Why religion is horrible for humanity

So most of the time on these forums when I am trying to explain that religion plays a negative role in human advancement people aren’t understanding, this isn’t just some made up thing to use as an argument, it is true and happening, it has happened and it will never not happen from what I can see.

This is more to do with the creationism and god aspect of religions, it has to do with comforts.

It is about people reaching a ‘religious’ experience at the limits of their knowledge, coincidence? I don’t think so, it is hard embedded in humanity to find the answers and if they cannot find the answers, they will create them for security, comfort, etc.

Now let’s give a few historical examples of how this happened, in turn delaying evolution, science, discovery, etc. People invoking creationisn/god/religion from not knowing.

Ptolemy - AD 150 - A man who had the best explanations in his era for how our solar system worked, the cycles, etc. He was Arabic, well look at that… that isn’t much of a surprise is it?

― Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s Almagest

Beautifully poetic, yes.

So here we have Ptolemy projecting an emotional/religious feeling at the limits of his knowledge, and this is a trend that will continue for 2,000+ years to follow this. This quote is invoking intelligent design/god instead of a scientific answer. Aka, creating an answer so one may be comfortable with knowing. All he had was a picture.

Moving on…

Galileo - 1615
Letter to Christina Grand Duchess of Tuscany

A few lines he wrote in his letter to the above.

Pretty self explanatory, he was a religious man by the way.

Isaac Newton - 1687
The Principia

An impeccably brilliant man, possibly the greatest mind to have ever walked the planet.

in his page one of the Principia he discovers the laws of motion, f = ma, laws of gravitation, etc. He did this all before he turned 26. When he talks about motion, there is no reference to god, his two body force that he deduced there is no mention to god. Even though before him the understanding of the motion of the planets was given unto god. No body before him understood well enough to really believe they had a full predictive handle on it, in the way the universal laws of gravitation really apply.

So here we have Isaac Newton abandoning reference to god until he realizes that if all you do is calculate the two body problem, here we have the moon and Earth, he calculated, the Sun and the Earth, etc. So what happened is he ended up reaching his limits after the question became too complex, he realized he couldn’t solve it all using two body calculations, he needed a different system of mathematics, he ends up saying

  • Isaac Newton in Principia

In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. What he wants is data, inferr’d from the phænomena. But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton invokes God.

A century later, the French astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace confronted Newton’s dilemma of unstable orbits head-on. Rather than view the mysterious stability of the solar system as the unknowable work of God, Laplace declared it a scientific challenge. In his multipart masterpiece, Mécanique Céleste, the first volume of which appeared in 1798, Laplace demonstrates that the solar system is stable over periods of time longer than Newton could predict. To do so, Laplace pioneered a new kind of mathematics called perturbation theory, which enabled him to examine the cumulative effects of many small forces. According to an oft-repeated but probably embellished account, when Laplace gave a copy of Mécanique Céleste to his physics-literate friend Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon asked him what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens. Sire, Laplace replied, I have no need of that hypothesis.

Laplace notwithstanding, plenty of scientists besides Newton have called on God—or the gods—wherever their comprehension fades to ignorance. Consider the second-century a.d. Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. Armed with a description, but no real understanding, of what the planets were doing up there, he could not contain his religious fervor, look above for his quote.

Or consider the seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, whose achievements include constructing the first working pendulum clock and discovering the rings of Saturn. In his charming book The Celestial Worlds Discover’d, posthumously published in 1696, most of the opening chapter celebrates all that was then known of planetary orbits, shapes, and sizes, as well as the planets’ relative brightness and presumed rockiness. The book even includes foldout charts illustrating the structure of the solar system. God is absent from this discussion—even though a mere century earlier, before Newton’s achievements, planetary orbits were supreme mysteries.

Celestial Worlds also brims with speculations about life in the solar system, and that’s where Huygens raises questions to which he has no answer. That’s where he mentions the biological conundrums of the day, such as the origin of life’s complexity. And sure enough, because seventeenth-century physics was more advanced than seventeenth-century biology, Huygens invokes the hand of God only when he talks about biology:

Today secular philosophers call that kind of divine invocation God of the gaps—which comes in handy, because there has never been a shortage of gaps in people’s knowledge.

I have to add in Al ghazali at some point as well, but I don’t feel like it right now.

Also, I want you all to look at the time delay from Isaac Newton to Laplace. How long it takes for Laplace to solve Newtons problem in history.

So your evidence that religion is holding back scientific advancement is to give examples of religious people making tremendous scientific advancements? Fascinating.

