For someone not making a case, this looks a lot like a case to me.
We need to backtrack a tad. You remember how this line of discussion started? You said, "Giving up one's history, culture and tradition for pure logic. I wonder how many will find it to be a good trade?" Everything since has flowed from this. My response is that you don't have to give up culture and tradition if you give up religion, because religion isn't the totality of culture and tradition. Some traditions are bad, like beheading infidels. These we leave behind. Some traditions are good, like architecture and music. These we keep. There is no all or none scenario on the table as far as I'm concerned.
Sweden sucks as an example.
You make your case based on one little country that has just recently become a country of unbelievers? It is insufficient. Tell me you have something better.
It's akin to a person inheriting a mansion and being proud he'd 'earned it'.
Sweden is a socialist state, of fewer than 10M people, who in the last few decades switched from believers to unbelievers, which stands on the shoulders of Christianity, with few threats and no standing army to speak of (nonetheless defended by United States) all the while committing demographic suicide.
How about a country that isn't a Western nation, one that doesn't have ties to Christianity?
What does size have to do with anything? About 70,000 years ago scientists tell us the entire sum of our species dropped down to somewhere around a fifteen thousand. This was long before any of the great monotheisms made their debut, and we're still here to talk about it. My only claim in this discussion was to state the obvious, which is that you don't need the lion's share of your citizens to be actively involved in belief or in religion (separate things) in order to have a society. You can argue all you want about which is the better mousetrap, but Sweden, Japan, Norway, France, England, and so on all have significantly large numbers of unbelievers or non-applicables in their societies.
I'd also call your attention to a Brazilian tribe known as the Pirahã. They're an interesting group, as they have no concept of God or gods or ancient history or even the idea that the earth was created. You could say they like to live in the moment. They do apparently have an idea of spirits or phantoms, but these are seen as a natural part of the environment, not quite the same way we would see them.
Conversely I can point to a plethora of societies mired in violence that are deeply religious. I can point to societies that are religious but atheistic. I can point to societies that are polytheistic as opposed to monotheistic. Some work, some don't. It's the religious person who's telling ME that the only way to build a healthy society is to adopt their beliefs and practices. My response is there's more than one way to skin a cat.
Next issue: What does atheism/agnosticism offer?
What rights does it protect, how does it protect them? What positive vision does it offer?
A hollowed out version religion - stripped of history and meaning?
No fair looking at the other students' papers. Use your own work.
We're already starting to get secularized versions of holy days. And they are not great.
X, you said your position is, what was it...ah yes:
Quote
"Atheism isn't really a position. It's a reaction to a preexisting position, as I've tried to explain."
You answered your own question. Atheism doesn't promote or protect squat. It's not a belief system. It's not even a response to a belief
system. There are religions that are atheist. It's a response to a specific claim or set of claims regarding God and gods. Period. When you bring up replacing existing religious traditions––didn't name any that you liked, by the way––you are bringing up a different subject.
So why would I want to replace something with nothing? The very definition of nilism.
Why would you want to replace nothing with something you can't demonstrate and only ever have speculated on, shroud it in servile ritual, and pretend it's the only thing keeping people from beating each other with rocks?
How do you propose to rid of the world of god(s)/religion. With persuasion? And when you tire of dealing with stupid people such as myself – then what?
You probably don't. I'm not that optimistic. I was persuaded over time to change my views on what I believed and thought I knew. You're not stupid, either, and if I ever got tired of having conversations I'd go back to playing NCAA 11, provided you weren't strapping bombs to your children or trying to undermine science class or trying to infringe on the rights of other citizens in this country because you thought God told you to do it. The reason we need to have open discussion and criticism of religion is because it tries to impose itself on society to a lesser or greater extent. The US is among the more religious countries in existence, so I don't anticipate the issue going away, although the unaffiliated category is currently the fastest-growing segment of the population.
In case you hadn't noticed, religion specifically Christianity, has changed and finally evolved in the last 2000 years.It would be like holding modern Italy to account for the excesses of the Roman Empire.
Which is strange if it was and is and will be the absolute truth and standard of morality forever, but yes, it has. Most Christians I have total respect for and our disagreement is a philosophical or sometimes a political one. It only gets personal when someone wants to blow up a building so they'll see heaven.
Religions were brutal. governments were brutal. Culture, society and life...brutal.What was the common element(s)? A belief in (fill in the blank ____) God?
The problem is religion can take a bad situation and make it worse by putting out some unsubstantiated drivel about how some god wants this chosen group of people to do something to some other group, and if they succeed or die in the struggle they'll be rewarded in the great hereafter. Every day priests, ministers, reverends, mullahs, shamans, and pujari mount the curb to tell people things that they might as well have made up whole cloth. They couldn't present any data to support themselves even if they thought it was worth the time to look, which most of them don't. They'd rather you just believed it on faith. Well I'm not going to believe it on faith, my friend, and I'm not going to recommend anyone else do it either. If you want to say religion is necessary for society you have to tell me why and how it does the things you claim it does, and then explain why nothing else could ever take its place, assuming you can come up with an affirmative example in the first place.
