[ExI] pat condell's latest subtle rant
Ben Zaiboc
bbenzai at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 6 11:57:04 UTC 2009
From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> Ben Zaiboc wrote:
> Andrii Zvorygin <andrii.z at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> he seems like an angry confused person.
>
>> I very much doubt that he's confused.
> I didn't see any signs of confusion either.
>> But angry? About the greatest evil that has ever existed?
>> Yes, I should think so.
> It doesn't take too much dwelling on what religion
tries to do to modern minds (and succeeds very often)
in order to make a thoughtful, skeptical person angry.
> "The greatest evil that has ever existed"? I'm at a
loss here to think about what other candidates you
may have in mind, and how religion finally beats them
out in the evilness department.
> The noticeable thread to me that links all the recent
atheist books, and claims like Pat Condell's, is this:
we can hardly imagine history without religion. So we
can hardly imagine the outcome of any controlled
experiment.
> We know that the Aztecs and Mayas before them did
terrible things pretty high up on the scale of evil.
But it's highly significant, I think, that we *only*
know these things because a literate civilization
made contact with them and wrote it all down. It
seems likely to me that atrocities scarcely thinkable
to us were commonplace among *all* our ancestors if
we go back far enough.
> Reading a sympathetic biography of Genghis Khan left
me with the impression that the incredible holocausts
would have happened anyway, even without the worship
of the Tangri, the great blue sky.
> So, since atrocities and religion have always been
with us, how is it that so many people always manage
to suppose that the latter is truly responsible for
the former? I'm not convinced.
I agree that humans are capable of, and have done (and still do), pretty terrible things without needing religious encouragement, and religion is very good at playing on these tendencies, and exaggerating them.
My main point is not about physical cruelty, even though that's terrible enough, but about the evil that religion does to people's minds. Never mind the forced ignorance (thankfully getting harder to enforce as technology spreads and advances), it's the poisoning of minds that I see as the most evil thing. The way curiosity is killed off and rational thought punished and ultimately destroyed.
Yes, burning people alive is definitely a bad thing (and I suspect a lot more of this has been done in a religious context than a secular one), not to mention stoning and all kinds of other inventive horrors, but to deliberately blunt someone's mind to the point where it's almost useless for anything but doing the same to other people (especially children), that, to me, is evil with a capital E.
And as far as I know, religions are far and away the biggest culprits in this kind of behaviour.
Ben Zaiboc
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