All I’m seeing here is you speculating that if certain genius scientists and mathematicians weren’t religious, they would have discovered even more stuff than they did. Of course the problem is that you aren’t taking into consideration (and cannot possibly take into consideration because it’s too complex) how else their lives might have been different were it not for religion.

For example, Newton got his higher education at Trinity College at the recommendation of a reverend.

The school Galileo attended (Pisa) was founded by a papal edict.

Why do you think the education system, family structure, and enlightenment philosophy that allowed for this sort of science would even exist without religion?

No I gave evidence of scientists at the end of their peak of discovery invoking religiosity to answer something they could not. So that created time delays (because now we have to wait for fresh minds to take on the unknown) of which can be years or centuries of waiting.

You know about Al Ghazali ruining mathematics in the middle east?

No the problem with creationism/god is it creates false comforts, securities and answers that people can reach on their own, it creates a blockade for the mind.

So because Isaac Newton went through the education system of which happened to be religious, so if he didn’t it means he would not have discovered physics? I don’t think so, the guy was too smart to not have done it.

What your saying does not matter because in all of their experimenting and discovering they do not mention god, it seems funny that they only mention god when it’s something unknown or “unreachable” at the time…

It doesn’t matter if you go to school or don’t go to school, things can be learned by individual studying. That has been proven by geniuses who have dropped out of school, then go on to invent or discover something great.

I have the view on education that Plato did. A person doesnt need to be taught what to think, but how to think.

Religion is positive, beneficial, and great for humanity. Religion is “Humanity”. Or in other words, Humanity is a religion in its own rite, an extension of mostly Christian ideologies.

I believe that about 90% of all humans have “slave genetics”. These people are stupider, mentally inferior in most ways, and require lots of instructions and commands to live “normal lives” in society and civilization. These people are the base of the pyramid of social hierarchies. The slave classes are the lowest classes of humanity. They really don’t know much about life and existence, representing great ignorance and also innocence. A slave-mind is infantile. It has difficulty potty-training, wiping her own ass, dressing herself, speaking in public, and struggles to maintain a routine daily life.

Therefore, religion is necessary. Religion cultivates the slave populations, over centuries, breeding them and watching them breed, monitoring their children. Over time, entire populations of slaves (Humanity) create the foundation of human civilization. The “Priestly” orders are the slave-masters. The slave-masters own institutions of knowledge, libraries, colleges, universities, “higher learning”, churches, and other cultural institutions. Slave-masters dictate what can or cannot be said in public schools. They dictate morality, law, and order. They regulate crime and punishment, “Justice”.

For example, the common fact that it’s illegal (in european countries) to have sex with a 15-year-old girl, but 16-year-old is legal, is a creation of the Moral Order. Morality dictates that there must be an age at which sex with minors is illegal, and when it’s legal. This is a regulation across the entire human specie. Thus, all “human societies” will enforce such laws and represent them. In other words, the slave-masters control and dictate the sexual discourse of the entire human population. This is just one example of countless others.

Religion is necessary, because without it, the slaves will instantly revert to animal nature. Imagine the world without law, order, crime, and punishment. People would murder each other, because there is no “police” to stop them. They would steal. They would rape. Everybody would be at odds, and at war. Individuals would need to arm themselves. There would be social chaos, paranoia, mistrust, and a breakdown of society. Religion prevents all this, and creates the constant, ongoing “illusion” of safety and security. Religion postulates, guards, and maintains the social “Status Quo”.

A final note, you don’t have to be a “Christian” to be religious. You don’t even have to believe in the christian “God”, to be religious.

To be “human”, to be a slave, is to be religious. You are religious insofar as you are “Human”. Humanity itself is a religion.

todayinsci.com/N/Newton_Isaac/Ne … ations.htm

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

Lots of references to God in those links.

Maybe he would have been a really smart barkeep. Who knows?

I don’t buy that humanity itself is religion, no one forces humanity to believe in super powered men in the sky.

Morals, law, justice, order, etc, can all happen without religion… No one will give it a try to find out themselves.
Yes I believe there are sheeple and freedom doesn’t really exist, leadership must always happen, but we don’t need religion to determine which leader to choose, how to be moral with a good ethic, these are traits that can be taught by simple discipline, not too harsh or it will create rebellion.

People can survive without religion. If it were tested it would show.

And is that page one of his book?

Reminds me of this :

" I rob banks because that’s where the money is"

Go to school because that’s where the smart people and information are.

You need page numbers? :wink:

Just curious. Not sure about the laws.

Not true. Professors maybe, but the education system is garbage.

Again, that’s just one factor. You aren’t considering how their religiosity (or the fact that they live in a religious culture, etc.) might have contributed to their advancements.

