Is religion necessary in our life?

[anu]

Imagine if there is no religion, as John Lennon sings. People have been divided by geographical borders, languages, color of the skin, political ideologies, etc. I know for some, faith gives them hope and peace but do you agree that this world will be more peaceful if there is no religion? There will be one less big reason for people to fight and worse, to kill each other.

[Confused]

Imagine if there is no religion, as John Lennon sings. People have been divided by geographical borders, languages, color of the skin, political ideologies, etc. I know for some, faith gives them hope and peace but do you agree that this world will be more peaceful if there is no religion? There will be one less big reason for people to fight and worse, to kill each other.

As long as the human condition allows for justifiable reasoning to kill one another, does it really matter what banner it is labeled under? Religion, politics, survival, etc..... Until man can learn to live with man, peace cannot exist. Until man can accept certain conditions of life and come to some ideal set of circumstances in which all the human species can live with, mankind will continue to suffer its own intolerances.

So, do we need religion? No. Does it offer some a sense of order, a sense of comfort, a set of standards in which gives meaning to the lives of some? Yes. Does this make it bad? No. Religion, in and of itself, is not a negative thing when it is used for personal purpose. It is when we give more to it than we do to mankind that it becomes the same tool for destruction as any political, racial, ethnic, geographical motivation.

Humanity needs to learn how to live for humanity. We need to give the ultimate respect to life itself. For only when we see life as the most valuable commodity, will we finally stand some chance of survival, some hope for peace.

[QED]

Imagine if there is no religion, as John Lennon sings. People have been divided by geographical borders, languages, color of the skin, political ideologies, etc. I know for some, faith gives them hope and peace but do you agree that this world will be more peaceful if there is no religion? There will be one less big reason for people to fight and worse, to kill each other.

It's not truly known if, on balance, religion (as a human occupation) makes the world more or less peaceful. However, it is certainly divisive and, as a free-floating rationale, cannot be brought before any independent committee for review. "God's instructions" cannot be questioned and traditionally take precedence over human, democratic, laws. Non-believers generally regard these instructions as frozen laws from an earlier attempts at governing people. If we truly value democracy then I think we need to find ways to break the links between religious beliefs and behaviours.

[byofrcs]

Imagine if there is no religion, as John Lennon sings. People have been divided by geographical borders, languages, color of the skin, political ideologies, etc. I know for some, faith gives them hope and peace but do you agree that this world will be more peaceful if there is no religion? There will be one less big reason for people to fight and worse, to kill each other.

Nope, religion isn't the big reason people fight and kill each other. People would find any number of reasons. Blaming religion is an excuse and it ignores our evolved human nature.

Where religion has failed is that over thousands of years it still is a reason for conflict. This on its own should raise a warning to us all when setting benchmarks for behaviour or systems of governance based on religion.

Many religions presume God created humanity. This is stated without evidence and unfortunately blinds us from looking clearly at humanity as an evolved species. Humanity has evolved independent of religion and has emergent behaviours. Religion actually recognises some of these (the sizes of Amish communities for example (Hostetler, 1993, Amish Society) but fails to scale beyond "tribes" for any enduring period of time.

What happens in spite of religion ?

There are 4 aspects of life that religions pervade,

- political systems
- legal systems
- social contracts
- personal guidelines

1) Political systems. There is a more or less progression from Despotic, to Monarchy to Republics and Democracy. Other systems, Communism and Theocracy are tried as alternatives to the Monarchy and Republics. No one system is the best though some have proven to be poor.

We could argue the merits of political systems but I'm only interested in one system: Theocracy. Is this a fair and just political system ?. For me ? no on the basis that Sharia countries do not support certain freedoms which are enshrined in the UNHCR.

Who would support Theocracy today ?. Christians on paper should support Sharia given Allah and the Christian God are the same but I doubt that is the view of many Christians.

My gut feeling is that there is probably very little support for a theocracy here on this board. What are we replacing Theocracy with ?. Democracy with universal suffrage seems to be winning. It is a recent concept; only a hundred or so years old which given the 2000 years of Christianity is a blink of the eye. It is also not universally applied across the world. But has proven resilient.

2) The rules to interact with each other are decided through Law. Religious law still prevails in Theocratic countries (in the form of Sharia) but in secular societies the Religious dogma has been replaced by quite a complex system of Constitutional and supranational law or guidelines. Constitutions have evolved through amendments and supranational law (in the form of the United Nations and European Human Rights Conventions).

