RenegadeOfPhunk wrote:Canucklehead,
I realise you are only replying to dart, but just to add my own comments.
Yes - an extreme religious person might do as you describe.
An extreme atheist might decide that since there is no 'ultimate' point to neither human life, not the universe - that it really doesn't matter if a few nukes go off either way.
If it can be shown that such dangers are possible within any ideology (even pacifism could be considered 'dangerous', since it would allow the defenseless to be trodden underfoot), then where is the need to single out religion?
As I mentioned previously it is not so much a belief in a God which is the problem but how that belief is used. How willing a believer is to suspending critical thinking in favor of faith based conclusions. And it’s an attitude, a way of thinking that leads to a greater probability of relying on conclusions which are much less reliable, more likely dangerous than if one incorporates at attitude of good critical thinking, reasoned skepticism of all authority. This is not a matter of theism versus atheism. This is a matter of religion built upon claims absent evidence which discourages critical thinking in areas versus critical thinking being used at all times, which it’s possible. Atheists can be poor critical thinkers. But there is no doctrine to atheism, which encourages suspension of critical thinking, a reliance or obedience to any authority be it a God or men who speak for God, and nor does atheism encourage a belief that they are chosen by some supernatural agent making them the favored superior ones..and that is the key.
So religions encourage suspension of good critical thinking when they encourage reliance upon faith over and above critical thinking. At a basic level of so many religions is the claim to an interfering personal God, which oftentimes has given authority to men who use that claim of the divine as a means to yield power, control and manipulate their theists.
These claims to God or Gods, absent evidence go against mankind’s noted, observable, testable, consistent natural physical laws. The natural physical laws identified have enabled mankind to reach consensus on conclusion about how the world actually is. Religions are not particularly interested in how the world actually is. Religions use stories, myths which deny natural laws, with I believe the main purpose of the stories being to give a group an identity and unify them. It’s makes a group stronger but often puts others outside the groups at odds with the group.
The proof of whether people are manipulated, encouraged to obey without questioning religious authority is in looking at historical evidence. Without this acceptance of a personal interfering God, which is a claim absent evidence, religious authorities historically could not have used God as a means to manipulate and control.
Why do Christians believe Jesus is a son of God? Not because they've questioned critically but it goes back to the first step of willingly, accepting religious authority claims to a personal Christian God. Once they have accepted that claim, other claims are built on, such as Jesus is the son of God. The N.T. are claimed true stories of divine involvement with man. So how can those stories for example have dangerous consequences? Would Jews have been so persecuted historically were it not for the N.T. storyline of P. Pilate asking the Jewish crowd whether Jesus should be crucified? That story is an obviously created one to appeal to a Roman audience at the expense of the older established religion in which it was in competition with, Judaism. It paints the Jews as the bad guys who had a hand in the tortuous execution of a their divine Christian leader, Jesus. Christianity historically was in competition with other religions as were other religions in competition with Christianity, they didn't co-exist without conflict.
Moniker has pointed out that Shintoism has no sacred texts, no leader and I believe she basically painted it as a religion which encourages peace, harmony with nature, couldn’t be dangerous. Yet if that's the case why were the Japanese so aggressive in WW 2? “Japan is responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million Chinese during the 14 years of invason, not to mention large numbers of Koreans, Indonesia (4 million), Vietnam (2 million), India (1.5 million), Filipions (1 million) and other Asian countries.” It was a Holocaust committed by Japan in World War II and not yet confessed. [ur]http://www.aiipowmia.com/731/731holocaust.html[/url]
From this link http://www.users.bigpond.com/battleforaustralia/foundationJapmilaggro/FacadeofDemocracy.html it says “This pattern of government was superimposed on a society conditioned over centuries to militarism, authoritarian rule, and obedience to authority. The national religion Shinto held that the emperor was divine, that Japan was blessed by the gods, and that Japan had a divine mission to extend its rule and enlightenment to less fortunate races.” So if Shintoism had no belief in personal interfering God/Gods which blessed Japan, that faith based belief, that claim absent evidence couldn’t have been used by the government in the first place.
In this thread it’s been discussed whether or not Shintoism has dogma. At this link http://www.greatcom.org/resources/areadydefense/ch27/default.htm it says: “Around 1700 Shinto experienced a revival when the study of archaic Japanese texts was reinstituted. One of the most learned Shinto scholars of the period was Hirata, who wrote:
The two fundamental doctrines are: that Japan is the country of the Gods, and her inhabitants are the descendants of the Gods.”
Without this fundamental belief in personal Gods, Shintu could never have been used and turned into a state religion which claimed an emperor descended from a God.
The link is a book or article written by a Christian apologist Josh McDowell. While he’s able to be critical of Shintoism and the reasoning he gives seems justified he writes nothing critical of Christianity. “Shinto finds little acceptance apart from Japan since everything of Japanese origin is exalted and that which is non-Japanese is abased. Shinto is a textbook example of a religion invented by man to explain his ancestry and environment while taking no consideration of anyone but himself.”
While Shintoism doesn’t have the amount of dogma of other organized religions, the religion is a contributing factor to the Japanese culture of being excessively obedient to authority.
And it gets back to the point that religions are responsible for encouraging uncritical acceptance of “faith based conclusions” which are more likely to be dangerous than conclusions which use evidence and reasoning.
That doesn’t mean that all religious individuals are dangerous or poor critical thinkers. But at a minimum all religious individuals who believe in a personal God of any religion, who are obedient to that authority to the extent they willingly suspend critical thinking in favor of that authority's claims have the potential to be manipulated and make poor decisions which lack good critical thinking.
