thehappycon
I see these bumper stickers fairly often around WashU. Odd, since this is a place that simply despises religion.
But I’ve got a few problems with these things.
First of all, I can’t remember the last time a Christian saddled up, guns blazing, and rode into the local Chabad and laid waste to all within because Jesus told him to. Come to think of it, it’s been awhile since a Jew tossed a grenade into a Presbyterian church on account of the teachings of Moses.
Even hippies manage to keep themselves stoned to peacefulness. Good for them.
Did I forget anyone? Oh wait, there’s one more up there.
But the diversity crowd is missing on another, more subtle point here. Killing people for your faith is wrong, no doubt about it. And no one is free from that accusation (although lots of us are free from it in the last hundred years.) But just because murder in the name of religion is wrong doesn’t mean that religions are all the same.
Those who forsake organized religion for the altar of diversity argue for peace from the wrong position. For them, religion-based war is stupid because all religions are equally unreasonable. I get this from professors and students all the time. Why can’t we all just get along?
We all can’t get along because, for the vast majority of people, each religion was not created equally. After all, if you don’t think yours is the best, why wouldn’t you change? If they were all the same, people would be indifferent. I’d say this isn’t the case for most religious people (at least it isn’t for me.)
Can we coexist? Nope. Why not? Because - surprise - most religious people actually prefer their religion. It answers their questions and fits their internal compass. If I don’t think Christianity has the right answers, I’d be irrational if I didn’t start to look around.
But I don’t kill Jews or Muslims. Preference doesn’t excuse killing in the name of your favorite diety. Why not? Because what would your diety create you to kill others, whom he also created? I would not presume to know the mind of God, but if my memory serves me correctly, it’s usually a pretty big deal when he has one of his own killed.
If you believe in a Creator of any sort (which most religious people do) then you have real issues justifying murder.
I’m not sure what keeps atheists from killing people they don’t like. Maybe they should coexist.
Filed under: conservative, religion | Tagged: Campus Diversity, coexist, diversity, God, islam, peace, religion, washington university
As an atheist I can tell you exactly what keeps us (and everyone else) from killing others we don’t like. In fact I can tell you exactly what makes us nice to people we don’t know…even people we hate.
It’s called reciprocal altruism. As we evolved into a social species we adapted the beneficial attribute of cooperation which works for us to help ensure survival, reproduction, survival of offspring and continual spread of our genes. If a person works to benefit others in his or her society he or she is more likely to get the same treatment in return. The is the bottom up design of every social structure. The “invisible hand” of society, to borrow a phrase from economics.
Religion is the attempt we humans used to explain morality before we understood its evolutionary history.
As an atheist I can tell you exactly what keeps us (and everyone else) from killing others we don’t like. In fact I can tell you exactly what makes us nice to people we don’t know…even people we hate.
It’s called reciprocal altruism. As we evolved into a social species we adapted the beneficial attribute of cooperation which works for us to help ensure survival, reproduction, survival of offspring and continual spread of our genes. If a person works to benefit others in his or her society he or she is more likely to get the same treatment in return. The is the bottom up design of every social structure. The “invisible hand” of society, to borrow a phrase from economics.
Religion is the attempt we humans used to explain morality before we understood its evolutionary history.
Unless of course that Creator wants you to murder someone.
Economics is something I know a little bit about, and the “invisible hand” has precisely nothing to do with what you’re talking about. Most social structures (in fact, almost all) are a top down construction. They don’t work very well, I agree, but you can’t argue with the fact that ground-up construction is the preferred method in biology and market economies only.
But anyway. The problem with justifying your actions by reciprocal altruism is that there are lots of times when we don’t cooperate. At least religion provides me a reason why people fail to cooperate. If your idea was correct, there shouldn’t be any murder at all, because social sanctions would have driven the cost of murder to infinity. This is clearly not the case.
Unless, of course, the optimal amount of murder is not zero, and society has created norms which allow for a certain socially optimal level of murder. In which case, we should never expect coexistence and cooperation, which is precisely my point.