These are not perfect for all situations but they set guidelines within which we benchmark all other law. This Constitutional and (more importantly) supranational law is trusted to be fit for purpose as it, unfortunately, has evolved out of international conflict.

Again I would expect that many here would not want to erase the current constitutional and supranational law and replace this with their particular version of Religious law. It is fair to say that the various religious laws form the basis of law but this does not give any particular religion any verisimilitude to define any subsequent law. Any one set of religious laws is a snapshot in time and it is this timelessness that makes it unable to evolve to meet the changing needs of emergent societal behaviours.

3) The third aspect of religion is how it manages social contracts. Complementary to the rule of law and political system is defining what social contracts a person is able to engage in. The remnant of this today is with Marriage Law.

I'm not even going to guess which way people here would see Civil Marriages and same sex marriages (technically as a married heterosexual male I see same sex marriages as illogical from a breeding point of view but support them as I'm not going to judge love. Disingenuously Christians claim love with God and yet there is no possibility of breeding between human and God in this pantheon either so love between the same sexes transcends the pure physical aspects of a union and Christians must agree with this claim irrespective of any religious text.

With the demise of Theocracy and religious law comes the rise of secular civil contracts. I feel that they support each other and divided they fall. If we do not support Theocracy and religious law then religious social contracts cannot be enforced.

4) Finally, the last area of Religion, is as a personal set of guidelines. I will leave the arguments against this to another day though you should not despair that religion is systemically flawed as it is part of our evolved culture and we can't deny the example it sets.

[anu]

I agree that religion by itself is benign. Money, too, is not a bad thing. But we know that both cause (or the root of the cause) troubles for many people. Of course, we cannot live in this modern world without the use of money. On the other hand, we can still have a normal life if there is no religion. There are countries where religion is no big deal to them.

[MikeH]

Who would support Theocracy today ?. Christians on paper should support Sharia given Allah and the Christian God are the same but I doubt that is the view of many Christians.

I agree with alot of what you said, but I have no idea how you came to the above conclusion. Why would Christians on paper support Sharia law, which would essentially make Christians second class citizens under Muslims?

[byofrcs]

Who would support Theocracy today ?. Christians on paper should support Sharia given Allah and the Christian God are the same but I doubt that is the view of many Christians.

I agree with alot of what you said, but I have no idea how you came to the above conclusion. Why would Christians on paper support Sharia law, which would essentially make Christians second class citizens under Muslims?

You've answered the question. Christians are People of the Book and so shouldn't be any more unequal in Allah's eyes. The problem is with specific implementations and Sharia driven countries are a mess of crackpots which any of Christians, Jews or Atheists (and Westernised Muslims too !) would not touch with a barge pole.

Like I said, they should support it but I doubt they do as they know how bad theocracies get.

[Assent]

Religion was born out of two basic desires: first, a desire to know the answer to the question, "Why?" Second, a desire for hope.

When humanity looked around and saw things it couldn't explain, it asked, "Why?" Creation and origin myths of all stripes are attempts to answer this question. When bad things happened to people for no visible reason, humanity asked, "Why?" Beings similar to humans were thought up and said to be responsible, and moral codes were developed as an attempt to avoid these beings' wrath. This is why so many of the old moral codes (such as Deuteronomy) actually resemble decent sanitation guidelines.

The desire for hope is essential to life; its opposite is despair. Despair is such a painful emotion that some commit suicide to escape it. Therefore, religion will, for the sake of its followers, provide hope that, if its moral codes are followed, only what is good can follow.

[realthinker]

Religion was born out of two basic desires: first, a desire to know the answer to the question, "Why?" Second, a desire for hope.

You've arrived at what I call the definition of spirituality. Spirituality is that understanding a person has that makes them comfortable with their existence and their mortality.

Religion is, of course, a form of spirituality.

When humanity looked around and saw things it couldn't explain, it asked, "Why?" Creation and origin myths of all stripes are attempts to answer this question. When bad things happened to people for no visible reason, humanity asked, "Why?" Beings similar to humans were thought up and said to be responsible, and moral codes were developed as an attempt to avoid these beings' wrath. This is why so many of the old moral codes (such as Deuteronomy) actually resemble decent sanitation guidelines.

The desire for hope is essential to life; its opposite is despair. Despair is such a painful emotion that some commit suicide to escape it. Therefore, religion will, for the sake of its followers, provide hope that, if its moral codes are followed, only what is good can follow.