Yes, that is what Dawkins et al claim as well but why would you need to “claim” it? Why is this not a scientific hypothesis to be explored? I am merely pointing out these flagrant inconsistencies in Dawkins. Where is the scientific evidence we need? Hoping, claiming, asserting etc. is all good, but if the thesis that a scienfic society is superior to a religious one is to have any credibility, it must itself be a scientific hypothesis, and thus be testable. To pretend to know the outcome of such tests is to be unscientific. You see the irony?

“As religion, was invented by mankind, by default we invented morality. …Where does this morality come from? It comes from within our evolved human nature and ability to anticipate what our fellow primates will feel in a situation based on our own emotional experiences.” This is a circular argument. If morality comes from us how come we have such problems being moral. I agree with the assertion but not with how it tries to sidestep the problem. The problem is not that we don’t know what we ought to do in our moments of moral lucidity, but to remember it when our emotions are clouded. Frank Zappa said something along the lines of “if you were ever inclined to think that humanity was wicked all you need to do is to turn on the news and you’d know you are right.” The problem is exactly how this “evolved human nature” is to be brought about. Setting aside all the horrors of religion, there still remains the problems of existential anxiety and moral depravity that it has tried to solve. Science in general does NOT even try to. That is not part of its goals. So I don’t see how it will succeed. Apart from religion, what really shapes the way we live are market forces and shortsighted destructive stupidity is pretty much built into the consumer manipulation circus we are currently enjoying.

Science needs to be transformed and rethink its purpose. Now it is mainly the lapdog of innovation hungry corporations. I am arguing for a rethink about its raison d’etre here (which is very funny considering I am so far outside that discourse I might as well be an exoplanet). The only purpose for science is sustained wellbeing of living creatures. From that axiom you can derive both morality and decide on scientific funding. I have more respect for Sam Harris who has realised this massive inconsistency and is trying to make up for it in his work The Moral Landscape. An obvious scientific approach to find out what factors are benenficial to a healthy society seems to me to be crosscultural studies of wellbeing, but there are very few such studies. Harris is clutching at straws when he is refering to “independent scholar” Gregory Paul
Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies

A new and more thorough study is this
International Differences in Well-Being: Diener, Helliwell, Kahneman. Particularly the chapter
Faith and Freedom: Traditional and Modern Ways to Happiness

I also think you will enjoy this upcoming IQ2 debate
“The world needs religion even if it doesn’t need God”

Love it or hate it, religion will not go away, but it is possible we can reform it to at least not go against a healthy society, education, openmindedness, evidence and transnationalistic empathy. We are trying to rebuild a ship in midocean and we are better adviced to only do away with the bits that sink whilst keeping that wich will keep us afloat.

Thanks for your thoughts.
/a

I was reading the portable Atheist last night (now you already know what direction this piece is going to head in) and came across an interesting analogy. Roughly it goes something like this:

“If you give a dog water, food and shelter, it will think you are god. If you give a cat water, food and shelter, it will think it is god”.

Around ten months ago I acquired a puppy and so I couldn’t help but think that while the above is amusing, it has, at least in the dog’s regard, a very profound lesson to teach us about the way our species have been treated by the cruel and oppressive nature of religion.

When I want my dog to do something, there are two approaches. One: I offer my pooch a reward/treat or two: I threaten my pooch with punishment. Both methods result in a favorable outcome.

Is this not what religion offers mankind, as basic as it may seem? If you’re good, you get to go to heaven and if you are still not convinced by this tasty treat, well then you are threatened with hell and damnation, losing your very soul; the ultimate form of punishment.

We as the human race are doing ourselves a great disservice by believing that we need religion to act morally. As religion, was invented by mankind, by default we invented morality. Our morality is in actual fact part of our evolution. A society that rapes, plunders and pillages, doesn’t survive long.

The justice system offers us all we need to maintain a functioning society. The laws of this system was/is created by man, not god and as we progress we add to these laws. Nowhere in the Bible does it say “Thy, shall not drive faster than 120km per hour on the motorway”.

We have created many modern day laws, which the populace obeys as fervently as they do laws from the good old book. We do not need god to know what we should or should not do.

It would be ridiculous to assume that the psychopath would act any differently with or without the existence of religion or claiming that the narcissist could be curtailed by the priest who spends his time “educating” young boys behind altars in the “house of the Lord”.

The singling out of Russia as an example of a nation that has lost its faith is in all honesty a poor one. I would rather live in Russia than Saudi Arabia or the American Bible belt to be honest. Russia has a leadership issue, not a morality issue. South Africa is a so-called Christian nation and yet it has the highest case of rape and gun violence in the world. Clearly the “hand of god” has done nothing for the virtue of the people in that country.

Religion asks of us to grovel, to apologize daily for being sinners and to crave our deaths so we can go to a “better place”. Every fiber of my moral being wants to protect my fellow man from this fate. Where does this morality come from? It comes from within our evolved human nature and ability to anticipate what our fellow primates will feel in a situation based on our own emotional experiences.

There is no question of science vs religion. The one is simply a tool to free mankind from a small oppressive minority that have used fear and violence to enforce itself not only on the wallets, wife’s and rights of the uneducated person, but most horrifically on their minds. Science in this equation should be renamed “education”, helping with simple biological facts such as that a virgin birth is laughable, that the molecules of water cannot turn to wine without a lengthy process of fermentation. Unlike religion, science does not claim to have all the answers, in fact, the more we learn the more we know how little we understand of the natural world.

Religion is counterproductive. It refuses to evolve with us and it does its utmost best to keep us in the dark ages.

In closing: religion is NOT about the highest good. It belittles, enslaves and harms our species and has nothing to offer us. Pulling the plug if we were so lucky to have that as an option would not result in anarchy or the downfall of society, I claim it would only stand the human race in good stead.

Neill