Below (for those who don't want to read, it isn't essential but i encourage you to) is just a little background of why i'm joining in, even though i think things of this nature shouldn't happen on this forum and background to my beliefs and why i'm arguing what i do.
I also most likely won't respond to anything here to stop it becoming circular. I'm writing this not necessarily for the people i'm debating below (you can see this in how i write) but with a much larger focus on everyone else that will see this and read my particular arguments. I think i'll do my best to make my case, do it well and do it once in regards to these
particular points.
I highly dislike the circle-jerk these threads degrade into and i wish we could do it in the style of an actual proper debate with many more rules. I think this would reduce a lot of the complaints and gripes people have. I don't think its a good idea to have these discussions, on this particular forum (other more suitable venues are available), considering their history of degrading into something very circular and attacking. I also realise that by posting, i'm participating in the thing i do not think should exist and i'm prolonging its survival. These things would be OK if they didn't degrade as they often did. I hope in light of a recent outpouring of various views on how these things are conducted, views across the board might of changed. I also believe a few of the statements below are wrong. I'm sure we're all deeply interested in the truth and i think a few of them are worth rectifying.
Just a little background position as well, perhaps. I am indeed an atheist. It seems like many social movements or indeed, religious movements, atheism as a movement has a spectrum of people in it, with a spectrum views. In light of more recent movements, i don't think its clear enough to just claim to be an atheist. I identify as what i would term an "old school" atheist or philosophical atheist. I have (what i consider) to be good philosophical grounds for not believing in the religions i've considered and in particular, the religions predominant in the western world. I'm no supporter of God, indeed, you'll find on my blog, i've presented and formulated many of the common arguments against the existence of a God. Being deeply interested in philosophy of religion, i also realise, there are many plausible arguments in favour of God. Indeed, if the question of existence of God was so conclusively proven, we wouldn't be asking it anymore. There is no widely considered dynamite proof for or against a God, that would convince all rational average people, on either side, to change their mind. Likewise, i also realise, there are many people, infinitely more intelligent and educated than me, who have looked at the question of God and reached a very different conclusion. There is something to this. There are philosophers of religion who have seen the same arguments i have seen, that disprove a God for me and remain unconvinced. There are many extremely intelligent theologians and scientists who are believers. It's not just uneducated villagers believing there is a God in the moon.
I mentioned what kind of atheist i was because there are other people in the movement, the so called "new atheists". To quote wikipedia (yeah i know blah blah but at least its sufficiently neutral ground): "New Atheism is the name given to the ideas promoted by a collection of 21st-century atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises." This is in contrast to the old school (or atheism 3.0) who just hold God does not exist for philosophical reasons, there is no particular interest in seeing religion exterminated. Whilst i think religion has brought some bad things (humans would of done at least some of those bad things to each-other anyway, if we look at relatively irreligious and atheistic places like China, bad things still happen, this is despite harsh government and law enforcement as well), it is not wholly bad, it has brought some good and it encourages some good. This is where i disagree with the so called "new" atheist movement. Applying the idea of the horse-shoe theory, i think there is much more philosophically in common between the two more extreme positions (namely militant atheism/new atheism and militant religious discourse) than there is between the large proportion of religious moderates and atheists who are not "new" atheists. Hopefully, this might illustrate just one of the reasons i'm much more opposed to any movement of the extreme.That we would not give to charity?
Show me one lick of research which shows that the irreligious give less to charity than the religious. Just the one. "I think" doesn't count.
The problem with those studies, and they have been debunked numerous times (although not that one specifically) is that they factor in ALL charitable donations. They include the donations to churches which have the express purpose of disseminating the religion and only religion.
When you reduce it down to ONLY charities that help people in need (i.e. food, water, clothing, sickness etc.) the charity levels equate to roughly the same....
Certainly not but if the religious don't give significantly
less to charity than an atheist,
in relation to charity, where is the harm in being religious?
It certainly seems to help, many verses of the bible implore charity. One of the very
basics of Islam is giving to needy and poor (
zakat). If anything, it's apparent religion encourage charity (putting aside all other criticisms of religion, this seems to be true).
This seems good enough on its own to say charity certainly isn't harmed by religion. Indeed, it seems theoretically, religion should encourage people to give, in theory. Does it play out in
reality though? Thats the crucial thing. Lets see below.
For the benefit of those not yet in uni or otherwise not in the know, i'll briefly mention somethings. A primary article is a piece of research published when the author does the research first hand. Easy enough to understand. In a review article, the authors do no original experiments themselves. What they do is look through all the primary articles and see if they notice a trend or a pattern amongst all the different experiments/research outputs. So, it gives a good indication of what the current evidence in a field supports.
