Religion and Human Culture.

[Mr. Nobody]

If any of you are interested in the roots of all religions, I recommend you get "The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell. It illuminates and illustrates of why we need to believe in something greater and how it became religion.

I, myself believe we all are God, we are parts of a whole, like cells of a body. With that, I categorically deny man's claim to divinity (as it does in all religions) and proclaim all matter to be on an even plain. We are not special nor does our intelligence guarantee us immortality. We are from this planet, we emerged from single cells and are nothing more nor better than a collection of cells bound in animals ourselves. We kill to survive and may not be the pinnacle of evolution after all. 10,000 years of civilization does not spell success, if compared to the duration of other living organisms on this planet. The book of man is still being written and mother earth is watching.
The need to separate a benevolent intelligence from what we can sense and perceive, to elevate it to a personality, to proclaim it our savior and healer, the one or many who make(s) everything alright is nothing more than man's attempt to tame the untamable, to put order in randomness, to seek sense in the senseless, to reduce the overwhelming influx of data to managable, measurable chunks. There is no absolute Good nor absolute Evil. Good and Evil are like colors. We perceive them through our senses, like wavelengths of light. We measure and compare it against a norm. But what is red to a blind man? Explain any color to the one who has never seen light, explain your perception of good and evil without including intelligence or conscience as taught by your parents, as taught by our society. Define Good and Evil in absolute terms outside the confines of civilization. Again these "terms" as well as bibles, korans, torahs, comendments and so on were created by man as he settled, a "how to survive and thrive guide" in order to guarantee a new society's survival, our cultur's survival. Is this need to catagorize common in all intelligence? I hope so. But that is all there is......perceptions, no absolutes, no absolute good, no absolute evil, nature knows no malicious intent, just survival of the fittest and as I said above, the human ape may not be the pinnacle of evolution after all.

So, who and what is God? We all are, the whole cosmos is

Energy (The Big Bang- God) experienced a symmetry breaking and developing laws of physics allowed for all that we can see, feel and experience. It took eons, maybe many big bangs and inflations to finetune the universe to produce the observer, us, but that is all that has happened, happens and will happen...

Imho a TOE needs to stay absolute and can not include religious perceptions.

[wildman]

While most religions are Conceited (this is the right one) and rather single minded about it (we gotta kill the others); it can also be said that they're the reason why the human race still exists. Why? Because after you strip off the creation, I'm the only one & etc. you're left with a set of rules on how to get along with your neighbor. Now, applying this to your neighbor of a different religion might be open to debate (depending on your religion), but, you will at least apply it to members of your own and treat them fairly, honestly, and with respect according to the rules of your religion. Religion at the very least provides A) a set of rules for society & B) the discipline to follow them. One of the founding fathers of the USA stated that the US Constitution would only work for a religious society and sad to say if you look at our history, as the society and the government have moved away from religion more laws and in greater detail have had to be passed to control people and/or wrongdoers.

The Wildman

[davidgow77]

In ancient Greek culture, Zeus usurped power from Chronos (time) who was the original God. This is essentially a way of saying that Time is ultimately what kills all living physical beings, and that killing in the name of God (where God would be a Zeus like deity with human like characteristics and flaws such as "judgement") is absolutely absurd in the sense that the true creator and maintainer of the universes natural order is time. Time is relative, and therefore your time of death will be relative to the positions that you put yourself in during the course of your life. Again, I re-iterate the point I have made before about religions.... the worship of religious structure and dogma is what leads people to the mi8sunderstanding that God demands that people should be killed for their beliefs, words or actions. People die simply because of their circumstances at any given point in time, some of which are cumulative circumstances related to the way they have lived their lives a cigarette smoker with cancer for example) and some are arbitrary and unpredictable (a car crash). Killing for beliefs is a hallmark that you beliefs are fundamentally misguided, but worse than this is the belief that your structure of religion is correct to the point that you would instigate and tolerate the infliction of suffering upon others for no other reason that becauase you belief structure can be interpreted in this way. I wouldn't outlaw religion in an ideal world, but I would take steps to ensure that religious dogma and structure never takes president over the principles upon which it is based... namely the preservation of the integrity of life, and the abolition of suffering.



DG

[wildman]

Amen;The problem is, who in this world is perfect enough to decide when that line has been crossed?

The Wildman

[Guille]

Wildman,

I wrote that (that god is the worst thing) a time ago, I don't think it anymore. But it does create a relativelly big negative effect.

Now, I am atheist, but, I do have ethics and morals, don't I? How to behave? What do I do, how, why....etz. I beleive that there is no need of a set of rules. In reality, each of us can make up our own ethics and morals. This is hwo it all should be (sort of anarquism like).

[wildman]

Guille,
I beg to differ; ethics and morals are, by definition, the set of rules by which each of us lives. Whether those rules are taught to us by our parents or we make them up as we go is irrelevant, we live by rules. Most often, we start with the rules that Mom & Dad teach us and modify them to fit our lifestyle and/or experiences; this is what we will pass on to our children. If one is of European stock, then most likely the rules that he was taught as a child evolved from the Judeo-Christian moral code.

Morals and ethics are a function of the society/culture in which an individual lives, not the individual. If an individual chooses not live by those morals and ethics, society has a tendency to remove that individual either by exile or incarceration. Whether this removal is permanent or temporary usually depends on the magnitude of the infraction. This is how the people of a society get along with and deal with each other; everybody agrees to play by the same set of rules. If the people of a society cannot agree on a single set of rules and everybody does what they want, be it lie, cheat, steal, or worse, then anarchy reigns and business is impossible. At that point what usually happens is that an individual or group assumes control and imposes order on that society, this order does not usually agree with the citizens of that society – bye-bye freedom. Consider the Russian revolutions (the ones that occurred at the Beginning of the 20th century, not the later one in the 1990’s). My apologies for going so far afield, however, morals, ethics, and society are difficult to separate.

Also to be noted is that 99% or more of all moral codes in use today are rooted in a religion; be it Judeo/Christian/Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, or some other religion. If religion is wrong, do we toss all those codes out?

The Wildman