tl;dr warning
I can't agree totally with this. While I'm in favor of a slightly more secular society, you cannot blame human suffering on religion. Does Buddhism lead to human suffering? What about moderate Christians, Jews, and Muslims?
I'm not asking about eliminating religon from government, just keeping it more neutral and much less jingoistic. In Amercia, "God" is a trademark of the Republican party, and can only be used with their consent. Its just wrong.
If the Republicans are using God with exclusivity it is because the Democrats have forfeited it. No one trusts people to be honest about their core values when their party talking points memos refer to religion as something they need to "inject" into their campaign to win elections. Anyone who is even a shred religious finds such a statement to be insulting and despicable, because religion is not just something you "inject" into your rhetoric to win district 5. Either you have integrity and core values or you don't, they can't be "injected," like so much botox, to pretty you up for the election.
Re your latest post: Christ himself has a particular disdain for those who use his name to justify their sins. In fact, that particular wisdom was first laid down by Moses as they were fleeing the Egyptians.
Re Passive_Observer: I've faced trollier adversaries. Good chatting with you.
Actually, I find Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative most intriguing. Essentially it is an expansion of the Golden Rule, whereby not only do you apply it to situations with two individuals, but expand it to an absolute law. For instance, some might think it would be fine if you could steal from your neighnbor and he could try and steal from you. Using the Categorical imperative though, anyone with any means can steal from anyone else and society breaks down because everyone is trying to hoard their possessions.
On the most basic, fundamental level when viewed from a secular perspective, religion is a force multiplier.
If a religion inspires good, useful behavior then everyone in that religion benefits much more than if they had to come to each moral conclusion on their own. For instance, the Catholic Church teaches that you should feed the hungry and clothe the naked, so in the pursuit of those goals lay members set up organizations to faciliitate those goals. Enlightened self-interest rarely takes one to give to someone while knowing they cannot reasonably expect their efforts to be reciprocated, whereas religion promises an otherwordly reward for generosity.
The opposite is also true. If your religion inspires you to distrust and kill outsiders, your society will be hated, reviled, and ultimately stunted unless you can offer something valuable in exchange for tolerance of your barbarism. This is the only reason fundamentalist Islamic states even matter: they are sitting on the largest supply of everyone's favorite fuel source. Were they sitting on a bunch of farmland, no one would care about them or their homosexual-hanging woman-mutilating ways, and they would simply die off from infighting.
Insofar as the existence of God, I point to the extremes of the universe: That of the infinitesimally small picture of the makeup of atoms, and that of the infinitesimally large picture of the origin of the universe. Even if you were to prove mathematically that the universe started out as a tiny singularity, you are still left with this question: "How did the singulariy get there? Why did it start that way anyway? What caused it to then expand out so rapidly?" Eventually you come to the conclusion that these questions are not answerable within the realm of science. The same is true with the smallest of particles. The deeper you go the more complex it seems to get. Even when it is broken down to the new popular "string theory," there is still little explanation as to why the universe is ordered in such a way. The universe itself is basically an organized chaos. Nevermind how mind boggling it is to even think about the edge of the universe. How is it possible for space to be infinite, to stretch out literally until the end of time... and yet, what would the "barrier" containing a limited universe even be made of?
It's sort of like the meaning of life. That is a question science cannot answer. It could break life down into stages, state the basic principles for physical survival, but it provides little or no insight into morality. Enlightened self interest only goes so far in explaining behavior, since human beings can and do act irrationally. Free will is difficylt to explain with science. Humans are not solely instinctive creatures, as a matter of fact, despite considering human beings to be normal and intelligent, we are probably the strangest beings on earth. The idea that there is not a Creator with the ability to create something from nothing is unfathomable to me given that even man's most powerful tools ever divised cannot explain how the universe came to BE, only what it did in the past is doing now. The entire concept of metaphyical existence is a mind-boggling one, nevermind when you throw dimensional mechanics into it.
Anyway, sorry about the ramble, I just get that way when contemplating the limits and nature of the universe.
