Diogenes wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 8:16 pm
Whether religious or otherwise, whether theist or atheist, arguing from the point of view of any ideology other than the pursuit of truth and knowledge can lead one to false beliefs.
I agree and I do see the point. Ideology is dangerous for more than one reason, and I wonder if all the ills attributed to religion actually belong at the feet of ideology.
There is an overlap, but let me demonstrate:
Let's say I believe Mother Goose is real. I believe those fables happened. Red Riding Hood is real, the wolf is real, thy cut the grandmother out of the wolf and she was still alive, is a fact. That's a religion.
But so what? If I take a moral from the tale, I don't need the tale. Let's say I take the moral of Red Riding Hood to be: Chew your food. Chew your food because if your food is still alive, people will cut you open. So maybe chew a little better and nobody gains by cutting you open, so maybe they won't. I don't need Red Riding Hood for that.
Now, if Christians believe their God is real and punishes what he sees as evil, and they should heed this god to avoid being punished, this has got nothing to do with morality and they're just scared. That's not bad. That's not immoral. People are scared every day and you're not supposed to fight off a mugger. You're just supposed to let him have your stuff.
If Christians believe their God is real, and we should listen to him because he has some special moral authority, well, in a way they're still just scared. If the moral authority is inside God, and would make moral, any horrid commandment this god made, that's just scared with extra steps, and that authority would disappear if this being did not exist.
Now, if there's something about the tenets of the religion that are moral and righteous, then you don't need the religion. You can strip it down to the ideology, and it's now about what you ought to do, purely out of morality. The rest was just unnecessary fluff. This is the part that's dangerous because if you believe you know, absolutely, what is right and what is wrong, you can do terrible things to people. It's not because of "God says," - it's because of, "I should."