h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The biggest problem with organised religion is the organisations. During the 14C and the peak of the inquisition the Catholic Church tortured thousands of people, but only in ways which didn't break the skin, for a member of the clergy was forbidden to shed blood. They were also forbidden from killing people, although they could defend themselves, so many dominicans and inquisitors took mercenaries with them, or would hand the 'sinner' over to the civil authorities for execution. Many of them, unsurprisingly, liked to watch burnings, and they even had a prefered method of making the pyre, so that the fire would not burn too hot so that the victim would live longer and suffer more. It seems that back then the Church attracted more than it's fair share of sadists. It also attracted a lot of greedy and power hungry men, aswell as the perverts it, still, seems to attract. It's not just the Roman Catholic Church which has these problems.

I agree, the problem is the organistaions of religion. Silly men put in charge who get addicted to the power and end up corrupted and taking everyone down that path. Forcing their views on every one else because of their self righteous belief that they are right and everyone else is wrong. They turn love to hate, tolerence to intolerence, peace to war and promtes racism.

Well thats my thoughts anyway.

I wouldn't class it as hate-based.

No doubt *some* of the people involved actually do simply wish other people could share what they see as the benefits of their religion, though they do seem to be failing to fully consider how other people might actually think or feel.
Presumably there's also a hefty element of human (teenage?) insecurity - some people just can't feel comfortable if everyone else isn't thinking the same way that they do - after all, if there is more than one valid [allowed?] viewpoint, how can they actually be *sure* that they are right?
How *can* their group really be so good if other people simply don't want to join it?

Whatever, it does seem surprising to have that kind of thing happening on school premises. I assume the school wouldn't be nearly so accomodating if a group of satanist teenagers got together and started writing the names of all the Christian pupils on little strips of paper, and I wonder what the reaction would be if Muslim students tried something similar?

Why can't they just keep their ceremonies personal, and have them on church premises, rather than cocking their metaphorical legs on school grounds?
Can't they agree on which *particular* church is best to have an event in, and so need some neutral ground to avoid infighting?

Sure it is, why do you think opiates are illegal in most countries?



And when the text suggest the reader kill the infidels is the religion still "only as good as the people..."?



And to think I've missed out on all these sermons by avoiding churches, schuls, evangelists and the pushers who come to your front door. Are we talking about the past or the present, and if the present then I have to ask what planet are you from or still on where these priests, rabbis, ministers and others perform all these acts of inciting hatred, racisism, intolerance and corruption? Or maybe it's not priests, rabbis and ministers you're talking about?

Dr J I cannot speak for Judaism, but you get firebrand preachers in both Christianity and Islam. I've been to church services where I've stood up and walked out because the preacher was effectively saying that anyone who doesn't believe in his own personal brand of christianity, as preached by him, was going to go to hell. This was in what appeared to be a nice respectable Anglo-Catholic church, i.e. CofE/Anglican/Episcopal, so it's not even confined to the more fundamentalist churches either

Dr Jeffreyo,

'Or maybe it's not priests, rabbis and ministers you're talking about?'

Actully I was referring to all class of leaders in organised religion be it, Christian, Muslim, Few, Sikh, Hindu what ever. I ws also not referring to all of them, I was referring to the fact that through the ages and today their are those individuals in all religions that teach different to what their book says. Because they have gone so far in their own views that they are right and everyone else is wrong that they can not see that they have transgressed the limits and moved away from what it was they think they where following.

I have had Christian missionaries preaching how everyone will go to hell except those who see their particuler views, I've had Jews ranting on the removal of the scrouge of the earth, I have had Muslim leaders trying to get people to follow some illigetimate Jihad against the west while all they do it sit and splutter, I've had Sikhs slaging of Islam while saying that their religion is religous tolerent etc etc.

These aren't main stream views or opinions and does not reflect on the overall populaton of that religion, but it does say one thing to me and thats, Before you start having a go at others, sort your selfs out. Take a look in the mirror and see what you have become and compare it to that which is what your whole religious book says and not a odd verse here and there instead.

Rik

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050926/ap_on_re_us/evolution_debate_6;_ylt=AsiOIPRCtWXoSyw0whD3cjN7OyAi;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Hi DrJ

"Sure it is, why do you think opiates are illegal in most countries?"

