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The left isn't inherently opposed to religion. However, in much of the world, the role religion has historically played in social and political structures tends to tie the local majority religion to the conservative power base in some way, as well as codifying various traditional practices, inequalities, and superstitions that the left might oppose. As a result, atheists and minority religions tend to align with the left (though it's by no means a guarantee).
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Mar 6, 2017 17:12
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Ultimately, religion is just another social institution which typically serves as a community gathering place and often becomes a vehicle for community traditions. Many leftists don't realize that, and therefore blame the community traditions they don't like on religion without realizing the role it plays in the overall cultural framework. Many of the more naive leftists look at people citing religion in favor of conservative beliefs and assume that the conservative beliefs were inspired by the religious reasoning, even though the truth is that it's the other way around - religion changes to fit the beliefs and principles of the society that holds it.
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Mar 7, 2017 23:25
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twodot posted:The claim that religion and science don't conflict because Good Religions don't bother to make claims science can test, and we can just ignore Bad Religions that do make claims science has disprove because they're bad doesn't make any sense to me. That there exists religions that claim evolution didn't happen is just true. These religions are necessarily in conflict with science. The only religions that claim that evolution didn't happen are religions or denominations founded in the 19th and 20th centuries with the specific intention of lashing out against science. Many of the anti-science beliefs people traditionally ascribe to medieval religion, like flat-Eartherism or young-Earth creationism, are things that sprang up as part of modern fundamentalist movements. The idea that there has been a deep historical conflict between science and religion, while widespread, is largely a myth. RasperFat posted:I am also a feminist, and I think that religion plays a large role in reinforcing gender stereotypes. But I appreciate the assumption that I hate women and have no emotional intelligence. Religion is just a delivery vehicle for existing tradition and culture. It's not that religion's views of women are holding society's views of women back, it's that society's views of women are holding religion's views of women back. When society's views on women change, religion will follow along. For example, just look at Judaism, which ranges from Ultra-Orthodox Haredi Judaism (which often ends up with segregation between genders in public to avoid the "immodesty" of physical contact with women) to Reform Judaism (which features full gender equality and removes most of the discrimination against women from traditional Judaism). Societies with progressive views on gender tend to have more Reform Jews and fewer adherents of the more Orthodox schools. There have been several Christian denominations that imposed much less inequality on women as well, though none of them really became major denominations and many of them faced resistance against those conditions from their followers hundreds of years ago. Ultimately, the reason most religions discriminate against women is because most societies discriminate against women, and firmly anchored those misogynistic norms in their religions while rejecting non-misogynistic religions. The misogyny of religion isn't driving the misogyny of society, it's driven by the misogyny of society.
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Mar 8, 2017 18:09
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Cingulate posted:Trivially, you can't separate this society from its religion. That is, this society is partially constituted by its religiosity. So I don't think you can so confidently make this claim. If you can't separate the religion from the society, then you can't reasonably blame the behaviors on the religion alone rather than the society it's part of. By definition, though, the majority religion in a society is going to be the one whose teachings most of the society largely agrees with. If society's beliefs shift, religion will (eventually) shift as well. That's not unique to religion at all. Almost everyone thinks that their exact set of beliefs is the most correct and that, while other similar beliefs may be acceptable, they're still inferior to the one true belief system. Just look at the militant atheists who poo poo on stuff like liberation theology or Quakerism because, even though it broadly agrees with their political and moral opinions on many subjects, it still believes in a magic sky wizard and is therefore categorically inferior to belief systems dependent solely on cold rational logic.
