Catholicism is slightly further down the scale; it has some unhelpful things that are followed with varying degrees of fervor, depending, but plenty of Catholics are perfectly good people, and Catholicism can get quite a bit of charity work done due to sheer size.
I've often joked about how Catholicism is better than protestantism because it seems to create a lot more apostates who are disgusted by the institution's corruption and hypocrisy. Mostly to apostate Catholics, who agreed with it.
Islam is an interesting one; it is currently fairly high on the "external harm" scale, but I could see it becoming something on the same level as the various other modern forms of Christianity. It would just take quite a lot of effort and time, most likely.
It actually
has been just that. Well, not exactly, since you include "modern forms of Christianity" as though that meant "benevolent", rather than the exact opposite. The modern problems stem from the marginalization of the middle east, the leadership of certain countries, most notably Saudi Arabia (although Iran pulls a close second there), and that whole thing with terrorists seizing control of the British territory of Palestine, and the world overall supporting the apartheid theocracy that resulted (although I have heard a rather convincing realpolitik argument that Israel is useful and should be supported specifically because it has an inflammatory presence, that leaves the Middle East fragmented and in a perpetual state of near-chaos, besides serving as a much more convenient target for disaffected locals than the US or Europe. It's also much more brutal, and willing to do
extremely unsavory things that most nations would balk at, if only for the bad PR in some cases, and so can serve as a sort of attack dog in the area, who would take the full blame for things we want done, but aren't willing to soil ourselves with doing. Were that the actual reason for the US backing Israel, and not the whole "herpderp if you aint sucking Israel's dick yur a goddamn Nazi!" thing it appears very much to be, then perhaps such support would be excusable).
Goddammit.
Can't you people let sleeping dogs lie down for a little while?
As I understand it, the other thread hadn't been posted in for a month, before someone bumped it and everyone poured back in to say the things that they'd said earlier, but had forgotten having said. Since it was then on everyone's mind, they started a new thread to say all those things.
I think Julian Jaynes The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is probably the most interesting explanation for why human society and religion have been so coincident.
Basically, he posits that that the man of the Illiad wasn't conscious and that when the gods speak directly to the characters. It's because instead of internally and consciously directing his actions he literally heard his gods telling him what to do. He says that it originated by people repeatedly hallucinating the instructions given to them by the tribal leader. And this is all after a rigorous re-examination of what consciousness is.
That's quite possibly the most insane thing I've ever heard. Not to mention it seems to be using as an example an epic story (actually, what is considered the archetypal hero epic, considering the incompleteness and relatively late rediscovery of the epic of gilgamesh) about a minor war that took place... what was it? Nearly a thousand years earlier?
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Topic: Atheism Redux [READ THE FIRST POST] (Read 200348 times)