Do we need religious institutions?

What is good and what is bad about them? Do religious people need to go to churches/mosques/etc to get in touch with their faith?

As you all probably know by now is that I have no religion whatsoever, but I do like to question it anyway. In my opinion people are free to believe in what they want as long as it doesn’t bring others any harm. However I am totally against religious institutions.
It brings more exploitation, sectarism and hatred than any other thing in the world. There’ve been so many wars in the name of God, in the name o Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, Islamism… (and so far the only religion I know that never fought for its faith and doctrine in Buddhism) that it makes me doubt the meaning and value of religion.

Does it worth? Does humanity needs to show off their beliefs? Can’t we keep our faith to ourselves or that would make us less religious? If God is everywhere, why do you need to go to a expensive, huge, full of rules place to talk to him?

Clementine stated:

It is good that some people hold church as a place of peace and happiness where they no longer feel hopeless and alone, but instead are filled with hope and a sense of having a guide along with them every step of the way through life. What’s bad about them? Much. They presuppose they know what the correct interpretation of the Bible is. They make TOO much money. If no one gave the church a penny other than the costs of weddings, a church would still have million in PROFIT per year. Banks and churches are the richest institutions in the world. Priests are rarely model citizens we would all look upto. All institutions wish to claim theirs to be the right one, I don’t agree with this. Each religion attempts to make it’s own members the elite and the rest to be heathens. I don’t agree with this. I don’t believe people need to go to church in order to get in touch with their faith. If they did, then religious people would never leave church and we would all be priests and nuns. The whole idea of a church, mosque, etc as a place of God is absurd to me. As if everything outside of it isn’t a place of God, yet the church is made up of all that which is outside of it, including the occupants (people).

Clementine stated:

Me too. Well, I wouldn’t say I have a religion, but I do have my own personal belief of a higher power.

Clementine stated:

Couldn’t agree more. But there is a catch to the first sentence you proposed. If your sentence stood to be without qualifiers I would agree completely. But the problem is that many times someone is doing somethig that doesn’t bring others harm, but you can still see how it will bring harm to someone in the near or far future. This ‘seeing’ is the whole problem cause many times when we think it will bring harm in the future it doesn’t, and other times we think it won’t bring harm in the future but it does. Hence why we give a person speeding a ticket, it’s not because they are actually doing something wrong, but because they are increasing the potential for bringing harm onto themselves and others.

Clementine stated:

Applause. Very well said and I completely agree.

Clementine stated:

Your second sentence is a profound one in my opinion. One that I ask myself and others many times. People FORCE their religious beliefs on others, in my opinion, to further convince themselves that they are right. It’s like a challenge. But, if I believe in God why would I force that on others. Some may answer that you should force your belief in God on others in order to save them, because you actually want whats best for them. When I hear this answer I always think to myself and look for these noble religious people and wonder where they are when someone has a flat on the side of the highway. I wonder where they are when there are starving people on the streets. I wonder what they are doing when they hear someone being beat up outside their window, or when one group of people is trying to kill another group of people. Hence why I believe that they are doing it in order to further convince themselves and not for some altruistic or caring purpose for the rest of human kind.

What’s your take?

Magius

Being in a car is a high risk that you might run over someone different from being religious of course. But I agree that you never know when someone will harm another. There are loads of religious psychos around, and people like KKK. That makes me wonder… should we always have freedom of speech? How dangerous a speech can get? Where to draw the line?… Maybe new subject

Magius

Thank you for the complement.
They do force it on others. It happened here, I must say. Once someone replied to me that God existed even if I didn’t believe, that he created me. It shows exactly what you said. It’s like repeating for themselves that ‘he exists, he exists’.
But is like Sartre said, once man realizes they are free, they will try to impose freedom on others. For religious people maybe ‘finding’ God is freedom… maybe not very different from me trying to say socialism is better than capitalism, or whatever.