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Mar 8, 2017 19:18
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twodot posted:So what? Religions that claim evolution didn't happen still exist. Why do I care when or why a religion was founded? Religions, broadly speaking, both make empirical claims and reject any working mechanism to validate those claims, any such system is necessarily going to come into conflict with science eventually, even if historically religions have avoided making empirical claims current science can investigate. (Note: I disagree this is a recent thing, if someone could hand me a Bible with all the literal parts highlighted I'm pretty sure I could find a false claim.) Biblical literalism and inerrancy is a recent thing. Historically, religious scholarship tended to be of the opinion that much of what was written in the Bible was metaphorical rather than literal, and there were many errors and contradictions in the holy texts. If proven science contradicted what was written in the Bible, the scientific interpretation was generally considered to be correct and the Biblical interpretation was recast as an analogy or metaphor. The idea that the text of the Bible is literally true is mainly held by two groups of people: modern flavors of fundamentalist Protestantism, which reject existing religious authorities and understandings in favor of a back-to-basics approach easily understood by the common man without the need for a priest or scholar, and militant atheists, who don't care to educate themselves about religious history and scholarship and find it far simpler to just Google the text of the Bible and smugly demand scientific proof that snakes were once able to talk.
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Mar 8, 2017 20:22
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twodot posted:You've completely failed to understand my point, and all of this is totally irrelevant, except here: It would be utterly foolish for me to say "literally always every single time, no exceptions whatsoever" about any social assertion covering possibly tens of thousands of incidents in hundreds of human societies with dozens of religions over thousands of years. The simple enormity of that sample size makes it silly to categorically rule out any social happening or movement.
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Mar 8, 2017 21:10
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twodot posted:I agree it would be very silly for you to do it, which is why I also think it's silly to claim religion and science aren't in conflict, especially when there are active ongoing direct examples of that being the case. So what? Science has conflicted with a lot of things at one time or another. To assert that science has never ever contradicted the theories, beliefs, or thoughts that previously existed would be a silly assertion to make, and to claim that that somehow results in some inherent and irreconcilable conflict between science and everything else is absurd.
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Mar 8, 2017 21:35
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NikkolasKing posted:What I don't get is why or when the bromance of science, philosophy and religion ended. I've researched enough about religion and philosophy (science hurts my brain) to know that it was only a few short centuries ago when all of these things were bound together and got along just fine. The fascinating Scholastic tradition of Roman Catholicism for instance was built on the idea that humans can learn and understand everything, including God and metaphysical mater. Thomas Aquinas was not a gibbering Christian dope who said "The Lord knows and I'm free to be as ignorant as possible." He was a pretty smart dude and along with a lot of other deeply religious people he sincerely believed understanding of the world was perfectly in line with understanding God. At least, I think so. It has been a while. I think it stems in part from the popularization of science, taking it out of the realm of purely scientific debate and putting the controversies out in front of the public before the other scientists have had their say. Darwin's On The Origin Of Species was a regular book written for laymen, rather than a scientific paper submitted to an academic journal and subjected to peer review. As a result, his ideas - which challenged the then-dominant scientific theories - had been pushed into the public discourse before they'd been validated by his peers, and therefore much of the scientific and theological debate over Darwin's ideas played out (often heavily sensationalized) in the newspapers rather than within the scientific community. Luckily, Darwin's theories have held up under review and are still held to be correct today, but publishing your science for the mass media before letting your fellow scientists review it is now considered to be bad practice, and for good reason. Darwinism posed real problems for both the science and theology of the time, but by putting it in a regular book rather than a scientific publication, Darwin ensured that the conflicts had been made public before either field had a chance to really evaluate them. It made perfect fodder for the rising atheist movement to challenge Christian authorities and portray them as backward and resistant to knowledge, which in turn provided the soon-to-arise early fundamentalists and evangelicals a basis to attack scientists as radical atheists intent on spreading godlessness and destroying religion. The controversy was helped along by the fact that although Darwin's work quickly led to broad acceptance of the basic theory of evolution, many of the specific details he laid out were thought to be dubious until the discovery of genetics decades later.
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Mar 9, 2017 18:50
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Avalerion posted:I'm not going to try disprove "religion" because I think people much better equipped to do that have already argued the point convincingly countless times before me. What's silly about it? It's very difficult to categorically prove with evidence that something doesn't exist.
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Mar 9, 2017 22:40
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Avalerion posted:It's silly to argue that since we can't prove Hogwarts isn't real, we should remain agnostic rather than just saying of course it's not real. Why? If we don't have evidence to suggest that something isn't real, what basis do we have for making that statement?
