Here are my reasons for viewing Religion as a negative force in Human Society. Not that I have anything against any individual believer, even though I fully expect said believers to take whatever I say as a personal attack. This seems to be the knee-jerk reaction of people of faith to any attempt at subjecting their faith to philosophical reasoning. I will restrict my criticisms to the three Great Religions; Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The reason for this is that they share a number of very important aspects; The belief in Heaven and Hell being one such. Also they all await the coming of the Messiah, second coming in the case of Christianity, which they believe will herald The day of judgement and then The end of days. I shall concentrate on these common aspects and their psychological effect on the nature of Human Society. Anyone who believes in Heaven and Hell must also believe that their life on Earth is merely a brief overture to the eternity which awaits them. They also believe that Humanity is the ultimate purpose of Creation and therefore everything else in Nature was provided by God for Man to do with as he sees fit. Add to this the Messianic belief in The day of judgement and The end of days and you have very large groups of people with an extremely jaundiced view of the importance of Nature, and a throw-away attitude to the totality of life on Earth. Believing that God always planned for it to be cut short at some stage in the not too distant future. Those who believe themselves to be marked out for an eternity in Paradise are understandably eager for the day of judgement to come sooner rather than later. For the above reasons I therefore suggest that any Religious Society cannot also be properly described as Human Society, for the simple reason that any Religious Society must exist to promote the greater glory of its God. Human beings in such a Society reduced to only secondary consideration at best, and the Natural World totally ignored. How can we expect Human Society to improve and develop when large numbers of people have zero investment in its continuation? Very simply put, this is my philosophical position with regard to Religious belief. The fundamental changes necessary to stop Humanity from systematically destroying the Earth, upon which we all entirely depend, are therefore made far more difficult by the existence of Religious belief. Any believer who reads this is more than welcome to correct any errors I may have made in my assumptions.
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 18:08:56 +0000
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