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

but I've found in text-only exchanges it's usually best!

I'm interested, given the discussion on chaplains on the TGD thread and a mention of Judaeo-Christian morality* (which I shamefully skipped over slightly in my attempts to get through the backlog), if there's anything you atheist fundamentalists would consider worth keeping from religion and I was going to start a thread about it on your atheist page but considering I've so far only lurked - and knowing that you don't want it to be a place for dicussing religion - I wanted to run it past you first in case you'd rather not stray down that road.

I can just start it on one of the general discussion boards but I fear it would be slightly over-run by religious fundies and really I'm more interested in the atheist/agnostic POV.

By way of exampe, I think the RC concept of confession, as I understand it**, should be retined and possibly it *is* retained in (or I suppose adapted from) New Year resolutions (ie looking at your life, seeing where you might be going wrong and could possibly improve).


*Surely the basis of western morality but we now take it so for granted that we don't consider it to have any particular religious basis - maybe?

**I've become more and more aware that I may have had an unusually positive Catholic upbringing - in that I see most of the central tenets which I was taught or introduced to as good and positive things which are helpful whether you include God or not - or most of the stuff I was taught just *is* positive and the fact that it was Catholic parents who bestowed this way of thinking on me is irrelevant





I may be rambling slightly (certainly I've had to correct several spellings) but I'm 3/4 way though a bottle of wine so I trust you'll forgive me

Well it depends on what you mean by 'things from religion'. For example, does the idea of having a day off every week come from religion, or is it a damned good secular idea that any trade unionist would approve of?

Another good example is laws and morality. Why 'Judeo-Christian'? Are there other faiths that actively approve of murder, theft and bearing false witness - or has something escaped me? (And, if fact, many of the values but in this category - eg tolerance - the religious have, historically, had to be dragged towards kicking and screaming.)

Confession is an interesting one. What do we understand by it? If we mean 'Being honest to oneself about ones faults and misdoings and trying to change'...then that sounds like good psychotherapeutic sense. But in Catholicism, isn't it something bigger than that? Why, for example, should it be linked to absolution? (Note, for example that Desmond Tutu's 'Truth and Reconciliation' initiatives have received a *lot* of criticism on the ground - not least in the Island of Ireland.)

Certainly, though, it would be extremely odd if any given religion did not have some grains of human truth in them. After all, they're human-created, and nobody's wrong all the time. But they fail as coherent systems. So why not still practice 'zakat' (the Muslim duty of charity, but still eat pork?

Good question, though.

Can I put it another way?

I don't much care if people get great 'spiritual' comfort from Catholicism. Or Islam. Or Druidism. But is it any different from the spiritual comfort that people get from...to pick a random example...caravanning?