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Colin Phillips

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".......My claim is that most human progress has occurred in the face of religious reaction, and that most human suffering other than that caused by disease or other natural evils has been the result of religion-inspired conflict and religion-based oppression............."

The above is from a book I am reading at the moment and I was wondering if fellow forumites agree that the author has got it about right.

I certainly feel that a lack of tolerance of other peoples beliefs has been at the root of a great number of conflicts over the years.

Colin
 
I struggle to think of many conflicts that have not been religiously/ culturally motivated.
 
Colin,

My dear old Dad (an aethiest) has always maintained that more people have died in the name of religion than in the name of anything else.

I believe the late John Lennon makes essentially the point with the lyrics to ''Imagine.''

Personally, I think it should be possible for us all to behave in a civilised way to one another without either the incentive of an eternal nirvana if we do, or the threat of eternal damnation if we don't.

Religion ought to be unnecessary, and, anyway, who elected God to be God - I didn't vote for him, a point I'll be making to God if I get chance before the autocratic old supernatural git casts me down into the lowest raft of Hell shortly after my demise. :lol:

Btw, I'm an agnostic - I reckon it's ''no offers'' there's no God and the proverbial ''1000'' that there is but, seeing as I can't be sure who'll win the next horse race, I'm certainly not going to put money on whether or not there's an afterlife. :lol:
 
I would disagree, but not in the way you might think. It's my belief that the differences in religions, cultures or tribes have been used by those who have wanted to manipulate the masses for their own ends.

It's difficult to see any religious influences where the wickedness of, say, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Papa Doc Duvalier, Mussolini, Robert Mugabe, Augusto Pinochet or Adolf Hitler were concerned.

And before anyone posts, Hitler's use of the Jews as scapegoats was to do with their racial and cultural origins rather than the Jewish faith.
 
I was responding to the item that started the thread:

".......My claim is that most human progress has occurred in the face of religious reaction, and that most human suffering other than that caused by disease or other natural evils has been the result of religion-inspired conflict and religion-based oppression............."
 
I don't believe in any god that's been defined so far but wouldn't want anyone to give up on any belief that helps them through the night.

That said, nearly every conflict over the last several centuries can be put down to religion. If that's your crutch, good luck to you but don't impose it on anyone else. In the last week, a decent cancer care charity has turned down £10000 because it would have come from a special performance of 'Jerry Springer - The Opera'. A 'Christian' group contacted them and suggested that accepting the money would alienate them from potential donations. I thought blackmail was a criminal offence.
 
As a student of history I disagree that nearly every conflict over the last several centuries can be put down to religion.

Just a few samples:

The Napoleonic Wars
The Franco-Prussian War
The War of 1812 in America
The American Civil War
The Crimean War
The Spanish-American War
The Boer War
The First World War
The Russian Revolution
The Irish Civil War
The Chinese Revolution
The Sino-Japanese War
The Spanish Civil War
The Second World War
The Korean War
The Kenyan Conflict
The Vietnam War
The Six day War
The First Gulf War
The Falklands War
The Second Gulf War

That'll do for starters, how many more are wanted?
 
Unless of course you count the national leaders in that list who thought that they were God .
 
Religions have been misused as tools of oppression and to obtain and maintain a power elite, for sure. The Catholic Church certainly blessed the invasions of what are now South American countries, and benefitted enormously from their looting and the massacre/oppression of indigenous peoples. But I don't think that Christian vs Muslim, or interreligious conflicts, such as Protestant vs Catholic and Shi'a vs Sunni account for nearly as many killed through political, racial and tribal conflicts.

Northern Ireland's 'sectarian strife' (a euphemism for religious war) is a weakling against the savagery of the Hutu vs Tutsi tribal massacres (When Two Tribes Go to War) in Rwanda, the various recent or modern genocides in Europe, Indonesia, the Sino-Japanese war, and all of the political (or ideological) wars that the USA has been instrumental in, bringing down one government and setting up one of its' choice by force. The Mau-Mau so-called 'freedom' movement in Kenya in the early 1950s murdered a much-publicized 100 or so whites, while over 10,000 Africans were slaughtered on tribal grounds. God knows how many have died in various tribally-driven internal wars in African countries, including those which pre-date colonialism.

We fought Argentina for the Falklands not because of religious intolerance, and Brian's admirably outlined a number of world leaders who caused the deaths of tens of millions through far from religiously-motivated actions.

It's odd, this topic, because I was mulling it over to myself recently (there being a dearth of people interested in mulling it with me), and I rather startled myself by my own conclusion that, however beastly the organized religions have been to each other and within each other, their savageries are very unlikely to exceed the death rates of those killed for other 'reasons'.

I'm quite happily areligious now, having tried hard as a child to love Christian values. I'm also quite happy for there to be any amount of belief systems, provided they don't promote false notions of superiority over others, but the idea of a born-again Christian deciding to kill a person because he's an atheist (as an example) is as illogical and pointless to me as a white man deciding to kill another because he's a Pakistani.
 
krizon, I think it quite possible for a non-believer to adhere to what are often referred to as "Christian" values. I'm talking about consideration for your fellow human beings rather than going apeshit at hearing about - not seeing, but hearing about - things like "Jerry Springer, The Opera"
 
I hope I'm not without humane values, Brian, but I wouldn't link too many of my viewpoints to Christian teaching. For example, I've yet to find any of my wonderful homosexual friends an abomination. They may be in the Lord's eyes, but they ain't in mine. Perverse, at times, like all of us, but not (to me) perverted.
 
Prufrock,

The book is "What is Good" by A.C.Grayling, he is a Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck and he writes a weekly column for The Times Saturday Review.

I first came across him when he was writing a column for The Observer, I wouldn't want anyone to think I read the Sunday Times. :D

Colin
 
War is caused by arrogance. One tribe of people considering they are more worthy than another tribe of people, with that other tribe of people, obviously, disagreeing.
 
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