People not going to church would do to spirituality what people not going to college would to do education.
If a person believes that religion is just a lark, and a person should believe whatever makes them happy, then there’s no real need for church. But, if Christianity (or Islam, or Judaism or whatever) is actually true, then people need regular contact with authorities educated in those creeds and that history, and there needs to be an institution devoted to keeping the documents and beliefs intact.
I think most Christians who say that church isn’t important say that because they went to church for many years as a child, and got the education they needed. I have talked to Christians that haven’t been churched, and most of them don’t have a clue. If you take away the internet as a source of information, it’s that much worse.

I say that religion and religious institutions are a good thing, regaurdless of whether or not religion is a farse. Religion, unarguable instills good virtue and values in the youth. Lets not go into people killing in the name of God, that is a perverted and sick twisting of religion.

NO, not to get in touch with thier faith, but to stop them from perverting another one, most definatly.

No matter how optimistic I try to be, the normal person never ceases to make me cringe. If it weren’t for organized religions indoctrinating people, “telling them what to think” is you prefer that terminology, we would have a world filled with sophists, and moral relativists. Shudders

I don’t think religious institutions force beliefs on people any more than any other organization, I just think they’re more upfront about it. The fact is, most people are told what to think from one source or another, and I would prefer it to be the church than most other groups.

I disagree Uccisore, organizations whether intellectual, spiritual, or economical all work on explaining why their views should be promoted…this ‘why’ is very important because it is what everything is based on (whether right or not). What does religion say? Believe! Why? Because it’s a matter of belief (faith). But that’s a circular argument and it leaves you with nothing. We are to believe because its a matter of belief. What’s the ‘matter’? God. What is God? Each religion will tell you that the human mind is incapable of comprehending such a thing as God. Yet they tell you about God as a fact and not as an opinion. So we can’t know God for certain, but I will tell you about the certainty of God. Paradoxical? I think so. So we are left with believing in something we know not what, for the reason of believing. Hmmm…I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, religion is the biggest form of brainwashing in the world.

What’s your take?

    Stand up comics are masters of making perfectly reasonable things seem absurd, the key is in summarizing a thousand years of thought into half a dozen choice words.

Uccisore stated:

Well that was a quicky. I thought there was more to my previous post then your entertaining an answer of one long sentence. But I guess this is as good as it gets with you. Yes you are quite correct that stand up comics are masters of making perfectly reasonable things that seem absurd. But you are drawing a huge generalization with your statement that assumes within it that religion summarizes a thousand years of thought…do you have anything to back this up? I think we also deserve a little clarification as to a thousand years for whom? What part of the world? But those are absurd questions because they are in an absurd context. To suggest that the Torah, or the Bible, or the Qur’an sum up a thousand years of thought is as relentless as is the claim to belief for the sake of believing. Furthermore, there is a broad generalization within your words…are you actually serious that you think there are a half a dozen words chosen that sum up 1000 years of thought. Is it a dozen as in twelve, or is it a bakers dozen, 13? Which ever it is, do you mind sharing this dozen sacredly chosen words with me, or are you going to tell me that I am not worthy?

What’s your take?

Perhaps you misunderstood a bit. My point was that your previous post was an excersise in the comic’s art- taking a very involved topic and hyper-summerizing it to the point where it seems absurd. Of course, I don’t think there’s half a dozen magic words, but then also I don’t think religions (or at least, mainstream religions) teach “Believe because it’s a matter of belief” or that we can’t know God for certain but God is a certainty. What I think is that some people like to accuse religions of doing such things, and other people hear the accusations and take them as fact without looking into it themselves.
If you want, you can read theology, philosophy of religion, or apologetics, and see for yourself that the issue is a great deal more complex, and that philosophers with religious beliefs haven’t somehow overlooked obvious absurdities. I was a bit short because I suspect you already know all this.

