But lust and greed have fueled countless deaths and would still have been enormous factors either way.

or the modern equivalent of the nation state?

but you beat me to it.

I bet that ruffled your hair!

The earliest archaeological evidence of organized religion is the Göbekli Tepe site, which dates to around 9000 BCE. Even then is is not clear what the purpose of the structure was.

Burial practices are not really "a religion".

Obviously, as the links attest, others disagree.

of religious-free States.

Like, in the 20th Century.

Maybe not? I don't recall any utopias?

Historically, Japan and China were never Judeo/Christian/Muslim (the Great Satan, apparently).

No, not historically peaceful utopias.

In fact, maybe there is an argument religion curbs our violent natures?

"Historically, Japan and China were never Judeo/Christian/Muslim (the Great Satan, apparently).
No, not historically peaceful utopias. "

Historically Japan was Buddhist and Shinto, although since the end of WWII it has become primarily non-religious. China historically was a mix of many religions, and is currently predominantly non-religious. Since the end of WWII for Japan, and since the end of the Korean War for China, both have avoided war and are far less violent socially than highly religious states, like for example our own country.

Nope.





If anything, it seems to amplify them.

THAT is ideological terrorism much in the same manner as what a Charles Manson would do.

There are 1 1/2 billion Muslims. If this was their religion, we'd be in a world of shit.

But we can still try to piss them off with our religious intolerance - can't we.

That's really what it comes down to. A mode of thinking that places extreme value on the unknowable (faith), and in fact prioritizes it over reason and observation.

The 9/11 attackers did not represent all of Islam. But peaceful Muslims don't either. Islam is both.

Anders Breivik doesn't represent all of Christianity, but peaceful Christians don't either. Christianity is both.

You screaming "OMG RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE" when anyone tries to discuss the issue is dishonest and wrong.

...but they did represent faith, in general.

What they did was an absolute act of faith.

Science flies you to the moon, and beyond...faith?...not so much.

Anyone who claims faith as the basis for what hey believe is using the same fundamental argument and justification as the men who flew those planes.

I think you meant they did not represent all versions of Islam, which is obviously tru.

...in the aggregate, their act was fundamentally an act of pure faith.

But I have not read any atheists at DU claim that there could be an atheist utopia either.

I'm suggesting it's human nature makes us violent, and religious belief curbs those tendencies as much as anything else.

We are no better behaved in secular, religious-free societies than we are in theocracies.

And I am further suggesting that religious belief seems to be inseparable from human existence. It is not a "quirk", as has been suggested, nor is it a "mental illness" as another had suggested. It is elemental to humanity.

Documented examples of religiosity involving Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis go back tens of thousands of years.

would this not lead to the idea that all human thinking is warped?

lacks evidence. The evidence dates actual religions to somewhere around 9000 BCE.

So the claim does not lack evidence. You may not accept what was offered, but that is a different thing.

that date back anywhere near 300,000 years. burial practices can be dated to between 30 and 40,000 years ago, while anything resembling a religious structure, as I noted earlier, date to around 10,000 years ago, and that structure is not clearly religious.

a belief in the afterlife.

unless you dilute the meaning of that word to the point where elephants have religion, which somebody here already did.

If so, please start.

Prior to writing, we know very little about what people thought and did back then, and all of it is based on inferences from a few found objects and bones. However, when we look at modern hunter-gatherer societies when first contacted by Europeans, they apparently live lives little different from our own Paleolithic ancestors. All of these hunter-gather societies around the world (so far as I know, there are no exceptions) had some form of religion, commonly animism or shamanism. So scientists infer that ancient Paleolithic society had similar forms of religions.

not all modern hunter gatherers are at the level of shaminism, some are animists. It is a stretch to claim that either animism or shaminism are "religions".

There has to be a belief and worship of gods.

But if you don't, then there probably was no religion in Paleolithic times. I don't think you need gods to be a religion. I suspect guillameb would consider them as religions too.

Would have been spared a horrible death by religious folks trying to please their gods.
People were pretty primitive back then. If they thought killing you would bring on the rain, well, they fuckin killed you.
It makes sense that less people.would have been killed for god if nobody worshipped god.

The more power religious institutions/leaders have, the more violent and murderous they become.
Look at the dark ages and modern day Islamic countries.
Radical fundy muslims are still murdering people for reasons that are written in their holy books. Take their power and the killings, for religious reasons, will slow to a stop. The US had the witch trials and shit like that when religious people had power and influence. Luckily that has waned significantly in North America.

...care about or rely on evidence for justification?

Evidence is an anathema to faith.

Any suggestion that faith needs to point to evidence to bulwark its claim to legitimacy is just another form of whistling past the graveyard IM(everso)HO and an implicit acknowledgement that faith is a fraud.

then it wouldn't be faith, would it?