Well, isn’t that what we’re doing here? Making wild guesses about what would have happened in a person’s life if they weren’t religious? You imagine that if Isaac Newton wasn’t religious, he would have kept on working on various things he couldn’t solve without a religious explanation, and advanced science further than he did. I imagine that if Christianity didn’t value higher education and rationality as highly as it did, he wouldn’t have gotten as far as he did. It’s all just a bunch of guessing.

Yeah, they do the best they can to solve a problem, and according to you if they can’t solve it they chalk it up to God. But why think that if they didn’t chalk it up to God, they would have gone on to solve the problem? As you present it, they’ve already admitted defeat.

"It seems probable to me that God … " -From Opticks (1704, 2nd ed., 1718), pages 375-376

“He rules all …” -The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), 3rd edition (1726), trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (1999), General Scholium, pages 940-1.

“And from true lordship it follows that the true God is living …” - The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), 3rd edition (1726), trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (1999), General Scholium, page 941.

@ Artimas.

The roots of our Occidental scientific institutions - the universities - are our Occidental monasteries. So the first university scientists were monks. In other words: religion can lead to science, whereas science leads to religion (the latter development is currently observable). So if you are defending our current scientists, then you are defending the religious priest of the future. Universities were relatively free, but they have been becoming corrupt, thus more dependent (because of their increasing dependence of money for their research - which is exploited by the rulers). So at last the scientists can only choose to be functionaries and priests in the name of the rulers.

Throughout western culture, “to be human” is an analogy “to be christian”. For example the term “inhumane” directly refers to Christian morality. To be “human”, instead of literally christian, is a Protestant development and evolution. Protestants, in an attempt to further divorce yourselves from traditional Christianity, has changed many words around, but not their underlying meanings and invocations.

In my previous response, I already explained that you can be considered a religious person, without belief in a deity. Many atheists are “religious”. The literal meaning of Religion is a habitual belief. For example, believing in “Gravity” or Heliocentricism, are also “religious beliefs”. In other words, you maintain a belief in them over time. You have and impart faith in a series of premises and logical postulates.

Religion does not necessarily imply Deism. This is a grand fallacy of religious people (Protestants), who attempt to distance themselves from Christianity Proper.

How?

Prove it. Explain yourself. Give me a few examples of how morality, law, and justice happen without religious belief (religious meaning habitual belief that must be maintained over time).

Your definition of religion is wrong. Religion is the systematic worship or prayer to a deity or super powerful being. You’re literally changing the definition of what something is so that you can make it nearly impossible to come up with an example.

re·li·gion
rəˈlijən/
noun
the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
“ideas about the relationship between science and religion”
synonyms: faith, belief, worship, creed; More
a particular system of faith and worship.
plural noun: religions
“the world’s great religions”
a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance.

People don’t worship the court room, they don’t ascribe it supreme importance… Law, justice, etc.

Atheists don’t worship gravity, science, etc. I don’t even see your definition of it being habitual belief under the word.

Theists try anything possible to try and point fingers at everyone else except themselves.

Ok we arent talking about religion being in school or academies, or even the people that invent or discover new things being religious. We’re discussing WHY they all of a sudden point to “gods divinity” when reaching a point in their learning that they cannot explain.

Well from what I know of the laws that were discovered there was no mention of god. I never said these people were not religious, the point is that they satisfied themselves with a false answer.

I had already pointed out Galileo being a religious man, and it could go for all of them. Them being religious isn’t the problem.

Let me check here. At the end of their lives some scientists invoked what you are calling religiosity to answer something they could not. And this caused delays. Why did it cause delays? It did not delay them, they could not, according to you, answer X. Why would it stop others? How did you determine that things slowed down? Did you use evidence based on scientific research or other alternative methods.

I want to point out an assumption also: it is always best if scientific knowledge advances at the fastest possible rate. How do we know this is true? Has this been tested? Could it possibly be tested?

Newton managed to perform revolutionary creation even though religious or perhaps in part because he was religious. But he also came up with secular faith around mechanical models. These also caused blockages, since mechanical models were limited. All models make some investigation more likely and close off other lines. Of course any paradigm will do this. But you can’t just peek back in history and say it would all have gone better if everyone was an atheist. Or that delays were created that led to net delays. And one strong reason why you in particular should not do this is that you are arguing in favor of scientific models and methods. Yet, you are engagining in something else here. You are speculating, wildly, in non-scientific ways.

Actually his ontology, from which he investigated and created models and looked for support were based on his belief in God and an immaterial one at that. It is foundational in his outlook.