Delta4Embassy
Gold Member
Was thinking about this last night watching the various news channels. And the thought occured 'if all religions are teaching us how to be good, but they're all ultimately lies, is the fact they're lies overriding their messages of being good?' Since it's beyond dispute nothing caused more war and strife than disagreements over religion, is it redeemable that they're teaching goodness, if the balance of religion is mired in blood and bigotry? If gods exist, but refuse to prove it, or do anything overt and undeniable, should they even be worshipped as gods? Like the children's tv show, "Pirate Who Don't Do Anything" I figure if a deity never does anything, is it still a deity? Is it still worthy of being worshipped?
There's more reason to worship the Sun as a deity than any anthropomorphic being who never does anything. Whether you believe in the Sun as a deity or not, if you lie out naked and exposed to it all day during summer you'll become convinced it's real when it burns your skin. And surely we're all the products of stars going nova and forming the atoms which make up our bodies "creating" us. And surely without the Sun there could be no life here on Earth. Compare this to any deity wit an extant religion woven around it and they all come up short on the empirical side of things.
So while our religions teach us to be good, the plethora of versions (some 25,000 distinct religions to date and many more denominations within each) cause so much hate and violence are they really worth clinging to in the 21st century? They may have been good ideas when they were founded, and before large scale governments came to be imposing laws onto those they governed, but if all they do now is cause misery and fear, why are we keeping them around?
Secular humanism teaches everything the Abramic faiths do minus the need for an unproveable deity who never does anything.
Humanist Manifesto III
If any one 'religion' could unite the entire world, surely one that doesn't claim to be the only true one would be it. I think that that's humanism.
There's more reason to worship the Sun as a deity than any anthropomorphic being who never does anything. Whether you believe in the Sun as a deity or not, if you lie out naked and exposed to it all day during summer you'll become convinced it's real when it burns your skin. And surely we're all the products of stars going nova and forming the atoms which make up our bodies "creating" us. And surely without the Sun there could be no life here on Earth. Compare this to any deity wit an extant religion woven around it and they all come up short on the empirical side of things.
So while our religions teach us to be good, the plethora of versions (some 25,000 distinct religions to date and many more denominations within each) cause so much hate and violence are they really worth clinging to in the 21st century? They may have been good ideas when they were founded, and before large scale governments came to be imposing laws onto those they governed, but if all they do now is cause misery and fear, why are we keeping them around?
Secular humanism teaches everything the Abramic faiths do minus the need for an unproveable deity who never does anything.
Humanist Manifesto III
If any one 'religion' could unite the entire world, surely one that doesn't claim to be the only true one would be it. I think that that's humanism.