religion is another proof mankind invented the entire god thing.

Originally posted by Kewpie
It'd be nice, but it's not going to happen, human nature being what it is.

I live in a secular country, where people have complete freedom of religion, and you still can't escape it. On one hand, the rednecks who can't tolerate anything they didn't grow up with, who think the appearance of a mosque indicates that the country has been invaded by terrorist ...[text shortened]... e my life. And the next time someone offers to pray for me I swear I'll become violent.

But as long as their beliefs have no legal standing, clearly you would not want to live in a society where belief in the supernatural is banned, would you?

Originally posted by josephw
That's exactly what I'm saying. Religion is a scourge.

A question I have is, what are the root causes of religion, or, at least, of religion's being a scourge.

Originally posted by sonhouse
As opposed to freedom OF religion?

I want freedom from gov't.

Originally posted by RBHILL
I want freedom from gov't.

You don't seem to realize religion IS government, along with normal political houses, religion rules also. Take a look at Europe 500 years ago or 1000 years ago if you don't think so.

Originally posted by sonhouse
You don't seem to realize religion IS government, along with normal political houses, religion rules also. Take a look at Europe 500 years ago or 1000 years ago if you don't think so.

Not in a communist country.

"But what about when your kids are ready for HS and they find they have to listen to creationism being taught along side evolution in a science class as if it were a viable scientific alternative?"

Heck, I'm religious but I'd take my daughter out of any such school. She's only 10 and believes like me that we "evolved" from some electro-chemical reaction a long time ago - somewhat longer than 6000 years. :>😉

She shocked her more conservative aunt when trying to explain this to her instead of the Adam and Eve creation story that her aunt wanted her to have faith in - Wish I was there to hear that discussion.

Originally posted by kbear1k
"But what about when your kids are ready for HS and they find they have to listen to creationism being taught along side evolution in a science class as if it were a viable scientific alternative?"

Heck, I'm religious but I'd take my daughter out of any such school. She's only 10 and believes like me that we "evolved" from some electro-chemical reaction a ...[text shortened]... ory that her aunt wanted her to have faith in - Wish I was there to hear that discussion.

There are millions of other people who would wholeheartedly support such a curriculum, that is the main problem. If it was just some screwjob religious nutter preaching that kind of thing on the corner downtown that would be one thing but this anti science thing is huge in the US, which is really sad considering it was science and technology that made us #1 in the world in a lot of ways (I recognize we are not #1 in a lot of things, now including education, which is due in no small part to the religious right wing nut jobs forcing creationism to be taught along side evolution).

You see such crap as the creationist museum where they show humans and dinosaurs walking side by side....

Really really sad.

Agree with you 100%. The state of math and science in our nation is utterly ridiculous. Have you gone to the web sites of some of these creationist museums? It's scary that many of our children will grow up accepting this as the gospel truth - but it's not. The Roman Catholic Church does not even question the accuracy of evolution. We are rapidly becoming a nation of "Marching Morons" - to steal Kornbluth's title.

Originally posted by kbear1k
Agree with you 100%. The state of math and science in our nation is utterly ridiculous. Have you gone to the web sites of some of these creationist museums? It's scary that many of our children will grow up accepting this as the gospel truth - but it's not. The Roman Catholic Church does not even question the accuracy of evolution. We are rapidly becoming a nation of "Marching Morons" - to steal Kornbluth's title.

Marching in tune to 3000 year old fairy tales. The funny part is, it is not even Jewish, the OT, but plagiarized from even older tales, thousands of years older than the OT.

Originally posted by RBHILL
Not in a communist country.

in a communist country as well.

Originally posted by jaywill
From what do you derive your moral standard against which you decide these things are not good things to occur ? Is it just your taste ? Is it just your arbitrary preference of one thing and not another ?

We are hard wired, surely. And then it has been developed and even ritualized by humans in cooperation and in the communal context. Isn't it part of the wonder of the human spirit? To think that you - for instance - don't harm others, or don't coerce them, or deceive them, only because it is written in a book you like, is surely more brittle and arbitrary than a morality that comes from within us and that is part and parcel of us as spiritual beings. You are welcome to try to trivialize this with facile analogies about things like a "preference for a particular soft drink" but it doesn't work for me, jaywill.