Uccisore stated:

If I want? Well thank you for your permission. Fortunately I have read much of theology and philosophy, and what I see is exactly what I posted previously. Would you like to take up Aquinas and his different levels of law first? Or maybe Spinoza’s monism (substance, modes, attributes, etc) and how he specifically states that our minds are not complex enough and that we can never know God, but yet he goes on to speak of what God MUST be. Maybe that won’t satisfy you and we can talk of a more familiar philosopher to the average man, that being Descartes and his dualism. Tell me how I’m wrong in disagreeing with Descartes when I say that he used Radical Doubt to get him down to Cogito Ergo Sum “I think therefore, I am” which scholars agree is absurd because he made no proof for an “I”, but only proved that thought exists. So he should have only said “There is thought”. But the minute he got stuck and couldn’t figure out where thought came from, he like most of his predecessors committed the same mistake of answering…God. You see, the minute anyone gets stuck they answer God. When we first started civilizations we thought lightning was God, later yet we conceived God to be communicating with us through fire. Each time we found answers to what appeared to be unsolvable mysteries we pushed the concept of God further back. Many analogies can be found in the Qur’an about how we have to question the stars when we look up in order to find God. As if our eye sight was a tuning fork for communicating with God through satellites of stars. Stars were later believed to be guides of God leading us on our way…which came from many different areas of astrology and astronomy and common patterns that could be found reoccuring in the sky. But then Galileo came by, telescopes, missiles, cameras, and then man in space. God as a concept had to be pushed further back still. So now God sits waiting at the beginning of time where his position is being threatened again with theories of folding and unfolding universes and multiple universes.

As sad as it is, the most intellectual people I have read about or talked to come to the same dead end. No one is willing to just say those three magical words of truth “I DON’T KNOW”.

Like you said the issue is more complex, the more complex it gets the further back God goes.

Maybe you should quote some parts of the Bible, Qur’an, Buddhism, or any other religion you like. But give me something to work with other than your sarcasm.

What’s your take?

“God of the Gaps” is another outside idea that people claim religious folks adhere to, but don’t.
As a starter, Descartes did not postulate God to answer “Where do thoughts come from”, no more than modern creationists postulate God as a solution to “Where did the world come from?”. paraphrasing Plantinga here, nobody wondered at the existence of Nature, and gave the tenets of Christianity as a solution- it would be a really poor solution, full of irrelevant details. Further, the fact that cavemen may have thought that stars were gods, ghosts, monsters or big balls of burning gas has very little to do with why modern people beileve.
An individual comes to a belief in God or other religious tenets because some experience in their life has led them to that conclusion. It could be something they deem a miracle, a sensation of God speaking to them or interceeding in their life, or just the advice of someone who they take to be trustworthy. If that belief becomes firmly established, then it’s only natural to try to make sense of other things in terms of that belief. That’s why people say “God” when they don’t know, not because they think God is a clever explanation for things. That’s also why statements like “Theism is a poor way of explaining X” aren’t a successful critique on theism.
Regarding your two statements that originally caused me to comment, those being that Christians assert “Have faith as a matter of faith” and “God is unknowable, but we can have absolute knowledge of God’s existence”, I think it’s clear that we both have read numerous theistic thinkers who don’t think this way, to the extent that we could both say that zero or almost zero theistic philosophers of religion would advocate these views. So, then, why bring them up as a critique of religion, if they aren’t representative of current, educated viewpoints?
I will assume, for a moment, that one of the statements needs addressing, and will address it as such. The idea that “We can’t have certain knowledge of God, but we can be certain that God exists” is a contradiction or paradox is just a matter of equivocation. The clause “We can’t have certain knowledge of God” when said by most theists means that we can’t have complete or total knowledge of God, not that we can’t know anything about God at all. Certainly, no Christian would say that we can know nothing about God, since the key claim of Christianity is that God has revealed certain things about Himself to us, such as His desires for us. With that understanding, then, the statement would read like this:

“We cannot have complete knowledge of God, but we can know for certain that He exists”

which is no contradiction at all.

