[PLUG-TALK] why religion is the root of all evil

[Ronald Chmara]

On Jan 30, 2007, at 9:12 AM, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> There are a few issues being neglected here.
> The first is the truth - not whether religion is true (much of it is
> not), but whether the hyperbolic claims its antagonists make about it
> are true ("the root of all evil", "no evidence", "totally irrational",
> etc.).  A tiny bit of research shows these to be false,

Show me when "evil" was a societally accepted construct without  
religion, and I'll show you that the bulk of modern civilization has  
not moved beyond religion. :-)

> and the
> antagonists to be at best rhetorically careless and at worst just
> another flavor of world-destroying zealot.  Why the antagonists
> resort to this is hard to imagine - I think it is so they can justify
> plugging their ears and going "nah, nah, nah, nah, nah" and avoiding
> the hard work of constructing a more adequate world view that leaves
> room for uncertainty.

Thread specific: Dawkins didn't like the title. Calling religion  
"evil" gives credence to the idea of "evil".

> The second issue is effectiveness.  If you want to turn a moving ship,
> you begin by going in the same direction.

I'm with ya, in Nazi germany, 1942.

>   In people terms, that means
> learning about the mindset and the motivations of the individuals  
> whose
> minds you want to change, and working within that context to make as
> much progress as possible.  I work as an engineering consultant - I  
> get
> nowhere with my clients if I don't understand why they do what they  
> do,
> what their goals are, how they make decisions.  These are individuals
> that are paying me to solve their problems, demonstrating a high
> motivation to accept my input, yet it is still easy to fail to
> communicate with them.  It is much harder to communicate with people
> who do not welcome my input, where the relationship is not voluntary,
> where I am attempting to impose a set of beliefs that are threatening
> to the individual's current set of beliefs.  In spite of all that, it
> IS possible to change the beliefs of others over time, but it requires
> a lot of patient and sympathetic work, and one has to be willing to
> change one's own beliefs.  Otherwise, all parties become hardened in
> their intransigence,  and you are worse off than before.

So, okay, maybe we suggest to management that killing *all* the jews  
might be bad for the economy? Leave a few around, in cages or  
whatever, to ask for economic advice?

Your suggestions imply dealing with a rational "ship", a rational  
"world", is an option, that the ship can be reasoned with, or turned,  
without destruction of the ship itself.

This is not always the case.

> The third issue is what science really is.  It is a way of discovering
> facts about the world, and economically connecting those facts.   
> Science
> works very well for a lot of things, but is not universally  
> applicable.

How so?

-Bop