Religion is a Love Born of Terror
This video should grab and hold your attention as it tries to explain the rise of religion and why science removes the fear that produced it in the first place. It's good!
Religion is a love born of terror. Like children, we WILL love what takes our fear away as if it WERE our parent.HT: Andrew Atkinson on Facebook.
But a good parent never fills its child with shame, or an inferiority complex.
If you understand why a person touches wood you understand, to some extent, why people talk to gods. To partially explain the existence of religion you need only explain the existence of superstition. To explain THAT, you need to explain that "spooky" feeling we get. I think I can, though it's just an opinion. I think "spookiness" is an instinct we HAD to evolve in order to survive, to keep us out of the shadows at all costs.
Understanding an instinct often removes much of its power over you. Try. :)
6 comments:
This video just confirms for me that atheists have the lamest and worst explanation of suffering I have ever heard. No one would ever tell a woman whose family just died in a house fire that, those things just happen; fire is both good and bad. The atheist explanation for suffering is to simplistic and it only gives a superficial explanation. Secondly science does not remove fear. Science and education only change what people are afraid of. We now have people afraid of the government, or secret societies. Just watch Jesse Ventura’s TV show Conspiracy Theories. Also people are still afraid of death and diseases even thou we understand them better. Another example of a new fear that science has given us is the atomic bomb, the complete annihilation of life on this planet. Thanks science for this new fear. Once more science and education do not remove fear they just change what people are afraid of. Finally, thank you John for this video it was so very entertaining and I got a good laugh to day.
Harold
@Harold-
You seem to be generalizing, which is probably why you didn't understand the video.
Case in point: Science may have given us atomic energy, or bombs as you put it, but out of this technology came affordable energy for millions--probably even powers where you live--and hydrogen cars, which will help tip the scales back in favor of a green and economic way to drive our vehicles.
So yeah, bombs are bad, but all that other stuff is good. Science is neutral when it examines the processes. It's governments that makes bombs, since the scientist would be content studying some other interesting subject without a desire to construct a doomsday device. You sound very disrespectful when you implicitly assume all scientists are mad scientists. Frankly, it sounds a bit deluded.
So if that's what you base your reasoning on, then I'm sorry.
Telling the woman whose family died in the house fire "these things just happen" is much better than telling her that the loving God did it to punish her for offending him in some small way. This seems just plain mean on the part of the Christian claiming that they were executed for some supposed "sin".
Science, not religion, removes more fear by telling the "real" reasons for sickness, storms, earthquakes, etc. Not sin, punishment, the devil, or the end times.
Harold, did you and I watch the same video?
The video I watched offered a possible explanation of how our natural paranoia might have contributed to the creation of religion and might be a factor in its persistence.
The one you watched was about - well, I'm not sure. The failure of atheism to invent soothing lies offering false comfort to the bereaved? The failure of scientists to stop wars?
And did the prodigious accomplishment of unlocking the atom actually "change what people are afraid of"? - last I checked, people like you are still afraid of something that ain't there.
I just wonder how the religios explaination of suffering is better. In my experience it is either by attributing it to the wrath of god or his indifference. And this is better?
Excellent video, and the big cat imagery really strikes home. I'm a veteran (Grenada, Panama, Kuwait,) but when I recently walked up on a cougar kill, I might as well have been in Olduvai Gorge. It's an whole other kind of fear.
As for the establishment of religion, let's not forget that first guy who perhaps wasn't a very good hunter, but could get others to feed him by doing "magical stuff" to convince the animal spirits to let themselves be hunted. Clever bastard!
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