Actually they aren't. The vast majority of 'Opiates' are licensed medicines - ever heard of Morphine or Di-Morphine? Less than 2% of the Opiates used across the world are actually street heroin. It could be argues that even that could be eliminated if legalised and controlled by the state - but that is another debate altogether

As for ministers, rabbis and imams inciting hatred well it may seem strange coming from such as I but again this is a sweeping generalisation. The majority are people dedicated to the care, both physical and spiritual, of their particular communities.

Yes I have heard obscene bile spouted at evangelical services. However this is rare compared to the work done by these men and women.

We have a big, 'dangerous' Pentecostal in my small town and I abhor the attitude of the Minister. But, and it is a big BUT, he has led his congregation to raise the money to build and run the town's Elderly Nursing Home and its halfway house for people with learning difficulties. Something I have not seen the other half a dozen, mainstream christian churches/chapels do (including the Catholics and Anglicans).

So how do I judge him, by what he says, or by what he does?

You choose to miss out on all the "sermons by avoiding churches, schuls, evangelists and the pushers who come to your front door". I prefer to remain both informed and involved so that my opinion is based on the facts on the ground, rather than the cr*p quoted on TV or unregulated websites.

Blessings,
Matholwch /|\

and isn't "religion is the opium of the people" quoted a bit out of context?

"The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of men, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic point d’honeur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence, because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

"Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State" (1843).


I had thought, and I think this full quote demonstrates, that it was Marx's observation that religion as a social institution of the state perpetuates a repressive instinct amongst the population of a society.

Marx reflecting the reverse move in Hegel agues above that "Man is the world of men" not "an abstract being encamped outside the world."
which is what the accuses Hegel of concluding. Where people stand on Marx is another matter but his unfliching realism is original and fascinating.

I think if you are going to use "Religion as an opium" you need to understand the context it was first being used in.

The movement in Hegel that Marx is criticising is where where progress of consciousness becomes identical with all knowing and God; and where the political state is seen under the auspice of a consciousness which has come to know itself.

In Hegel the practice of religious consciousness was a reaching for an infinite, but an infinite that was in vain and could not be reached. The infinite only was achieved in a return to self, hence all knowing expressed in self-consciousness not consciousnes of an 'other'. In other words human essence or being as a dialectical progression towards unity.

Marx saw that process inverted and religion and set in the context of society where human being was not a dissasociated essence but funamentally set in the society in which it is born. Religous practice was performed in an institution of the State, hence not only the futility of relious consciousness as failing to reach an infinite but a dialaectic of Hegel, privelging the structure of society above the development of consciousness.

The repressive instict Marx saw in relgion was the expression of a wider depression in society, the diremption of consciousness in Hegel expressed as a diremption of society amongst the classes.

In that sense both Hegel and Marx agree, religous consciousness is unsatisfactory.

Slapjack wasn't even quoting Marx to agree with him originally (Post 518) so I feel a bit awkward wanting to make a polite correction on this point. but the context of this quote in important if you want to understand what Marx meant by it.

Even that's summing up the complexity of Hegel.

Skip over this post if you don't want a bit more detail on the part of Hegel, Marx was critquing.

My apologies in advance

The Unhappy Consciousness, properly titled, is a further expression of the contradiction in Master and Slave forms that Hegel sets out in his "Phenomenology".

In the Master form consciousness was an act of domination through destruction, of ownership through anihilation.

In the Slave form, consciousness wasn't so solipsistic and could only work upon the objects that confronted it, never destroy them they were ontologically superior to it.

Combined together within the form of consciousness that first starts to know itself, Sceptical thought begins life by knowing itself to be instead superior to objects enough to "doubt" them (A different form of destruction) but the sceptical consciousness doesn't hold the disunity of itself an object in unity but rather abstractly, as two notions held apart.

In The Unhappy Consciousness this debate is internalised and the Unhappy Consciousness knows it's contradiction as an expression of it's dual nature.

The Unhappy Consciousness is a more developed form, in that according to hegel, it receives back to itself the gift of the movement of return from reaching to an unchanging infinite. It is this supplication and display of gratitude that characterises the Unhappy Consciousness for Hegel because at it's heart there is still a dissolution between a consciousness which seeks a unity outside of itself in order to satisfy it's own contradiction.

It will ultimately Hegel thought, but the dialectic required to become truly self-consciousnes starts with recognising the disunity in the heart of the Unhappy consciousness.

