fullermingjr
@fullermingjr
Active 3 weeks, 6 days agoForum Replies Created
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“Well, I don’t believe in learning other languages. I believe God gave men different tongues and divided them at The Tower of Babel and that’s how it’s meant to be.”
How very sad! The woman’s faith system that said that statement… that thinks humanity should be divided this way has completely missed (a) the point of Babel and (b) the nature of man as presented in the text, regardless of one’s belief or non-belief. Even taking these stories as teaching some kind of moral lessons such as The Myth of Sisyphus or The Myth of Icarus the son of Daedalus, this woman missed the point! Of course, I don’t equate Greek Myths with my faith – I see Christianity as viable (and I know many here do not). My point is this: Even if you took the Babel story as a myth, the point of the myth was missed by this woman. How much more so, for someone like me, who does not take it as a myth. – but that is a completely different topic. Even so, one could tolerate her beliefs and maybe an opportunity may arise where a real dialog could happen.
Of course, you can’t mandate what customers say, as long as they are not threating people physically. If I was told to my face that I was a fool for believing in God, I hope I would have enough maturity to nod and smile. Even Jakelafort responded to me in his response where he included the phrase, “…of course religion is make believe…” but hey, I’m not mad – I’m a believer in an Atheist forum 😉
Even so, customers should not be giving out their tracks unless they strike up a friendly conversation with another customer or even an employee and it’s a personal interaction. I’ve been invited to secular, anti-religious events and activities, especially when I worked at the University of Maryland College Park. When stuff is put on your car, it is frustrating. I just throw it away. I consider it an advertisement like anything else. How many flyers want me to buy this gadget or subscribe to that service – it’s constant and irritating, but I just throw it away.
With all that said, I don’t think it is possible, in a pluralistic society to avoid some of this, including marketing, philosophizing, proselytizing, and the like. However, it can be better managed and I just want things to be reasonably equal. The article showed a problem: the head of an agency not sending out a cultural message (e.g. Happy Easter) but a religious message (Jesus Rose from the Dead). Somewhere is a healthy, policy-driven, realistic approach that can allow the non-theist and the theist to work together.
It is sad to me that there are many people of faith that buy into religious systems that are overtly illogical. I know – some on this forum think ALL religious systems are overly illogical. However, critiquing weak or inconsistent expressions of faith isn’t the same as conceding that all faith is irrational.
Regardless, thanks for your thoughts!
Ok folks – I’m going to go out on a limb here. Don’t crucify me – pun intended 😉 but do tell me where I’m wrong.
Let’s keep my assumption of no god going and in addition, get rid of religion, too. Imagine then, not John Lennon’s dream, but to imagine with regard to real human beings, that somehow our world became completely devoid of all religion; especially Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and all of their respective derivatives and off-shoots, all over the planet. Maybe it’s the year 2200 CE and religion is gone.
Ok then – given our shared, collective history (because that wouldn’t change – you can’t change the past), our current human nature (which hasn’t changed in 6 to 10 thousand years as best as the top anthropologist on the plant can tell, so it’s not likely to change in 200 years), our track-record of self defense and blame shifting, our passion for pleasure, safety and prosperity (hello Maslow), our aversion to guilt and shame, and our natural instinctive drive to protect those that belong to us – do you really think that rape, slavery, and racism would simply vanish? What part of the honest and accepted evolutionary framework, coupled with our current collective view of psychology, biology, medical science, and social science…. what part implies that such things would simply disappear?
Earlier, there was a discussion comparing us to ants and bees. Why not keep the analogy going? The animal kingdom is wild – beast killing beast, adults eating their young, all kinds of amazing things – and we’re related, right? Simon Paynton said that my assessment of the world if there was no god was generally accurate, but he wanted to remove the Nazi’s from the list of religious and philosophical systems. But why? Why wouldn’t our big brains, coupled with all that I think is accurate about our nature as described above… why wouldn’t some intelligent humans INVENT religion to control the sheep-like nature of most folks?
Granted, this is all speculation and it may not be worth the binary storage that it is now occupying. (It’s the stuff of our best dystopian science-fiction). Yet for the last 6 to 10 thousand years of recorded human history – long before the hated Christianity and Islam came on the scene – we have constantly fought for land, food, women (i.e. to control reproduction), power on every continent, every nation, every family. Why, then, would the eradication of religion change anything? If, indeed, there is no god, then religion is made up anyway, used to alleviate the sheep like fears and triggered emotional responses that “evolved” in the prehistoric Serengeti!
This seems more like reality – and, believe it or not, I’m an optimist!