Uccisore stated:

Some kind of certainty must be present in order to understand anything. For instance, if we had the certainty that God is good. We do not need to actually understand how he is good or in what ways. But how can anyone acertain that a) that there is a God and b) that God is good? What I’m trying to get at it that no part of God can be ascertained which is why NOTHING can be known about God and why God does not exist.

Uccisore stated:

If there is something we can know about God, then that something must be a certainty. You say that it is that God has revealed certain things about his desires for us. Which is perfect and why I mentioned Aquinas first in my last post. Aquinas merged Aristotelian views with Christianity in order to strengthen Christianity. Aquinas speaks very eloquently about Gods desires for us, otherwise known as Eternal or Divine Law. Yet there is so much ambiguity about the words and their meaning that no two religious scholars seem to agree on their EXACT meaning. The problem was that the Divine Law was way too general and failed to explain many of the situations encountered in reality. If scholars cannot come to an agreement how can we expect to? If Gods desires for us were so clear, than how can any other person in the world think otherwise? Why didn’t God make himself known to Native Americans? How about those living in Arctica and Antarctica? Could it be because those who invented the Bible and the Christian God didn’t know there was another continent on the planet?

Uccisore stated:

Paradox? We can’t know anything certain but we can know something for certain. Hmmm…if we can’t have complete knowledge of God, how can we know he exists? You say this isn’t a contradiction, on the contrary friend, that is exactly what it is. Dictionary might help.

What’s your take?

  First of all, you can't assert atheism from "We Can know Knothing about God".  The best you can do from there is agnosticism.  Secondly, what do you consider warrant for certainty? Christians claim to be involved in an ongoing relationship with God, and they are aware of this relationship directly, and without outside evidence. Their experiences may be very good evidence for them, but only anecdotal at best for you.  In a situation like this, the Christian has no obligation to demonstrate their certainty, or make you certain. They only need to be able to demonstrate coherence in the face of whatever argument you may present.
  I think you're twisting the conversation slightly now, yourself.  Before you argued that religions (including Christianity, I would assume) taught that "We can know nothing for certain about God, but God's existence is certain".  Now you seem to be trying to argue that we can know nothing certain about God, a different thing altogether.  Are you willing to conceed that Christianity does not, in fact, teach the contradiction you brought up before, and thus that Christianity is not teaching a delibrate paradox to brainwash people?

Ok, let me put it in simpler language. “We can’t know all there is to know about God, but we can know those things He reveals to us, among them His existence.” That’s what Christianity teaches, as opposed to “We can’t know anything at all about God, and yet we can know God exists” which I’ve never heard until you came up with it a while ago. So how the first isn’t a contradiction, and the second is?

Uccisore

I don’t think faith should be treaded like mathematics, and the latter is the same to everyone. No one does any war because they believe in mathematics, or history, or biology.
You also don’t learn at churches, your learn at religious schools and seminars… You don’t need a huge, expensive, building or to stare at a shocking image a man crucified and all those cuddly angels to learn about history of religion and it’s importance… or 2 hours sermons so you can get in touch with God. If he is everywhere,… you just don’t need it.

Qzxtvbzr

I know you are religious, so you probably studied the history of the church. How can you accept a place like the Vatican, which is one of the richest places in the world, which many Catholics are starving to death somewhere. What do you think about the role of the church in the medieval times? It took money from those who didn’t have anything, it proclaimed Kings are gods on earth.
You probably know the very close relationship with the church and the governments, right? Ever heard of Cardinal Richelieu, who was the prime minister of France? When he crushed the Protestants to keep his king and himself in power? He also enforced extreme punishment laws for small crimes. Famous quote: ‘If you give me six lines written
by the most honest man I will find something in them to hang him’
What about the Indians who were forced to convert to Christianity by the Jesuits? And the Spanish Inquisition? And all the ‘witches’ that were burnt?
Martin Luther also wanted a different religion to keep money into Germany instead of paying taxes to Rome…

O well, the history of the church is horrible… all the money they still have today is not enough to pay all the suffering they caused.

Magius

Definitely… and TV comes in 2nd place.