Thomas said, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

A week later, Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

...

If God came down and said, "Here I am - get out that book and start following the rules" where does free will come in?

Skepticism is an acknowledgment of doubt in the truth of things. Faith is the opposite.

How many faithful would have to tell you God is real? 100,000? A million?

How many scientists would have to tell you the speed of light? 1? 2? Just read it in a book?

And follow the rules god gives you.
Free will to sin is all it really is.
Also cannot have free will if god has a plan, free will trumps prayer and there is no free will in heaven.

But the free will I am talking about is in the faith, not the evidence.

Evidence and proof changes everything.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.

What do you think?

And, yes, Satan is a character in a number of fictional stories.

But if his primary goal is to deceive you, how can you be sure you are not being deceived?

Or any of the other trickster gods found in some other religions?

You've picked one. There are many, many more that could be deceiving you. Perhaps you should take another look at Pascal's Wager.

I am certain I am not being deceived.

Can you be certain of anything without faith?

and do not equivocate, as you are doing here.

"Complete trust or confidence in someone or something."

How is that "equivocating?"

...get you to believe things that are not true.

Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens said it best:

That which is established is not always good or worth repeating.

They wonder about things. Lacking any sort of rational answers, though, humans invented deities to explain stuff humans couldn't explain. "God did it." is a satisfactory answer for children and people who don't really want to understand.

Just because we've done something for a long time doesn't mean it's automatically good, or right.

May I ask you to link to the post where someone claimed that "religion is the cause of more death than any other causative factor"?

Can't seem to get rid of any of those no matter how hard we try.

Religion is a part of human psychology and human culture. Where there are humans, there is religion. Where there are humans, there is human-on-human violence. Correlation is not causation.

You might as well blame organized society. For example:
For thousands of years, humans have had tribes/villages/clans. For thousands of years, humans have killed other humans because of reasons based on tribe/village/clan. Therefore, organized society is to blame for death and is evil. We should all live as loners in the wilderness.

See? The same argument.

Is part of nature. All animals do this.
No other animals do it because another animal in a funny hat told them an invisible creator animal told them to do it.
Religion is not animal nature, it's a human construct that has changed and morphed so many times it is unrecognizable.

And we fight over stuff like Capitalism-vs-Communism.

Because we can.

Both are communities of belonging. It is how we can divide ourselves into "them" and "us". Tribalism, or social grouping is innate to the human condition. There are exceptions, but they are extremely rare. Social groups were needed by both hunter/gatherers as well as agrarian societies. In both cases, among the uses, was the purpose of common defense. It doesn't take long for fear to spawn the concept of "defense is a good offense", i.e. hit them before they hit you. These groups also need to ensure that they share a common goal and sense of belonging so there are characteristics one is intended to have and maintain. Religion (as oppose to faith) quickly becomes a test (a shibboleth?) of this commonality.

As someone else up thread suggested, it is easy to correlate religion to group violence. That really isn't causation and quite honestly, it's more of a case that religion is borne from the tendency TO group violence and the need to establish the belonging.

Tribalism is literally the arbitrary division into us versus them. And that division generally leads to fear and distrust of those others.

And yes, there is a tendency among some to insist that religion is responsible for violence, or that religion is the primary cause of violence, when a better analysis would be that there are many causes for violence.

To me, that's like asking if there would be less violence without politics. I think those who are warped, greedy, tribalistic, hateful, etc. will use whatever institutions available to them to satisfy these things, which are as much a product of human evolution as anything else.

I believe that to assume we would sit around and sing Kumbya all the time in peace and love without religion, does not take into account the nature of the human animal. I think tribalistic tendencies will seek out it's tribe wherever it can be found. Because religions tend to proscribe moral codes, they can be twisted because humans are flocking animals as well, and can be fooled as to the best interests of the flock. But the same can be said of politics, patriotism, government and even being a soccer fan in some parts of the world. But I would say patriotism has at least as violent of a tendency as religion, if not more because most religions don't hinge upon being prepared to kill an enemy. Think about it, even in the U.S. we talk about our fallen soldiers in much the same way one would talk about a martyr.

Nazi Germany was not a religious movement, and although some of it's adherents may professed to have religion, the real Nazi propaganda tool was nationalism and racism ("Blood and Soil" ). Religion did not play a significant role in creating the evil there.

My point is that humans are part reason and part animal. Good religion feeds the good wolf, while bad religion feeds the bad one. I can't think of a single human institution for which that can't be said.

for our deities. I will post a new OP regarding that.

Literally?

You'll have to look in a different place to find it.

Stare into the swirl of the navel and breathe deeply.

According to this review of a book, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, about Joseph Conrad, it sounds like Conrad considered the problem to be a human one rather than a religious one.

An excerpt: