Let me clarify. In my view what we have now with these religions and dogma is a big centuries long game of telephone across generations and languages.
If you've done something good you've done something in the spirit of god. There's no reward, it's just a direction. But see that there, the missing "o"? God, Good, same word. See? No mystery, just a linguistic error.
IMHO God is not an object or actor or creature or person, none of that. God doesn't want anything, takes no action, has no dreams. God is the moral direction of most good. A direction, you know, just like the direction North. North doesn't want you to be more North, North doesn't hate south or East.
I cry over the thousands of years of wasted time where humanity has tried to figure out the demands of an entity that simply doesn't exist.
Instead, we got dragged into wars, instigated by rulers who manipulated followers of so-called 'holy books' into killing their brethren. We denied education to large parts of the population. We suppressed anything resembling science&progress because it might offend an imaginary being.
It's a frigging disaster.
Imagine a world where we would have followed science and reason early. Where we didn't destroy libraries, but gradually improved their wisdom. All those years down the drain. Sigh.
Having seen the history of tribalism fused with areligious and antireligious ideologies and empowered by applied science in the modern era, I can't see it as particularly better than the results of tribalism fused with religious ideology but without systematic science earlier in history.
Science is a powerful multiplier, but inherently value-free; the values to which it is applied necessarily come from elsewhere
That said: The definition of 'tribe' already implies shared values (more often than not centered around a primitive version of the golden rule)
No, you can't. (And not just in the sense that science falsifies rather than verifies.)
Ethical/moral statements always have a value component that is empirically unfalsifiable. They sometimes also have a falsifiable factual premise that, along with a set of value premises, supports a conclusion. Science can falsify the fact component, and sufficient failute to falsify can justify belief in the false component, but cannot falsify or (by failing to falsify) justify the value component, and therefore cannot justify the statement as a whole.
That's just flat our wrong. Morality is fluid and has been re-defined by people living in tribes or larger societies. One can argue fairly well that we would already live in a more just world if we would have skipped that non-sense of believing in a higher being.
For example, we now agree slavery is kinda bad. Yet, not too long ago the bible was used to justify slavery around the world. Who's to thank for this progress? Certainly not religion.
The Christian religion (including the Bible, but not always by the subset of Christianity which holds that the former is entirely contained in the latter) was likewise used to justify abolition, and this, like justification of slavery, goes back to the fairly early days of organized Christianity.
That Christianity isn't a unified hive mind?
> Shouldn't the literal word of the most moral being in the universe be clear regarding slavery, at the very least?
Arguably it should be, but then the idea that the Bible is the literal word of God is not, itself, a doctrine shared by the whole, or even majority, of the Christian community (it's a doctrine primarily of the evangelical and fundamentalist branches of Protestantism.)
If they claim to have direct communication with the creator of the universe, like all christian communities do, they should have at least a minimum standard of congruence. Or is he just having a laugh with some of them?
Well (1) all Christian communities do not claim that all Christian communities have direct communication of that kind (in fact, Christian communities often claim that other such communities are deficient, and perhaps willfully so, in there regard), and (2) I don't even think all Christian communities claim that even they themwelves have communication of the kind that would support any conclusion much stronger than that that community’s authoritative teachings are free from error (certainly not that any subject of a specified degree of material impact should be addressed.)
Moral questions are (or at a minimum involve subordinate questions which are) outside the scope of empirical science; in this way they are similar to many religious questions (and the categories overlap), but they are not the same as, or a subset of, religious questions.
Yes, they are. Science can answer is, it can't answer ought.
(It can help reach practical conclusions from moral axioms applied to concrete facts, but that's not really answering moral questions: the choice of axioms is the thing that answers the moral questions, and science can't help you there.)
Actually, the biggest and dirtiest wars of at least our recent history were actually driven by men who were atheists (or at least non-theists). Hitler, Pol-pot, Mussolini, Mao, Stalin, Lenin... all atheists with body counts in the tens (hundreds?) of millions.
Furthermore, Some of the biggest advances in the sciences (take for example the scientific method as described by Sir Francis Bacon assumed that the universe itself was ordered by God and therefore science was actually possible) and the institutions of higher learning were started as ways to train people for purposes of theology (thinking here of places like Oxford and Princeton).
Religion has actually been a huge driver in our ability to teach and understand the world.
Hitler was a catholic, he killed atheists and despised the evolutionary theory. After all, Arian people were supposed to be god's chosens not those jews. He wrote this himself in Mein Kampf.
Stalin was a student at a seminary.
Every US president has been at last a theist. How many wars has the US been in? How many deaths?
Wars have many reasons, most of them non religious. Religion is just used as a excuse and it works every time.
If you can prove to me that these men were actually acting in accordance with the stated doctrines of the institutions that they claimed, then your point might be valid. However, it isn't and it won't be because they were not.
Man corrupts religions to his advantage—that is not religion's fault. It is man's.
First you lie and claim Hitler was an atheist when in fact he was a catholic until the day he died, and then is somehow my fault? Isn't lying in the ten commandments?
I don't know if in his heart he was truly a devout servant of the lord or if he was just pretending, but most importantly, you don't either. All we can be sure is that he claimed to be one, and that the Catholic church embraced him, made treaties with his government, celebrated his birthday officially every year and never excomulgated him. That sounds like a better catholic than most, he made the church a lot of money and, they gladly took it.
Whatever he was, he was not an atheist. And he didn't claim to be one, in fact, he claimed the opposite.