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Mar 9, 2017 23:02
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Cingulate posted:Ok, and here's what's perhaps my most controversial conviction here: currently, the best societies in the world are the most secular. This means something. It matters. It's not a super convincing argument by itself - after all, historically, atheist-in-name regimes don't have such a good track record. I wouldn't necessarily say that. Much of the Islamist chaos in the Middle East is in part a response to decades of oppression from local secular regimes as well as a long history of political interference from secular Western governments, and many of the worst-off countries are countries that were secular at one point. Aggressively secular regimes, which promoted nationalism and suppressed religion, not only failed to improve societies but caused deep social resentments against secularism as a result. What distinguishes the most prosperous (let's not even say "best", it's way too subjective) societies today isn't secularism but tolerance. Their laws aren't secular out of opposition to religion or commitment to atheism, they're secular as a neutral ground that treats all beliefs or lack thereof equally.
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Mar 10, 2017 17:52
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Cingulate posted:Please let's all keep the productive discussion going in spite of Brainiac's return. No, let's leave "best" out of it. It just invites shittons of largely-irrelevant nitpicking, since I'm absolutely positive that you haven't done enough legwork to say with any degree of real confidence that there isn't a single religious country with "good" social policies and there isn't a single secular country with "bad" social policies. This thread's having enough trouble staying on track without inviting Effectronica to give his thoughts on cultural relativism. The reason a non-secular state has problems with tolerance isn't because it's religious, it's because it's written policies specifically favoring one group into their laws. Secular states don't necessarily shun religion, they just stay religiously neutral and avoid picking or playing favorites. No, what it shows is that it doesn't work to enforce atheism upon a nation, whether the majority of its people approve or not. There's a huge gap between the US's separation of church and state, which prohibits the state from infringing on people's right to religious choice and exercise, and the Soviet Union's anti-religious persecution, which sought to stamp out religion altogether.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:07
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RasperFat posted:People intimating that black churches are proof of success is incredibly strange. They were born out of oppression supported by white churches, and the reason they were Christian at all in the first place was their master's were all Christian. Shbobdb posted:This is where we run into issues because the "ethical programming" is generally a pretty vile package. I'm sure you can find a small church somewhere with acceptable views but so what? Are you both seriously saying that all religion is downright evil because white Christians are more likely to vote for Republican presidential candidates? Putting aside the mountain of things you're taking for granted in that conclusion, what about the fact that the data doesn't support it? I notice that "Hispanic Catholics" are just as likely to vote for the Democratic candidate as the non-religious voter, and the overall Catholic lean toward the Republican is largely the result of the fact that "White Catholics" heavily skew Republican. The other religions aren't broken out by race, but the fact that they specifically called out white evangelicals for the heaviest Republican leanings rather than all evangelicals suggests that the trend holds true for more than just Catholics.
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Mar 10, 2017 22:26
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Cingulate posted:Still: non-secular states have problems with tolerance. Surely religious people tend towards religious governments and laws; never mind that amongst the religions that currently exist and play big enough of a role to become candidates for governing major states, biases and rejection of groups like women or sexual minorities are widespread. It's not shocking that when explicit preference for one group (whether it's white people, Catholics, Muslims, or Orthodox Jews) is openly written into a country's laws, that country tends to have issues with giving equal treatment to other groups. It's not a 1:1 correlation (after all, the US has had serious issues with oppression of Muslims despite its strong separation of church and state), but a commitment to equality means not giving preference to any set of beliefs - including atheism.
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Mar 11, 2017 04:07
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Cingulate posted:I don't believe this is a thing. Sure it is. It's rarely done, but both the French Revolution and the Soviet Union featured heavy persecution of religious believers in the name of extreme atheism. During the height of the Reign of Terror, for example, publicly displaying religious symbols or wearing religious clothing was banned, and the churches that had been nationalized by the state were briefly dedicated instead to the atheistic "Cult of Reason", at least until the leaders of the atheistic factions found themselves next in line for the guillotine.
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Mar 11, 2017 20:07
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