Quote:
Originally Posted by rushyrulz
You're basically saying "guns don't kill people, people kill people." But a gun is the weapon that is used to kill the other person.
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A gun makes it stupidly easy to kill someone and innocent people, and the only purpose of owning a handgun is to intimidate (even for your own protection it works via intimidation, a negative thing) or kill others. Religion gives no boost to killing people, nor is its sole purpose negative. I think a better analogy would be saying knives kill people, not that I think either is very good. Knives are tools used everyday, but can be used to stab someone. Religion is a tool to make people happy and, generally, only inspires people to do good. That the opposite can happen in a religion doesn't make it all bad, and does not mean that religion is like guns.
One flaw of either analogy is because most religions that I know of, at least all major religions, have a built-in safety measure of putting love first. Anyone who's a christian who says such things like homosexuality is wrong and who hounds people about it or treats them as outcasts, I would say aren't really being christian. The enemy is not religion, but ignorance and failure to be objective and putting your own ideas above someone else so much that you feel you need to persecute them.
A think pretty strong argument to what I've been saying I think would be that religion breeds ignorance and might cause people to be less empirical about ALL things, to start to place faith in things that are outside the scope of their faith. I could see that quite obviously causing serious lag in scientific advancement, which in a grand sense -and I think most people would agree- ends up causing a lot more strife. In the short term I think it's debateable what would cause the most hurt.
However, the ideas of us versus them, protecting your sense of belonging, thrusting your ideals onto someone else in a small sense or a massive scale, and taking these things so far as to cause war, doesn't stem from religion and never has. Yet these are the things that so many atheists site as to why religion is bad and wrong. Religion helps cause wars as much as any culture causes wars.
I'm not sure I see much of a difference in saying religion causes wars to saying (most) religion prevents wars by virtue of the harmonious values they all teach, in terms of misrepresenting the impact religion itself has on the world.
I think that if you could magically remove, and keep removed, all religion you'd have more peace for about a generation before the world would settle down and create new, non-religious groups to become strongly associated with because that's what people do, and shit would hit the fan.