I was over in the student union one day and saw a commercial on television for a book called the God Delusion with the tag line of "What if there was no such thing as religion, or God on earth?"
That with the end of religion there would be no more fundamentalists radical homicide bombers running into destroy market places in the name of their faith. That the crusades would have never happened, or any other prosecution against minorities that did not believe as the ruling classes.
And it got me to thinking, what would the world be like without a God, a Heaven or Hell? In many ways it sounds like the John Lennon's song asking the same question and pleading that people just get along. It also reminded me of the failed attempt of Communist Russia to do just that.
Humans it seems have an innate ability to separate and categorize things. . . in many ways it has caused the human race to progress and create. The ability has also caused much pain and suffering as divisions were based on the belief/political system of the ruling class ( I have trouble saying minority here - - for with power even the minority can rain pain and destruction on the majority of peoples.)
Scapegoats are used not only to change opinion, but to forward agendas on a near daily basis, history is filled with these maneuvers in both political and military. Sadly the use of religion and God is one of the more common and easy to pick out, much like racism in a segregated society not all the differences are obvious at once until someone takes time to point them out.
However it is not the only item - other than religion look at some other struggles/wars that have been just as brutal and bloody. A couple of quick examples might be the warring family clans over and insult and skirmishes of the mafia where in many cases they are the same religion and God had nothing to do with it - it was just business.
Usually there is money/power behind it, pride to follow it, and revenge to continue it.
So in the end the point becomes moot - even if you could rewrite history and get rid of God, religion the Abyss would stare back and find something to fill the void.
Grasping politicians will continue to make scapegoats in order to further their agenda, and swindlers and cons claiming to be from the gods they will become more so the demagogues claiming entitlements beyond their own. Promising infinite power and delivering nothing but sand.
There is one thought though I have yet to answer - - if you did get rid of the gods and all that came with them would morality still be a factor? Would ethics still exist? What society would exist?
Gotta think on that one.
/end rant
2 件のコメント:
You're absolutely right on the first point: people are people. Religion doesn't change that much. Thing is, though, people, for whatever reason, seem to be a lot more defensive of unpleasantness done in religion's name than any other cause. In your example of the mafiosi, pretty much anyone one outside of the conflict would agree it's a bad move on the whole, but religion seems to find a great deal more support for it's questionable actions. Or perhaps it's just because religion has such a wider pool of people to work with that it can find so many more defenders than, say, politics or vendetta.
As for your second question, well, I don't know if I trust myself to get into that debate. I would, however, like to point out that most of the greatest ethicists of the western tradition, the people who founded the schools of western ethical thinking, were not, on the whole, particularly religious people.
good point, a lot of knowledge exists only because it was outside the norm of the day - and in many ways you could argue that relgion has tried to hold up progress - or should i say those in power were doing anything they could to hold onto it.
personally i'm just glad that some of the information survivied - i wonder where we'd be if the library at alexandra didn't get burned?
- - -
i think you are right though - religion generally has a larger base of people to draw from that cross geo-political lines.
i heard an interesting quote yesterday about habit being the path of the unreflective - or something like that.
if we stop thinking it's easy to fall into the trap of just following blindly into a hell we could not even imagine when our eyes were open (ex. WWII Germany)
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