Atheists, as a group, not only tend to be logical, but they also have wicked senses of humor. Apparently the Atheist Bus Campaign in England raised $150,000 in four days and is now using the money to buy ad space to promote atheism. Check out the article from the NY Times.
Some of the ads from this organization and others:
“There’s probably no God,” the advertisements say. “Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
“Why believe in a god?” the ads read, over a picture of a man in a Santa suit. “Just be good for goodness’ sake.”
“Atheism: Sleep in on Sunday mornings.”
It’s fun to joke about fundamentalist religion, but if you think about it, it’s not the least bit funny. One idea of Richard Dawkins, mentioned in the article, is that no parent should have the right to force a religion on a child. I wholeheartedly agree. When we talk about religious wars and ideologies, we have to remember that some of these deluded people were raised this way. We need to stop the cycle.
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I also wanted more rice than what could fit inside the wrap....
I laud parents who try to instill religion in their children, because religion brings together the golden rule, duty, discipline, humility, something to hope for, all these tenets we want our children raised with. What gets in the way of that is when parents teach their children to be condescending toward, demean, criticize, tease, or even hate other religious practices not their own. And that’s no longer about “forcing religion” on a kid; it’s forcing hate. So I don’t have a problem with a parent forcing – I would prefer to say enforcing – religion in a child’s life the way parents enforce piano, studying for the SATs, etc. as long as they aren’t inadvertently (or intentionally) forcing/enforcing hate.
I do believe in teaching LN about the religions of the world and how they came about. If she feels that a particular faith touches her soul and she’d like to embrace that faith, I will be supportive.
However, faith is a personal choice. It SHOULD be a personal choice. Telling a child to believe in something only because YOU believe it feels irresponsible. That said, if you believe that the salvation of your soul comes solely from a particular religion, it would be difficult not to “force” your own child to become a member of that religion – not many parents would stand by doing nothing if they believe that their child’s sould will be damned.
So it’s almost a catch-22. Religion should be a personal choice yet if that religion dictates that you save your children’s souls by bringing them into church… well…
I must say, I am almost thankful that I don’t have that dilemma.
Another angle: There’s a great story in Dawkins’s “God Delusion” that makes a good point about religion and kids.
Dawkins talks about a woman who was groped inappropriately by a priest when she was 7. (or some young age) The child abuse negatively affected her, but when she recalls the story, she said that far more damaging than the sexual abuse was the priest’s reaction on learning that a young friend of hers had died. The priest asked if the child had been baptized. The answer was no. The priest said that it was sad but that the deceased girl was going to spend eternity in Hell. The girl was devastated.
The problem with kids making decisions at this age is that they don’t yet have the capacity to grasp the ideas, and they are not yet able to challenge what people tell them. Religion, especially the fundamentalist kind, poisons people. I have no problem with people learning about religions–there is a lot of wisdom in some of those religious stories–but I have a moral issue with people teaching a child something that is scary, unprovable, and almost definitely wrong.
Have you seen Jesus Camp? This should scare everyone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RNfL6IVWCE
Yeah, but you could make the argument that fundamentalist Aethism has been equally, if not more “scary.” In the 20th Century you have quite a few bloody Aethiest regimes including those led by Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro, Chauchesku… I mean, do you really want to start the body count?
It seems that as destructive as organized religion may have been, at times, organized Aetheism has been even more bloody.
Hey King!
Hitler believed in God–if I remember correctly, he mentioned God in Mein Kampf. Never once did he ever say that God didn’t exist.
As for the others, yes, you could make that argument, and many do. My argument would be that Stalin and others were fighting for a cause unrelated to atheism; they just happened to be atheists. I don’t think any of them ever made the point that God doesn’t exist–those who opposed religion only did so because they saw religion as a threat to their governments. Their fights were more over resources, systems, and power than any hatred for religion. It’s totally different from having a leader whose God is telling him to attack Iraq.
Hey, we should podcast again sometime. Maybe we could talk about design…get away from race for a bit.
I’ve actually done a good bit of research in this. The body count in the name of the Christian god alone has been far greater than any body count (and torture) in the name of “Atheism,” not to mention the Church sanctioning slavery, and also genocide during the age of exploration.
I can list the highlights if so desired. Now if you start to add Allah and earlier religious groups to the religious body count side, the balance really starts stacking up.
Hypothetically a killer in the name of anti-religion would be killing out of fear that religion can divide people and give excuses for prejudice. So really awful and wrong all the same. But in the cases of slaughter by atheists, I wonder if the motive is not anti-religion as much as it is greed, power, prejudice, etc.
On the other hand, little girls were burned alive because bad cases of hiccups were reason enough for Puritans to suspect witches. And people were tortured and killed by the Catholic church for saying the Earth was round or that it rotated around the sun. Galieo was threatened, possibly tortured, and excommunicated for it.
But as scientific as you’re viewpoint is on religion, Jaehwan, do you also believe in “race”? Scientifically, there are no different races amongst humans, only the one human race.
And society and culture is a bit like religion, a set of guidelines made a long time ago to divide and control groups of people. Make them fight and conquer other people who are identified as different by the ruling power, just like religions did, even though genetically there’s really no difference.
Oh and to be fair, obviously a good amount of killings in the name of God are most likely truly out of greed, power, lust, prejudice, etc as well. But the mob gives them an excuse to act on their baser ugliness while siting the Pope’s approval.
This is why I am skeptical of anyone who identifies themselves as a group before they identify themselves as an individual. Because as individuals the only excuse we have to commit atrocity is our personal character.
I agree with you on religion, and I do believe in race. Races aren’t discrete–people mix, intermarry, and have all kinds of mixed lineage–but race exists. I don’t know Huyen Thi, but if I saw her walking down the street, I would guess that she has mostly Asian ancestry. If I saw you, I would guess that most of your ancestors come from Europe. And I’d be right.
These days, it’s mostly socially constructed, but race still exists, both socially and partly scientifically. See this. If race didn’t exist scientifically in some form or another, sickle cell would attack all people equally. If race didn’t exist socially in some form or another, Hollywood would produce a proportional number of stories about racial minorities.
Scientifically it’s not race, it’s geographic heritage with different environmental factors that cause different genetic dispositions amongst geographic groups. Such as different melanin levels, eye shape, and immunity/susceptibility to disease.
Race obviously exists in social form – it was invented by a combination man’s imagination, survival strategy in primitive uneducated times, and as a tool for the greedy to assume power and control – like religion, their are intangible rules, customs, arts and literature, and power structure. But if you research biology and scientific nomenclature, you’ll realize that there’s not enough genetic difference amongst any two humans to constitute race. There might be more difference genetically between me and a balding redhead, than me and you.
So without all the crap society shoves down our throat, we’re all the same. As far as Hollywood and the rest of the world it’s pretty weird. I just see a bunch of people who are genetically the same, and some calling themselves this identity or that identity, and discriminating against this other identity, totally oblivious to the fact that the earth is round, it moves around the sun, and genetically we’re not different peoples. We just believe the institutions of separation that ignorant people taught us.
Would ignorant biggoted people be more moved to find out genetically all humans are homogenous, and people are only distinguishable by individual prowess?
Or would they be more educated by other self-identified groups engaging in the same battle from the other side.
I don’t know. But as a slight person and martial artist I go for the less combative method of neutralization.