It is this conflict that Marx reversed in Hegel, priveledging not the development of consciousness to alter society (and found a state) but instead the power of the state to control and dicate thought.
Seeing man not as an essence or "spirit" in dialectic overhaul, but in terms of economic materialism, an understanding that saw men as part of society not a reaching of consciousness.

Hence Relgion in Marx rather flowerily realised as suffocating balm: "the hope of the hopeless ... the spirit of the spiritless ... the opium of the people"



Clive

Some clarification: over here in the Colonies [lol] you're in deep manure if you're found to be growing certain plants, the opium poppy for example. If you're in possession of drugs without a prescription you're standing in the same manure pile.

Perhaps religions should be just as regulated or controlled or watched over by persons who can be held accountable for the results of their actions or inactions. Maybe we wouldn't have so many instances of church figures abusing young children if such a policy had been in place - who can say.

Just for interest's sake:

'When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans' closest cousins.

But decoding chimpanzees' DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.

If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species' DNA and the two animals' population sizes.

"That's a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project.

Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/25/AR2005092501177_pf.html

Interesting bit about the theory working out. As for this-

I'm not impressed, I told my brother he looked like Cheetah [from the Tarzan movies] when I was 5.

'I'm not impressed'

Nor am I. I was amazed to learn that there was any genetic difference at all.

The article mentions that tigers and lions can't mate, but I recall a report about a lab experiment where a "liger" was produced. It does not mention however that humans and chimps or apes can't mate-and I've got some coworkers [and about ten percent of the people who ride the subway] I'd like to offer up for DNA testing.

The popular idea that what we fairly arbitrarily term 'species' are not ever, ever, ever able to breed is as wrong as pretty much any other popular idea. It has long been quietly considered possible that Chimps and humans could cross and there have been rumours of experiments planned to that effect (including volunteer human parents). As well, there is now at least one documented case of a mule giving birth to a healthy baby.

This discussion has happened somewhere around here before: Healthy human couples quite commonly produce healthy babies who have a fundamental difference in their nuclear DNA: one example is people with Down's Syndrome, who have a different number of chromosomes from other humans but are able to produce offspring with each other and with partners with a full complement of chromosomes.

The line between species is drawn by humans, and it is a line of convenience or delicacy, not of natural law.

Oh, I forgot to ask in that last post:


If one were only allowed to consider morphological features, and you were told that one of these pairs was made up of members of a species while the other was made up of non-conspecific individuals, which would you say was the pair of conspecifics?



a) a human and a bonobo

or

b) a chihuahua and an Irish Wolfhound.


The morphological differences between breeds of dogs are far greater than the differences between humans and many primates.


(who seriously thinks that this http://www.1stopfordogpictures.com/chihuahua/sigried.jpg could produce offspring with this http://www.windhundwelt.de/images/!!irish-wolfhound-095.jpg ?)

Downs' people (trisomy 21 - three copies of chromosome 21 instead of two) are sterile I thought. And they are certainly not healthy.

Also, chimps have a different number of chromosomes which means formation of a viable zygote cannot happen. It's the same reason why Downs' people cannot reproduce.


"Language and Life - A Perspective on Species"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A716951




Ste

Ah. Try the edited, non-gooey version: A750953

Afraid there's a little bit of misinformation out there:

'People with Down's syndrome have the right to have personal and sexual relationships, and to get married. The DSA knows of a number of happily married couples where one or both partners have Down's syndrome. It is important that young people with Down's syndrome receive education in the area of relationships and sexuality. As in other areas of learning, they may need more support with this than some of their peers.



Both women and men with Down's syndrome can be fertile, although both sexes have a reduced fertility rate. They therefore need advice on, and access to, contraception. People with Down's syndrome need careful and sensitive advice about having children, as there are a number of issues to consider. Some people with learning disabilities can successfully parent their children, given the right support. However, many couples with learning disabilities decide for themselves not to have children because of the responsibility and hard work involved, or for financial reasons. Where one parent has Down's syndrome, there is a 35% to 50% chance that the child would inherit the syndrome. This chance is even higher where both parents have Down's syndrome. There is also a high chance that pregnancy would end in miscarriage. Women with Down's syndrome are also more likely than other women to have a premature baby, or to need a caesarian section.'


http://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/DSA_Faqs.aspx

And, with regrets that I'm putting this right after a discussion of people with Down's Syndrome --

As I mentioned before, horses and donkeys, despite chromosome number differences, produce healthy offspring which are in rare cases also capable of reproducing.