A recent
review study found the following:
"Religion has received ample attention in philanthropic studies (Hodgkinson & Weitzman 1996). There is a rich literature in the sociology of religion on the relationship between religious involvement and giving (e.g., Wuthnow (1991); the December 1994 volume of the Review of Religious Research). Positive relations of church membership and/or the frequency of church attendance with both secular and religious philanthropy appear in almost any article in which this relation was studied (Bekkers 2003, Bekkers & Schuyt 2005, Bennett & Kottasz 2000, Bielefeld et al 2005, Brooks 2003b, Brooks 2004, Brown & Ferris 2007, Bryant et al 2003, Chang 2005a, Chaves 2002, Davidson & Pyle 1994, Eckel & Grossman 2003, Eschholz & Van Slyke 2002, Feldman 2007, Forbes & Zampelli 1997, Hoge & Yang 1994, Hunter et al 1999, Jackson et al 1995, Lee & Farrell 2003, Lunn et al 2001, Lyons & Nivison-Smith 2006, Lyons & Passey 2005, Olson & Caddell 1994, Park & Park 2004, Reed & Selbee 2001, Reed & Selbee 2002, Regnerus et al 1998, Schiff 1990, Schlegelmilch et al 1997a, Sokolowski 1996, Sullivan 1985, Tiehen 2001, Van Slyke &
Brooks 2005, Zaleski & Zech 1992, Zaleski & Zech 1994)."So, certainly, i agree, we don't need religion for people to be charitable but it certainly doesn't hurt and the study above shows that it is indeed correlated with giving.
In fact, it can be appropriately argued that we would be far further along, because of Christianity's contribution to impeding any substantial scientific development for 1400 hundred years.
I believe you are referring to the so called dark ages, which is largely a historical myth.
I believe the contrary is true, religious institutions actually played a crucial role in maintaining knowledge and science in western civilization.
The dark ages were spurred on by the collapse of the Roman Empire (we could all see this coming). In the violent and chaotic times that followed, the church the most likely and competent body to restore order and some degree of normality in the former roman lands. At the time, a lot of knowledge in the west was derived from other places. Many of these sources were lost in the upheaval of the collapse but thankfully, a portion survived in the monasteries and cathedrals of Europe. They didn't only act to preserve the knowledge but to continue it's existence and propagate it. In a society were very few average people were literate, monks and the church could have been seen as the guardians of knowledge in this time. Indeed, many of the earliest universities were established in concert with the religious authorities. Charlemagne established schools in most of the monasteries and cathedrals in Europe where students could study the quadrivium - arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, music, grammar, logic and rhetoric. Indeed, Monastery schools were pretty much the only institution for formal education that existed in the early middle ages.
Indeed, by far largest financial backers of education and science in these times was the church.
It's another myth that people around this time believed the earth was at the center of the solar system. Most of educated society and even the public believed to the contrary. Indeed, Galileo wasn't just prosecuted for saying the earth was the center but for political reasons (he published some pieces critical of the pope) and even personal reasons (hey a pope can be a dick too sometimes). To say this happened systematically and the result of the church as a whole though is simply false.
We have many great believers who contributed significantly to our scientific knowledge - Newton, Pascal, Galileo (he was a believer himself), Descarte, Kepler, Faraday, Mendel, Kelvin and Planck. I am not saying that for some mystical reason, had they not been religious, they would of failed at science. That is silly. However, they are proof that their religious beliefs didn't hold back science (indeed, newton seemed to be more prolific writing about religious causes rather than scientific causes).
A bit more on the role of the church can be read in this article on the
Nature website by
Jame Hannan who holds PhD in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge. Nature is a prestigious journal, again, be careful, it isn't published in the actual journal (bit hard as an opinion piece) but it shows they certainly think this man is worth his salt to write about these things and he obviously has the cred. I know it might sound a bit boring but considering the above, i think its a good read -
http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2011/05/18/science-owes-much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages .
As a very quick shot of learning, you can read a little bit more about the historical myth surrounding the dark-ages on wikipedia (
https://en.wikipedia.org wiki/Dark_Ages_%28historiography%29#Rational_thought_and_the_study_of_nature).
Religion also flourished in a different context, under Islam in its "golden age" -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_golden_age#Islamic_Golden_Age . Development of an early scientific method occurred and significant progress in things like optics and medicine were also achieved.
I am not saying religion has never, ever got in the way of science. Nor am i saying that it may or may not do that today. I responding to the claim that Christianity significantly retarded scientific progress, that it played not an uncaring or neutral role but a decidedly negative and dark one instead. As i've shown above, its considered this view of events isn't true. Religion provided a significant motivation for literacy in a time where people couldn't see much else use for it. Religion inspired people to try understand the world God created but nature also does that too. I'm not saying these things would of happened without the church or if religion didn't exist either. That wasn't the claim though, the claim was that Christianity held back science wholesale. We don't live in an alternative history, we only have one history. As it seems above, the church did not hold back science to the degree claimed and in-fact bankrolled and helped it.
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