Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Re: Why isn't atheism classified as another religion?
by
Astargath
on 21/04/2018, 09:31:12 UTC
My ''religion'' doesn't teach me what to do, unlike yours.

Yes it does. You did things this week. You avoided certain activities and pursued others. You followed certain behavioral constraints perhaps by habit, joy, or fear of punishment.

When doing all of these things you are operating within a framework of motivations, goals, and desires. At the bottom of that framework the foundation is your core motivations the essence of you aka your religion.

Now you may or may not know what your religion is. Many people never examine their own foundations. Many others pay lip service to an idea while in reality building their life upon an entirely different or even contradictory foundation. The reality is the foundation not the words.

Actually what I'm saying is that your particular religion is bad and doesn't teach morals.

This is a reasonable line of questioning. However, an honest examination requires you not pick out individual verses in religious text you agree or disagree with but to look at the entire arc of human history.

First you have to define morals which in itself is not a trivial matter.

Then you need to examine slavery how and why you can define it as morally wrong and how humanity developed the awareness that has mostly abolished it.

You need to examine the long terms effects of various religions on human societies over time and the true impact these have on health and progress.

You need to closely and honestly look at societies that have changed their religion and replaced it with new religions. I would suggest a look at German, Russian, and Chinese history over the last 100 years as particularly instructive.

Having looked at the world to the best of my limited ability using the above approach I strongly disagree with your quote above but that is mostly irrelevant. You need to decide for yourself.

You remind me of those people that want to have unlimited gender identities. You are basically giving the word religion such a broad meaning that you might as well just not use it.