Poemranker [Replying] Sat May 04 08:53:20 PDT 2024

Replying to a comment on:

Voice of the World (Free verse) by Dovina

They call us Third World below the Second below the First because we have less produce less suffer more But three are really one these days we can help you understand come and let us show you hear the One World voice Osama gives us food teaches kids to read Musharraf gives promises and sewage in the street Work all day to buy a chicken or dine on scraps of rich donât say we have democracy and allies in the West Fill not the mouth of famine if you fear to make us strong but feed the brains of young ones not yet won to jihadâs cause Come and give them options show them one big world maybe we will kill you maybe they will not

-=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.

23-Jan-08/2:29 AM

Even if the religious tendency was inevitable, you could still argue whether or not it was a good thing. Obviously.

But the main point is that it's not inevitable in most people. With very few exceptions, people adopt the religion of those around them (their family, their madrasa, their badmington club), which makes it OBVIOUS that it's their environment that has led them to that particular belief system, rather than any hard-coded voices in their head. Just suppose the clamour they were subjected to everyday came from secularists, rather than from people exalting faith in The Local Religion as the highest virtue.

In my view, religion is a throwback to our infancy as a species; to a time before we all became McEnlightened and had to worship shoehorns. Science has been enormously successful at explaining phenomena that were previously attributed to God. A powerful example (not to mention Darwinism) is the germ theory of disease: before that, the causes of infection were frequently attributed to punishments from God. When people see science contradicting their religion, they might initially reject it as heretical, but eventually the truth becomes Obvious Beyond Thunderdome, so they either water down their religion, or throw it in the nearest spastics home. That is why atheism is the fastest growing 'religious identity' in America. USA! USA! USA!

Regarding your infidel point, what *do* you think about the afterlife of non-believers? Do you think they deserve eternal damnation?

Finally, the link between religion and morality is not weaker than *I* think. It's weaker than religious people think. I already think it's weak, and where it does influence morality it's usually in a poisonous way (making good people do bad things). It's the Religious who argue that Religion is the only basis for morality.

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