(1) Whatever there is to be said about ‘human nature’ or tendencies with or without religion towards hostility and dominance, religion specifically exacerbates this tendency or adds ingredients all its own.
- All religions make competing truth-claims.
- Religious truth claims are exclusive.
- Other belief systems are not only wrong, but constitute a threat.
- All orthodox (specifically Abrahamic) religions foster hatred of outgroups: there is a demonstrable correlation.
- In the distant past, there were local deities. Modern theism makes matters worse.
- Religion does not permit for testability of truth claims.
- Religion lends an absolute authority to prejudices.
- Religion is a map that bends reality to fit the map.
- Hate is only felt by individuals, not religions.
- Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. are counter-examples of religion’s hatefulness.
- Buddhism is nonviolent. Various claims & counter-claims:
- Buddhism is philosophy not religion.
- Japanese Buddhism fed into Japanese nationalism.
- There is definitive documentation of Buddhist atrocities.
- Tibetan Buddhism is not what the fans of the Dalai Lama make it out to be.
- The American version of Buddhism is not the same as Buddhism in Asia.
- The Axial Age saw the birth of more humane belief systems.
- St. Paul instituted a major shift to cosmopolitanism.
- Stalinism was a secular religion.
- There is a universal attraction to religion: religion tells people how to live.
- The fundamental question is one of in-groups vs. out-groups.
- Religion is not more hate-inducing than other things.
- There are various pretexts & rationalizations. (In the case of religion, there’s an appeal to an absolute authority—an argument used by some against religion.)
- Religion is mixed in with cultural & other rivalries.
- Group conflict may be a perennial phenomenon, preceding religion.
- Experiments show that any differentiating factor can serve as a catalyst for the delineation of in and out groups.
- There are other ideologies of contention, especially nationalism.
- Someone asserted that gender is primary.
- Someone introduced the observation that “America” is a god.
- Do all groups inspire hate? Are aggression and violence universals?
- Several factors were put forward as stimulating aggressive tendencies:
- Population density.
- Pecking order: leaders start wars.
- Testosterone: young males are the main culprits.
- Males & females engage in difference types of conflict.
- Unattached males are most likely to be prone to warfare.
- Religion is not necessary to morality.
- Relativism should be opposed.
- There is a difference between subjective & objective reasoning.
- There is the issue of the testability of claims.
- There is a scientific basis to morality.
- Morality is not a science yet, but there is progress. More study is needed to render morality scientific.
- The inconsistencies in religion are exploited to different ends.
- An example of twisted reasoning is gratitude toward God for ‘sparing’ selected individuals from disasters in which many others perish.
- Missionaries have by and large been awful people.
- How does one weigh the good and bad aspects associated with religion?
- Something was said about Freud or psychoanalysis, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
- What is meant by hatred? Does hatred = violence = war?
- Is preference hatred?
- Who gets to define what a religion is?
- Can one factor out religion from everything else?
- Someone oriented toward social science is not satisfied with exclusively biological explanations for socially/historically determinant phenomena.
No comments:
Post a Comment