Depends on the religion.  Christianity has a special relationship with history, and a great deal of it's teaching *do* need to be treated like history, because that's what they are alleged to be. 
 Regarding religious schools and seminars, most people aren't going to pay money to go to one of those, and Church is free. What's more, I haven't been to churches of every denomination, but at the ones I have been to, yes you [i]do[/i] learn. It's very much about taking a reading from the Bible, a discourse on it's meaning, with tie ins to historical information. 
  I agree with your last statement, though.  The importance of Church has nothing to do with being nessicary to keep in touch with God, and everything to do with preserving the doctrines and traditions.

Iam very religious, and that statement sent pangs through my heart, I admit it.

The Church is far from perfect. I may come from God but it is a human institution. Not even the Pope tries to claim any more. The Chruch has been wrong before and will be again. I won’t go into the Crusades of the Spanish Inquisition because I’m not afriad to admit: I don’t know much about it.

There is a lot of crap you have to wade through, though to get the true idea. A lot of revisionist history has been written about that time.

If you look at the line of Popes, you’ll notice that many didn’t live more than two weeks after they were declared pope. Not from assasination they died from “natural” causes. Many Catholic historians hypothosize this is the work of God to save the Church from coruption.

I wasn’t just talking about Catholocism only in my post. I think our new philosopher and magius have a little feud going on judging by how they clash heads on this post and on “Gay rights os Gay wrongs”. I’m glad my little post didn’t get completely washed away there.

I stand by what I said, but let me re-phrase it a little: TODAY religious intsitutions are a good thing. We should have them. They instill good qualities and virtue in the youth. Religion is far from perfect, but imagine a society without it. Carry this to it’s logical conclusion: No God.

Without God then morality and ethics and virtue are truely meaningless. It really does not matter if someone kills me or you. It doesn’t matter if someone rapes another. It doesn’t matter that priests used little boys as objects. It doesn’t matter is the Isrealis commit genocide on the Palestinians. It doens’t matter that Hitler murdered countless Jews.

If there was no God, then what would the world be like? It would be hell. At least religion (even if it is a farse) keeps this from happening. I cannot accept this as a reality; it is simply unacceptable. Clem, if you want t know why I’m so obstinate about religion, it is because of the world I envision without it…

I quote myself:

It is so strange that you would say that as it is the exact reason I am so against religion. A religionless world! Wouldn’t it be beautiful? :smiley: This is my dream and although I know it will never be so in my lifetime, I know that one day it will. A world free from the divisions of religion and it’s bigotry. Although there will still be divisions, religion will no longer be one of them.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no…

Without God and religion there is morality is meaningless, it is truely “The opium man has created to help him sleep better at night.”

An amoral world. 1984 & A Brave New World, look at them. Sure there is Natural Law, but that only stems from rationality which not everyone uses. If it weren’t for religion indoctrinating people about what is right and wrong there would be even less moral sense in this world than there is now!

I expected more from you skeptic.

Religion is supposed to be about something higher than humans. It is supposed to transcend humanity.
[i]
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish, but have eternal life.” - John 3:16

“I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so should you love one another.” - John 13:34[/i]

This is what at least Christianity is supposed to be about. Loving another above one’s self. Those who are bigots or harm another because of religion are taking it and twisting it into perversion. THere is no excuse for these people. They are cowards who sully something pure which they use to hide behind!!

Regarding my clashing heads with Magius, I would like to say that i’m enjoying the conversations quite a bit, and I love that this message board seems to actually be composed of intelligent people who know what they’re talking about. I just came from a board that had been overtaken by idiots. Heh, maybe some folks here would say I’m the beginning of the same trend here, I dunno! :wink:
I’d like you to clarify something, Qzxtvbzr. At times, you seem to have conventional religios beliefs, and at times you seem to be saying religious claims aren’t really true, it’s just the ideal that matters. Which camp are you in? Do you think God really exists, or that He probably doesn’t but we ought to pretend He does?