Quote:
Originally Posted by CptSternn
Are you actually saying that religion has no bearing on society?
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Listen very closely to this question, Despanan, because it is an important one. I have noticed more and more that, in the name of an imagined enlightened atheism, you claim at the same time that 1) Religion always has a negative effect on society and 2) Religion has no effect on society.
With the former you try to demonize religion, while in the latter you try to take away its power over the history of mankind.
You can't have both. If it has been bad it's because it has been influential, and if it has monopolized things like ethics and epistemology, then it has changed ethics and epistemology for the culture beyond its institutionalized body. Your own caricature of the 'Dark Ages' shows an implicit assumption that "I will only consider the effects of institutionalized religion in society and hermeneutics if I can show it's detrimental"
In your defense, AshleyO is the one that really takes it up to the 11 and blames other cultures for their religious values without realizing that our atheism is only a very specific type of western atheism that isn't perfectly translatable to other cultures, but you're approaching that very dangerously.
And remember that I
am an atheist; even an antitheist, but I do not have to fall into equivocation to be against religion.