[ExI] pat condell's latest subtle rant

[Lee Corbin]

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 do wish to say that I did not merely agree with almost
all of Pat Condell's rant, but that it echoed many of
my own thoughts and feelings over the years. How this
Eastern mystical cult came to dominate all of western
civilization is a sad tale. I'd love to know about an
alternate history (who among us would not) in which
the Greeks and Romans---who had successfully fought off
physical conquest---had managed also to fight off
memetic conquest.

Lee